McDowell, Intuitions and the Handwaving Argument

John Dombrowski jdombrowski@tkschools.org Philosophy 800 December 2011

John Dombrowski In a recent essay titled Avoiding the Myth of the Given, John McDowell argues for a conceptualist account of perception. Conceptualists maintain that the conceptual capacities of rational animals strictly determines the mental content of perception.1 Conversely, non-conceptualists maintain that some perceptual mental content is not determined by conceptual capacities and that ones nonconceptual capacities contribute mental content that is produced by ones non-conceptual capacities.2 McDowell uses an argument known as the Myth of the Given to demonstrate why ones conceptual capacities must be operative in perception, but more importantly he also develops how conceptual capacities are operative in perception. To do this, McDowell appropriates the Kantian notion of intuitions and maintains that perceptual mental content is intuitional in the Kantian sense and draws on ones conceptual capacities. This does not sit well with non-conceptualist. Robert Hanna recently published an account of non-conceptualism claiming that non-conceptualist must go back to Kant in order to provide arguments for non-conceptualism. This paper focuses on McDowells appropriation of Kantian intuitions into his conceptualist theory and one non-conceptualist attack against his theory. I maintain that McDowells appropriation of Kantian intuitions into his account of perception allows him to withstand certain attacks leveled against him by non-conceptualists like Robert Hanna. This paper has the following structure. Section one provides an account of the Myth of the Given that McDowell develops in his essay Avoiding the Myth of the Given. Section two details McDowells conceptualist account of perception as it is found in Avoiding the Myth of the Given. I focus on his account of viewing perceptual mental content as intuitional in the Kantian sense and how this provides a detailed description of how it is that ones conceptual capacities are operative in perception. In section three I explain the Handwaving Argument leveled against McDowell and conceptualism by

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Hanna, 26 Hanna, 26

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John Dombrowski Robert Hanna. I then show how McDowells account of conceptualism can withstand Hannas particular attack against conceptualism. 1. The Myth of the Given McDowell uses the Myth of the Given as a point of departure to demonstrate why we need to develop a conceptualist account of perception. The focus of this paper is not on the validity of the Myth of the Given, but rather on McDowell's appropriation of Kantian intuitions to avoid the Myth of the Given. However, the Myth of the Give drives McDowells account of conceptualism and an explanation of it will aide in painting the picture that McDowell offers. The Myth of the Given is a transcendental argument that places constraints on what can be given for knowledge. One path to explaining the Myth of the Given is to look at what the idea of knowledge entails. Following Wilfred Sellars, McDowell claims that in order to know something one must be in a position to know what entitles, or justifies, ones belief.3 A belief is justified only if the person is aware of the reason or reasons that entitle the belief. To have knowledge, then, one must utilize capacities that belong to the faculty of reason.4 The faculty of reason, or rationality, is conceived of as the capacity for self-conscious thinking that allows one to be aware of reasons and use reasons to justify ones belief. The faculty of reason alone, though, is not enough for perceptual knowledge. In addition to the faculty of reason, perceptual knowledge requires the faculty of sensibility. The faculty of sensibility is conceived of as the capacity for varying responses to ones environment enabled by properly

McDowell, 1; this is an internalist view regarding epistemic justification. Externalist views are excluded as knowledge in Sellars and McDowells views. For a defense of McDowells internalism, see his work Perception as a Capacity for Knowledge (2011) 4 McDowell, 1

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John Dombrowski functioning sensory equipment.5 Neither of the two faculties is reducible to the other. The faculty of sensibility provides us with perceptions while the faculty of reason allows us to think about those perceptions and use them as reasons to justify beliefs. Now the problem with the Given comes in. In order to know something, one must exercise the faculty of reason in order to be aware of the reasons that justify the belief. The reasons that justify a perceptual belief come from the faculty of sensibility. The faculty of the sensibility does not belong to the faculty of reason. If the faculty of sensibility alone provides the reason for justifying a belief, then one would be Given a justifying reason for a belief (i.e., a perception for perceptual knowledge) without needing the capacity that allows one to use reasons to justify beliefs.6 To draw an analogy, it would be like giving someone water to drink from a cup without them having a cup. If a person does not have the capacity to drink from a cup, then it is incoherent to think that they could be given water to drink from a cup. Likewise, it is incoherent to think that someone can be Given a perception that can serve as a justifying reason without that person having the capacity to use reasons in justifying beliefs. Givenness in the sense of the Myth is the idea that sensibility by itself can produce reasons for justifying beliefs without involving capacities that belong to the faculty that justifies beliefs, namely the faculty of reason. As McDowell puts it: it is a form of the Myth to think sensibility by itself, without any involvement of capacities that belong to our rationality, can make things available for our cognition.7

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John Dombrowski 2. Kantian Intuitions and McDowells Conceptualist Account of Perception The Myth of the Given demonstrates that ones faculty of reason must be drawn upon in perception. This section provides McDowells conceptualist account of how the faculty of reason, i.e. ones conceptual capacities, are drawn on in perception. To explain his account of conceptualism, McDowell introduces two technical terms used by Kant. The first of those is the term intuition. The word intuition today means various things that have no relation to the way Kant and McDowell use the term. McDowell puts it succinctly when he says that an intuition is a having in view.8 Applying this definition to objects, an intuition is having an object in view, or the presentation of an object. For example, when I look out the window, one of the objects that I have in view is a red bird. In this case I have an intuition of a bird. If I take the intuition I have of the bird and use it in the judgment That is a bird, I am actively bringing my conceptual capacities into play to propositionally express the intuition that I have of the bird. To be clear, though, when I make the judgment That is a bird I am actively making a judgment and thus going beyond perception per se, as it goes beyond my mere intuition of the bird. Before continuing, I will briefly clarify some of the terminology that I have used. A perception is a mental act or state that is comprised of mental content. Mental content is described as intuitional in the Kantian sense of having an object in view. McDowell uses the term experience instead of perception, but I find that term experience resonates too much with Kants use of the term and have thus chosen to use perception instead of experience to reference the mental act of perceiving.9

McDowell, 6; Both McDowell and Kant use the sensory modality of vision as exemplary. However, the same considerations would apply to other sensory modalities. 9 For Kant, experience actively and necessarily involves the faculty of the understanding. I do not think that McDowell uses experience in this way, though, as he claims that intuitions, the mental content of perceptions, only passively draw on the faculty of the understanding.

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John Dombrowski The second term that McDowell borrows from Kant is the faculty of the understanding. McDowell introduces the understanding as the faculty of concepts and states that conceptual capacities belong to the understanding.10 Conceptual capacities, defined as ones ability to produce and use concepts in thoughts and judgments, must belong to the faculty of reason as I defined it above. McDowell is a little unclear on his switch from using the term faculty of reason to using faculty of the understanding, but I think it is fair to assume that the faculty of the understanding corresponds with his use of the faculty of reason as defined above.11 What I mean by faculty and capacity needs some explaining. By faculty I mean that which provides the capacity to do something. By capacity I simply mean the ability to do something. So, the faculty of the understanding provides the capacity to produce and use concepts. Likewise, the faculty of sensibility provides the capacity for varying responses to ones environment. Ones conceptual capacities, the ability to produce and use concepts, are actualized by the exercise of the faculty of the understanding. Following Kant, McDowell claims that one role of the understanding is to give unity to judgments and intuitions. What it means for the understanding to give unity to both judgments and intuitions is the crux of McDowells conceptualist account. In the rest of this section I explain McDowells conceptualist account of perception by fleshing out the nature of this unity in intuitions and judgments. I begin by explaining the unity in judgments and then move to explaining how the understanding plays a passive role in the unity of intuitions. Unity in a judgment comes in the form of putting significances together. Judging is a discursive activity and can be thought of as an assertion that one makes to oneself. Asserting something to oneself

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McDowell, 3 Note that for Kant, the faculty of reason is a separate faculty from the faculty of the understanding. However, I dont think McDowell uses faculty of reason in the same way as Kant.

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John Dombrowski is making something discursively explicit.12 For example, if I make a propositional judgment by thinking that is a bird, I made it discursively explicit to myself that the object in my visual field, i.e. my intuition, is a bird. The concept I used in that discursive thought, bird, is a meaningful expression that contains content of a certain form. I put that significance together, i.e. unified it, in a discursive thought by stringing the meaningful expressions That is and bird together to produce the unified propositional judgment That is a bird. The result is a propositional judgment that has content that is unified in a specific form, namely a form containing the concept bird and the demonstrative that is. The idea of the conceptual centers on content unified in discursive activity.13 While the unified content of a propositional judgment is the result of putting significances together, that is not the case with intuitions. The unified content of an intuition is given, it is not the result of a discursive activity.14 However, the understanding still functions as the faculty that provides the unity for the content of an intuition, but it serves that role in a different way. Intuitions have a categorical form that is identified by the intuitions distinctive kind of unity.15 McDowell contends that the categorical form of an intuition is the specific way that the content is unified together to present an object. Take the example of the space occupancy (i.e., the shape, size, and movement) of a red bird. When an object is presented in an intuition with the distinctive unity of a bird, i.e. the distinctive shape, size and movement of a bird, the categorical form is identified by the unity that that object has. It is not that bird merely expresses part of the content of the intuition, as red would in this case, rather the categorical form that is identified with a bird captures the distinctive unity, size, shape, and movement in this case, that the object in the intuition has. I will demonstrate shortly that the distinctive unity that the intuition of a bird has corresponds to the

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John Dombrowski distinctive unity that the concept of a bird has. In other words, the mental content of the perception, i.e. the intuition, corresponds to the mental content of a judgment, i.e. concepts. The distinctive unity of an intuition is not the result of putting significances together and is thus not discursive in the way that conceptual content is. If the idea of the conceptual centers on discursive activity and intuitions are not discursive, why does McDowell insist that intuitional content is conceptual? Because, McDowell answers, every aspect of the content of an intuition is present in a form in which it is already suitable to be the content associated with a discursive capacity if it is not at least not yet actually so associated.16 McDowell claims that the thrust behind Kants claim that the understanding functions to unify the content of judgments as well as intuitions is highlighted by the fact that any intuitions content can be analyzed into concepts for discursive use.17 The categorically unified content of the intuition of a bird (its categorical form), corresponds to the unity of the significance (i.e. concept) bird that I use in judgments about birds. Recall that the unity of an intuition is not actively put together like a judgment. It is given. If it was not given, then the mind would be active everywhere and we would fall into some kind of idealism. However, even though the unity of an intuition is given, it is not Given in the sense of the Myth, as ones conceptual capacities are in play. They are not in play, though, in an active way. The operation that provides the unity of an intuition, i.e. provides its categorical form, reflects the operation that provides unity to discursive judgments. It is in this way that intuitions are conceptual. As McDowell puts it: We could not have intuitions, with their specific forms of unity, if we could not make judgments, with their corresponding forms of unity.18

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John Dombrowski The fact that intuitions and concepts used in discursive judgments share forms of unity is the exploitation of a potential for discursive activity.19 In this way, intuitions passively draw on ones conceptual capacities. The conceptual nature of an intuition is found in the intuition in a form in which one could make it, that very content [of the intuition], figure in discursive activity.20 Intuitions passively draw on conceptual capacities by having a categorically unified form that can potentially be taken up in a judgment that utilizes concepts that correspond to the forms of intuitions. In other words, the form of an intuition is so constituted that it matches the form of a concept, even if that intuitions is not taken up in a judgment. Saying that perception draws on conceptual capacities can be misleading. When McDowell uses the term draws on, I do not take him to mean that the faculty that produces intuitions reaches out to ones conceptual capacities. Rather, the drawing upon happens before a particular intuition occurs. To say that the operation that gives unity to an intuition reflects the operation that gives unity to judgments means that the former operation is informed by the latter operation. Intuitions can be unified in certain forms because the understanding (i.e. the operation that unifies judgments) provided those forms to the operation that unifies intuitions. In this section I detailed McDowells appropriation of Kantian intuitions into his conceptualist account of perception. To avoid the Myth of the Given, conceptual capacities, capacities that belong to the faculty of reason, must be drawn upon in perception. McDowell uses the Kantian notions of intuitions and the faculty of the understanding to show that the perceptual presentation of objects in an intuition draws on conceptual capacities in a passive way. Specifically, since the categorical forms of intuitions correspond to the categorical forms of concepts used in judgments, intuitions draw on capacities that enable one to make judgments, namely conceptual capacities.
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John Dombrowski 3. Robert Hanna and the Handwaving Argument This section details one non-conceptualist argument brought against McDowells conceptualist account of perception. Non-conceptualists maintain that some object directed perceptual mental content is not informed by ones conceptual capacities. The argument is provided by Robert Hanna. I am going to show that McDowells appropriation of Kantian intuitions into his conceptualist account of perceptual mental content makes it easy to defend against this argument. Here is Hannas Handwaving Argument: (1) Suppose that I am standing right in front of you and saying All bachelors are males, and all males are animals, so it is analytic that all bachelors are animals, right? By hypothesis, you are concentrating on what I am saying, and clearly understand it. (2) All bachelors are males, and all males are animals, so it is analytic that all bachelors are animals, right (5) Your conceptual capacities are being used by you to concentrate on what I am saying about bachelors, males, and animals, and to understand it clearly, which by hypothesis you do. (6) Insofar as you are using those conceptual capacities to concentrate on and to understand clearly what I am saying, you are not using your conceptual capacities to see clearly what I am doing with my hands. (7) Yet you also see clearly what I am doing with my hands. Your conscious attention is divided into linguistic understanding and lucid

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John Dombrowski vision, but by hypothesis your conceptual capacities for linguistic understanding are not distracted. (8) Therefore you are using your non-conceptual capacities to see clearly what I am doing with my hands. (9) The kind of mental content that guides and mediates the use of nonconceptual capacities is essentially non-conceptual content. (10) Therefore essentially non-conceptual content exists.21 In (7) Hanna contends that ones conceptual capacities are actively being used for linguistic understanding. This coincides with McDowells notion of discursive activity, judgments and conceptual capacities as explained in this paper. When one is actively thinking and making judgments, she is actively using her conceptual capacities to put significances together. Just so, the thinker/onlooker in the Handwaving Argument is putting significances together about bachelors and animals. So, the question remains whether Hanna is right to conclude that because one is actively drawing on their conceptual capacities they cannot at the same time be passively drawing on their conceptual capacities. In (6) Hanna claims that because the onlooker is actively using their conceptual capacities and is both aware of and not distracted by the hand waving that is occurring in front of her, she is not in any way using her conceptual capacities to be aware of the hand waving. Recall that for McDowell ones conceptual capacities are drawn upon in a passive manner in perception. In the case of the waving hand, an intuition of a waving hand passively draws on ones conceptual capacities because the specific type of unified content of the intuition, the waving hand, corresponds to the specific type of unified content in a judgment about waving hands.

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John Dombrowski Hannas argument breaks down at (6) because in McDowells account of conceptualism, ones conceptual capacities are still drawn upon while perceiving the hands waving. Thus, Hannas Handwaving Argument fails to demonstrate the existence of non-conceptual mental content in perception and thereby does not demonstrate that the mental content of perception in rational animals is not strictly determined by their conceptual capacities. 4. Conclusion In this paper I presented McDowells use of the Kantian notions of intuitions and the understanding to demonstrate that ones conceptual capacities are drawn upon in perception. McDowell shows that the categorical form of an intuition, i.e. the distinctive unity that an intuition has, corresponds to the categorical forms of judgments. It is in this way that intuitions (i.e. perceptions) passively draw on ones conceptual capacities and are therefore conceptually informed. Robert Hanna attempted to demonstrate that there are some perceptions that are not conceptually informed and therefore that conceptualism is an untenable thesis regarding mental content in perception. However, his argument, titled the Handwaving Argument, fails against McDowells theory that intuitions passively draw on ones conceptual capacities.

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John Dombrowski

Works Cited McDowell, John. Avoiding the Myth of the Given. Electronic Resource, obtained 10/1/2011. http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/germanphilosophy/files/2011/09/mcdowell-Avoiding-theMyth-of-the-Given1.pdf. Also published in: McDowell, John. Having the World In View: essays on Kant, Hegel and Sellars. Havard University Press: Cambridge. 2009 Hanna, Robert. The Myth of the Given and the Grip of the Given. Diamatros 27 (2011): 25-46

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