Matt said to Ron:
My reticence to use the pre-conceptual/conceptual distinction myself, or
suggest it as a good idea, is not because people occasionally use Platonic
techniques of argument ("that's just the way things are," as if there were a
method of demonstration lying around) as you did not, but because after we
distinguish purposes, the only ones I see left are ones created by taking on
the Platonic problematic (like the unrepresentability of pure experience).
These we might call "metaphysical purposes," and the only way to fix them are
with "metaphysical splits." I don't see the need for taking on the
problematic, see those purposes as "false needs" (in Marcuse's sense), and so
don't see the utility of the distinction.
I certainly wouldn't claim that there aren't people out there making strong
claims to the contrary (John McDowell in Mind and World is one), but as largely
a spectator to the sport, I still can't see the point that's being made. The
issue that Dave has with me, I think, largely surrounds this--he perceives me
as evacuating philosophical space.
dmb says:
It's not very clear to me what you're saying here. I thought it might help if I
looked into McDowell's "Mind and World", although I can't tell what his claim
is contrary to. When I try to simplify your sentence by taking out the
parenthetical statements and qualifiers, I get something like:My reticence to
use the pre-conceptual/conceptual distinction is because after we distinguish
purposes, the only ones I see left are ones created by taking on the Platonic
problematic, like the unrepresentability of pure experience." I don't know what
that means but it seems that your reticence about this distinction stems from
issues that have nothing to do with the distinction. I'd say your reticence
comes from the influence of philosophers who tend to understand things in terms
of analytic philosophy and not pragmatism. It's a source of confusion, I think,
because you take their criticisms of traditional empiricism and inappropriately
apply it to radical empiricism, which has a completel
y different "metaphysical" starting point and a completely different theory of
truth. I know it's an unpleasant thought, but I'd like you to entertain the
possibility that your reticence is the result of conceptual errors with respect
to the meaning of the preconceptual/conceptual distinction.
As I understand it, the analytic philosophers deny that there is any such thing
as the preconceptual. Apparently, McDowell's Mind and World is all about about
denying exactly that. He's an analytic philosopher who is influenced by Rorty
and your other favorites from the analytic school. I know it's only Wiki, but
it's also totally relevant to this dispute....
Mind and World (1994)The later development of McDowell's work came more
strongly to reflect the influence on him of Rorty and Sellars and, in
particular, both Mind and World and McDowell's later Woodbridge lectures focus
on a broadly Kantian understanding of intentionality, of the mind's capacity to
represent. Mind and World sets itself the task of understanding the sense in
which we are active even in our perceptual experience of the world. Influenced
by Sellars's famous diagnosis of the "myth of the given" in traditional
empiricism, in which Sellars argued that the blankly causal impingement of the
external world on judgement failed to supply justification, as only something
with a belief-like conceptual structure could engage with rational
justification, McDowell tries to explain how one can accept that we are passive
in our perceptual experience of the world while active in how we conceptualise
it. McDowell develops an account of that which Kant called the "spontaneity" o
f our judgement in perceptual experience, while trying to avoid the suggestion
that the resulting account has any connection with idealism.Mind and World
rejects, in the course of its argument, the position that McDowell takes to be
the working ideology of most of his philosophical contemporaries, namely, a
reductively naturalistic account that McDowell labels "bald naturalism". He
contrasts this view with what he deems to be his own "naturalistic" perspective
in which the distinctive capacities of mind are a cultural achievement of our
"second nature", an idea that he adapts from Gadamer. The book concludes with a
critique of Quine's narrow conception of empirical experience and also a
critique of Donald Davidson's views on belief as inherently veridical, in which
Davidson plays the role of the pure coherentist.One of the hallmarks of
McDowell's later work is his denial that there is any philosophical use for an
idea that our experience contains representations that are not
conceptually structured, so-called "non-conceptual content". Given that other
philosophers claim that scientific accounts of our mental lives, particularly
in the cognitive sciences, need this idea, this claim of McDowell's has
provoked a great deal of discussion. McDowell develops a stringent reading of
Sellars' diagnosis of a "myth of the given" in perceptual experience to argue
that we need always to separate out the exercise of concepts in experience from
a causal account of the pre-conditions of experience and that the idea of
"non-conceptual content" straddles this boundary in a philosophically
unacceptable way.
His work has been also heavily influenced by, among others, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, P. F. Strawson, David Wiggins, and, especially, Wilfrid Sellars.
Many of the central themes in McDowell's work have also been pursued in similar
ways by his Pittsburgh colleague Robert Brandom (though McDowell has stated
strong disagreement with some of Brandom's readings and appropriations of his
work). Both have been strongly influenced by Richard Rorty, in particular
Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). In the preface to Mind and
World (pp. ix-x) McDowell states that "it will be obvious that Rorty's work is
[...] central for the way I define my stance here".
dmb continues:
It's funny that Strawson, the one who thinks SOM is a straw man, is listed
here. Seems to me that all these guys are rejecting the notion of objectivity
without dropping the basic premise of SOM. The don't deny that it's all a
matter of the subjective mind's capacity to represent the world, the debate is
just about the ways in which our representations are structured. To say that
there is "no blankly causal impingement of the external world upon judgement",
for example, is to say we can't subjectively have the Kantian thing-in-itself,
the objective reality as it really is. As I see it, you are understanding the
non-conceptual in these terms, in terms of the analytic critique of traditional
empiricism, both of which are understood and handled from within the
assumptions of SOM.
As a result, you have a misconception about what the non-conceptual ("pure
experience" and "Quality") means. It certainly doesn't involve a claim that the
subject has direct access to objective reality or a claim that we've gone
beyond mere appearances to obtain reality as it really is because radical
empiricism begins by rejecting those categories and distinctions. The idea of
pure experience is predicated on the notion that subjects and objects are not
the "pre-conditions of experience" but rather the secondary conceptual effects
of experience. At the risk of sounding like an anti-analytic snob, I really
don't think these guys are ever going to help you with radical empiricism.
That's just not what they're talking about. I can see how it might look like
they are, but they aren't. The myth of the given that they're criticizing is
the myth of the positivists in particular and the SOMers in general. Their
position as inheritors of that tradition and the influence of Kant, as a
lluded to in the wiki article above, is a dead give away.
Matt said:
...How do we suggest to other philosophers that while we don't have a
systematically articulated response to their arguments, we also don't "feel,"
on the inside, that the argument was successful--the sense in which we've "been
successfully persuaded to change our opinions"? It would be lying, wouldn't
it, to say because you can't think of anything cogent to say, that you've been
persuaded by their arguments? Or, because of your quasi-inarticulacy, to begin
to repeat their positions because you can't articulate your own up to high
enough standards? This may seem like pure evasion, but to me it is a
description of the first-person difficulty of negotiating the argumentative
process--how it _feels_ to argue and be persuaded. If you don't _feel_
persuaded, what do you do? What is the proper response? What is the best
rhetorical presentation to give each side their due?
dmb says:
I remember a friend of mine once explained to me how he had thoroughly and
utterly defeated his opponent in a debate but also told me that the victory
would be much more satisfying if only his opponent could see it that way. I
laughed out loud.
But it seems that in our case, you remain unpersuaded as to the value of the
preconceptual/conceptual distinction because you're listening to the analytic
critiques of traditional empiricism and mistaking that for a critique of
radical empiricism. But if you just stop for a moment and remember that radical
empiricism is itself a critique of and replacement for traditional empiricism,
you can see what a big problem it might be to confuse or conflate the two. Are
you, at least, persuaded of that much yet?
Please don't get upset about my efforts to correct you. I realize you're not
going like the idea that there is something about this that you don't
understand but my aim is not to insult your intelligence or find fault just for
the fun of it. If I'm right, then you and I have been talking about two
completely different things for a long time and it would explain a lot as to
why there has been so much progress. Give it some thought, will you.
Ultimately, you are the only one who can change your mind. I can put a few
suggestions out there but you have to put it together in your own thoughts and
then see what it does.
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