content is taken to be non-conceptual, Cussins believes that it can, in McDowell's terms, be suitably available for judgment. The difference between the two views can be framed as follows. For Cussins, what makes a perceptual non-propositional content suitably available to be ReasonAS for judgment is activity; for McDowell, what makes a perceptual non-propositional content suitably available for judgment, according to his new position, is the involvement of the conceptualfaculty for discursive activity170. To put the point another way, Cussins thinks that activity is sufficient for ReasonAS, whereas McDowell holds that conceptual capacities are necessary forReasonAS.
This is just another way to say that even McDowell's new position, contra Cussins, still holds the Normative Concept of Truth View. In accordance with McDowell's new position, we can reformulate such a view as follows:
Normative Concept of Truth View2: In terms of ReasonAS and/or ReasonOB, content-awareness is answerable to the normative concept of the contents of judgments, namelytruth171.
In fact, although McDowell now thinks that the contents of perceptual experience are non-propositional the involvement of capacities for judgment in experience entail Normative Concept of Truth View. But if one takes Cussins's account as persuasive, how can one give intelligibility to the thought that, say, the maestro's performance might express something true through theactionitself?
I believe that McDowell's comments on John Haugeland's criticism of
“positivism”, as the latter understands it, are illuminative. First, because McDowell, as
171Recall:content-awareness:thinkables are contents but not objects of sensory awareness.
170Or, “the same functionthat gives unity to the different representations in a judgement”.
well as Haugeland, analyzes similar examples like that of Cussins. Second, because in his exchange with Haugeland McDowell brings exactly his interpretation of the Deduction and of Hegel as an inspiration for the thought that there is a sense in which (non-propositional) action can also be understood as a meaningful expression of truth.
As McDowell indicates, Haugeland takes “positivism” as “the idea that reality, or the world, is exhausted by what can be truly said to be the case”, or “that reality can be completely captured by true propositions” (RDW, 311)172. Within the context of the obvious allusion to the first sentence of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Haugeland highlights that McDowell's thought on perceptual experience is a developed version of this type of
“positivism”:
“Remarkably, it was several decades before Sellars brought the issue into focus and pointed the way out. If experience is to provide rational grounds for empirical knowledge, then it must itself already be in 'the logical space of reasons'; that is, it must already be conceptually articulated with the logical form of the factual. That left it to McDowell to extend the argument beyond experience to the entire world, insofar as it is knowable at all. 'The realm of the conceptual,' McDowell says, 'is unbounded on the outside' - a self-conscious reformulation of Wittgenstein's positivist slogan173.
In that sense, we can also take “positivism” as the thought that there must be an equation of what is the case with the world. Call it the “positivist equation”. Against that, Haugeland points out that there are instances of knowledge about the world that
“cannot be entirely verbal”174. In using scientific know-how as a paradigmatic example,
174Haugeland 2016:297.
173Haugeland 2016:295.
172Here is Haugeland himself on “positivism”: “Picturesquely, it is the view that reality is 'exhausted' by the facts -that is, by the true propositions. (Note -that 'positive' and 'propose' stem from the same root.)” (Haugeland 2016:293).
Haugeland contends that the knowledge acquisition of some scientific practices is not solely factual. For instance, he states that the hand-down of a skillful know-how of an empirical technique may not be “expressed in words or formulas”175. As he suggests, tutors, for example, in most of the time motivate the students to practice, that is, to perform practical exercises as they learn them: “First they watch while the tutor demonstrates, and then they try it themselves, repeatedly, under critical supervision”176. For Haugeland, what is being displayed as the tutor hands-down the know-how to the novice may not “be reduced to a text”177, or articulated discursively. From that, Haugeland concludes that “positivism” could only comprehend propositions - or discursive capacities - as independentof the idea of the world/reality. Haugeland's point is that if a piece of know-how is knowledge about the world, and if “positivism”
conceives the world as what can be captured by true propositions - or as an equation between reality and discursive capacity - scientific know-how, as being non-verbal, would end up not being a knowledge about the world, which is inconceivable.
Nonetheless, McDowell will try to show that discursive capacities and reality should be understood interdependently. And within this context of the exchange between McDowell and Haugeland, I would like to return to Cussins’s view. One can take Cussins's view on non-conceptual content as suggesting a similar approach to that of Haugeland's view on know-how. Take a look, for instance, at how Cussins describes the contents of theReasonAS for a judgment such as “that wasn't Schubert”:
“What was the content of this reason? If we were to express it in words then we should talk about a distinctive way, exhibited by the pianist, in which the activity of piano playing
177Haugeland 2016:297.
176Haugeland 2016:297, emphasis added.
175Haugeland 2016:298.
might be structured. It's easier to show what this way is than to state it in words, but it's not ineffable: after years of talking about music together we have our ways of describing the different styles and authorities with which hands fly across keyboards”178.
In saying that it is “easier to show what this way is than to state it in words”, Cussins suggests that experience can for itself account for knowledge about the world, without any involvement of discursive capacities. To that extent, positions such as that of Cussins and Haugeland seem to propose that there is a role for experience in our knowledge about the world that does not lie in, or does not depend on, discursive capacities. In fact, in holding Normative Concept of Activity View, Cussins can be seen as denying the idea implicit in Haugeland's notion of “positivism”, which states that reality is exhausted by what can be said to be the case; Haugeland, in its turn, can also be understood as holding a version of a Normative Concept of Activity View, as he claims that the normative concept (in Cussins's terms) which guides know-how about the world is practice rather than truth, just like the following passage clearly indicates:
“in learning [in actual practice] what will and won't work, or what will workbetter- that is, in acquiring the relevant know-how - scientists are learning something about the world”179.
McDowell acknowledges, in fact, that “one can know how to work with a material without having explicit concepts”, and that the knowledge of the actual practice is nonetheless “a function of the world” (RWD, 321). However, he will contend that the fact that a given experience may not be expressible in words (or formulas, symbols, and so on) does not imply that there cannot be other expressive capacities capable of
179 Haugeland 2016:297, emphasis added. Recall that what is important for us is not the normative concept of activityper sebut the idea of the possibility of giving experience another normative concept than truth.
178Cussins 2002:53, emphasis added.
displaying a know-how - say, a scientific knowledge or a knowledge about Schubert - as being a case of speaking something true about the world.
As instances of these other expressive capacities McDowell presents those that, although not able to fully specify a given practice or action, sufficiently say true things about the world. Then, linguistic expressions such as “this is Shubert”, or, in the case of scientific know-how, like “here is a way one can work with this material”180, can be seen, according to McDowell, as cases of speaking something truly:
“(...) why should that debar rationalists from counting them as cases of speaking the truth? We can agree with Haugeland that there is more to the world than what can be expressed in exploitations of finitely specifiable formal systems. But on a sufficiently liberal conception of capacities to say things, that is no threat to the idea that the world is exhausted by what can be truly said” (RWD, 322).
It is noteworthy that at least in the “Schubert case” there is a linguistic expression involved in the action. As Cussins himself says, the maestro provides the ReasonAS while “sitting down at her piano and playing as she pronounces, 'Now, zis is Schubert!'”181. One can contend that there is a sense in which linguistic expressions are needed to at least contextualize what the performance intends. For example, as McDowell would understand the “Schubert case” the maestro, in using a demonstrative expression such as “this is Schubert”, intends to say something true about the “skilled manifestation of music by Schubert”, as she gives ReasonAS for the judgment in question. McDowell's point is that although it is correct to say that less specifiable linguistic expressions such as “this is Schubert” are not capable of giving explicit
181Cussins 2002:53. Here, Cussins plays with the maestro's Russian accent.
180SeeRWD, 322.
meaning as action and practice do, one can count a demonstrative expression as still capturing something true about that action and practice.
In this sense, McDowell believes that Haugeland's mistake is to conceive “what can be truly said as restricted to what can be made explicit by words (or other symbols) without the help from anything besides themselves” (RWD, 322). McDowell thinks that such “things besides explicit words”, for instance demonstrative expressions, are sufficient for holding an image of the world as being “exhausted by what can be truly said”. What McDowell wants to emphasize is that there is no gap between discursive capacities and the world: “[t]hose are two angles on a single kind of thing, each intelligible only in the context of the other” (RWD, 326), insofar as there would be nothing outside the realm of the conceptual.
In his exchange with Haugeland, McDowell appeals to Kant and Hegel to provide intelligibility to this idea that discursive capacities and reality might be understood together. One of the reasons for this call upon them is the fact that Haugeland ascribes
“positivism” to Kant: “the transcendental deduction of the categories is nothing other than an attempt to prove that there can be nothing to the empirical world except such as can be the content of a judgment”182. In the face of it, McDowell (RWD) will explore how Kant and Hegel can be helpful in understanding why Haugeland's interpretation of
“positivism” does not hold. To do so, McDowell will explain why the Deduction, in contrast to Haugeland's reading, is not meant to argue for any substantive thesis concerning empirical reality.
As we saw, McDowell's Kant stresses that “it is analytic that empirical reality would be thinkable if we could make sense of the idea of empirical reality” (RWD, 319).
182Haugeland 2016:295.
But McDowell notes, however, that Kant cannot directly establish an identity between empirical reality and reality itself. That would be so since Kant states that sensibility plays a distinctive role in a subject's access to reality: “It is thus just as necessary to make the mind's concepts sensible (i.e., to add an object to them in intuition) as it is to make its intuitions understandable (i.e., to bring them under concepts)” (CRP A 51-2/B 75-6). To that extent, Haugeland's notion of the “positivist equation”, in Kant's sense, would need to make sense of the idea that the understanding needs sensibility in order to have a subject matter.
In this respect, McDowell will try to show that Kant's issue in the Deduction is not, despite Haugeland's suggestion, the quest for any proof for something like “positivism”, but actually a search for a way to guarantee that empirical concepts have objective validity. To account for Kant's issue in the Deduction, McDowell believes that what one needs is to “stop supposing that the formal character of the power of thought can be understood in abstraction from something that plays the role of sensibility” (RWD, 320), so one can make proper sense of Kant's idea that empirical reality is not out of reach of the categories. For McDowell, the best way to dissolve this kind of worry is to appeal, now, to Hegel's conception oflogic.
According to McDowell, in fact, this would be a somewhat natural step, since Hegel's thinking can be seen as a development from Kant's. Such a development is framed by McDowell as Hegel's appropriation of the categories to his notion of “the Concept”. For clarity's sake, here is Sanguinetti on the Concept:
“[T]he Concept represents an ontological mode of self-determination of reality as a whole. (...) In the Concept, the determinations of reality manifest themselves as an
immanent development, in which determinate concepts are conceived of as internal articulations of the universal structure of the Concept itself. They are 'posited' by it, but not as something other with respect to the Concept itself. Rather they are internal particularizations of the Concept” (...)183.
According to this conception, reality itself, in contrast to Kant,isthe Concept. More than an actualization of conceptual capacities, the Concept, in Hegel's sense, would be self-actualizing: “the categories fall short of the Concept, properly understood, in that they do not contain, but stand over against, their own actualization in reality. That reflects Kant's dualistic conception of how the understanding relates to sensibility”
(RWD, 243). As reality, in Hegel, would not be in opposition to the conceptual, he would offer, according to McDowell, a less problematic equation of the forms of reality with the forms of thought, to the extent that Hegel, unlike Kant, would not need to explain how sensibility - something that standsover againstthe understanding - is not external to the realm of the conceptual.
For McDowell, then, once we suppose that reality (or in a sense, intuition) should not be taken as being independent of the realm of the conceptual (or in a sense, the understanding or the Concept), the world could be seen as exhausted by what can be truly expressed, even if an expressive capacity, such a demonstrative, would not be able tocompletelycapture the world through discursive capacities.
Cussins stresses, however, that regarding non-conceptual content one should not be misled by demonstrative expressions:
183Sanguinetti 2018:141.
“The bearer of the content, here, is the activity; the demonstrative functions to direct our attention towards the activity – it does not itself say what the content is. (...) That the linguistic demonstrative word often expresses a concept tells us nothing, in this context, about the nature of the content expressed (...). The demonstrative functions here as a pointer towards the expressive item (which is then allowed to 'speak' for itself), and so nothing can be deduced about the content of the (...) the demonstrative” (Cussins 2002:n.15).
Cussins seems to suggest that although the demonstrative expression involves concepts, experience itself falls short of the realm of the conceptual. So what is relevant for the “expressive item”, i.e. the activity itself, has nothing to do, at least in principle, with the demonstrative expression. In other words, the demonstrative would not be necessary to determine the content of the experience. In this sense, what is displayed -i.e. the maestro's performance - although not having a verbal character, determinesfor itself - i.e., without any help from concepts - what the maestro means by saying “this is not Schubert”184. At first sight, Cussins seems right about that. For instance, consider a situation in which, after the teacher claims that “this is not Schubert”, the pupil asks something like “what do you mean?”, and only then the maestro plays the piano in response to the question. In such a case, the action is even “farther” from the maestro's demonstrative linguistic expression. It is also plausible that there are many contexts in which one does not even actually need to say anything while displaying - in a successful communicative way - a reason. Think of a musical course - say, “Introduction to Schubert” - in which a teacher, while playing along the same piece with her pupil, shows
184 In McDowell's terms, what people like Haugeland and Cussins mean is that activity or practice “enters into determining what it is that being said” (RWD, 322).
how to correctly play a part wrongly played by her pupil an instant ago. An eye contact may suffice for direct one's attention towards an activity that displays, say, “this is the right way to play the piece”, which might be understood as a candidate for reasons for what the teacher communicates with her eye contact. For those reasons, I believe that, at least for now, one might focus on action itself, instead of what surrounds it. It is true that one could argue that, through the lenses of a Cognitive Capacities View, an expressive capacity such as an eye contact may be taken as involving conceptual capacities. Surely, that can even be understood, in a conceptualist framework, in the same spirit of Cussins's suggestion that what is linguistically mute can nonetheless
“speak”. Be that as it may, my point is that what is at stake for both McDowell and Cussins is whether action - and only action, e.g. only the performance at the piano, in the “Schubert case” - is capable of giving ReasonAS, in spite of how one might understand the involvement of demonstratives or any other expressive capacities. So I think that our question should be about the nature of what perceptually grounds a judgment. In Cussins's terms, a question with the form “what is the content?” of perception that gives reason to perceptual judgments.
McDowell's new position, as we saw, states that intuitional contents are not discursive. That does not mean, however, that intuitional contents are non-conceptual:
“If intuitional content is not discursive, why go on insisting it is conceptual? Because 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. That is part of the force of saying, with Kant, that what gives unity to intuitions is the same function that gives unity to judgments” (AMG, 7).
For our current purposes, what is remarkable about this passage is that what matters for McDowell's new position is the thought that the unity of the content of intuitions is endowed by the functions of the understanding. It is in that sense that intuitional contents are still conceptual. Moreover, in spite of the fact that the contents of intuitions are not articulated in nature, that does not mean that they are not articulable. In being so, the content of intuition is potentially the content of a judgment. For McDowell, in line with his reading of Kant and Hegel, perceptual experiences have conceptual content not only because demonstratives or other expressive capacities are cases of “speaking”
the truth, but also because what is presented in experience is potentially articulable in judgments:
“With much of the content of an ordinary visual intuition, the capacities that are in play in one's having it as part of the content of one's intuition are not even susceptible of discursive exercise. One can make use of content's being given in an intuition to acquire a new discursive capacity, but with much of the content of an ordinary intuition, one never does that. (Think of the finely discriminable shapes and shades of colour that visual experience presents to one.) Nevertheless an intuition's content is all conceptual, in this sense: it is in the intuition in a form in which one could make it, that very content, figure in discursive activity. That would be to exploit a potential for discursive activity that is already there in the capacities actualized in having an intuition with that content”
(AMG, 8).
Nevertheless, it seems that, for Cussins, it is not a problem for his argument that all the content of experience would be articulable, as positions as McDowell's suggests.
In effect, Cussins himself admits that the reason for the judgment “this is Schubert” “it's not ineffable [insofar as] after years of talking about music together we have our ways of
describing the different styles and authorities with which hands fly across keyboards”185. Cussins's point, then, seems to be whether or not one can provide an account of a mode of presentation of the world that is radically distinct from the mode of presentation characteristic of propositional thoughts. And as we saw, such an account would be possible, according to Cussins, notbecauseexperience, in most of the cases, exhibits a richer or fine-grained perceptual content, but because there would be a mode of experience that makes the world available not as a truth-maker. Nonetheless, this type of availability of the world, for Cussins, could perfectly account for ReasonAS. What is at stake, then, is whether the normative condition that governs experiential presentations of the world can be taken as not being guided by truth.
As this debate seems to be not yet resolved, I think that McDowell's appeal to Kant and Hegel only partially explains why non-discursive/non-propositional contents could still be considered as being conceptual, insofar as in the specific context of the normative conditions for ReasonAS there is more to say about why the normative concept of truth is necessary for taking a reason as aReasonAS.
I believe that it is enough for a chapter concerning Kant and Hegel. At this point, the issues regarding the contrast between McDowell's and Cussins's positions risk going too far away from what is involved in McDowell's reading of these German philosophers. In Chapter 6, though, another appeal to Cussins will be pertinent: in defending my own argument, I will offer what I think is a possible candidate to be the normative concept of perceptual experience.
In this chapter, I have discussed McDowell’s reading and the objections to it exclusively in the context of Representationalist accounts, be they conceptualist or
185Cussins 2002:53, emphasis added.