Truism can also be read as a suggestion that sensory awareness has epistemological significance. Recall:
Truism: The way a subjects judges things to be is a way her sensory awareness makes it available to her how things are.
That indicates that authors such as McDowell take experiences as playing a rational role in empirical thinking, in the sense that experiences must be able to give reasons for perceptual judgments. In other words, they must “constitute warranted judgments about the world” (MAW, 5).
MAW's way to frame the idea that experiences have epistemological significance is to set it in a middle ground between, on the one hand, Donald Davidson's so-called
“coherence theory of truth and knowledge”60; on the other hand, Gareth Evans's
60See Davidson 2000.
suggestion that perceptual experience has a non-conceptual content that nonetheless serves as a basis for perceptual judgments61.
Positions such as Davidson's and Evans's aim to be responses to the idea that conceptual capacities as well as perceptual experience should play a role in empirical thought. Nevertheless, at first sight it can seem to be difficult for conceptual capacities and external reality to share the same space, i.e., the space of reasons and justification.
For that reason, according to McDowell there is a threat of an unending oscillation between these two positions, as we must wish to guarantee the following conditions:
one the one hand, the constraint from a reality external to our freedom to exercise conceptual capacities (as per Givenness); on the other, the avoidance of the idea that
“sensory impingements” or “brute impacts” in experience are able to establish any rational constraint from the world in a thinker's perceptual judgment. McDowell sees an unwanted consequence here: Davidson's position, in defending that only beliefs can warrant other beliefs (as we will see in more detail below), seems to interrupt any chance of a rational contact with external reality, if we understand it as an extra-conceptual impact on a subject's sensibility; and although Evans's view is an attempt to regain our rational contact with the world, it is not a properly normative move, since it goes from a non-conceptual to a conceptual content.
McDowell's strategy to get off this oscillation, as indicated above, will be to take experience as already involving conceptual capacities. But before we can get to grips with McDowell's suggestion, as well as with a clarification of Davidson's and Evans's positions, I first need to place the background of those issues.
61See Evans 1982.
The view that sensory awareness has epistemological significance is elaborated by McDowell from the perspective that our thinking is answerable to the empirical world through our sensibility. If that is the case, we might take this answerability to the empirical world as a responsiveness to experience. For McDowell, experiences, in this sense, might be treated as a “tribunal” that mediates the way our empirical thinking is answerable to how things are62. This is exactly what McDowell takes as a “minimal empiricism”: experiences can provide “verdicts” in order for us to judge how things are in the world63.
Yet, McDowell notes that this is often questioned. Sellars (1956), for example, criticizes the view that experiences can serve as a tribunal, by drawing attention to a distinction between two different logical spaces: “the logical space of reasons” and “the logical space of nature”. As we will see, this logical distinction will put a pressure on the idea that our access to the empirical world through experience can be treated as having cognitive significance. In McDowell's words, we are facing an impasse along the following lines: “[According to Sellars's concern] whatever the relations are that constitute the logical space of nature, they are different in kind from the normative relations that constitute the logical space of reasons” (MAW, xv). I want now to show the characteristics of these two logical spaces.
For McDowell, one can take the logical space of reasons as the space of concepts, in the sense that the space of reasons, for Sellars, is the space of justifications and rational relations. It is noteworthy that McDowell connects Sellars's space of reasons with Kant's faculty of spontaneity - “the faculty for bringing forth
63For a detailed exposition of McDowell's understanding of “minimal empiricism”, see Gersel 2018. See also Kern 2019 for a critical approach to “minimal empiricism”.
62McDowell borrows such terminology from Quine 1961.
representations itself” (CPR B75/A51)64. McDowell's appeal to Kant aims to describe conceptual capacities as elements that operate in the faculty of spontaneity, understood as a realm that comprehends the relations between freedom and reason. In turn, Sellars situates the logical space of nature as a realm of law, in opposition to the space of reasons. Sellars's point is that the space of nature cannot include a normative context in which, for example, a subject's stance towards a judgment with the content that things are thus and so can be correctly or incorrectly adopted. For that reason, an empirical description, as Sellars understands it, could never be placed in a space where freedom is constitutive of it; a concept such as that of “knowledge”, then, would only be intelligible in a normative context of the logical space of reasons. Sellars himself spells out the distinction: “In characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says” (Sellars 1956:298-9).
In taking the way Sellars characterizes the distinction between the logical spaces of reasons and nature, McDowell addresses the following question: “which logical space would be the home of the concept of experience?” (MAW, xv, emphasis added). For McDowell, if we take Sellars's indication that experiences are to be equated with impingements by the world in a subject we end up considering them as an empirical description that naturally must be placed in the logical space of nature. In fact, according to Sellars sensory impressions could not be placed in a normative space where things can be correct or incorrect, as we should not suppose that an empirical description is equivalent to something that can be set in the space of reasons.
64Cf. Pippin 1997.
Experience, then, could not be considered a “tribunal”. What we have seen from this short explanation of the way Sellars rejects empiricism is part of his famous attack on the “Myth of the Given”. To fall into this myth, then, would be to incoherently conceive experience as having epistemological significance while recognizing it as not being a tribunal. McDowell illustrates the issue as follows: “The trouble about the Myth of the Given is that it offers us at best exculpations where we wanted justifications. (…) then the best [experiences understood as impingements] can yield is that we cannot be blamed for believing whatever they lead us to believe, nor that we are justified in believing it” (MAW, 13). The quest for a Given (with its capital “g”) can be formulated as a response to the following worry: we must recognize an external constraint on our freedom to exercise conceptual capacities in empirical justifications since the deployment of empirical concepts is something that could only occur in the space of reasons. The Given, then, is meant to calm the anxiety to bring a definitive external fundament to empirical justifications65. With that overview of the notions of the Given and the space of reasons in hand, I now turn to Davidson's and Evans's positions.
65Kern frames the issue in the form of a regress argument: “Imagine I answer the question 'Why do you judge p?' by saying, 'Because I judge q', and the question 'Why do you judge q?' by saying, 'Because I judge r', and the question 'Why do you judge r?' by saying, 'Because I judge s'. What I am doing in this series of answers is changing the content of the judgment - I rest p on q, q on r, and r on s - while holding constant the nexus between the respective content and myself. Each time, the nexus is that of judging, even as the content varies. Thus, at no point in this series of answers is the explanation of the judgment such as to answer the original question, because every answer is such that it solicits the same kind of question, just with respect to a different content. It follows that there must be an explanation of judgment that answers the question 'Why do you judge p?' not by adducing a different content from the one that is to be grounded but instead by adducing a different sort of nexus to this content, namely, one that explains judgment in a way that forecloses the possibility of soliciting the kind of question from which we began”
(Kern 2019:161).