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MIND and ·WORLD John Mcdowell MIND AND ·WORLD • • • With a New Introduction • • • John McDowell HARV ARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Copyright C> 1994, 1996 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Fifth printing, 2000 First HarvardUniversity Press paperback edition, 1996 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData McDowell, John Henry. Mind and world : with a new introduction I John McDowell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-57610-1 1. Philosophy of mind. 2. Knowledge, Theory of. 3. Concepts. I. Title. [BD418.3.M37 1996] 121'.4-<lc20 96-22268 Contents Preface Vtt Introduction xi Lecture I. Concepts and Intuitions 3 Lecture II. The Unboundedness of the Conceptual 24 Lecture III. Non-conceptual Content 46 Lecture IV. Reason and Nature 66 Lecture V. Action, Meaning, and the Self 87 Lecture VI. Rational and Other Animals 108 Afterword Part I. Davidson in Context 129 Part II. Postscript to Lecture III 162 Part III. Postscript to Lecture V 175 Part IV. Postscript to Lecture VI 181 Index ' 189 \ ' Preface The main text of this book is a sort of record of the John Locke Lec­ tures that I delivered in Oxford in Trinity Term, 1991. I have done some recasting of the lectures from the form in which I gave them. I have tried to make improvements in clarity and explicitness. I have also eliminated phrases like "next week" and "last week", which it seemed absurd to leave standing in a version meant to be taken in through the eye, perhaps-at least for the texts of the lectures-at a single sitting. But apart from correcting one inessential falsehood at the end of the last lecture, the texts I offer here, headed "Lecture I" and so on through "Lecture VI'', aim to say just what I said in Oxford. They aim, moreover, to say it with a mode of organization and in a tone of voice that reproduce those of the lectures as I gave them. There are at least three points here. First, even where I have made revisions at the level of phrases and sentences, I have preserved the order of the lectures, as I delivered them, at the level of paragraphs and sections. In particular, I have not tried to eliminate, or even lessen, repetitiveness. I hoped that frequent and sometimes lengthy recapitulations would be helpful to hearers, and I hope they will be helpful to readers too. Second, in a brief set of lectures, it seemed sensible to try to pursue a reasonably linear train of thought, and I have not tried to make the revised texts any less two-dimensional. The footnotes, in so far as they go beyond merely bibliographical information, and the Afterword are meant to give some indication of what a more rounded treatment of these issues might look like. But they are no more than an adjunct to the record of the lectures, more or less as I gave them. viii Preface Third, I have tried not to erase an unguardedness that seemed proper forthe lecture format. I have many substantial debts to acknowledge. Someone who read these lectures superficially might suppose Don­ ald Davidson figures in them, after the first page or so, as an enemy. I hope it is clear to less superficial readers, even from the texts of the lectures themselves, that I single out Davidson's work for criticism as a mark of respect. I define my stance against his by way of a contrast that it would be easy to relegate to the edges of the picture, with mas­ sive agreement in the centre. For my purposes in the lectures, I play up the contrast. In the Afterword I try to make some amends. The fact is that Davidson's writing has been an inspiration to me ever since, at David Wiggins's urging, I first read "Truth and Meaning" or perhaps "On Saying That" (I am not sure which came first forme).1 I have been more strongly influencedthan footnotes can indicate by P. F. Strawson, especially by his peerless book on Kant's First Cri­ tique.2 I am not sure that Srrawson's Kant is really Kant, but I am convinced that Strawson's Kant comes close to achieving what Kant wanted to achieve. In these lectures I follow Strawson directly when I exploit Kam in the context of considering the first person (Lecture V); and my use of Kant in saying how we should conceive experience­ the main thing I try to do here-is Strawsonian in spirit and often in detail. Strawson's influence operates on me both directly and at one re­ move, through Gareth Evans. Evans did nor live to write a preface to his seminal book, The Varieties of Reference;3 if he had, he would surely have tried to convey the extent to which his teacher had shaped his thinking at its most central points. Evans's direct importance for me is incalculable. For a decade or so what mattered most in my intel­ lectual life was my collegial life with him. Anyone who knew him will know what this amounted to: a non-stop barrage of intellectual stim­ ulation. I have no idea how I could so much as begin to separate out the difference he made to me; I cannot imagine what sort of philoso- 1. Both now reprinted in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Clarendon Press, Ox­ ford, 1984 ). 2. The Bounds of Sense (Methuen, London, 1966). I should also mention Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (Methuen, London, 1959). 3. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982. Preface ix pher (if any) I would have been now if it had not been for him. He is one of the two people now gone with whom I most wish I could dis­ cuss this work. The other is Wilfrid Sellars. His classic essay "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind"4 began to be central for me long before I ever thought of coming to the University of Pittsburgh, and it is an abiding regret for me that I became a colleague of his too late in his life to profit from talking to him as I have profited from reading him. Robert Brandom's writings, and conversations with him, have been very important in shaping my thinking, usually by forcing me to get clear about the differences, small in themselves, that transform for me the look of our wide measure of agreement. The way I put things here bears substantial marks of Brandom's influence. Among much else, I single out his eye-opening seminar on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, which I attended in 1990. Thoughts Brandom elicited from me then show up explicitly at a couple of places in these lectures, but the effect is pervasive; so much so that one way that I would like to con­ ceive this work is as a prolegomenon to a reading of the Phenomeno­ logy, much as Brandom's forthcoming Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment5 is, among many other things, a prolegomenon to his reading of that difficult text. I am also deeply indebted to Brandom for detailed help and support while I was preparing the lectures. Many other people have helped me with this work. I try to mention specific debts in the footnotes, but I am sure there are many places where I have forgotten who first taught me to say things as I do, and I am sorry about that. Here I want to thank James Conant, john Haugeland, and Danielle Macbeth for special help and encourage­ ment. I made my first sketches of the kind of formulation I have arrived at here during the winter of 1985-86, in an attempt to get under control my usual excited reaction to a reading-my third or fourth-of Rich­ ard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. 6 I think it was an earlier reading of Rorty that put me on to Sellars; and it will be obvi- 4. In Herbert Feig! and Michael Scriven, eds., Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol . 1 (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1956), pp. 253-329. 5, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 199+. 6. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1979. ous that Rorty's work is in any case central for the way I define my stance here. I used those first formulations in lectures in Oxford in that aca­ demic year, my last ther�, and in my Whitehead Lectures at Harvard in the spring of 1986. That initial work was done while I was a Rad­ cliffe Philosophy Fellow, and even though this fruit of my Fellowship is rather belated, I want to record gratefully that this book owes a great deal to the generosity of the Radcliffe Trust. I also thank the Master and Fellows of University College, Oxford, for giving me per­ mission to accept the Fellowship. I am very grateful to the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy in the Univer­ sity of Oxford for doing me the great honour of inviting me to give the John Locke Lectures, and to many friends in England for their kind­ ness during my stay. Introduction 1. This book first appeared without an Introduction. Since then, however, I have been made to realize that it is harder to understand than I thought. I hope an overview, omitting some details in order to focus on the central theme, will help at least some readers. My aim is to propose an account, in a diagnostic spirit, of some characteristic anxieties of modern philosophy-anxieties that centre, as my title indicates, on the relation between mind and world..._,,,,..
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