The Intentional Spectrum and Intersubjectivity: Phenomenology and the Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians (Series In Continental Thought)

PhilosoPhy —James Swindal, chair of the Philosophy Department, Duquesne University, and author of Reflection Revisited:...

Author: Michael D. Barber

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PhilosoPhy

—James Swindal, chair of the Philosophy Department, Duquesne University, and author of Reflection Revisited: Jürgen Habermas’s Discursive Theory of Truth

W

orld-renowned analytic philosophers John McDowell and Robert Brandom are known as the “Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians.” In The Intentional Spectrum and Intersubjectivity, Michael D. Barber is the first to bring phenomenology to bear not just on the perspectives of McDowell or Brandom alone, but on their intersection. He argues that McDowell accounts better for the intelligibility of empirical content by defending holistically functioning, reflectively distinguishable sensory and intellectual intentional structures. He favors Brandom on knowledge’s intersubjective features that converge with the ethical characteristics of intersubjectivity Emmanuel Levinas illuminates. Phenomenology becomes the third partner in this debate between two analytic philosophers, critically mediating their discussion by unfolding the systematic interconnection among perception, intersubjectivity, metaphilosophy, and ethics.

Michael d. barber is professor of philosophy at St. Louis University and the author of several books on the phenomenology of the social world. His most recent book is The Participating Citizen: A Biography of Alfred Schutz. SERIES covER DESIgN By ELISSA RoBERtS

series in continental thought, no. 39

BARBER

the intentional spectruM and intersubjectivity

“Michael Barber’s The Intentional Spectrum and Intersubjectivity: Phenomenology and the Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians carefully and thoroughly analyzes for the first time ways in which Brandom’s and McDowell’s thinking, particularly about perception, can be illuminated by phenomenological thought, particularly that of Husserl and Levinas. An impressive scholarly accomplishment and a solid contribution to contemporary phenomenological analysis.”

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ohio University Press the Ridges Athens, ohio 45701 ohioswallow.com

Michael

bbarber re the intentional

spectruM and

intersubjectivity phenoMenology

and the pittsburgh

neo-hegelians series in continental thought

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The Intentional Spectrum and Intersubjectivity

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CONT INEN TA L

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Editorial Board Ted Toadvine, Chairman, University of Oregon Elizabeth A. Behnke, Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body David Carr, Emory University James Dodd, New School University Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University† Joseph J. Kockelmans, Pennsylvania State University William R. McKenna, Miami University Algis Mickunas, Ohio University J. N. Mohanty, Temple University Dermot Moran, University College Dublin Thomas Nenon, University of Memphis Rosemary Rizo-Patron de Lerner, Pontiﬁcia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz Gail Soffer, Rome, Italy Elizabeth Ströker, Universität Köln† Nicolas de Warren, Wellesley College Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University

International Advisory Board Suzanne Bachelard, Université de Paris† Rudolf Boehm, Rijksuniversiteit Gent Albert Borgmann, University of Montana Amedeo Giorgi, Saybrook Institute Richard Grathoff, Universität Bielefeld Samuel Ijsseling, Husserl-Archief te Leuven Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania State University Werner Marx, Albert-Ludwigs Universität, Freiburg† David Rasmussen, Boston College John Sallis, Boston College John Scanlon, Duquesne University Hugh J. Silverman, State University of New York, Stony Brook Carlo Sini, Università di Milano Jacques Taminiaux, Louvain-la-Neuve D. Lawrence Wieder† Dallas Willard, University of Southern California

The Intentional Spectrum and Intersubjectivity ..................................

Phenomenology and the Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians

M I CHA E L D. BA R B ER

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

ATHENS

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701 www.ohioswallow.com © 2011 by Ohio University Press All rights reserved To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax). Printed in the United States of America Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ∞ ™ 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barber, Michael D., 1949– The intentional spectrum and intersubjectivity : phenomenology and the Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians / by Michael D. Barber. p. cm. — (Series in Continental thought) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-8214-1961-8 (hard : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8214-4368-2 (electronic) 1. Perception (Philosophy) 2. McDowell, John Henry. 3. Brandom, Robert. 4. Phenomenology. I. Title. B1647.M144B37 2011 121’.34—dc22 2011000788

For Charlie, Dave, Eleonore, Ollie, and Susie

C O N T E N T S

Preface 1 The Debate about Perception: Inferentialism, Representationalism, and Intelligible Empirical Content 1. Representationalism versus Inferentialism 2. The Intelligibility of Empirical Content 2 The Debate about Perception: Rational Constraint, Phenomenology, and Interiorization 1. The Question of Rational Constraint 2. “Experience” in McDowell and a Phenomenological Elaboration 3. Rational Constraint: Critique 4. Interiorization 3 The Fullness of Perception 1. McDowell’s Disjunctivist Account of Perception 2. McDowell on Nonconceptual Content 4 Tradition and Discourse, I-We and I-Thou: McDowell and Brandom on Intersubjectivity 1. Intersubjectivity and the Debate on Perception 2. I-We Intersubjectivity, Its Ethical Dimensions, and the I-Thou Relationship 3. Self-Reﬂective Methodology and I-Thou Relationships 4. Ethical Intersubjectivity: Older than Epistemic Intersubjectivity 5 McDowell’s Wittgensteinian Quietism 1. Interiorization and Metaphilosophy 2. McDowell’s Nonconstructivism 3. McDowell and Natural Science 6 Self-Reﬂectivity, Radical Reﬂection, and Consciousness: Brandom’s Philosophy of Philosophy 1. Self-Reﬂectivity: Ultimacy and Essentiality 2. Theorizing the Pretheoretical 3. A Philosophy of Language or of Consciousness? 7 The Levels of Ethics 1. McDowell: Ethics and Practical Rationality

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1 1 10 19 19 25 34 39 45 46 61 87 88 95 103 113 129 130 135 145 153 155 169 180 185 186

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2. An Alternative View of Ethical Experience and Practical Rationality 3. A Discursive Ethics of Principles 8 Phenomenology, the Intentional Spectrum, and Intersubjectivity 1. Phenomenology and the Intentional Spectrum: The Perceptual Pole 2. Phenomenology and the Intentional Spectrum: The Eidetic-Theoretic Reﬂective Pole 3. Points of Tension: Intersubjectivity and Ethics

193 209 217

Notes Bibliography Index

259 305 319

218 226 238

P R E F A C E

Over the last twenty years the University of Pittsburgh has been the site of some of the most exciting philosophical work in the world. Drawing inspiration from the work of Wilfrid Sellars, his successors in the Pittsburgh Philosophy Department, John McDowell and Robert Brandom, have sought to realize his legacy and debated its signiﬁcance. Both McDowell and Brandom are in agreement in different ways with Sellars, who opposes what he takes to be a myth that some perceptual given independent of a conceptual network forms the foundation of empirical knowledge.1 As Sellars puts it, “One could not have observational knowledge of any fact unless one knew many other things as well.”2 For example, the place that such a conceptually grasped fact has within a more encompassing conceptual network (e.g., knowing that something is green involves also knowing it is not red and is colored). This rejection of the “myth of the given” reminds one of G. W. F. Hegel’s crucial discussion in the “Sense-Certainty” segment of the Phenomenology of Spirit in which he opposes the empiricist view that one can get at a particular without a universal, a concept, of some kind, even if only a universally applicable indexical concept such as “here” or “now.”3 It is for this reason that Richard Rorty has dubbed this second generation of Pittsburgh philosophers (including John Haugeland, who has subsequently moved to the University of Chicago), the “Pittsburgh School of Neo-Hegelians,”4 a denomination that Brandom proudly applies to himself and McDowell.5 Despite their being subsumed under a common classiﬁcation, McDowell and Brandom have developed their own distinctive philosophical viewpoints. In addition, they have engaged each other in an intriguing and intricate threeround debate on perception. The ﬁrst round appeared in a 1997 issue of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (cited hereafter as PPR), dedicated to a discussion of Brandom’s central work, Making It Explicit (cited hereafter as MIE). In this issue, one ﬁnds a précis of Brandom’s work, including a response by McDowell titled “Brandom on Representation and Inference” and Brandom’s replies to McDowell. The exchanges of the second stage of

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the argument, published among a series of papers in PPR in 1998, included an exchange between Brandom and McDowell, but an expanded version of Brandom’s criticism of McDowell and another response by McDowell appeared in a volume titled Perception, edited by Enrique Villanueva.6 This 1998 issue of PPR commenced with McDowell’s précis of Mind and World (cited hereafter as M&W), continued with Brandom’s critical essay “Perception and Rational Constraint: McDowell’s Mind and World,”7 and terminated with McDowell’s “Reply to Brandom.”8 The ﬁnal stage of the debate on perception started with McDowell’s “Knowledge and the Internal,”9 and this essay was accompanied by Brandom’s critical piece, “Knowledge and the Social Articulation of the Space of Reasons.”10 These two articles can be taken as pertaining to a later phase of the debate because this discussion was drawn to a ﬁnish by McDowell’s 2002 essay, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited.”11 In that essay, McDowell makes the case that Brandom’s entire approach, which is marked by a certain skepticism toward common sense, ends up cutting commonsense perceivers off from the world, that is, “interiorizing”12 their beliefs about the world, as will be explained below. I will trace this debate in chapters 1 and 2 under three technical rubrics that will be fully explained later and that have been alluded to in the brief account of the rounds and articles above: representationalism versus inferentialism, the intelligibility of empirical content, and rational constraint. The ﬁrst issue has to do with whether one’s epistemic relationship with the world begins with the effort to represent the world or with the inferential network without which representations cannot be linguistically expressed. While representationalism risks being linguistically naïve, inferentialism is in danger of enclosing itself within a set of linguistically interconnected inferences that may never make direct contact with the world, in other words, a kind of linguistic idealism. The second topic concerns how conceptual capacities are involved in our engagement with the world, that is, whether they function in isolation from sensation processes, especially if those processes are causally explained, or whether we have access to some sorts of pure, concept-free givens that are in some impossible way supposed to justify conceptually formed judgments. Because these forms of isolating conceptual capacities from experience end up jeopardizing the intelligibility of empirical content, which for McDowell must be conceptual in nature to be intelligible, he argues that commonsense concepts are deployed in experience from the start, in receptivity, from within a ﬁrst-person perspective. The third question deals with whether it is necessary to have experience, conceptually informed as McDowell thinks,

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validate and constrain higher-level judgments or whether rational constraint by the world can be achieved through an intersubjective process in which we hold each other accountable to the world, as Brandom contends. In my opinion, McDowell accounts better than Brandom for the intelligibility of our rational connection with the empirical world, which I take to be the central issue in their debate on perception and the one in which the other two questions (i.e., representationalism or inferentialism and rational constraint) are rooted. McDowell’s view that conceptual capacities are engaged in experience from the start enables him to explain the intelligibility of empirical content in a way that Brandom, Donald Davidson, Gareth Evans, Wilfrid Sellars, and several others cannot. Phenomenology in the Husserlian tradition, with its appreciation for holistic cognitive functioning and its reﬂective, constitutive methodology that uncovers strata of intentional activity that need not appear separately, is capable of accommodating McDowell’s fruitful and important insight. It will become clear in considering this debate about perception that both Brandom and McDowell, being the systematic philosophers they are, do not approach the issue of perception and our relationship with the empirical world apart from the broader dimensions of their standpoints. These dimensions, in particular their conceptions of the role of intersubjectivity in knowledge and their philosophies of philosophy, appear repeatedly in all three rounds of the perception debate. Their differences over the place of intersubjectivity in knowing, which have been discussed by them in other venues besides the threeround perception debate, will be considered in chapter 4, where I will favor Brandom’s approach over McDowell’s for reasons that I will explain below. In addition, one residual issue raised in the third and ﬁnal stage of the perception debate concerns whether Brandom “interiorizes” perception, that is, cuts off commonsense perceivers from the world. Such interiorization occurs when a critical, skeptical philosopher adeptly imagines scenarios in which factors hidden from the view of commonsense perceivers (but imagined by the philosopher) lead to the conclusion that they can be deceived without knowing it. As a consequence, the philosophical critics become cautious about affirming if what they experience ever conforms to the way the world is such that they appear to be conﬁned within their own experiences that do not extend to the world itself. This issue raises the deeper question of Brandom’s and McDowell’s philosophies of philosophy, with McDowell upholding common sense and Brandom articulating the basic structures involved in philosophical discourse characterized by a scorekeeper perspective that

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does not accept uncritically the commitments and entitlements attributed to others. These differing metaphilosophies will be analyzed and compared in chapters 5 and 6. For our purposes, what is signiﬁcant is that the central issues present in and emerging from the debate on perception—our perceptual relationship to the world, intersubjectivity, and the philosophy of philosophy—have all been discussed thoroughly within the phenomenological tradition. Drawing on the works of Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, and Emmanuel Levinas, I will attempt to bring the resources of phenomenology to bear on this exchange (some of which I have reconstructed) between McDowell and Brandom. I hope to show phenomenologists how their approach to philosophy is highly relevant to this discussion that has gone on in analytic philosophy especially insofar as McDowell has brought to light the importance of experience for understanding how it is possible to have intelligible empirical content at all. In chapters 5 and 6, I also intend to demonstrate (to phenomenologists, analytic philosophers, and those of other persuasions) that phenomenology— particularly Husserl’s understanding that there is an intentional spectrum extending from our perceptual encounter with world and everyday lifeworld experience to self-reﬂective, transcendental phenomenology—can locate McDowell’s and Brandom’s philosophies of philosophy in relationship to each other and mediate their debate. Furthermore, Husserl’s phenomenology can accommodate, support, and appropriate within itself the insights of both McDowell and Brandom. For example, I will show how phenomenology’s retrogressive reﬂective method can illuminate how strata of perceptual intentional activity can work in tandem with the actualization of conceptual capacities for McDowell. Finally, I will illustrate how McDowell’s account of conceptual capacities being actualized within receptivity explains a phenomenologically recoverable stratum with the higher-level, linguistic inferential activities constitutive of discourse for Brandom. In addition, at several points I will introduce criticisms and clariﬁcations of McDowell’s and Brandom’s views that a phenomenological perspective might contribute. For example, though agreeing in many respects with McDowell’s realism about our encounter with the world, I will show in chapter 3 how phenomenology, especially as it is developed by A. D. Smith,13 might be used to converge critically with his disjunctivist view of perception, explaining perceptual dimensions of experience (e.g., three dimensionality, kinesis, Anstoss [the resistance (things offer us)]) that can offset the argument from illusion that is focused only on deceptive sensations.

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While McDowell shows the mistakes that the skeptic makes in arguing from experiences of illusion to the conclusion that nondeceptive experience cannot be distinguished from deceptive experience, Smith develops a more ample account of the perceptual dimensions of perception (beyond mere sensation) that enable us to relate to an object independent of us. Further, Husserl’s approach to veriﬁcation, constitutive methodology, and his concept of horizon can ﬁll out aspects of perception that McDowell, because he limits himself to the mere cooperation between receptivity and spontaneous conceptualizing, does not develop. In chapter 4, I will defend Brandom’s views on intersubjectivity against McDowell’s argument that his own I-We approach to intersubjectivity, which consists of a tradition equipping individuals to know on their own, is superior to the I-Thou relationship that he thinks is characteristic of Brandom’s views. In McDowell’s view, Brandom’s account of intersubjectivity amounts to a set of critical individuals keeping “one another under surveillance,”14 and it is unhelpful for understanding how sociality underlies our aiming at the world, or objective purport. In refuting McDowell’s criticisms here, I will explain the importance of I-Thou relationships in administering the norms (even the traditional ones) through which knowledge is achieved. Moreover, I will show how Brandom’s approach to epistemic intersubjectivity resembles the primordial ethical intersubjectivity developed by Emmanuel Levinas; how it can exemplify a surprising openness and vulnerability of individuals to each other; and how it, in fact, plays an important role in the question of objective purport. In chapters 5 and 6, on their respective metaphilosophies, I will suggest that McDowell’s argument on behalf of common sense, which rightly opposes skeptical approaches to it, nevertheless represents a model of Brandom’s scorekeeping model insofar as McDowell keeps score on those who are skeptical of common sense (and who therefore keep score skeptically on it) and thereby indirectly vindicates common sense. McDowell’s scorekeeping, in fact, resembles a kind of “recognitional,” rather than skeptical, scorekeeping, affirming a knowledge that is already there and does not itself rely on scorekeeping mechanisms, as Brandom exempliﬁes in his defense of those who know even though they might not be able to provide justiﬁcations for their beliefs (e.g., reliable shard identiﬁers or chicken sexers). I will illustrate that McDowell’s affirmation of common sense depends on a philosophical perspective that is not itself common sense but “above” it and already en route, therefore, to something like an unacknowledged

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transcendental-phenomenological perspective on which his critique of scientism depends. Further, I will demonstrate how Brandom’s work rests on phenomenological insight and the striving for an ultimate perspective typical of transcendental phenomenology, which must always be understood at the same time as transcendental intersubjectivity. In addition Brandom’s philosophy requires, if it is to be fully self-reﬂective, an explanation of the lifeworld, which is the origin of discourse, which Husserl provided for the natural sciences and philosophy itself, and which McDowell recognizes in his apology for common sense. Chapter 7, “The Levels of Ethics,” provides a kind of ﬁnal test case dealing with an area distinct from the epistemic domain in which the debate between McDowell and Brandom has been predominantly conducted, namely, ethics. Here I will show that McDowell’s vindication of common sense leads him to develop a virtue ethics functioning at the lifeworld level in which communities imbue their members with capacities, an Aristotelian “second nature,” through which they perceive situational moral requirements in a manner parallel to their epistemic capacity to encounter the world rationally. However, on this commonsense level of ethical experience, McDowell, despite his recognition of other-regarding virtues, does not take sufficient account of the ethical force that is involved in experiencing another person and that has been more adequately described by Levinas and by commentators giving a virtue-ethical interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s thought. In ethics as in epistemology, intersubjectivity plays a greater role than McDowell acknowledges. In addition, this summons to accountability by the other in ethical experience can motivate one to provide to this other a theoretical justiﬁcation of one’s ethical beliefs. McDowell overlooks this possible motivation and his philosophical quietism inclines him against such a theoretical undertaking, which both Husserl and Brandom endorse as a possibility and to different degrees sketch out. Brandom, for example, endorses as a possible direction in which an ethics compatible with his epistemology might be developed, namely, a discourse-ethical approach similar to that of Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel. Once again, because McDowell and Brandom are such systematic philosophers, one sees how the different approaches they take toward perception, metaphilosophy, and intersubjectivity have implications for the kind of ethics they envision. The concluding chapter, fulﬁlling a promissory note implicit throughout the book, presents Husserl’s intentional spectrum, encompassing the poles of philosophy that McDowell and Brandom occupy, from the lifeworld

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perceptual encounter with the world to self-reﬂective transcendental phenomenology’s philosophy of philosophy. By committing myself to Husserlian transcendental phenomenology (which can be taken to extend from one pole to the other), though, I incur a certain responsibility at least to show how that viewpoint is reconcilable with the other positions that I have taken on in the course of elaborating and criticizing the viewpoints of McDowell and Brandom. For instance, I attempt to show how Levinasian ethics might be integrated with Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and how Husserlian transcendental intersubjectivity is compatible with Apel’s transcendental pragmatics (which I utilize in explaining Brandom’s theory of discourse and which underlies Habermas’s discourse ethics that Brandom claims to be compatible with his epistemology). Finally, I suggest how Husserl’s own view of ethics might be compatible with the two-level Levinasian-discourse theory of ethics, whose bare bones are indicated in chapter 7. One might ask why such a book is important now. Indeed there have been systematic studies of Brandom’s work by Jeremy Wanderer, for example, and of McDowell’s work, particularly by Maximilian de Gaynesford, Tim Thornton, and Richard Gaskin, who have in different places compared and contrasted Brandom’s work with McDowell’s.15 But I know of no work that has addressed the Brandom-McDowell debate on perception as a starting point from which to trace their rich philosophical encounter as it blossoms across several philosophical areas (e.g., metaphilosophy, the role of intersubjectivity in knowledge, and ethics). Likewise, many respected thinkers in the phenomenological tradition have engaged the work of McDowell, such as Steven Crowell, Walter Hopp, Frode Kjosavik, Jakob Lindgaard, A. D. Smith, and Dallas Willard. A smaller number, such as Crowell or Thorsten Gubatz, who has discussed Brandom’s work from a Heideggerian perspective that is sympathetic to phenomenology, have incorporated Brandom’s questions into their phenomenology.16 But no one in the phenomenological tradition has considered both McDowell’s and Brandom’s work in relationship to each other and to the phenomenological tradition, as this book does. In addition, several philosophers in the tradition of Jürgen Habermas, including Habermas himself, have devoted much greater attention to Brandom’s thought than phenomenologists have; consequently, this book, by including Brandom as a key interlocutor in this threesome, attempts to redress that lacuna also.17 In sum, this is the ﬁrst work to clarify the different systematic approaches of Brandom and McDowell by bringing them into relationship to each other and to consider their philosophical relationship from a systematic

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phenomenological viewpoint, drawing, particularly, on the spectrum of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology and Levinasian ethics. At a time when analytic philosophers and continental philosophies withdraw into separate camps—perhaps because the burgeoning of secondary literature makes it difficult even to keep up with one’s limited ﬁeld of expertise—this book attempts to cross the boundaries. Though one might question the accuracy of a particular exposition or argumentation in this three-way dialogue between Brandom, McDowell, and phenomenology, something is gained by endeavoring to examine philosophical encounters systematically, across a variety of issues, something that cannot be seen when one’s interest is too limited to speciﬁc, particular arguments. For ﬁnely grained arguments, such as those found in the debate between McDowell and Brandom on perception, emerge from a broader, often implicit background and reﬂect broader philosophical values, strategies, and commitments that become visible only in a systematic encounter between the two of them and between them and phenomenology. Further, phenomenology can learn about itself in this encounter, about the usefulness of its constitutive methodology, the breadth of the intentional spectrum it encompasses, and the value of the ethical approach to intersubjectivity that has been developed under its auspices. In brief, such systematic encounters between different philosophies reveal philosophy itself to be an intersubjective endeavor, for it is only in seriously encountering counterpositions that require that we understand, appreciate, and carefully disagree with that we begin to understand ourselves. I would like to acknowledge St. Louis University for bestowing on me from 2004 to 2010 the Hotfelder Distinguished Professorship and for providing me with a sabbatical semester in the spring of 2008—without this generous support, this book would never have been possible. Thanks are due to the anonymous reviewer of Ohio University Press for his many ﬁne questions. I am also indebted to Erin Jones and Joshua Anderson for their extensive, careful editorial assistance. I also am indebted to a host of family, friends, and colleagues: David Barber, Timothy and Terrance Barber and their families, Marian Cowan, the late Susie Duckworth, William Hamrick, Tom Kelly, Patti O’Connor, Robert Poirier, Tom Rochford, Ollie Roundtree, Aliyah Roundtree, Bill Rehg, Don Schlichter, Charlie Shelton, Eleonore and Donald Stump, Ted Vitali, and Paul Vu. Without their support and encouragement, I would never have had the fortitude or hope necessary to bring this work to fruition.

CHAPTER 1

the debate about perception Inferentialism, Representationalism, and Intelligible Empirical Content

As promised in the preface, I will discuss in these ﬁrst two chapters the debate between John McDowell and Robert Brandom about perception under three foci: representationalism versus inferentialism, the intelligibility of empirical content, and rational constraint. These issues will frame the structure of these two chapters, and in each case I will exposit what is involved in the issue and where McDowell and Brandom stand, and I will present my critical viewpoint. A fourth issue that arises in the third stage of the debate, “interiorization,” will be presented in the next chapter and discussed at length in chapter 5, since resolving that issue depends on understanding their philosophies of philosophy.

1. representationalism versus inferentialism 1.1. Inferentialism before Representationalism? After Brandom’s brief précis of MIE in the ﬁrst stage of the debate in PPR 57, McDowell’s “Brandom on Representation and Inference” takes up Brandom’s inferentialist opposition to representationalism. According to McDowell, Brandom opposes representationalism, which involves a kind of naïve directedness of language toward the world insofar as representationalists overlook (or merely conﬁne to an afterthought) how the linguistic contents through which they direct themselves to the world are inferentially related to each other. For example, one might observe a red brick and state, “This brick is red,” without taking into account the linguistic-conceptual network one presupposes, insofar as “red” is a “color” different from “green” and “bricks” are “rock-like substances” different from “Jell-O.”1 The worst example of

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the intentional spectrum and intersubjectivity

such representationalism, discussed by Ludwig Wittgenstein at the outset of the Philosophical Investigations, is St. Augustine’s idea that to understand the language-reality relationship we begin with names semantically related to objects in reality. Augustine seems so preoccupied with representing the world that he fails to understand how language works, since its basic element is the sentence, which brings linguistic terms into relationship with each other and enables us to make moves in a more encompassing language game. Brandom concurs with Wittgenstein that it is incorrect to take for one’s starting point a semantics of words and then to build up to sentences and ﬁnally language games. Indeed, the structure of MIE begins by discussing inferentially related assertions long before Brandom analyzes in chapters 6 and 7 the functioning of subsentential parts in his discussions of substitution and anaphora. Furthermore, one of Brandom’s central insights is that at that point where language meets the world—where I designate an object by deploying a demonstrative pronoun such as “this,” often with a sortal, that is, a classiﬁcation of some sort, such as “pig”—I anticipate that subsequent pronouns and tokens can pick up on that designation. This can be rudimentarily exhibited in the simple sentence “This pig grunts, and so it must be happy,” in which the pronoun “it” links back to the demonstrative and sortal “this pig” and exempliﬁes thereby an “anaphoric chain” between “this pig” and “it.” Future references that I might make can tap into this anaphoric chain as when I state, “That pig to which I referred yesterday when I said ‘this pig grunts.’” Brandom thinks that when I ﬁrst use a demonstrative and sortal to designate an object I am anticipating how a whole series of future pronouns might be linked in an anaphoric chain and, in this sense, might be inferentially related to each other.2 Brandom’s theory of anaphora illustrates how one cannot make a representational reference to the world apart from an inferential network of (anticipated) interrelated linguistic terms (e.g., demonstratives and personal pronouns) and how, therefore, inferentialism precedes representationalism. McDowell objects, ﬁrst of all, that this may not be the case. In contrast to Brandom’s suggestion that one must opt for either representationalism or inferentialism as prior, McDowell argues that one can accept the idea that empirical concepts are intelligible only when considered in the context of each. In fact, McDowell points out that Brandom acknowledges the possibility of avoiding representationalism without prioritizing inferentialism in a footnote in MIE.3 Furthermore, McDowell suggests an alternative representationalist view that would be more aware of its inferentialist presuppositions

the debate about perception

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than Augustine was. For example, one could explain the linkage of the word “snow” with snow through a Tarskian T-sentence that, in this particular case, would relate a sentence to the world by affirming that “snow is white” is true only if snow is white. An assertion of this kind as a move in a language game of making empirical claims about the world and as an instance of linguistic self-consciousness need not involve any untoward representationalism.4 A more modest approach, McDowell believes, would simply hold that whatever one is speaking of is not intelligible independently of the notion of assertion.5 In his reply, Brandom acknowledges the possibility of clarifying in tandem representational and inferential dimensions of language, but he asserts that he sought to defend the stronger hypothesis of the priority of inferentialism on a kind of Popperian wager to see if it could withstand falsiﬁcation. Furthermore, he concurs with McDowell’s example of snow to discuss word-world semantic relations, and he points out that he has not neglected representationalism insofar as chapter 8 of MIE gives an account of the representational dimension of language. For Brandom, the question boils down to whether he has successfully explained representational language within the inferential context, and he thinks that if he has done so, then he has surpassed Wittgenstein, who, though he succeeded in showing that not all sentences have the expressive role of saying how things are and that not all terms pick out objects, did little to clarify what these roles themselves consisted in.6 Making explicit the inferential structures that referentialism deploys but does not reﬂect on has much to do with Brandom’s understanding of theory, rationality, and philosophy itself as a matter of “making explicit” what is implicit but not acknowledged. In turn, Brandom seems to detect the workings of McDowell’s philosophy of philosophy behind the criticism of inferentialism, and hence Brandom objects that his project ought not to be ruled out beforehand by “theoretical quietism”—a swipe at McDowell, whose theoretical position has been characterized as quietistic, as we will see in chapter 5.7 Nevertheless, it seems to me that Brandom cedes McDowell’s point when he admits that other versions of inferentialism might avoid a bad representationalism; that one could start with both inferentialism and representationalism and illuminate the relations between them, as he himself acknowledged in the footnote in MIE; and that he adopted only a Popperian strategy of trying to justify the stronger, more easily falsiﬁable hypothesis. Moreover, he allows that word-world semantic relations exist and endorses McDowell’s

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way of specifying the connection between “snow” and snow through the sentence “Snow is white,” which would be true if the latter (snow) were white. Given that McDowell recognizes the importance of the inferential dimensions of representation, Brandom in the second phase of the debate, in his essay “Perception and Rational Constraint,” affirms that he would like to hear more from McDowell about how reference to what we think about precipitates out of the rational relations among things we might think (e.g., our beliefs) about what we are thinking about, that is, about how we represent the world through inferential structures.8 McDowell counters by disputing that M&W, on which Brandom’s essay comments, is but a “promissory note” to Brandom’s execution or, in other words, that the representationalism of M&W is but a prelude to Brandom’s inferentialism, and by spelling out his different theoretical purposes. He aims at offsetting naturalism and upholding what he calls “minimal empiricism,” understood as “representational directedness to toward the empirical world.” This discussion of perception and, in particular, the question of whether inferentialism ought to precede representationalism immediately elicits from McDowell, as it did from Brandom, an acknowledgement of his overarching view of rationality and theory, his very philosophy of philosophy—the topic of chapter 5. But for here, it is enough that McDowell resists Brandom’s requirement that he ﬁrst clarify rational responsiveness (of inferential elements in relationship to each other) before clarifying rational responsiveness to the facts and that he precipitate the latter out of the former. He is concerned directly about responsiveness to the facts.9

1.2. A Linguist Idealism? McDowell’s second objection to Brandom’s placing inferentialism before representationalism begins with the recollection that Wilfrid Sellars held that proprieties of material inference (e.g., inferences about the world that are not expressed or analyzed in formal-logical notation) are essential to meaning in the sense that such proprieties make conceptual contents expressible. Gradually, however, Sellars slides into the position that the contents expressible in language consist of those material-inferential proprieties. For McDowell, however, these contents expressible in language are linked back to the world, which actualizes our conceptual capacities in the act of perception. But if conceptual contents are a matter of nothing more than the proprieties of the language used to express them, then the link to the world, so important for McDowell, would be severed, and one would seem to have fallen into a kind

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of linguistic idealism. By the end of Sellars’s development, as McDowell puts it, the whole perceived layout of the space of reasons, which would include our contact with reality, is not merely expressible in conceptual contents but “taken up into the content of concepts.”10 Once we have taken up the space of reasons into conceptual contents, if we change our minds about the way the world is, it would be equivalent to changing our concepts. For McDowell, Sellars’s slide, which he thinks Brandom repeats, is equivalent to a passage from a weak inferentialism in which one is aware of inferential connections to a strong one and everything is absorbed into inferences.11 One detects here McDowell’s opposition to forms of idealism that derive the world from out of one’s conceptual contents, as opposed to his view, which recognizes and requires the “arduous work”12 involved in “adjusting one’s world view in response to experience.”13 This second objection, that Brandom has absorbed the world into the content of concepts, elicits Brandom’s response that he believes, as an inferentialist should, in the intimate connection between our concepts and the way the world is, such that when we change our minds about the way the world is we are remaking our concepts. However, our inferences also depend on how we take things to be, and Brandom accuses McDowell of misinterpreting his strong inferentialism as a hyperinferentialism, a claim that McDowell denies.14 Strong inferentialism, according to Brandom, includes the idea that one deploying concepts must take account of the noninferential and nonlinguistic circumstances and consequences of application “characteristic of directly empirical and practical concepts (such as red and clumsy)”15 that are to be deployed in the presence of red, clumsy things.16 To determine whether Brandom has absorbed the world into the contents of concepts requires a deeper understanding of his view of how language relates to the world. He describes his theory of language, which conceives language as an inferentially connected system through which the world is spoken of, as an “inferential semantics.” Language, though, also needs to be understood with reference to the wider context of rule-bound, normative practices. It is we who institute and endorse the obligations of normative practices, such as language, though these practices bind us in ways that are not up to our subjective whims, and the rules of such practices are neither derived intellectualistically from ﬁrst principles nor reducible to blind causal regularities. In explaining the normative system that is language, he adopts a particularly reﬂective stance insofar as he resists, as we have seen, beginning to discuss representation “in advance of thinking about the correct use of

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linguistic expressions.”17 Just as rigorous phenomenology strives to be aware of the conscious activity to which objects are given, so Brandom requires that one attend to the expressions through which representation is achieved, in particular, judgments with propositional contentfulness. The world stimulates propositionally contentful responses (e.g., “this is blue”), which are not derived from inferences and are therefore “noninferential,” but that, once uttered, pertain to inferential networks within which terms like “this” or “blue” are understood. We humans, unlike parrots and animals that can be taught to differentially respond to stimuli by uttering linguistic expressions (e.g., the parrot can be trained to say “blue” in the presence of blue things), can follow up on inferential links, knowing, for instance, that if something is “blue” it is “colored” and “not red.” Brandom would have concurred with Sellars that there could not be observational knowledge that is expressed in sentences without inference.18 However, Brandom’s discussion of language in chapter 2 of MIE, which was just summarized and which emerges from his account in chapter 1 of normative pragmatics that explains how practices are normatively governed (suggested in the previous paragraph), is narrowed in chapter 3. There he brings together the linguistic and normative features of the previous chapters, but within a particular model of language: the deontic scorekeeping model of discursive practice. In this norm-governed practice, one adopts a peculiar critical stance, namely, that of a scorekeeper, attributing, undertaking, and assessing inferentially articulated beliefs and justiﬁcations. In Brandom’s vocabulary, beliefs and justiﬁcations are known as “statuses” and are described as “commitments” and “entitlements,” and one might adopt various “attitudes” toward such statuses, such as attributing them to others or acknowledging or undertaking them oneself. So normatively directed is Brandom’s discussion of discursive practice that he admits that he is not describing actual practice but only an artiﬁcial, idealized version of it, of how we ought to proceed in discourse. Within the practice of discourse, the emphasis is on critically assessing others’ commitments and justiﬁcation; hence, the deontic (or normatively constrained) attitude of attributing beliefs to someone else assumes primacy and the model of discourse “trades in the status of being committed for talk about proprieties of practical attitudes of taking [another] to be committed.”19 Even the deontic attitude of undertaking a commitment by oneself is deﬁnable in terms of a critical and external scorekeeper’s attribution of it, insofar as “undertaking a commitment is doing something that licenses or entitles others to attribute it,”20 and the attitude

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of acknowledging a commitment is a matter of attributing it to oneself. This critical scorekeeper perspective reinforces and perhaps underlies Brandom’s repeated emphasis on the need for self-reﬂectiveness about the language one uses to the point of favoring a linguistic approach to intentionality over a pragmatic approach. The pragmatic approach explains intentionality beginning with a rational agent’s mental states to which that agent eventually gives linguistic expression. By contrast, according to Brandom’s linguistic approach, one cannot speak of belief apart from linguistic social practices in which belief alone becomes intelligible, and to explain assertion in terms of a prior notion of (internally held but unexpressed) belief would entail uncritically taking for granted the propositional contents of the belief one holds before expressing it.21 Despite Brandom’s methodological turn to a linguistic model of discursive scorekeeping, he does not believe that objective responsiveness to the world is jeopardized. From the beginning, he recognizes that one must take account of the not necessarily linguistic or inferential circumstances (e.g., of the world) that furnish the setting under which a linguistic expression or concept is correctly applied, uttered, or used. Perception—for example, in which the nonlinguistic world functions as a stimulus evoking a linguistic response—serves as a point of language entry. Because Brandom provides for such language entries, he insists that his strong inferentialism, which is sufficient for conceptual contentfulness, consists of broadly inferential articulation, that is, it encompasses those noninferential circumstances and consequences of application. Such a strong inferentialism differs from hyperinferentialism, which allows only narrow inferential articulation, that is, it permits only the kinds of inferential circumstances and consequences of application that might occur in mathematics or formal logic for instance.22 To ensure that language is appropriately linked to the world, Brandom, within his discursive framework, integrates his scorekeeping model with his account of perception, contending against Sellars, who thinks that perceivers establish their own reliability as perceivers, that someone else—a scorekeeper—must certify the reliability of a perceiver. Furthermore, he consciously extends this model to the question of whether observational authority should be attributed to a reporter’s claim. Attributing observational authority, though, is a matter of a hybrid deontic status in which the reporter and the scorekeeper make different contributions to the process. On the one hand, the observer (or “perceiver-reporter”) makes a claim; on the other, the scorekeeper, before considering whether the observer is entitled to that claim,

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must herself endorse a series of facts that must be true for the entitlement to be attributed. Thus, one keeping score and trying to determine whether to confer observational authority on a whale watcher’s claims about whales (i.e., trying to establish whether the whale watcher is entitled to those claims) must check whether the appropriate circumstances of application obtain (whether whales are in the bay), whether appropriate enabling conditions are in place (the reporter is facing in the direction of the whales and free from hallucinogenic inﬂuences), and whether there may be defeating conditions (e.g., walruses in the vicinity). In other words, the social dimension of the practice of giving and asking for reasons confers on thought and talk its representational dimension in which scorekeepers hold others accountable for their claims about the world, and the determination of whose applications of concepts are authoritative depends on a “messy retail business of assessing the comparative authority of competing evidential and inferential claims.”23 Just as Brandom’s turn to a linguistic model did not entail hyperinferentialism insofar as he provides for language entries in perception, this inclusion of discursive scorekeeping and intersubjective processes of holding each other accountable to our statements about things, does not imply that we “lose the world”24 by falling into an “idealism of linguistic practice.”25 Indeed we as scorekeepers do not make the facts be what they are, since our discursive practice is empirically “constrained”26—which is precisely the concept Brandom will use in the second phase of his debate over perception with McDowell. The representational dimension of our concepts is such that they answer for their ultimate correctness of application not to what you, I, or all of us take to be the case, but to what actually is the case. The mention of “all of us” suggests that even an entire community could be wrong about the facts, though that must be shown from some scorekeeping perspective, such as that of an individual over against the community. In other words, objectivity is generated by the critical, intersubjective, linguistic model of deontic scorekeeping in which each scorekeeper holds others accountable to claims about the world and in which the critical scorekeeping perspective has built into it a distinction between what is objectively true and what is merely subjectively held to be true.27 This exposition of Brandom’s views on how language relates to the world makes it clear that his reﬂective stance on the explanatory priority of language and his adoption of the critical attention to language, particularly to language as deployed within the critical deontic scorekeeping model of discursive practice, need not entail the kind of linguistic idealism of which McDowell seems to accuse him when he charges him with taking up “into the

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contents of concepts” the entire space of reasons. After all, he provides for perceptual language entries that prevent his strong inferentialism from deteriorating into hyperinferentialism and shows how the scorekeeping perspective attributing reliability and observational authority to another is accountable to things and how such accountability is built into that perspective.28 Brandom’s defense29 against McDowell’s second objection in this representationalist-inferentialist topical area might seem, then, to work. McDowell, however, denies that he has confused Brandom’s strong inferentialism with hyperinferentialism in a footnote in his “Brandom on Representation and Inference.”30 But this disavowal occurs after the earlier charge that the space of reasons has been absorbed into conceptual contents31 and after an intervening discussion of whether Brandom’s idea of keeping track of the differing auxiliary commitments across perspectives doesn’t entail a mind-boggling complexity. The disavowal is connected with McDowell’s criticism that Brandom’s inferentialism follows on Sellars’s view, according to which reporters must establish their own reliability, but the only difference is that Brandom thinks that a scorekeeper must establish that reliability. Later, McDowell will reject Sellars’s view that a noninferential reporter does not possess knowledge unless she can cite her own reliability as a reason.32 McDowell’s complaint here, however, is that Brandom’s position, by having an external scorekeeper establish the perceiver’s reliability, that is, determine her reliability as a perceiver and attribute to her perceptual knowledge, in effect, takes everything from the viewpoint of the scorekeeper and in effect removes the perceivable facts from the experiential viewpoint of the reporter, as we will see in the next section. The ﬁnal result of this discussion for McDowell will be that empirical content is rendered ultimately unintelligible. In other words, on the basis of the placement of that footnote about strong inferentialism, it would seem that McDowell’s problem with the strong inferentialism is not so much a matter of linguistic idealism (in the form of hyperinferentialism) as his own earlier comments about taking everything up into the content of concepts might have suggested and as Brandom interprets him. Rather, it has to do with the fact that strong inferentialism seems to include the idea that a scorekeeper is the one to establish as a premise the reliability of the perceiver en route to arriving at a ﬁnal conclusion in which that scorekeeper will ﬁnally be able to attribute perceptual knowledge to her.

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2. the intelligibility of empirical content 2.1. A Summary of This Aspect of the Debate By far, the most crucial and complicated issue between McDowell and Brandom—“the gravamen of McDowell’s concern,”33 as the latter calls it—is whether Brandom in his “treatment of observation reports makes empirical content unintelligible.”34 It is this issue that plays a central role in the second stage of the debate, especially in McDowell’s “Reply to Brandom” after his “Perception and Rational Constraint: McDowell’s Mind and World,” in Perception, though, it is also touched on earlier in McDowell’s “Brandom on Representation and Inference.” Whereas Sellars, as we have seen, believes that a perceiver has no observational authority unless she can certify her own reliability, Brandom rejects what he takes to be Sellars’s “internalism,” or leaving it up to the reporter to establish her reliability from out of her own resources. Nevertheless, Brandom retains the inference structure that Sellars follows, and so remains a strong inferentialist, insofar as he thinks that a perceiver’s reliability must still be established. The only difference, though, is that Brandom insists that it is not the reporter but someone else who must keep score on the reporter and who must recognize her reliability as a premise for establishing the authority of her report. “Here,” as McDowell observes, “we have the interplay of perspectives.”35 McDowell’s objection has in part to do with what he takes to be Brandom’s overly theorized approach to perception and observational reports that will be discussed below, and the objection also reveals differences in their understandings of the task of philosophy itself, to be discussed in chapters 5 and 6. But at this point, McDowell’s central critical point is that for Brandom the rational relationship between observational reports and features of the environment they report on appears only within the point of view of the scorekeeper or interpreter of a reporter’s report. In effect, this removes the fact being reported from the viewpoint of the reporter, since it is the scorekeeper who stands outside the relationship between the reporter and facts who must decide to endorse the report or not.36 “That is the position’s externalism,” McDowell comments.37 Further, if Brandom sought to ensure that the reporter be rationally constrained by the facts, his emphasis on the scorekeeper or interpreter’s assessment of the reporter’s claim has the paradoxical effect of making it somewhat irrelevant how the reporter comes to produce her claim—all that is really of concern is whether the report corresponds to

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the facts from the point of view of the scorekeeper. As McDowell puts it, for the reporter the “observational report degenerates, just because of the picture’s externalism, into a blind reaction to she knows not what.”38 But of course, the report cannot even be recognized as an observational report if the fact reported is not available to the supposed reporter.39 If the scorekeeper framework renders empirical content unintelligible by removing it from the reporter’s viewpoint, McDowell imagines a possible response on Brandom’s behalf to the effect that at least the scorekeeper, or interpreter, as McDowell describes her in his “Reply to Brandom” in stage two of the debate, might also have access to empirical content as a responder. Consequently, the roles of interpreter and responder could coincide within a single individual, a scorekeeper, whose role as a responder would make access possible to both intelligible empirical content and the capacity to assess reporters’ reports. However, if the interpreters are to be in touch with the relevant aspects of reality as responders, then they would have to come into the view of someone else, some scorekeeper interpreting them, namely, ourselves, who must assess the reliability of their observational reports. But then we would have to be responders ourselves at some point and someone else would have to be keeping score on us, ad inﬁnitum. This has the effect that even the “interpreter’s observational hold on reality is in turn made unintelligible by the picture’s externalism.”40 One can see why McDowell charges Brandom with failing to make “immediately empirical content intelligible”41 and why McDowell recommends forsaking the approach of a strong inferentialism in favor of a reporter’s direct engagement with the facts, as the discussion of interiorization below will make clear.42 Brandom, however, addresses this criticism that he withdraws content from the viewpoint of the perceiver. He asserts that he does not banish the “fact that p” from the view of the perceiver, but actually explains what it is for that fact to be in view. Hence, to understand in what “seeing that p” consists, one must master the essential social discursive deontic scorekeeping practice in which one recognizes the two elements of “seeing that p”: namely, “its being a fact that p and one’s being visually prompted”43 to undertake the appropriately articulated commitment. When both these elements are in place one, in effect, is seeing that p. Before assessing these arguments regarding intelligible empirical content, we must bring up one further point that surfaces at the end of “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” in which McDowell criticizes Brandom’s reduction of the cat’s awareness of the prey it stalks to the same kind of thing that happens

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when iron ﬁlings rust in the presence of moisture: both involve a response to environing stimuli.44 This comment reﬂects Brandom’s repeated statements in MIE that perception, whether in the case of humans or animals, is a matter of differential responsive dispositions through which we respond to environmental stimuli in a manner similar to how ﬁlings rust in a moist environment. However, while both we and the parrot respond by uttering “That’s red” in the presence of red stimuli, what distinguishes us from the parrot is that our classiﬁcation is “conceptual,” that is, we can trace out the conceptual network to which our utterance belongs, for example, explaining how red is a color and not a sound, how it differs from blue and green, and so on.45 For McDowell, however, to reduce animals’ perceptual relationship with their environment to a merely mechanistic response to stimuli underestimates their capacities, particularly their ability to “be on to things,”46 to apprehend them intentionally. Such a mechanistic reduction is the kind of thing “nobody but a philosopher would suppose. (Descartes perhaps),” and he insists that he wants no truck with it.47 It is a bit surprising that McDowell limits his criticism of the causal nature of perception to Brandom’s treatment of animal perception, since it would seem that his causal account of perception, which applies to humans also, would also jeopardize the intelligibility of empirical content. Although for Brandom our linguistic response enters the space of reasons in which its relation to an encompassing conceptual network can be intelligently traced, the initial expression of this response in relation to the world involves the world causally impinging on us and producing the response, apart from the kind of rational engagement that McDowell insists on and that we will brieﬂy explain in the next paragraph. In fact, in M&W this is just the problem that McDowell ﬁnds with Donald Davidson’s interpretation of experience as involving nothing but an extraconceptual causal impact on sensibility, as if the world lay beyond “an outer boundary that encloses the conceptual sphere”48 and as if that world impinges on us only causally and affects our thinking only causally, as opposed to rationally inﬂuencing it. Such an interpretation of perceptual experience depends on an outside observer who records the relationship between the world’s causal impacts and the perceiver’s conceptual responses to such stimuli, as Richard Rorty’s ﬁeld linguist correlating natives’ linguistic reactions with stimuli. It involves basically a “sideways-on view” (from the perspective of an observer observing another person’s engagement with the world) as opposed to the head-on engagement that McDowell favors. In the head-on encounter, we directly experience everyday objects (according to what Sellars calls the common sense “manifest image”) that draw our

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concepts into play from the start. These concepts, which result from the world’s exercising a rational inﬂuence on us, go into determining our judgments. We in turn justify such judgments by returning to those experiences in which the world actualizes our conceptual capacities, and our experience, the tribunal of such judgments, either conﬁrms or disconﬁrms the judgments. Davidson’s view, however, in which the world impacts us only causally and not rationally, in which experience is causally relevant to one’s judgments but plays no role in warranting or justifying them, has the effect of leaving the status of concepts as having empirical substance a mystery. If the world’s impacts have nothing to do with justiﬁcation, how is empirical content intelligibly in our picture? McDowell asks. The same problem, though, would appear to apply to Brandom’s causal account of perception.49 In sum, two issues then appear unresolved regarding the intelligibility of empirical content: whether Brandom removes the empirical report from the viewpoint of the perceiver and whether his causal account of perception makes impossible any rational connection with the world impinging on us.

2.2. Critique Regarding the ﬁrst question whether Brandom’s removal of the empirical report from the viewpoint of the perceiver renders empirical content unintelligible, thereby allowing the report to degenerate into a blind reaction to the reporter knows not what, one could imagine Brandom being perfectly happy to acknowledge that the perceptual activity to which a perceptual report gives expression involves, even in the human case, nothing more than a stimulus evoking a response, which is not all that different from moisture producing metallic rust. This is because for Brandom it doesn’t matter so much how the report comes to be; its intelligibility begins to appear once it is introduced into the inferential network of the space of reasons and is susceptible to scorekeeper assessment. William Rehg explains Brandom’s view along these lines by suggesting that even by attributing a commitment to a perceiver, the scorekeeper in effect recognizes that the perceiver takes up a stance within an inferentially articulated network in which that commitment carries some inferential consequences and rules out others. According to Rehg, even if the perceiver forms her belief on the basis of reliable causal mechanisms of which she is unaware, because she understands that her belief commits her to future consequences, she is proceeding not blindly but intelligently. This explanation,

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however, still proceeds from the perspective of the scorekeeper, who attributes to the perceiver the commitment and all the consequences following from it. In addition, all that is actually attributed to the perspective of the perceiver is a commitment to certain consequences that follow on her articulated belief, but there is no discussion of what goes on within the perceiver’s perspective as she experiences the world. There is no discussion of the direct, experiential engagement with objects actualizing conceptual capacities and constraining the deployment of concepts—which is the focus of McDowell’s discussion of intelligibility. To be sure, one is behaving rationally if one’s commitments are compatible with their consequences. But a different kind of intelligibility and rationality seems involved in McDowell’s view of the experiential encounter with the world. It would seem then that McDowell is correct in charging that for Brandom the rational constraint of what is responded to is still removed from the viewpoint of the responder.50 From the beginning of his explanation of Brandom, Rehg seems to ﬁnd comparable the experience of a perceiver and of an expert who is able to reliably identify Toltec shards, but who would not be able to explain how it is that she is regularly correct. The comparison rests on the common fact that both depend on the functioning of reliable causal mechanisms of which each can be unaware. McDowell, though, admits that causal mechanisms provide enabling explanations of perceptual activity,51 but such causal explanations leave out what one experiences in the intentional relationship with the world: the actualization of conceptual capacities leading to the claim that the thing is thus and so, a claim that is not rationally naked. In addition and contrary to Rehg, McDowell objects to the idea that the examples of shard identiﬁers or chicken sexers (people who reliably identify the sexes of sexually undifferentiated baby chicks without understanding how) represent cases of perceptual observation at all. The higher-level shard or chicken-sex identiﬁcations are themselves intelligible as claims only against the background of underlying perceptual observations, such as those that occur when one recognizes that something is a chick or that it is laying an egg, in which experts at identiﬁcation are as rationally responsive to the reported facts presented before them as any other perceiver.52 Moreover, Brandom himself admits that in the case of shard identiﬁers it is possible that a scorekeeper could attribute knowledge to a shard identiﬁer even though she does not believe herself to be reliable and from her perspective her claim would seem to lack any rational basis.53 In such knowledge attributions, as in the case of a scorekeeper account of perception, the perceiver’s point of view appears irrelevant.

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But what about McDowell’s objection that Brandom’s account renders empirical content unintelligible, because even if he conjoined a responder and interpreter role in a scorekeeper, it would generate an inﬁnite regress of scorekeepers, since every responder would always stand in need of an interpreter to guarantee her reliability? Brandom could begin by acknowledging that he does presuppose that scorekeepers are responders, since for them to be able to attribute observational entitlement to another perceiver, they would have to be able to determine whether the appropriate circumstances for reliable reporting obtain. Hence, to attribute observational authority to a reporter of whales, scorekeepers must be sure that this reporter is facing in the direction where the whales are to be found, that no horizon-hugging sun obscures the whales from sight, and that no defeaters (e.g., large walruses) are in the vicinity. To ensure that all these circumstances obtain, scorekeepers would have to be perceiving, as responders themselves, whales, seas, the sun, large walruses, or a sea in which no walruses are visible.54 As the next step in an effort to head off the inﬁnite regress of scorekeepers that McDowell argues for, Brandom could point out that McDowell begins with an abstract deﬁnition of perception, namely, that there can be no perception until a scorekeeper or interpreter endorses a reporter’s or responder’s perceptual claim. Hence, any responder’s claim even if it pertains to a scorekeeper must await a higher-level scorekeeper’s endorsement, ad inﬁnitum. This abstract deﬁnition, however, seems to occupy some “bird’s eye view”55 above the fray. Whereas Brandom’s account of the establishment of observational authority needs to be instantiated in particular, concrete settings in which one, from one’s own perspective, keeps score on another’s empirical claim. In that setting, one keeps score but one will also draw on one’s own responding to what is perceived as a moment subordinated to one’s overarching scorekeeping purpose. In this concrete context, the fact that the scorekeeper role is reversible and that someone else might be keeping score on the scorekeeper does not imply that it is impossible for the scorekeeper, who is also a responder, ever to attribute to another’s person’s claim observational authority simply because he must always await another scorekeeper’s verdict on such an attribution. Rather, the reversibility of roles merely indicates that any such attribution must be fallible because another, later scorekeeper might not concur, perhaps on the basis of better evidence, with that attribution of observational authority. Indeed, such a response heads off the inﬁnite regress, but unfortunately it does so by admitting that implicit within the scorekeeper stance is precisely the kind of experiential engagement with the world that

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McDowell points to and that must be philosophically accounted for, no matter how much it might be subordinated to the scorekeeper’s project and no matter how anonymous it may be within the scorekeeper’s perspective.56 Furthermore, what can be said about Brandom’s defense that he does not banish “the fact that p” from the view of the perceiver but explains what it is for that fact to be in view? His explanation, of course, involves showing what “seeing that p” means within the social discursive deontic scorekeeping practice, and it is, therefore, a theoretical undertaking that contrasts with McDowell’s account of commonsense perception. Consequently, as we will see in chapters 5 and 6, their accounts of perception are pitched on different levels of rationality. Within Brandom’s theoretical account, however, the fact’s being in view, or one’s seeing that p, occurs “against the background of such a [scorekeeping] practice, where it is the case that p and one is prompted to undertake the appropriately inferentially articulated commitment.”57 Again, though, the problem is that this entire explanation is undertaken from the perspective of a scorekeeper who has in view both the fact and the “one,” who is prompted to undertake the commitment, namely, the responder. It is the scorekeeper who determines whether that responder’s commitment is “appropriately . . . articulated.”58 In other words, the entire explanation precisely leaves out the responder’s experience of what is responded to, and this point is further suggested by the fact that the “one,” the responder observed by the scorekeeper, is “prompted” to undertake the commitment. The word “prompt” is ambiguous enough to suggest that the responder’s commitment could be and probably is, given Brandom’s regular account of perception, a matter of a response to causal stimulation. Such a description of what goes on reﬂects an outside view in which the scorekeeper registers the occurrence of a stimulus and the response following it (here an expressed commitment) instead of describing how the responder from her perspective experiences the world and employs conceptual capacities in that experience. Furthermore, from the perspective of the scorekeeper comparing the responder’s commitment with the fact that p, it is also obvious that, to recognize the fact that p and thereby to assess the other responder’s commitment, the scorekeeper must at some level herself be a responder. How this occurs would require the kind of account McDowell gives, as our discussion of a possible Brandomian response to the inﬁnite regress objection suggested. In Brandom’s discussion of “seeing that p,” he gives an account reminiscent of the “sideways-on” perspective that McDowell repeatedly uses to characterize critically views like that of Davidson (and Rorty, whose ﬁeld linguist

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metaphor involves an observer equating natives’ linguistic responses to stimuli with an organism’s reaction to its environment).59 Such a view entails an observer witnessing concept users with their systems of concepts set over against the world in which “the supposed concepts could be bound up with impacts from the world only causally, not rationally.”60 There is no attention to how the concept users themselves, from their perspective, employ their concepts in relation to the world. For McDowell, such a sideways-on account ends up evacuating empirical content of any intelligibility: “This picture places the world outside a boundary around the system [of the other’s concepts] we have supposedly come to understand. That means it cannot depict anything genuinely recognizable as an understanding of a set of concepts with empirical substance. These supposed concepts could be bound up with impacts from the world only causally, not rationally (Davidson’s point again); and I have been urging that that leaves their status as concepts with empirical substance, potential determinants of the content of judgments that bear on the empirical world, a mystery.”61 To be sure, one must say that Brandom’s portrayal of “seeing that p” is only “reminiscent” of the sidewayson view, since it involves not a relationship between the concepts of concept users and “the world” but between commitments (with conceptual content) and “the fact that p,” the latter of which must have been already linguistically articulated by the scorekeeper from whose point of view the entire story is being told. Nevertheless, just as the sideways-on view omits how concept users experience the world conceptually, so the explanation of “seeing that p” passes over the responder’s experience of what is responded to by taking as its starting point the scorekeeper’s or responder’s already articulated claim. In addition, it must also be said that Brandom’s regular depictions of perception do adopt a sideways-on view when they present empirical claims, to be sure inferentially articulated, as responses to causal stimuli. In these sketches of perception, for the scorekeeper or observer, conceptually articulated commitments stand on one side and empirical stimuli on the other and concepts are bound up with the impacts from the world causally, not rationally, with the result that empirical content is rendered unintelligible. As a result, Brandom not only removes the empirical report from the view of the perceiver and so renders empirical content unintelligible but also considers the report to be a causal product. Subsequent efforts to justify the intelligibility of such content on the basis of the perceivers’ understanding of the inferential signiﬁcance of their claims, or on the basis of some other inferential model, fail to provide the kind of intelligibility to be found in McDowell’s account of

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perceptual experience as an intentional encounter with the world. This deﬁcit in the causal account of perception also characterizes Rehg’s explanation of Brandom, which like Brandom’s approach, substitutes an inferential kind of intelligibility (e.g., the perceiver proceeds intelligently because she understands that her belief commits her to future consequences) for that given in perceptual experience. It would also seem that the scorekeeping model of perception generates an inﬁnite regress of scorekeepers, undermining all empirical content, unless one equips scorekeepers with a responder capacity that allows for a direct engagement with the world that cannot just be affirmed but must be analyzed, as McDowell does, to establish that, and how, empirical content is intelligible from the start.

CHAPTER 2

the debate about perception Rational Constraint, Phenomenology, and Interiorization

This chapter discusses two other issues arising in the perception debate: rational constraint and interiorization. Though the earlier issue of inferentialism and representationalism appeared squarely in the ﬁrst stage of the debate, and the issue of intelligible empirical content straddled both the ﬁrst and last stages of the debate, the issue of rational constraint lies clearly in the second phase of the argument and was crystallized by Robert Brandom’s essay, “Perception and Rational Constraint: McDowell’s Mind and World.” I will begin by describing Brandom’s and John McDowell’s positions on rational constraint and then provide a phenomenological elaboration of McDowell’s position, before turning to my verdict on the rational constraint phase of the debate. Finally, I will sketch out the issues of interiorization raised in the ﬁnal stage of the perception debate—an issue that is fundamentally concerned about the question of their metaphilosophies and so best addressed at the opening of chapter 5.

1. the question of rational constraint Although McDowell developed the issues of inferentialism and representationalism and intelligible empirical context against Brandom, the question of rational constraint is one raised by Brandom against McDowell after McDowell’s précis of M&W in the Perception volume. Brandom begins showing how McDowell’s criticisms of bald naturalism, coherentism, and the myth of the given all concentrate on their inability to explain why perceptual experience can impose rational and not merely causal constraints on thought. Naturalism, by opting for simply causal accounts of perception, simply has no place for the spontaneity and conceptualizing involved

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in experience that makes experience capable of serving as grounds for judgments, that is, yielding conceptually grasped objects and states of affairs against which conceptually articulated judgments can be checked. The world’s impacts have nothing to do with justiﬁcation, but experience that involves a combination of receptivity and spontaneity, that is, conceptualizing activity, has much to do with it. A problem with justiﬁcation, albeit a different one, also plagues the myth of the given, which holds that conceptual judgments could be constrained by some bare, unconceptualized given, but it is difficult to see how something unconceptualized could constrain conceptualized judgments in the way that McDowell’s notion of experience, drawing on receptivity and conceptual capacities can. How would we know which unconceptualized given would even be able to constrain our conceptualized judgments? Coherentism ala Donald Davidson and Wilfrid Sellars, in which our beliefs are produced by extraconceptual, causal impacts, achieves constraint on thought not through experience, in which receptivity and spontaneous conceptualizing cooperate, but through the interaction among beliefs, since “nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief.”1 Brandom argues that McDowell seeks a particular kind of constraint on judgments, a “rational constraint constraint,”2 that sets the standard according to which other manners of constraining thought will be found wanting. Brandom constructs three conditions that he believes must be fulﬁlled for one to have the rational constraint constraint that McDowell desires: (1) empirical conceptual content ought to exercise a normative constraint on thought, (2) such content ought to depend on inferentially articulated concepts, and (3) rational adjudication ought to take place between what we think and what we think about. The principal strategy of Brandom’s argument is to show that an externalism, in which thought is determined by causal impacts, like Davidson’s and a moderate version of reliabilism (which will be explained below) can both provide the kind of constraint McDowell seeks—and what Brandom terms a constraint by the world—without necessity for McDowell’s form of constraint, which is curiously arrived at through “prejudgmental experience,”3 that is, “not by the facts, but by experience of the facts.”4 For Brandom, sense impressions are behind perceptual judgments in the causal sense and facts are behind them in the normative sense, but he wonders why “there must also be some internal thing, the experience that plays both these roles at once.”5 In sum, if the standard for rational constraint that naturalism, coherentism, and the myth of the given fall short of can be met by other approaches than McDowell’s, it

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is not clear why his approach is needed to meet the standard; hence, he does not sufficiently motivate his own view.6 Of course, Brandom has to explain how moderate reliabilism and Davidson can meet the standard of McDowell’s rational constraint constraint. To begin, Brandom distinguishes a strong (or semantic) reliabilism, which he calls “gonzo”7 externalism elsewhere, from weak (or epistemological) reliabilism. The former, in trying to explain the “justiﬁed, true belief” that for the philosophical tradition constitutes “knowledge,” argues that a belief is justiﬁed if it is the outcome of a reliable performance as much as the way that parrots and thermometers reliably respond to stimuli from their environments. Thus, strong reliabilism thinks that even the giving of reasons, justiﬁcations, and drawing out the rational relations among beliefs are themselves justiﬁed if they are a matter of some reliable performance. For instance, strong reliabilism would say that a belief is justiﬁed if it is produced either by someone who is a reliably good reasoner or justiﬁer (i.e., someone who in circumstances of discussion reliably comes up with the right reasons or justiﬁcations) or by someone who follows processes that reliably yield good reasons or justiﬁcations. In Brandom’s view, however, such a version of reliabilism, which ﬁnds human reasoning processes to be nearly equivalent to the reliable performance of parrots and thermometers, fails to understand the concepts and conceptual content that go into making up a belief (one of the three conditions for knowledge in the tradition). This is so because the parrot or thermometer cannot follow up on the inferential relationships that are necessary for having conceptual contents at all and the beliefs constituted by them. Having a belief is not merely a matter of reliably reacting to stimuli (e.g., merely saying “this is red” in response to red stimuli, as a parrot might) but it is also a matter of being able to follow up on the inferential consequences of concepts, that is, recognizing that red is a color and different from blue or orange, and so on. Epistemological reliabilism, by contrast, makes the much more limited claim that one could be entitled to a belief or judgment without being able to offer a reason or justiﬁcation for it, as we have seen above in the case of chicken sexers and shard identiﬁers who reliably identify the sex of chickens or shards. In such cases, though, someone else, for example, a scorekeeper, could recognize that a reporter (e.g., a chicken sexer or a shard identiﬁer) is reliable and that she is noninferentially disposed to acquire a belief in the right set of circumstances (whether she is particularly conﬁdent in her ability or not). Consequently, this scorekeeper would be able to justify the reporter’s belief on the basis of reliability that the scorekeeper appreciates,

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even if the reporter does not. Such a justiﬁcation would be part of a “reliability inference”: Premise 1: X is a reliable identiﬁer of Toltec shards. Premise 2: X claims that this shard is Toltec. Conclusion: The claim that this shard is Toltec is justiﬁed. For one to attribute knowledge to the shard identiﬁer, a further step is necessary, namely, that this justiﬁed belief be true and this ﬁnal stage occurs when the scorekeeper endorses the belief as true (perhaps because the shard identiﬁer is so consistently right that one is compelled to take her belief for true, especially if no counterevidence appears, for example, that someone may have bribed her to make a false report).8 In this case of epistemological or weak reliabilism, the three conditions for the rational constraint constraint that Brandom imputes to McDowell can be met: (1) empirical conceptual content (e.g., the truth in the reporter’s commitment that the shard is Toltec, which must be affirmed by the scorekeeper) exercises a normative constraint on thought (validating [or not] the commitment that the shard is Toltec and making possible an attribution of knowledge to the reporter); (2) this content depends on inferentially articulated concepts (e.g., concepts like “Toltec” and “shard” are deployed and the identiﬁer’s reliability is part of a reliability inference that justiﬁes her conceptually articulated belief); and (3) there is a rational adjudication between what is thought (“this is a Toltec shard”) and what is thought about (the shard actually being Toltec) insofar as the scorekeeper decides whether to endorse the commitment that has already been attributed to the reporter and already entitled by reason of the scorekeeper’s having recognized the reporter’s reliability.9 Consequently, Brandom believes that epistemological reliabilists are able to meet the three conditions of McDowell’s rational constraint constraint. Likewise, Brandom argues that Davidson’s interpreter—think of the ﬁeld linguist checking natives’ perceptual reports after having come to understand their language—can also meet the conditions of the rational constraint constraint insofar as she, as an interpreter (or scorekeeper), assesses a responder’s reports, which are inferentially articulated (meeting condition 2). In addition, she examines whether those reports are true relative to independent facts (meeting condition 3); and, therefore, the facts exercise a normative constraint on thoughts, that is, the reported perceptual beliefs (meeting condition 1). Clearly because weak reliabilism situates the functioning of reliable

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processes within a normative, inferential context, it involves more than blind causal impacts and its judgments are susceptible of being constrained in the way that the rational constraint constraint requires.10 Insofar as perceptual judgments, though elicited noninferentially and yet pertaining to an inferential network of judgments, interact with other judgments inferentially in the space of reasons, Brandom believes the Davidson and epistemological-reliabilist views escape bald naturalism that reduces all knowing to a causal product. Moreover, insofar as no appeal is made to a nonconceptualized given, since validation here takes place in sets of conceptually articulated beliefs, these views escape the myth. Brandom’s key argument, though, is that these views even avoid the coherentism under which McDowell would likely classify them: “If a suitable story is told about how they [noninferentially elicited judgments] are rationally criticizable by those who key their correctness to their correspondence to the facts reported, and their entitlement to the reliability of the noninferential process that elicits them—a matter of the assessors’ rational willingness themselves to endorse respectively the claim in question and the inference from the reporter’s making of it to that endorsement themselves—then rational constraint by and answerability of perceptual judgment to how things actually are is secured.”11 In conclusion, the standards of the rational constraint constraint can also be met by Davidsonian and weak reliabilist perspectives, and these viewpoints also escape the pitfalls of naturalism, the myth of the given, and coherentism. Brandom, therefore, concludes that the turn to experience that McDowell calls for and that is distinctive of his approach is unmotivated. Brandom then states that the door is now open to diagnose, in McDowellian fashion, the blind spot that leads him to overlook these alternatives. For Brandom, the problem is his underemphasis of the social dimensions of the practice of giving and asking reasons. McDowell is only interested in “a single mind confronting an alien reality. Cooperation with its fellow minds is simply not in the picture.”12 By contrast, in the cases of Davidson and weak reliabilism, it is someone else, another person, who from a third-person perspective assesses whether a report is true to the facts and whether the perceiver is reliable and entitled to the claims noninferentially elicited by the environment. In brief, Brandom raises two major objections: (1) McDowell interprets the rational constraint constraint in terms of the world having a rational and not merely causal bearing on perceptual judgments, but he overlooks other alternatives that can also satisfy that constraint. (2) His blindness to these alternatives can be explained by his individualism.13

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McDowell proceeds to address the ﬁrst major objection by suggesting that Brandom ﬁnds rational constraint in the “rational relations among various things we might think (or beliefs we might have).”14 However, he objects that one cannot say that things are thus and so is just another thing that one might believe, since it is rather the very thing one is trying to decide whether to believe. If this is so, it is doubtful whether Brandom’s description of the lateral relationship among beliefs would be sufficient for rational constraint if one lacks direct contact with the fact that things are thus and so. McDowell insists that he is concerned not merely about “responsiveness to rational constraints” but about responsiveness to “rational constraints as such,”15 which require that one relate directly to the world that is constraining one and do so with a full awareness of its constraining and that the rational constraint of what is responded to be in the view of the responder. This contrasts with Brandom’s view, according to which the rational relation between reports and facts comes into prominence only from the viewpoint of the interpreter of the reports, where McDowell questions whether the status of the reporter’s report even remains intelligible as a report.16 Later in this same “Reply to Brandom,” McDowell highlights the difference between the experience of simpler, direct observational reports and the claims of the chicken sexers by denying that in the latter case one might use appropriately the language of “looks,” as if the chicken sexers’ assertion that a chick “looks” male is the same kind of statement that is used when one recognizes something “looking like a chick.” When one recognizes something as a chick, or as a certain kind of thing given in direct perception (e.g., it “looks” like a house), one doesn’t ﬁnd oneself merely “inclined to say that it is thus and so.” Likewise, when one immediately perceives that something looks like a chick and says so, one cannot be characterized as having the kind of conﬁdence that if one says that something looks like something and if the circumstances are of such a kind as to ﬁgure in a reliable connection between the inclination to say such a thing and things being a certain way, then one will be speaking truly. Such more hesitant and reﬂective renditions of “looks” language involve adopting an external assessor’s outlook on one’s own responding to the environment in immediate perception. They contrast with the immediate responder’s perspective, in which one’s inclination to declare that something “looks” to be something is equivalent to saying that it “is” thus and so. Such an affirmation is not “rationally naked,”17 but rather one feels well equipped with a reason to state what it is because that is how it looks. This example illustrates how McDowell’s claim that the empirical

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content needs to be intelligible converges precisely with what he means by rational constraint, since the intelligibly grasped object has a compelling force to it and constrains one’s beliefs, without leaving room for the kind of doubt that one might experience if one adopts a reﬂective, external assessor’s point of view on one’s own perceptual responding.18 On the charge of individualism, McDowell resists Brandom’s diagnosis in the ﬁrst place, since the other alternatives for providing rational constraint do not adequately provide it. McDowell further contrasts his position with Brandom’s on the role of intersubjectivity in epistemology (a point we will take up in chapter 4), and he insists that Brandom’s view, with its intersubjective structures, still fails to engage directly perceptual objects and therefore to make empirical content intelligible. Nevertheless, McDowell grants that there are occasions in which justiﬁcation might be provided from an external perspective, as, for instance, in the practical case in which a physiologist might justify cyclists’ adjustments of posture correlative to alterations in road camber, and thereby might provide knowledge not necessarily available to cyclists themselves.19

2. “experience” in mcdowell and a phenomenological elaboration Before determining who is correct on this issue of rational constraint, I need to consider more carefully McDowell’s overall account of perception to be able to mount some answer to Brandom’s question: “What is the source of this insistence that there must also be some internal thing, the experience” that plays both a causal and normative role with regard to perceptual judgments?20 McDowell’s notion of experiencing rationally the world takes ﬁrst and foremost the viewpoint of the perceiver encountering the world, as is evident, for example when he remarks critically on Christopher Peacocke’s explanations of concept possession, which “carefully refrain from saying— what the thinkers think when they use the concepts in question.”21 To avoid the circularity that would come by using a concept (such as “square”) when deﬁning a conceptual state (e.g., involving squares), Peacocke approaches “from the outside”22 what thinkers think, identifying what he thinks happens when they apply a concept with a certain condition being in place that is external to the possession of the concept (e.g., applying the concept “square” depends on them recognizing a line as symmetrically bisecting the

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sides). From the perceiver’s perspective, however, in McDowell’s view, one takes in the world as thus and so, and experiences contain a “claim,” as Sellars observed, that is “evoked or wrung from the perceiver by the object perceived,”23 insofar as conceptual capacities are involuntarily actualized by objects immediately present to subjects.24 Throughout most of his essay “Having the World in View,” McDowell battles against the view of Sellars on perception that threaten to undermine this idea of experiencing the world rationally. To be sure, Sellars postulates the conscious experience of objects, as McDowell does, but “below the line” of this conscious experience he also locates those naturalistic, non-conceptinvolved episodes, of which we are unaware when knowing objects. Manifolds of below-the-line sheer receptivity causally guide, from without, the above-the-line intuitions that Immanuel Kant took to involve understanding and sensibility. Kant would have done well, in Sellars’s view, to have posited such below-the-line factors to ensure that the thoughts we think are intelligibly connected to objective reality. McDowell cautions, though, that these unconscious and nonconceptualized manifolds guiding concepts above the line, which Sellars introduced in Science and Metaphysics, come dangerously close to affirming the myth of the given that Sellars opposed in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Of course, Sellars was led to his view about below-the-line guidance because he believed that the objects of common sense—for instance, red cubes—do not really exist; they are rather constructs of the imagination that ﬁgure in the manifest image. So if Kant wanted thoughts to be constrained by the objective reality to which science alone gives us access insofar as it “is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not,”25 he should have posited a layer of sheer receptivity directing concept deployment. In fact, Sellars raises the specter of G. W. F. Hegel, implying that without such sheer receptivity, Kant would have fallen into unconstrained idealism. McDowell, however, insists that perceived objects themselves, given intentionally and immediately to the perceiver, supply the constraints on conceptual goings-on and that the only things against such a view are the “putative reasons yielded by scientism for denying genuine reality to the objects”26 of the manifest image. The seen object in McDowell’s view invites one to take it to be as it visibly is, speaking to the perceiver: “See me as I am . . . namely as characterized by these properties—and it displays them.”27 To experience the world rationally is for the ﬁrst-person perceiver from her perspective to ﬁnd her (always inferentially articulated) concepts engaged by the objects of common sense, as opposed to causal accounts that

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explain such conceptual behavior as brought about by factors outside the perceiver’s perspective, visible to a sideways-on view, as Peacocke, Sellars, and Brandom all seem to argue.28 Of course, McDowell’s assertions that rational experience of the world involves conceptual capacities being drawn on in receptivity, in the encounter with commonsense objects, must be understood against his broader theoretical purposes spelled out in M&W. The oscillation between a coherentism whose conceptual schemes are caused by the world without being rationally constrained by it, on the one hand, and the myth of the given that provides constraint but a constraint that is not conceptualized (though it is difficult to see how we would know which nonconceptualized given would verify our conceptually articulated judgments)29—both result from the modern world’s understanding of the deliverances of sensibility as causally produced by factors described naturalistically under the rubric of scientiﬁc law. If one considers sensible experience to be so caused, then the conceptual activity of free spontaneity must be split off from sensibility and located in a contrasting logical space, with the ﬁnal result that empirical content itself will be evacuated of intelligibility. To restore the possibility of intelligible empirical content, McDowell provides for conceptual capacities to be drawn on in receptivity, and experience, considered from the head-on perspective of the perceiver, which cannot be taken to be something causally produced by naturalized processes operating behind the perceiver’s back, though accessible to a third-person, sideways-on (scientiﬁc) observer. Rather perceivers engage rationally with commonsense objects, relying on the concepts that they have inherited from the communities in which they learned their language, that function as part of a second nature, in Aristotle’s sense, in contrast to the naturalized causal processes that explain experience in “ﬁrst nature” terms. Kant, himself, whose great insight it was to see the cooperation of sense and understanding in intuition, nevertheless remained captive to the modern predicament insofar as he allowed intuitions, the collaboration of sensibility and understanding, to result from unknown noumenal factors, which others took to be the workings of the realm of scientiﬁc law, invisible from within the perceiver’s perspective but postulated by a sideways-on observer’s view. Since Kant had no notion of second nature, as McDowell and Aristotle do, but only the “ﬁrst” nature that science describes, he easily succumbed to the mistaken view that our intuitions are causally produced by a transcendental supersensible noumenal realm. As a result, when McDowell insists that our intuitions are constrained by the conceptualized objects given in receptivity

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and not by any supersensible beyond which we do not know, he ﬁnds his thought perfectly compatible with that of Hegel, who eliminated the existence of any unknown behind Kant’s phenomenal veil. We will have to ask in the next chapter whether McDowell’s solution of intimately conjoining spontaneous conceptualizing with receptivity does enough to rescue the receptivity itself from the naturalistic reduction of it to a mere causal interaction with the world.30 If McDowell’s entire project aims at establishing a “minimal empiricism,” which begins with the intelligibility of empirical content, that is, the engagement of concepts in receptivity, and climaxes in knowledge of the empirical world, then perception must be seen as en route toward judgments about the empirical world. McDowell conceives a continuum between such judgments and the experiences that “contain a claim,” whose content is what would be judged in the corresponding judgment. If empirical judgments are to be thus grounded in this experience, as McDowell portrays it, then those judgments will be related to a reality external to thought, and such grounding is necessary if “the bearing of empirical judgments on reality is to be intelligibly in place in our picture at all.”31 Furthermore, if experiences are to have a rational bearing on empirical judgment and provide reasons for it, they would be unable to ﬁll this reason-constituting role if they were devoid of conceptual content and so outside the reach of rational inquiry. Although the conceptual capacities drawn on in experience make possible experience’s playing this lofty rational role, it is nevertheless important to bear in mind, as McDowell reiterates, that the actualization of conceptual capacities in experience is involuntary, that it takes no work for objects to come into view as conceptualized, and “having something appear to one a certain way is already itself a mode of actual operation of conceptual capacities,”32 that are set in action “outside the control of their possessor.”33 But one could still imagine Brandom being dissatisﬁed with McDowell’s answer about why some extra thing, some internal experience, is necessary, especially for the intelligibility of empirical content. McDowell in his essay “Experiencing the World” speculates that the reason for Brandom’s concern has to do with mental experiences being internal to their subject, threatening to interpose themselves as intermediaries between subjects and objects and leading to the kind of Cartesian representationalism that generates skepticism, since we do not know what lies behind the sensations we experience—perhaps nothing. McDowell overcomes this, his own interpretation of Brandom’s question, by arguing for a subject-world intentional connection in which

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there are no intermediaries and through which there is “an environmental state of affairs borne in on one.”34 McDowell here envisions Brandom’s grasp of the subjective as resembling that of skeptics who base themselves on the argument from illusion, namely, that we have some highest common factor, some intermediary between ourselves and objects, that leads down the path to skepticism. Therefore, Brandom rejects the subjective realm instead of revising the false skeptical understanding of it and replacing it with a proper understanding of intentionality as open to the world and in contact with it, as McDowell will do, as we will see in the next chapter. If McDowell here interprets correctly Brandom’s motivations, then McDowell’s answer to the argument from illusion would make possible an interpretation of subjectivity that Brandom does not entertain—and an interpretation that converges with that of phenomenology.35 But one might read Brandom’s question in another way, interpreting him to be suggesting that his causal account of perception gets at all the passivity necessary for perception and that the active side of perception is be found when the response to the stimulus, the conceptually articulated sentence, is introduced into the spontaneous space of reasons. On the one hand, if our conceptual capacities are passively and involuntarily actualized in experience, why not explain the sentences that give expression to such experience simply as causal products (though they become “active players” when introduced in the space of reasons)? On the other hand, if one inserts a kind of low-level intentional, conceptualizing activity between the stimulus and the expressed sentence, as McDowell might seem to be doing, would one not lose sight of the immediacy of the response, as if there were some type of conceptual decision or semideliberation involved in applying a concept in certain circumstances? From that conceptualizing moment, one would then go on to build a sentence—with the result that the entire process of responding to stimuli begins to appear as overintellectualized. In brief, there is no need to insert “something internal” between stimulus and statement. The challenge here, to go between a causal approach to perception or an overintellectualized account of the conceptualizing involved in it, itself rests on at least two suppositions, namely, that passive, involuntary actualization of conscious processes is equivalent to their being causally produced and that there has to be some kind of temporal gap between the reception of the stimulus and one’s conceptual response (e.g., the application of concepts or utterance of a sentence) that makes the entire process much more deliberative than it usually is. I would like to suggest that McDowell could respond to

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this challenge, with its two dangers, by relying on the methodology Edmund Husserl develops in the course of providing his genealogy of logic. Much like Brandom, Husserl takes as his starting point predicative judgments whose abstract forms logic examines, and he then inquires retrogressively back from such judgments to the world of experience, the world in which we are already living, the “lifeworld,”36 which furnishes the ground for every such cognitive performance, including scientiﬁc ones. Hence, when the scientiﬁc psychologist inquires back to original experiences of the world (e.g., a child’s traumatic experience of a car accident), these experiences will be experiences of a world that is already given as complete and ready-made, a world of persons and things (e.g., children and cars)—a world whose clariﬁcation depends on phenomenology. Husserl envisions a more radical project of questioning, one that will not take for granted even this ready-made world, but will even go back to the intentional processes through which this pretheoretical world has obtained the form it has, that is, retrogressing to “the subjectivity bearing within itself, and achieving, all of the possible operations to which this world owes its becoming.”37 Husserl conceives this retrogressive reﬂection as uncovering a “hidden subjectivity”38 that is not exhibited in present reﬂection, but that is indicated by the sedimentations left by its activity in the world given to us. Starting with what we know or experience, this reﬂective method reveals that however objects may be given to us, they can only be given with reference to intentional activity, to the “experiencing consciousness and its essential features that make the experiencing accomplishment intelligible.”39 For instance, one can query one’s hearing a dog’s barking, which would presuppose the sound moving toward the ego, exercising an affective allure, to which the ego, at its lowest level of intentional activity, complies, as it turns toward it attentively, laying hold of it. But for the barking to exercise this allure, it has to be raised into prominence over against its background (e.g., the surrounding silence) with which it contrasts, and for there even to be such a contrast, consciousness would have to hold in an associative synthesis both the thing in the foreground and its background. Clearly, this holding in synthetic grasp of foreground and background, which takes place at the level of sensibility, involves accomplishments “without the participation of the active ego.”40 Furthermore, there are kinesthetic “activities,” such as the movements of one’s eyes that respond to visual objects by intentionally focusing on them, that are involuntary and that take place without thinking about one’s eyes. This I-less, passive intentionality clearly shows that intentional activity can be involuntary without being reduced to merely a causal product.41

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For Husserl, the receptivity of the ego, which appears when it turns toward the passively constituted affecting stimulus, is not exclusively opposed to the activity of the ego and it involves pursuing an external affection by the object, grasping it, and making it explicit. By contrast, spontaneous activity makes identiﬁcations with respect to the received object, interconnects it with other objects, and gives rise to new object-like formations, such as judicative formations and states of affairs. It is not entirely clear how Husserl’s distinctions between passive constitution and receptivity, on the one hand, and spontaneous activity, on the other, would correspond with McDowell’s idea of the deliverances of receptivity and spontaneity. However, Husserl is clear that receptive experience and predicative spontaneity, though distinguished from one another for purposes of analysis, should not be construed as different operations separate from each other,42 and it appears to be quite conceivable that for him sensibility and understanding are not separable, as they are not for McDowell. Though the signiﬁcance of Husserl’s admission of the holistic functioning of receptivity and spontaneity for McDowell’s idea of nonconceptual content will be addressed in the next chapter, the inseparable entwinement of sense and conceptualizing activity “in the concretion of one’s consciousness”43 would rule out the possibility of a recognizable time lapse between sensible encounters with the world and the application of concepts that might permit the application to be construed in an overly intellectualized fashion. Moreover, Husserl’s reﬂective methodology, which retrogressively uncovers intentional activities on the basis of the sedimentations detectable in already formulated statements, would rule out temporal gaps opening between sensation and conceptualizing and between the application of concepts and articulations of sentences—gaps that would make our linguistically shaped experience of the world far more deliberative than it usually appears to be.44 Brandom, though, might take exception to this phenomenological elaboration of McDowell’s viewpoint, in particular the regressive reﬂection to the intentional activities presupposed by any apprehension of pretheoretical objects, since the ﬁnal result of such an elaboration would be to conceive the relationship between subject and world as intentional without residuum. Such a way of depicting the subject-world relationship, however, seems to ignore how we are bodily beings and how perception seems to involve a causal relationship with the world. Of course, the radicalism of Husserl’s project that seeks to go behind even the commonsense acceptance of the ready-made things and persons that psychology takes for granted and to

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explain the subjective intentional processes to which even this commonsense world owes its becoming, requires one not to take for granted any concept, including “causality.” Within the framework of phenomenological reduction, all objective reality and all objective causality are bracketed, in the sense that one is determined to consider them only in the way that they appear in relationship to conscious intentional activity. Consequently, one would have to give an account of the intentional activities involved in the experience of causality—and in such an undertaking Husserl bears a resemblance to David Hume, who refused to accept objective accounts of causality that neglected how causality is subjectively experienced.45 For instance, instead of saying that the object causes my reaction—a claim that immediately entangles one in unclariﬁed, pseudoscientiﬁc, everyday understandings of causality that would construe the interaction between consciousness and its object as of the same type as that between two physical things (e.g., billiard balls) causally interacting—one describes the experience of the object acting on me. Causal laws, then, must be replaced by laws of motivation, in which one describes how one event “motivates” me to undertake a correlative action, as when something “reminds” me of something similar, or something beautiful “attracts” me to turn to it, or the perception of the room’s stale odor “stirs” me to open the window. As a result, whereas Brandom describes sentences as causally produced by stimuli from a sideways-on view (he witnesses the stimulus and notes how the responder utters the appropriate sentence), were he to implement the phenomenological reduction, he would have to provide a different account. For example, he would have to speak of a state-of-affairs “motivating” its linguistic expression, though such a motivational account based on immediate, passive associations need not imply an overly intellectualized account of the experience any more than the examples of motivation I have just given would.46 Husserl suggests, nevertheless, that it is possible to adopt a naturalistic attitude on oneself and explain one’s experiences causally, as when I interpret the falling of the hammer as disturbing the air, stimulating my hearing organs, and producing in me a noise. But the attitude of natural scientiﬁc explanation differs from the phenomenological attitude, which describes the common sense experiences from which natural scientiﬁc explanations take their start. Husserl’s discussion of different possible attitudes that one might adopt toward oneself, such as those of phenomenological description or natural science, ultimately raises the question of types of rationality and, indeed, the ultimate rational framework from which one views these different

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types of rationality. Because of Husserl’s and McDowell’s turn to an intentional account of perception, the question immediately arises about how the natural sciences now relate to such intentional accounts. By situating the natural sciences in relation to the ordinarily intentional lifeworld experiences, which the natural sciences can explain but never replace, Husserl brings into relationship what McDowell designates as ﬁrst and second nature. In addition, he converges with McDowell’s resistance to allowing bald naturalism to play the determining role with regard to what is rational or natural and, in the end, provides an ultimate framework for situating varying types of rationality in relation to each other—a topic to be fully examined in chapter 5.47 One ﬁnal criticism might be raised about whether McDowell’s account of experience and its phenomenological elaboration ignore the pragmatic dimensions of experience. Rehg objects to the idea that perceptual intentionality can be understood as a matter of “contacting things,” since such an account leaves out of the perceptual story the potential practical consequences in which the object perceived is embedded, such that when one sees a stairwell, for example, one sees it immediately as an instrument for ascending to a higher ﬂoor. Rehg is correct to assume that our encounters with objects in the lifeworld, in which we live our daily lives, are dominated by practical interests and that things are always grasped within a context, or horizon, that pragmatically relates them to other objects (e.g., the higher ﬂoor). Furthermore, nothing could even be identiﬁed in isolation from a horizon, from its relation to other things, or from its persistence across a manifold. Husserl, however, insists that if anything is given in immediate sense experience as useful, beautiful, terrifying, or attractive, it does so on the basis of its sensuous presence, which “founds” its higher level properties. “Founding” here is deﬁned, in the Logical Investigations, as claiming that if an A cannot as such exist except within a more comprehensive unity that connects it with an M, then A requires foundation by M. One could argue, similarly, that the perception of the barking of the dog described earlier presupposes as its foundation the discrimination of the barking from its background via a passive, associative synthesis. One could then envision and immediately connect the stairwell as something that makes it possible for one to ascent to an elevated area, but such recognition is founded on recognizing it as a stairwell, in which the object, standing out from its background (perhaps because of one’s interest in the anticipated ascent to the next ﬂoor) actualizes simultaneously the appropriate conceptual capacity. This founding relation (as in the case of the discrimination of a foreground object from its background) does not imply

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that that which founds the higher level is perceived ﬁrst in an isolated manner, as if we grasp a stairwell ﬁrst and then overlay it with the purposes it practically serves, or as if ﬁrst one discriminates something from its background and, then, in a temporally distinct moment, applies the concept “barking of the dog” to what is so discriminated. Founding only implies that what founds is structurally and not temporally presupposed by what is founded.48

3. rational constraint: critique We have seen why McDowell insists on prejudgmental experience, the internal “thing,” as Brandom refers to it and not simply the facts to constrain perceptual judgments. Without the perceptual experience of the world in which receptivity and spontaneity (activated conceptual capacities) cooperate, rational experience of the world and the justiﬁcation of empirical judgments would not be possible. If one speaks about reverting to the “facts” to validate such judgments, as does Brandom, the very apprehension of such facts presupposes that one’s conceptual capacities must already have collaborated with sensibility and receptivity in perceptual experience. Simply to say that one’s judgments are constrained by the facts leaves questions that are unasked about how this collaboration occurs and how it ensures that one is related to a reality external to thought in such a way that the empirical content is intelligible and able to provide reasons for those judgments—in brief, the questions that M&W answers. By reinstating the importance of experience in this debate against Brandom and the other thinkers Brandom aligns on his side, McDowell, in fact, opens a door to the kinds of investigations that phenomenology in general has pursued. Of course, the central issue in this discussion of rational constraint is whether the views of Davidson and moderate reliabilism can meet the three conditions that Brandom thinks must be met if one is to have the kind of rational constraint constraint that McDowell is after. If Davidson and moderate reliabilism meet these conditions, then McDowell’s view is not the only way of achieving rational constraint constraint; consequently, McDowell would not have sufficiently provided motivation for his own view. Certainly, rational constraint in McDowell’s view would involve more than beliefs being determined by naturalistic causal processes—and hence Brandom’s effort to keep reliabilist causal accounts of knowledge within an inferential context would move in the direction McDowell favors, as would Brandom’s insistence in

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the second condition that empirical content ought to depend on inferentially articulated concepts—a point of view shared by these two neo-Hegelians. However, the problem for McDowell would have to do with the manner Brandom conceives Davidson and moderate reliabilism meeting condition one, that empirical conceptual content ought to exercise a constraint on thought, and condition three, that rational adjudication ought to take place between what we think and what we think about. In the case of moderate reliabilism, it is the scorekeeper who ﬁrst establishes the reliability of a shard identiﬁer, providing an entitlement that the shard identiﬁer may not be able to provide for herself, and who then goes on to attribute knowledge to the shard identiﬁer after the scorekeeper endorses the truth of the shard identiﬁer’s claim (e.g., “This shard is Toltec”). Hence, it is the scorekeeper who adjudicates (by endorsing the truth of the shard identiﬁer’s statement) between what the shard identiﬁer thinks or claims and what is thought about (i.e., the facts of the case). It is the scorekeeper who sees to it that empirical conceptual content exercises constraint on the shard identiﬁer’s thought. Likewise, the Davidsonian interpreter, another kind of scorekeeper, like a ﬁeld linguistic observing natives whose language she understands, assesses responder’s reports, examining whether they are true relative to independent facts and allowing those facts to constrain the responder’s reports. Finally, Brandom thinks that the one keeping score on the reliable shard identiﬁer in the case of moderate reliabilism and the Davidsonian interpreter each escapes a mere coherentism of thoughts spinning in a void without rational constraint by the world because the scorekeeper in each case keys the correctness of a reporter’s judgments to their correspondence with the facts reported. For McDowell, however, the problem is that the constraint on reporters’ judgments in both cases (i.e., the adjudication between what is thought about and what the reporter thinks) is provided from the perspective of a scorekeeper, and the experience of one’s reports being rationally constrained by what one reports on is removed from the perspective of the reporter. In McDowell’s outlook, by contrast, one’s ﬁrst-person experience is involved in validating an empirical judgment insofar as that experience yields intelligible empirical content that can determine the truth of those judgments that purport to be intelligibly about a reality external to thought. If, however, the reported fact is not intelligibly within the viewpoint of the reporter (who in Brandom’s example may not feel herself even entitled to her commitment), then the connection between reported facts and reports is not a matter of rational adjudication and falls short of the rational constraint constraint, as

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McDowell understands it. If one were to counter this critique of McDowell’s by objecting that since the scorekeeper keys the correctness of the reporter’s judgment to the correspondence with the facts, it must be the case that the scorekeeper is in touch with those facts (e.g., be a responder and interpreter at the same time), then McDowell could simply argue that the scorekeeper would at some point possess that ﬁrst-person experience of intelligible empirical content determining the truth of judgment about a reality external to thought. Brandom’s scorekeeper account simply postpones to a later moment the need for an account of how the scorekeeper (as a responder) experiences the world rationally, constraining the scorekeeper’s thoughts. Brandom’s talk about empirical-conceptual content constraining thought, rational adjudication between what we think about and our thoughts, and keying the correctness of judgment to their correspondence with facts falls short of and actually presupposes McDowell’s notion of rational constraint, which explains how responders, or interpreters who are also responders, can ensure that their judgments are intelligibly in contact with external reality—a question Brandom really is not asking. Embellishing Brandom’s account that the scorekeepers in moderate reliabilism and Davidsonian interpreters avoid coherentism by endorsing reports as corresponding to facts and by thereby bringing it about that “rational constraint by and answerability of perceptual judgment to how things actually are is secured,”49 Rehg ampliﬁes the account’s intersubjective dimensions, but in a way that reveals precisely the problem to which McDowell points. Rehg writes, “Notice that Brandom does not jettison the idea that our beliefs and assertions are responsible to the world (i.e., to the facts, or to the way it is with things). Rather, the shift is both subtle and momentous: to explain representation, the theorist does not ask how beliefs are directly accountable to the world. Rather, one asks how we hold each other accountable to the world, or more accurately, how we hold one another accountable for having beliefs that are accountable to the world.”50 Rehg here precisely and explicitly sets aside the question that McDowell asks, namely, what account can be given about how our beliefs are directly accountable to the world, even though he seems to presuppose at some level that such direct accountability has taken place. However, insofar as this question is not handled and accountability to the world is just taken for granted or explained only in terms of whether a scorekeeper endorses a reporter’s claim about the world, the kind of rational constraint McDowell calls for is not achieved. Insofar as Brandom and Rehg employ a different understanding of the rational constraint constraint based

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in an intersubjective holding each other accountable, but without an account of how mind meets world, it would seem that coherentism—namely, the view that beliefs may be causally but are not rationally constrained by intelligible empirical content—has not yet been overcome simply because one person endorses or withholds endorsement from another’s claims. What seems implied, then, is that Brandom’s outlook is not so much wrong as incomplete in that it omits to tell the story of how its claims or the facts against which one checks claims depend on a level of experience in which intelligible empirical content comes into view and in which might be realized a goal that Brandom, too, would probably agree with, namely, that “the bearing of empirical judgments on reality . . . be intelligibly in place in our picture at all.”51 In fact, one could say that the same kind of founding relation that we have already seen exempliﬁed, for example, in the sensuous presence underlying practical and aesthetic properties or in the discrimination from a horizon that founds the conceptualized identiﬁcation of a perceptual object (e.g., the barking of the dog), also can be used to reconcile McDowell’s and Brandom’s position. The very rational adjudication between thought and the thought about, the “answerability of perceptual judgment to how things actually are”52 that Brandom believes to characterize his own discursive inferentialism cannot as such exist without at some founding level there being that meeting of mind and world in experience in which our concepts do not fall “short of the world itself”53 as they do in the myth of the given, in Kant’s notion of the noumenal supersensible, in the argument from illusion, or in most sideways-on views. The rational answerability to the way things are cannot exist on the discursive level if experience is reduced to a causal impact and so rendered incapable of playing a reason-constituting role with regard to empirical judgments. There is a kind of irony, though, in contending that McDowell’s account of the intentional engagement with the world that isn’t separate from language insofar as conceptual capacities are engaged from the start—something Brandom believes unites McDowell and himself54—should have to be placed at the founding level for Brandom’s strong inferentialism. After all Brandom had sought to give inferentialism pride of place over representationalism whereas McDowell opposes the prioritization, and what we seem to have come up with is that representationalism itself plays a founding role within the inferentialist project, “sedimented” within it, as Husserl might say. In fact, on the basis of McDowell’s essays in PPR (1998) before and after Brandom’s shorter version of “Perception and Rational Constraint,” one

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could further support the claim that McDowell is working on a founding stratum. In those essays, McDowell summarizes his own work as attempting neither to provide a theory of perception that meets rational constraint requirements nor to engage in theory construction at all but rather as addressing the transcendental question “pertaining to the conditions for it to be intelligible that our thinking has objective purport at all.”55 Coherentism and the myth of the given make it seem that such “objective purport” is ultimately impossible, since they both deny in different ways that our conceptualizing spontaneity is actualized in receptivity from the very moment of our encounter with the world. Bald naturalism denies spontaneity and explains the space of reasons as a causal product—and as we have seen, Brandom in his own way simply avoids the problem (without answering it). Richard Rorty warns against even trying to answer it, since it leads down a garden path toward all the dualisms of the pre-Darwinian and Kantian eras. McDowell, by contrast, thinks that the question of objective purport is innocent, and it is the appearance that it lands us in philosophical difficulties that needs dissolving, again by a quietistic approach that simply reveals the erring suppositions that make it impossible for our thinking, particularly the view that conceptual capacities cannot be actualized in receptivity. In other words, the questions McDowell and Brandom are addressing may not even be the same and may be pitched on different philosophical levels, as we will see more fully in our discussions of their philosophies of philosophy.56 One last comment is needed on the topic of philosophical responsibility. It is certainly true that Brandom, whose philosophical interests have to do with inference and the intersubjective relationships involved in philosophizing, could rest content with scorekeepers endorsing claims or claims being checked against facts without examining, as McDowell does, how it is that the empirical content of such claims can be intelligible and engaged with reality. But does philosophical responsibility demand more? As Husserl sees, the “resolve not to accept unquestioningly any pregiven opinion or tradition”57 is endemic to philosophy since its inception among the Greeks and is entailed by self-responsible philosophizing. Such responsibility explains Husserl’s unwillingness to call off the search for intentionality and for the hidden subjectivity that engages the world, instead of resting content with the things and objects of common sense, that really owe their coming to be to unexamined intentional processes. McDowell’s endeavor to reach back to the mind’s meeting with the world is an exercise of such philosophical responsibility. But such responsibility is not only a matter of philosophy’s methodological insistence of examining what is taken

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for granted, for the responsibility the philosopher exhibits is already anticipated by one perceiving the world. The perceiver whom McDowell discovers is also responsible, intent on grounding from his ﬁrst-person perspective empirical judgments by returning to fundamental experiences in which his spontaneity is engaged from the start (even if involuntarily actualized by objects) and by to-ing and fro-ing with the world. The perceiver is intentional all the way down as opposed to being the mere plaything of causal forces unbeknown to himself, such as below-the-line sheer receptivity of a supersensible noumenal origin. One glimpses the value McDowell places on philosophical responsibility in his defense against Brandom’s criticism of his individualism when he asserts that conceptual capacities transform a rational animal into an “individual who can achieve standings in the space of entitlements by her own efforts.”58 Brandom, however, is no stranger at all to such a sense of philosophical responsibility insofar, for example, as he demands that one examine the inferential and linguistic activities that the entire representational tradition, and philosophy in general, have taken for granted throughout their history. In addition, one ought not to underestimate the importance of endorsement for the whole of MIE, since endorsement is rendering oneself answerable, like plighting one’s troth in a promise, and the “undertaking by acknowledging of a commitment is something that no one but I can do.”59 The differing ways in which their philosophies exercise such philosophical responsibility will be another theme addressed in chapters ﬁve and six, but for now what is clear is that McDowell’s sense of philosophical responsibility leads him to that far point, where mind meets world.

4. interiorization The objection of the interiorization of perception, one basically raised by McDowell against Brandom, appears in the former’s essay, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” published in 2002 and constituting the third essay in a series whose previous two essays, “Knowledge and the Internal” by McDowell and “Knowledge and the Social Articulation of the Space of Reasons” by Brandom, were published in PPR in 1995. To appreciate the arguments in the ﬁnal essay, some understanding is required of the previous essays, and hence they will be brieﬂy summarized here. McDowell begins “Knowledge and the Internal” by identifying interiorization as withdrawing the space of reasons from the external world and as epitomized by the argument from illusion, which construes illusionary perception

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and authentic perception as both involving the appearance of seeing something (in the former case the object is not as it appears) and concludes that even in perception what we have at best is an appearance that things are thus and so. If we have done our best to avoid error and if then the appearances deceive us, it is a matter of the world’s unkindness; if the appearances reveal what things actually are, the world has favored us. McDowell considers that this viewpoint in effect cuts us off from the external world by giving us only appearances of that world that are interiorized in our consciousness and that fall short of it (unless the world happens to favor us), and he entertains three possible (and unsatisfactory) alternatives to such interiorization: skepticism (all we know are appearances that never reach the real world), the (impossible) attempt to undertake risk-free methods that would eliminate all risk of error, or a hybrid position. He develops at length this hybrid standpoint that consists of implementing reliable policies and acquiring appropriate habits of belief formation that will yield justiﬁed beliefs within the space of reasons, though the truth of these beliefs depends on the way things are apart from beliefs justiﬁed within that space. Given this chasm between justiﬁed belief and truth, McDowell wonders how one might even be able to recognize that one’s beliefs are reliable (i.e., tending to truth) and how, if at best all one ever has is justiﬁed belief short of the truth, one would ever be able to have what the tradition deﬁned as knowledge (namely, justiﬁed, true belief). His ﬁnal solution is to refuse to accept the parameters imposed by accepting the interiorization the argument from illusion produces, namely, that we experience only appearances. Instead, he contends that we can start “from facts, riskily accepted as such on the basis of such direct modes of cognitive contact with them as perception.”60 Brandom’s “Knowledge and the Social Articulation of the Space of Reasons” comments on McDowell’s article by focusing on the proper relationship between justiﬁed belief and truth that constitutes knowledge. While skeptics and dogmatists “aggregate” justiﬁcation and truth, agreeing that justiﬁcation ought to be truth-guaranteeing, the skeptic denies that such justiﬁcation (and therefore knowledge) is ever to be had and the dogmatist affirms that justiﬁcation ruling out the possibility of falsehood can be had. Extreme reliabilism and the hybrid view McDowell presents segregate justiﬁcation and truth, with the former dismissing justiﬁcation and counting on reliable processes to produce truth, and the latter granting that there can be only justiﬁcation, but not truth. In the end, though, Brandom equates interiorizing the space of reasons with individualizing it, since the only way to associate

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properly justiﬁcation and truth in the search for knowledge is via an intersubjective relationship. In that relationship, the scorekeeper attributing knowledge to a partner ﬁrst attributes to the partner a commitment (belief) and an entitlement (justiﬁcation) to that commitment, and then decides whether to endorse that commitment as true herself, and, if she endorses, to attribute knowledge to the partner (since that partner would then have a justiﬁed, true belief). Justiﬁcation and truth are separate insofar as the responsibility for each is distributed between two persons, and yet they are related through the collaboration in which the scorekeeper will only in the end attribute knowledge to the partner when the scorekeeper herself endorses a commitment the partner is taken to hold and be entitled to (even if that partner does not think he is entitled to her belief as in the reliabilist scenarios). McDowell neglects this social articulation of the space of reasons, though Brandom thinks that it is simply an unwitting omission, since at times McDowell simply “leaves stuff out.”61 In the ﬁnal paper of this triad, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” McDowell brings to a head their differences over perception, particularly with regard to the issue of interiorization. After an extremely humorous opening in which McDowell compares himself to a bombardier beetle emitting small explosions to ward off the predator, Brandom, trying to appropriate McDowell’s work as promissory for his own, McDowell identiﬁes himself with the dogmatist viewpoint that Brandom had rejected and that espouses two beliefs: there can be a justiﬁcation incompatible with falsehood and justiﬁcation ruling out the possibility of falsehood can be had. He ﬁnds such justiﬁcatory possibilities in claims of the form “I see that . . .” and argues that one who truly makes such a claim has an entitlement incompatible with any possibility of falsehood to the claim within the “that” clause, and the entitlement to such a claim consists of the visual availability of the fact affirmed in making the claim.62 Although it seems that McDowell ensures the impossibility of a falsehood simply by stating that the one who makes the claim truly makes it, his point becomes clearer in his criticism of an example of Brandom’s from the previous essay. There Brandom proposes a situation in which a perceiver seems to see a candle ten feet in front of her in a darkened room, but a scorekeeper, the sine qua non of the social articulation of the space of reasons, knows that there is a mirror ﬁve feet in front of her with no candle behind it and therefore would refrain from committing himself to what she would endorse. The perceiver’s entitlement here does not guarantee the presence of the candle, and

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in fact, even if there had been a candle there, her entitlement would not have guaranteed the presence of the candle. The best that the perceiver can do is “seem to see” a candle ten feet in front of her, and consequently Brandom’s example seems to reiterate the argument from illusion, namely, whether a candle is there or not, the best a perceiver has available are appearances that could or could not indicate the presence of a candle. McDowell counters, though, that the best case would consist of the fact that a perceiver would be in the presence of a candle making itself apparent to her, and in such a case it would not be a matter of a mere seeming and the subject would have an entitlement consisting in the fact that she sees the candle in front of her. Such an entitlement is not had by the perceiver in the darkened room, but such an entitlement can be had and in such a case justiﬁcation and truth would not fall apart.63 In addition to this criticism of Brandom’s account of perception as aligned with the argument from illusion, since the perceiver only has access to an interiorized set of appearances cut off from the world, McDowell faults Brandom’s general framework. To be sure, Brandom claims that he agrees with McDowell’s opposition to the idea that there is a kind of gap between the space of reasons and a world outside the space of reasons, and he affirms that his distribution of responsibilities for the different rational components of knowledge takes place completely within the space of reasons, since commitment and entitlement (corresponding to belief and justiﬁcation) are attributed by the scorekeeper to the interlocutor, whereas the responsibility for endorsing the commitment (truth) falls to the scorekeeper. However, McDowell asserts that this division of responsibilities ensures that the entitlement any perceiver lays claim to will always be interiorized. Whatever entitlement a perceiver may feel she has for her perceptual belief, the best that she could ever have would be an entitlement to seem to see what she is seeing. There might always be some factor at work (e.g., the mirror) that she is not aware of, and so entitlement will ultimately depend on the scorekeeper, who knows whether such a factor is at play and so is able to determine whether entitlement for what she sees is attributable to her and, if the scorekeeper endorses the commitment of the perceiver, whether perceptual knowledge is to be attributed to her. It is structurally the case in Brandom’s account that the candidate perceiver-knower will never have an entitlement incompatible with falsehood or never have knowledge on her own of what she perceives (since it must always await the scorekeeper’s endorsement). In effect the best that the candidate knower can have is an interiorized entitlement that falls

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short of knowledge of the facts, a mere truly believing that things are the case rather than a knowing of them. Here the distribution of responsibilities requisite for knowing does not remove the interiorization of entitlements but actually produces it.64 One ﬁnal criticism that McDowell raises has to do with Brandom’s overly theorized, inferential approach to perception. McDowell states that one does not infer “There’s a candle in front of me” from an entitling “I see that there’s a candle in front of me,” since one would not be entitled to the latter sentence if the ﬁrst were not already true. In McDowell’s view, the statement “I see that there’s a candle in front of me,” if made truly, vindicates the embedded claim that there is a candle in front of me, by itself, without needing some outside scorekeeper to affirm its truth. Unlike the reliabilist chicken sexer whose claim is justiﬁed even though she cannot justify it, I can vindicate my entitlement to the claim that there’s a candle in front of me by saying “I see that there’s a candle in front of me.” Brandom’s inferentialist approach, requiring another’s endorsement as a condition of knowledge, can be traced to Sellars’s view that one ought to establish one’s observational reliability, as we have seen, since Brandom keeps the inferentialist structure that one’s reliability needs to be established but allows that it can be established by someone else. For McDowell, though the problem is with the inferential structure itself. One can tell a green thing when one sees it, and thereby one recognizes one’s own authority as a reporter of greenness without establishing it on the basis of evidence or on the basis of an inference, leading to the inferential conclusion that one’s perceptual claim is valid. The strangeness one feels upon being asked to establish one’s own reliability as a perceiver enables McDowell to situate one’s authority as an observer with regard to broader epistemic presuppositions. McDowell observes, “But I would be at a loss if pressed for premises for an argument that would have my reliability about greenness as a conclusion. My reliability about that kind of thing has for me, rather, a sort of status that Wittgenstein considers in On Certainty. It is held ﬁrm for me by my whole conception of the world with myself in touch with it, and not as the conclusion of an inference from some of that conception.”65 One’s being in touch with the world and not having to establish one’s reliability as a perceiver belong then to the kinds of certainties that the game of doubting itself presupposes, according to Wittgenstein. Such taken for granted certainties constitute the system within which conﬁrmation and disconﬁrmation take place, and this system is no doubtful point of departure but rather “the element in which arguments have their life.”66 Brandom

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ends up interiorizing perception in part because he requires that perceptual claims be inferentially warranted instead of recognizing that they take place on a plane that precedes processes of warranting and the kind of higher-level theorizing of perception in which Brandom engages. In brief, McDowell challenges Brandom with (1) interiorizing perception by taking as his starting point for the perceiver the highest common factor appearances much like those found within the argument from illusion, (2) interiorizing entitlements in general (including perceptual entitlements) through the scorekeeping framework, since the scorekeeper must attribute entitlement and ﬁnally knowledge to those who may think themselves to be entitled and knowing, and (3) interiorizing perception by overly theorizing it as inferentially established instead of locating it on a level of world engagement that precedes the raising of philosophical doubts about perception. Since Brandom never responded to “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” we will have to assess critically McDowell’s argument, but insofar as these arguments on interiorization are centrally concerned with the different theoretical stances of Brandom and McDowell, they will be considered in the opening of chapter 5 that deals precisely with McDowell’s conception of philosophical theory.

CHAPTER 3

the fullness of perception

Having concurred with John McDowell’s position as opposed to Robert Brandom’s on the intelligibility of empirical content and the constraint it exercises on empirical judgment, I will now consider two other aspects of McDowell’s account of our relationship with the world: namely, his defense of realism against skepticism through his disjunctivist view of perception and his opposition to nonconceptual content. Regarding the ﬁrst issue, I will compare and contrast McDowell’s defense of realism through the disjunctive account of perception with the equally realist phenomenological account developed by A. D. Smith in The Problem of Perception, and I will show how Smith uncovers a layer of perceptual activity (e.g., three dimensionality, kinetic relationships with objects, Anstoss [the resistance objects offer us]) that is located between sensation and conceptualization and that McDowell overlooks. However, whether the kinds of dimensions of perception that Smith discloses jeopardizes McDowell’s understanding of intelligible empirical content will be considered in the second half of the chapter that treats McDowell’s opposition to nonconceptual content. In that second half, I will support, on the basis of a holistic account of perception, McDowell’s opposition to the kind of nonconceptual content he opposes, insofar as it would introduce the coherentism and myth of the given that he seeks to overcome. However, critics could take this elimination of nonconceptual content beyond thinking as the basis for accusing McDowell of falling into what he himself refers to as a possible “arrogant anthropocentrism”1 that would hold the world to be “completely within the reach of our powers of thinking”2— something McDowell denies insofar as he insists that one must continually adjust one’s worldview to experience. The critics’ objection can be further met by situating McDowell’s view of perception within a wider context that includes the experience of veriﬁcation, a fuller notion of receptivity, and a surplus beyond conceptual contents. In each of these areas, I will point to contents that seem to surpass conceptualizing, but without allowing the ghosts, which McDowell fears will accompany what he means by nonconceptualism, to return.

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1. mcdowell’s disjunctivist account of perception 1.1. McDowell’s Disjunctivist Defense of Realism against the Argument from Illusion John McDowell’s disjunctivism has often been simplistically interpreted as responding to the skeptical challenge that veridical perception may be nothing other than a deceptive appearance by insisting that an act can be either a veridical perception or the experiencing of a deceptive appearance, but not both. So understood, it is not entirely clear how this response meets the skeptical challenge or how it is anything more than a dogmatic counteraffirmation to the skeptic’s claim that veridical perception and deceptive appearances are indistinguishable. We must ﬁrst explain his disjunctivism and show how it grows out of a “turn to the subjective,” with which phenomenology has much affinity. In one of the central sites in which McDowell develops his view of disjunctivism, the essay “Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space,”3 he begins with a consideration of Bertrand Russell’s argument that singular sentences—which contain deﬁnite descriptions seeming to refer to an object, such as the present King of France—fail to express a singular proposition at all. For Russell, when there is no object to refer to, there is no proposition being expressed. Instead, using the theory of descriptions, he equips all such singular sentences with nonsingular propositions that they can be understood to express, whether the suitably referred to object exists or not. This is part of Russell’s overall strategy to replace commonsense language with more formal reformulations that avoid philosophical problems (of seeming to refer to a nonexistent object that must be taken somehow to exist, as Meinong thought, or of being taken to denote the null class or some other artiﬁcial object, as Frege believed).4 Thus, when a singular sentence (“The present King of France is bald”) begins with the descriptive phrase “the present King of France,” one needs to analyze that phrase away.5 One can do so by constructing a nonsingular proposition C(x) in which (x) is a variable for which there may or may not be something that can be substituted and of which one predicates C (the present King of France). One can add another predicate, such as B, “being bald,” and one would then have C(x) • B(x) (and one can account for the singularity of x by affirming that if there is any King of France, it is equivalent to x), while still leaving it open whether or not there exists such an (x) (i.e., whether one ought to quantify existentially over the proposition or not).6

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McDowell wonders, though, why Russell could not have been content with allowing that some sentences express singular propositions whereas others present the illusory appearance of doing so, rather than devising a kind of nonsingular proposition to cover both possibilities. To buttress the previous, less convoluted possibility, McDowell retrieves Russell’s notion of “acquaintance,” dispensing with his view that we can only have perceptual acquaintance with sense data and allowing for relations between minds and ordinary objects, “immediately present to the mind,”7 as one might expect from McDowell. He then contends that this simpler approach permits it that one can be under the illusion of standing in relation to an object and so under the illusion of entertaining singular propositions. The only reason Russell could have for disallowing such a possibility is that he holds that a capacity or procedure can function appropriately (e.g., be in acquaintance with an object) “only if it never issues in impostors,”8 as if the fact that singular propositions are fallible implies that none of their deliverances is to be trusted and that such propositions need to be done away with (by substituting for them nonsingular propositions over which one might existentially quantify). While rejecting Russell’s view that singular sentences do not express singular propositions, McDowell argues that Russell implicitly recognizes a central insight of Frege’s insofar as Russell understands that singular propositions are object dependent, just as Frege believed that singular senses are object dependent and generate object dependence in the thoughts in which they ﬁgure. Such object dependence coheres with other aspects of Frege’s thought, such as that reference failure yields truth-value gaps or that ﬁctional utterances contain mock thoughts or mock senses, and McDowell seeks to emphasize these implications of Frege’s sense-reference distinction instead of seeing it as preparing for the way for the development by Russell, who, faced with senses having no references (e.g., “the present King of France”), developed his theory of descriptions.9 Consequently, McDowell believes that on his view one could be “under the illusion of standing in relation to an object that would count as acquaintance, the impression being illusory because there is no such object.”10 In other words, McDowell allows that one could be mistaken about the contents of one’s mind—or to put it in Gareth Evans’s words, if one thinks about a physical object that is not there, one “may fail to have a thought of the kind he supposes himself to have.”11 Given that Russell’s strategy avoids such tensions between senses and objects and would therefore rule out the kind of failure Evans envisions, McDowell charges that Russell’s approach

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to singular thoughts puts him squarely within a Cartesian paradigm. After all Descartes too sought out a domain about which one could be certain and immunized against any illusion—for him the autonomous, inner realm of consciousness—even though he paid for this immunization by a disengagement from the world that could no longer correct false thoughts or that now becomes dubiously accessible to the thoughts we think.12 It is signiﬁcant that in this essay McDowell ﬁrst rehearses these arguments against Russell and then places Russell in the Cartesian camp just before developing his own disjunctivist account of perception. This account, in fact, takes aim at the skeptic who, on the basis of the Cartesian premise of a subject, certain of its self-possession, argues that we end up losing our grip on the world. McDowell needs to oppose such a skeptic because his own account of perception embraces conscious experience that is Descartes’s starting point (though McDowell construes such experience as intentionally open to the world) and that, paradoxically, Russell attempts to distance himself from. Although McDowell’s drawing parallels between Russell and Cartesianism is not off the mark, it deﬁes usually sympathetic interpretations of Russell that disclaim any Cartesian motivation at all, as McDowell acknowledges. In fact, many would interpret Russell’s theory of descriptions as precisely enabling him to do a kind of linguistic end-run around what he took to be unobservable Cartesian “mental contents” that need not correspond to anything in the real world and, to avoid, in particular, the subsistent nonexistent objects that the extreme realists (e.g., Meinong) of the early twentieth century posited, as McDowell in his commentary on Wilfrid Sellars observes.13 Therefore, when McDowell seeks to rehabilitate an idea of intentionality through which he hopes to bridge the gap between the conceptual and real orders that he takes René Descartes, Russell, and Sellars to have problems crossing, it is as if he himself is returning to a more Cartesian style of philosophizing that Russell sympathizers might argue that Russell had already gotten himself out from under. One ought not to allow McDowell’s assignment of Russell to the Cartesian perspective to blind one to how McDowell himself is pursuing, albeit critically, the Cartesian turn to conscious experience that Brandom is somewhat dismayed at and that Russell, and much of analytic philosophy in his wake, rejected.14 To his credit, though, McDowell recognizes that as soon as he makes intentionality basic to his thought in contrast to Russell, he faces the prospect that he, like Descartes, will become entangled in questions about the relationship between the contents of intentional acts and the world. For instance, it must

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now be asked what it is it that one seems to see in an ostensive seeing may not correspond to what is there and whether it is possible that such deceptive appearances might stand between one’s seeing and any object one sees to be there, such that one might never be able to know for sure whether one’s seeing is really seeing or only ostensive seeing. Rather than proceed directly to McDowell’s presentation of his disjunctivist theory of perception in his essay on singular thought, it will be more helpful to consider his presentation of this theory in his essay “Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge,” because the theory is more clearly presented in the latter and because this latter essay shows the relevance of that theory to broader philosophical concerns, such as the problem of other minds. In that essay, he begins discussing parallel ways in which we end up cut off from others or from the world. For example, we can begin with observable criteria that indicate another’s internal states and that are satisﬁed and yet we can still be mistaken about the other’s states. Likewise, the premise of argument from illusion is that we have access to appearances of how the world may appear when what appears may not be the way it appears. McDowell, then, lucidly develops this argument. This argument, insofar as it suggests that we get at the world only through appearances that could mislead us into taking something to be a certain way when it is not, might seem to imply only the conclusion that one’s knowledge of the world independent of oneself can at best be fallible. The argument, however, goes further, in insisting that deceptive cases are experientially indistinguishable from nondeceptive cases. Such a conclusion seems phenomenologically warranted insofar as when one is involved in a deceptive case it is impossible to distinguish it from a nondeceptive one (since one feels that one is not being deceived in deceptive cases). On this basis, the skeptic posits that one’s experiential intake must be the same in both kinds of cases, that is, that there is a “highest common factor” available in the deceptive and nondeceptive cases alike. It should be noted that McDowell acknowledges that there can be situations in which someone perceives that something is thus and so and in which someone else merely seems to perceive that the same thing is thus and so (i.e., is in error), and he allows that in such situations one can characterize both as sharing some highest common factor. He, in fact, objects to Simon Blackburn’s interpretation of his disjunctivism as implying that these two perceivers would have nothing in common.15 The problem occurs, though, when the skeptic generalizes from such ambiguous cases to conclude that all cases of nondeceptive perception also

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involve an intermediary “highest common factor,” which would also belong to deceptive perceptions (in which, though, the object does not appear as it is), and that such a “highest common factor” would therefore always stand as an intermediary between the subject and the facts. While in deceptive cases, the intake falls short of the fact itself, being consistent with there being no such fact, the skeptic would posit that even in nondeceptive cases there is an appearance falling “short of the fact ascertained, at best defeasibly connected with it, as interposing itself between the experiencing subject and the fact itself.”16 For McDowell, the problem lies not in the claim that there can be a “highest common factor” but rather in the fact that the skeptic generalizes from cases in which one is deceived to conclude that the highest common factor exhausts the epistemological signiﬁcance of nondeceptive experience also. In effect, the skeptic claims that the epistemic credentials yielded by experience can never be any better than they are in cases of mere appearance. It is, then, in regard to the skeptic’s theoretical generalization that would reduce all perception to a matter of grasping a highest common factor, making veridical perception appear no better than taking in deceptive appearances, that McDowell introduces his disjunctivist conception of perception: An appearance that such-and-such is the case can be either a mere appearance or the fact that such-and-such is the case making itself perceptually manifest to someone. As before, the object in the deceptive case is a mere appearance. But we are not to accept that in the non-deceptive cases too the object of experience is a mere appearance, and hence something that falls short of the fact itself. On the contrary, the appearance that is presented to one in those cases is a matter of the fact itself being disclosed to the experiencer. So appearances are no longer conceived as in general intervening between the experiencing subject and the world.17 McDowell further points out that, if one settles for a generalized “highest common factor” model, it is arguable that one will never really have access to things that are thus and so in the world, beyond the mediating appearances given to one. One would be, as it were, conﬁned within a ring of appearances, as in the Cartesian perspective, standing between oneself and the world, and the outer world would not really enter into, or penetrate, the inner appearances that one has when one is having veridical perception. Instead, in this “highest common factor” approach, the data given would always stand as

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proxies from which one might inferentially derive the real world, much as the criterial account of intersubjective understanding permits only a (defeasible) inference to the inner states of another. As McDowell points out, the end effect is that mental states of another retreat behind what is externally given (e.g., observable behavior) and are located “in the head” of the others, much as the external world retreats behind the appearances given. In other words, the contents pertaining to subjectivity would be exactly as they are however things might be outside this domain, and the commonsense view that one is in touch with reality would become entirely problematic. The gap between mind and world here becomes pronounced, unless one disputes what the skeptic takes to be given in the ﬁrst place (e.g., observable behaviors or highest common factors as grounds for inferences), which is exactly the strategy Wittgenstein pursued, according to McDowell.18 Commenting on the gap between behavior and the internal states of others that the skeptic posits, McDowell opposes solutions offered in a supposedly Wittgensteinian-style that would claim that external behaviors and internal states are coordinated by conventions. Such solutions, though, simply propose a minor adjustment within the skeptical position, suggesting that equally defeasible conventions could bridge the gap between behaviors and other minds. McDowell argues instead that Wittgenstein would have rejected the assumption that generated the skeptical problem in the ﬁrst place, namely, that there is a gap between the other’s external behavior and the other’s mind. The problem is generated by the artiﬁcial assumption that we have access not to full human beings whose thoughts and meanings we usually understand quite well, but to human bodies, conceived as material objects from which we must infer mysterious inner states. The answer, then, is not more and more subtle theory, but less theory, as McDowell notes, “In these terms, Wittgenstein’s response to the skeptic is to restore the concept of a human being to its proper place, not as something laboriously reconstituted, out of the fragments to which the skeptic reduces it, by a subtle epistemological and metaphysical construction, but as a seamless whole of whose unity we ought not to have allowed ourselves to lose sight in the ﬁrst place.”19 By contrast, McDowell argues, like several phenomenologists,20 that one grasps in another’s facial expression or behavior that she is in pain instead of inferring that she is in pain from a perceived behavior. Similarly, instead of inferring from a generalized “highest common factor” to what lies behind it, McDowell claims that the experiencing subject has an unmediated openness to “external reality”—in other words, he simply denies that there is a gap

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between mind and world that the Cartesian outlook postulates from the start and that the generalized “highest common factor” continues to maintain.21 In a sense, what sets up the skeptical problem is the introduction of explanatory theorizing—for example, explaining via generalization that even nondeceptive perceiving has access only to the “highest common factor” that it shares with deceptive perceiving. The very idea of a “highest common factor” itself had been used to explain theoretically how it is that those in the thrall of perceptual deception cannot distinguish their situation from that of nondeceived perceiving. Likewise, it is the objectifying, natural scientiﬁc theorizing of human beings that separates their observable behaviors from their unobservable inner states. McDowell repeatedly claims the Wittgensteinian mantle for himself insofar as he refrains from trying to respond to such problems as they have been framed by philosophical and scientiﬁc theory and insofar as he seeks to undermine the theoretically concocted picture that generates the problem in the ﬁrst place. Hence, the disjunctivism that refuses the theorized generalization of the highest common factor and insists rather on the disjunction (either one has the thing itself present that “ﬁgures”22 in the formation of the experience or one has a mere appearance) and on the possibility of a direct contact with things must be seen as part of McDowell’s wariness about theory and his philosophical quietism to which his commentators often make critical reference and about which we will have much more to say in chapter 5.23 Of course, McDowell’s mere insistence that the fact that such-and-such is the case can make itself perceptually manifest to someone (and that we are not conﬁned to highest common factors) may not suffice for regaining the world that Descartes lost. In fact, Barry Stroud has argued that Cartesianism has led to an irretrievable loss of the world insofar as, even when facts make themselves perceptually manifest, one does not know that one is not dreaming that one perceives such facts, since no matter what test one applies to prove one is not dreaming, it is possible that one is dreaming in applying that test. One might protest, however, that one knows that one is not dreaming because one’s senses yield knowledge of the environment, and this cannot happen while one dreams. But the Cartesian counterresponse would be that one must establish that one is not dreaming independently of whatever perceptual knowledge of the environment is in question. But McDowell immediately asks, “But why must the direction of epistemic support be like that? We are not allowed to depend on our possession of the world for knowledge that we are not dreaming at the relevant times.”24 While this

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response does not decisively show that we are not dreaming, as McDowell admits, it does identify the Cartesian skeptic’s presuppositions, particularly the idea that one must start with one’s dreaming rather than perception and explain perception in terms of dreaming rather than the other way around. McDowell, in the end, does not take himself to have deﬁnitively resolved the skeptic’s questions, but rather he characterizes in more quietistic tones his own endeavor as enabling us “to see how it might be intellectually respectable to ignore them, to treat them as unreal, in the way that common sense has always wanted to.”25

1.2. A. D. Smith’s Phenomenological Approach to Perception, Direct Realism, and the Argument from Illusion A. D. Smith, who acknowledges repeatedly that his work has much in common with phenomenology and that he follows Husserl’s views more closely than anyone else’s,26 offers a defense of realism against the argument from illusion on the basis of an account of perception that differs in important ways from McDowell’s. Smith undertakes the limited, well-deﬁned project of showing that direct realism cannot be shown to be false, and he deﬁnes direct realism in terms of direct perception of physical objects without assuming, as does indirect realism, that we can perceive them only in virtue of something that is distinct from them and that serves as a proxy for them, such as sensations. He clearly distinguishes his defense of direct realism against the argument from illusion, in which illusion involves perceiving a real, physical object but also misperceiving it, from his later defense against the argument from hallucination, insofar as in hallucination the experienced object is not real. In addition, Smith insists that the argument from illusion presents a serious challenge to direct realism because persons captive to an illusion are subjectively aware of the same kind of object as they could be aware of in veridical perception, that is, they are in the same kind of sensory state as someone who is perceiving veridically. Consequently, as McDowell too holds, those in the thrall of illusion may not be able to recognize that they are suffering from an illusion. In fact, Smith criticizes views that fail to recognize the depth of the problem the Argument poses insofar as they, in different ways, deny that a veridical and matching illusory experience have a shared sensory character. Examples of such views would be the “divide and conquer strategy” that argues that illusory experiences involve a kind of “thought representation” of the object different from the (sensory) veridical experience

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of it or causal accounts that eliminate all sensory, qualitative dimensions of experience, with the obvious result that the illusory and veridical experiences could not share any sensory character and so the subjective experience of the illusion would become impossible. In addition to these views, a commonsense view that acknowledges only that occasional illusions are possible is unable to see that such an acknowledgement could imperil our direct awareness of the physical world if the illusory experience one undergoes is indistinguishable from veridical perception. Smith ﬁnally lays out the four steps of the argument from illusion: (1) there is no type of physical feature that could not appear differently from the way it is; (2) whenever something appears to have a feature that it does not have, we are aware of something that does possess that feature (the sense-datum inference) and hence looking at a white wall that looks yellow implies that we are aware of something yellow; (3) what we are aware of is not the physical object (what we are aware of is yellow and so cannot be the white wall); (4) we are immediately aware only of sense data and not objects (of which we might be indirectly aware) and this is so of all perceptions, whether veridical or illusory (the generalizing step). In Smith’s view, if one accepts the second premise, the argument from illusion succeeds, and his entire project attempts “to see a way around that premise.”27 His presentation of the Argument converges with McDowell’s insofar as McDowell too sees that the generalization (step four) is based on the experience of being under an illusion, namely, that all perceptions, whether deceptive or nondeceptive, reach only to a “highest common factor,” an appearance, that stands as an intermediary between the subject and the facts, making possible only an inferential link to physical objects of the kind that indirect realism would favor (step two). To answer the argument from illusion, it is important, Smith believes, to allow that sensory qualities are present in veridical and illusionary experience (otherwise, one would not take the Argument seriously), but these qualities qualify experience rather than consist of sense data, which, according to the sense-data tradition, were the objects of awareness instead of the physical objects themselves. By insisting that we are aware of objects rather than sense data, one preserves the intentionality of perceptual consciousness, its world-directedness, that is, its ability to reach physical objects directly, much like McDowell’s idea of unmediated openness to reality. Smith proceeds then to provide a phenomenology of perception, in which sensations function as ingredients of experience, but in which other dimensions beyond sensation are also at play. These perceptual dimensions, through which an

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agent experiences not sensations but objects as over against him or her— “the hallmark of perceptual consciousness”28—consist in three-dimensional spatiality (in contrast to two-dimensional sensation), the kinetic structure by which an object presents itself as perspectively accessible (in contrast to nonperspectival sensation) and available to various bodily movements, and the ways in which objects check our bodily movements, offering resistance to our active movements through the experience of Anstoss. Although sensations are passive, all three perceptual dimensions involve a kind of dynamic interplay between agent and object in which mobility, or the potential for it (e.g., three dimensionality), is central. The distinction between sensation and these perceptual dimensions becomes particularly evident in experiences of object constancy over against sense variations. For instance, while my visual sensations of an object may change, the object observed does not change positions (position constancy); or when I approach an object it projects a larger image on my retina and occupies more of my visual ﬁeld, but its size remains constant. Or, to cite another case, the proverbial elliptical penny appears so to sensation, but the object itself remains constant in its shape. Position, size, and shape constancy depend on the perceptual dimensions enabling the copresent sensations to function perceptually, and if there were only constantly changing sensations, perceptual constancy would not even exist. While these perceptual dimensions are nonsensuous in character, what is also signiﬁcant is that through them we experience objects independent of us, separated from us in space, independent in relationship to our movements toward them, and checking our activity.29 But how does this account of perception handle the argument from illusion? Versus the Argument’s claim that what we are immediately aware of in perception is sensation and not normal objects, the Anstoss seems “to slip through the Argument’s net.”30 This is true insofar as we experience physical force directly, without some sensuous item between ourselves and that force, even though there are illusions (e.g., the force we experience isn’t as powerful as it actually is if we are tired) and even though “touch sensations” inevitably accompany the experience of resistance. Smith asserts that the argument from illusion would have to show that we are directly aware of sensory qualities or whatever it is that possesses them with the result that such qualities or their possessors would displace our experience of normal objects, mediate our awareness of the normal physical object, and, in effect, do away with all transcendence. While phenomenology cannot prove transcendence, it can block the argument denying transcendence, and it has achieved this by

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demonstrating through the Anstoss and perceptual constancies that we are in touch with an object independent of us rather than sensations mediating such an object. “Illusion” in this scheme is nothing but “the varying appearance of the normal object of perception.”31 The argument from hallucination against direct realism resembles the argument from illusion in positing the possibility of hallucinations, arguing that the hallucinating subject is aware of something that is not a normal object, and generalizing to conclude that even in veridical perception one is not aware of a normal physical object. However, Smith highlights important differences between these two arguments, since the problem of illusion involved the mistaken introduction of nonnormal objects of awareness (e.g., sensations), while, in the case of hallucination, one is deﬁnitely aware of some nonnormal object. Relying on phenomenological analysis, Smith explains that in both veridical perception and hallucination we are aware of objects (and not mere sensations), but the difference is that in perception the intentional object is a real object but in hallucination the hallucinated object is unreal, merely an intentional object. In illusory perception one can say that one misperceives an entity, the thing as it is in itself, but one’s intentional object is that same thing as represented by the perceiver, without positing that object as another “entity” in between the perceiver and the object (which would undo realism). For example, when we misperceive a red entity as black, the entity or thing itself is red, but the (intentional) object, that is, the thing as represented by us, is black. In the hallucinatory case, however, one is aware of an object that is not really anything at all, and this intentional object, which is not itself an entity, need not entangle one in speculations about nonexistent existents or Meinongian subsistents that, surprisingly, many versions of intentional analysis (including J. L. Mackie’s) in its long history have avoided. Smith’s affirmation of the role of intentional objects in hallucination enables him to combat Russell’s view, which Smith dubs the “ontological assumption,” namely, that there can be no true statement or reference to what is nonexistent. Despite Russell’s belief, we do seem able to describe what we hallucinate and differentiate it from other contents. Furthermore, to understand the force of the argument from hallucination, one would have to admit that hallucinatory experience is qualitatively identical to veridical perception as far as the subjective viewpoint of the hallucinator is concerned and this qualitative identity of experience implies that something is being experienced (even if it is merely an intentional object in the case of hallucination). Smith accuses Gareth Evans and McDowell of succumbing to this Ontological

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Assumption, or the “extreme position,” which holds that one literally has nothing before one’s mind in hallucination, although McDowell seems at times ambiguous on the topic.32 Perhaps because McDowell thinks that the allowance of any hallucinatory objects at all might set up the possibility of a self-enclosed Cartesian realm cut off from the real world, he insists on separating veridical perception, in which the world ﬁgures, from its nonperceptual disjunct, characterized as perception’s polar opposite insofar “there is really nothing precisely there.”33 In the end, Smith defeats the argument from hallucination by denying that what the subject is aware of in hallucination, the “something” of the second step above, is an entity and by asserting that even in hallucination what we experience is not sensations but objects (albeit merely intentional ones).34 Interestingly enough, in a recent article, Smith has argued that Husserl himself can be construed as endorsing the disjunctivist theory of perception insofar as he admits that in experiencing a real physical object that object is essential to the experience in virtue of the experience’s content. In other words, in perception, as McDowell argues, the real physical object ﬁgures in our experience of it. Furthermore, however indistinguishable a hallucination and veridical perception may be subjectively to the hallucinator, hallucinations and veridical perceptions are essentially different kinds of experience insofar as these experiences belong to systems of experience whose correlates are unreal and real objects respectively.35 This admission on Smith’s part raises questions about the exact points on which a phenomenological approach such as Smith’s agrees and disagrees with McDowell’s disjunctivist account of perception—a discussion to which we now turn.

1.3. A Confrontation of the Positions There is a sense in which both the phenomenological and disjunctivist accounts of perception seek to uphold common sense. Clearly McDowell thinks that the argument from illusion depends on skeptical theorizing that ends up, like Descartes, in conﬁning perceivers within their own experiences, cut off from reality, just as, due to scientiﬁc theorizing, one’s access to understanding another is limited to the other’s physically observable behavior, short of the other’s mind. In both cases, theorizing leads to accounts that contradict common sense in which we, for the most part, ﬁnd ourselves in touch with reality and understand others. Similarly, Smith explicitly follows Husserl in trying to get beyond mistaken theoretical approaches to

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perception, with their “aprioristic assumptions,” and to return “to the things themselves” through “a careful phenomenological appreciation of the lived character of perceptual experience.”36 Smith’s concern for upholding common sense appears in his insistence that we experience objects independent of us rather than sensations and in his recourse to commonsense examples (e.g., the perceptual shape constancy of the penny across the sensations of it as elliptical). Similarly, insofar as both McDowell and Smith grant that deceptive cases are experientially, subjectively, indistinguishable from nondeceptive cases when one is under the force of an illusion, they would both have to admit that deceptive and nondeceptive cases both share a sensory character (which McDowell refers to as the “highest common factor”). However, Smith, who considers how sensation ﬁts within a more encompassing perceptual experience, is a bit more explicit about this sensory character and about the importance of taking seriously the argument from illusion.37 Both McDowell and Smith resist the generalization from cases of deception to the cases of nondeceptive perception, and this generalization itself rests on the mistaken idea that deception reveals that there is some intermediary (e.g., highest common factor, sensations) between the subject and the world. It is their common commitment to unmediated world directedness, to transcendence, that leads them to insist that, despite deceptive experiences in which veridical perception and illusion may be indistinguishable, there is an essential difference between these two kinds of experiences. As regards hallucination, if disjunctivism upholds a distinction between it and veridical perception, Smith is ready to endorse the view that Husserl too could endorse such disjunctivism, since he claims that the real object is essential to veridical perceptual experience in virtue of that experience’s content, as it is not for hallucination. Though Smith insists that in cases of hallucination the subject is aware of something (a merely intentional object) of which disjunctivists might be wary, he affirms that the phenomenological and disjunctivist perspectives converge if one construes the disjunctivist denial of the hallucinatory object as a denial that any entity is present—which is what the phenomenologist would also believe. As Smith puts it, “So, perhaps, when your typical disjunctivist denies and Husserl affirms that a hallucinating subject is aware of an object they are not straightforwardly contradicting one another.”38 It is, of course, the differences between Smith and McDowell that are instructive. Because of his reliance on phenomenology, Smith seems more willing to discuss the intentional object in illusion (not an entity, but the “nonentitative” object, the thing as represented by the perceiver) or hallucination (a mere

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intentional object for which there is no corresponding entity). McDowell, by contrast, without the resources of phenomenological intentionalism and reluctant to succumb to Cartesian self-enclosure or to posit intermediaries between subject and world, allows “mere appearances” in illusion and seems to espouse “the extreme position” in regard to hallucination insofar as he denies that there is anything at all before one’s mind. By including intentional objects, which makes it possible for us to describe and differentiate what we experience in illusions and hallucinations—something that we are all capable of doing in common sense—Smith’s account actually seems more faithful to common sense than McDowell’s.39 Another area of difference is that Smith clearly discusses more thoroughly than McDowell what is involved in perception (sensation, perceptual dimensions, their distinction, etc.), whereas McDowell seems more interested in providing an explanation (with which Smith would concur) of what perception is not: that it involves no intermediary factor, that it is not deceptive perception or hallucination, and that it is not a matter of inferring the world from some proxy. To be sure, McDowell does conceive perception positively, though in a more minimal sense than Smith, as involving an unmediated openness to the world (with which, too, Smith would agree). Though Smith theorizes more about perception, his theorizing does not seem to be of the pernicious type for which McDowell chides the skeptic insofar as it ends up controverting what is obvious to common sense. As we will see later, it may not be philosophical theory itself that is the target of McDowell’s quietistic critique, but rather a kind of theorizing that partakes in the presuppositions that frame philosophical questions that one ought to reject instead of forging ahead with an answer. In fact, Smith’s theorizing, besides upholding commonsense experience, resembles McDowell’s insofar as it is modestly presented, not trying to prove direct realism, but only showing that it cannot be proved to be false and that the argument that seeks to deprive us of the transcendence of objects of consciousness can be blocked.40 In his fuller account of perception, Smith puts his ﬁnger on perceptual dimensions of experience—namely, three-dimensional spatiality, the kinetic relationships between our bodies and objects, and the Anstoss—that are all connected with our sense of agency in relationship to objects, beyond the passive sensations that pertain to perceptual experience but are not its objects. These three dimensions form “the nonsensuous and yet nonconceptual dimension to perceptual consciousness”41—a distinctive layer of experience lying between the receptivity and conceptualizing spontaneity that are

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basic for McDowell in M&W. If these perceptual dimensions are sufficient for delivering objects independent of us and if, as a consequence of such dimensions, our world directedness is not stuck on sensations that fall short of objects, then Smith is right to claim that the conceptual level really plays no role in defusing the argument from illusion. He is also correct in arguing that the appeal to conceptualization to explain the intentionality of sense experience is “totally wrong-headed.”42 Smith even argues further that conceptualization is unnecessary and irrelevant for what he means by perception (i.e., the stratum between sense and concepts), since perception gives cognitive access to entities in the world on which we can exercise classiﬁcatory capacities and that we can register perceptual features even when we lack concepts for them and the attunement to relevant perceptual likenesses and differences that such concepts foster.43 Smith’s analytic separation of perceptual dimensions from sensations and his demonstration of the relevance these dimensions for disabling the argument from illusion provides a richer account of perception than the one provided by McDowell, which seems limited to a cooperation between an underdeveloped notion of receptivity and conceptualizing spontaneity. On the other hand, McDowell does not conceive his treatment of the cooperation between receptivity and spontaneity that is crucial to the question of the intelligibility of empirical content, which appears in such works as M&W and “Having the World in View,” as being connected with his treatment of the argument from illusion, which appears in entirely different works such as “Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space” and “Criteria, Defeasability, and Knowledge.” The issue of intelligible empirical content and the defense of direct realism are distinct, and, pace Smith, McDowell never suggests that his views on the ﬁrst are relevant to the second. In McDowell’s defense, the issue of the intelligibility of empirical content, which is separate from the issue of defending direct realism, is a problem that Smith does not address. Further, there is a question of whether the sensory and perceptual dimensions of perception function separately from our conceptualizing capacities. Do we, for instance, ﬁrst gain through perception cognitive access to entities and then exercise classiﬁcatory capacities on perceptual deliveries? Or do our various capacities function in a much more holistic fashion in a way that empirical content appears intelligible (because conceptualizing capacities are present at the initial encounter) from the start? Is there a way of construing experience such that our various capacities, though analytically separable, may operate inseparably in experience? Does

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our registering of perceptual features not function in intimate connection with perhaps low-level conceptual activity, such as that through which we can identify as color, for instance, as simply “that color” even though we might lack a sophisticated conceptual repertoire that might include such concepts as “vermillion” or “burnt sienna”? Smith himself comes close to entertaining just such possibilities when he remarks, “In saying this, I in no way contest the enormously important role that conceptualizing plays in the perceptual lives of adult human beings. Perception, for us, is indeed typically ‘suffused with concepts,’ as it is often said. For all that is to be said in these pages, it may be that every adult human perception is so suffused. Nor shall it be denied that possession of a concept, or of even a recognitional ability, may affect the way something perceptually appears to you.”44 The consideration of how the perceptual features that Smith correctly describes might relate to McDowell’s views of conceptualization will be the topic of the second half of this chapter, a discussion of nonconceptual content.

2. mcdowell on nonconceptual content45 2.1. Introduction The second half of this chapter will turn to a second major discussion of McDowell’s analysis of perception, namely, his rejection of nonconceptual content, and I will consider three objections to his perspective, namely, that he cannot distinguish empty conception from perceptual experience, that perceptual discrimination outstrips the capacity of concepts to keep pace, and that the empirical world is more extensive than any conceptual focusing within it. I will show myself sympathetic with McDowell’s holism that envisions conceptual capacities being actualized in receptivity and that blocks the oscillation between the myth of the given and unconstrained coherentism. However, I will once again, as in the ﬁrst part of the chapter, amplify McDowell’s outlook, by situating it with reference to a distinction drawn by Husserl and Walter Hopp between mere signitive intending and perceptual fulﬁllment—a distinction McDowell himself would accept insofar as it is crucial for veriﬁcation, that is, the adjusting of the beliefs of worldviews to experience. Though Husserl and Hopp argue that this distinction brings additional intuitive contents to light that are nonconceptualizable (in contrast to the conceptual nature of propositions or Fregean senses) and narratively

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explained, I will argue that these contents differ from the type of nonconceptual contents McDowell, in his limited focus on the cooperation of spontaneity and receptivity in perception, rejects insofar as these nonconceptual contents would undermine the very possibility of veriﬁcation that both Husserl and McDowell seem interested in realizing. Further, I will contend that Husserlian constitutive phenomenology, with regard to the second objection, can explain how receptivity is experienced and how receptivity cooperates with conceptual activity in effecting discrimination, without falling back into the repudiated oscillation. Regarding the third objection, I will argue for a new content, a “surplus beyond conceptual content” (rather than nonconceptual content), which makes the grasping of objects through receptivity and spontaneity possible, without reinstituting the oscillation either. This second half of the chapter continues the project of the ﬁrst half, developing aspects that McDowell does not develop, as Smith’s analyses reveal, in ways, though, that support his opposition to skepticism and baneful nonconceptual content.

2.2. McDowell on Why Empirical Experience Needs to be Conceptual To show how experience can be a source of knowledge, McDowell, following Immanuel Kant’s view on the cooperation between intuitional and conceptual faculties, argues that, in the encounter with the world, conceptual capacities are drawn on in receptivity and that sense impressions already possess conceptual contents. McDowell achieves his overarching epistemic purposes by insisting on a holistic cooperation between what receptivity and conceptualizing spontaneity contribute to experience and by asserting that “receptivity does not make an even notionally separable contribution to the cooperation.”46 This elimination of any independent role for nonconceptual content is necessary for McDowell’s struggle against the perpetual oscillation between a coherentism, which is rationally unconstrained by the external world, and the myth of the given, which is meant to offer constraint. In McDowell’s view, Donald Davidson’s coherentism conceives concept systems to be enclosed within a boundary that the world crosses via causal impingement, and the epistemologist, watching causal impacts produce conceptual responses in those observed, views such crossings from sideways on. The coherentist embraces a scientiﬁc causal understanding of the sensitivity involved in experience, which in turn is causally relevant for our concepts and beliefs, but

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experience does not justify beliefs. In this regard, it differs radically from McDowell’s view according to which we, from within our conceptual system, engage the world rationally and intentionally as perceivers, who experience their conceptual capacities being drawn on in sensibility and who seek to determine appropriate concept applications. On the one hand, coherentism allows conceptual content to appear within a self-contained system that has been caused by a reality it never really directly encounters, and hence coherentism never experiences rational constraint by empirical content. On the other hand, the myth of the given insists on constraint by the external world but through an encounter with a brute impact, an extraconceptual, bare presence, that is somehow supposed to serve as a ground for justifying judgments. But such a nonconceptual given could not be used in a rational justiﬁcation whose evidence would have to be conceptual in nature. At best, a brute, nonconceptualized impact would yield exculpations, explaining how we are caused to believe what we believe. To ensure that this constraint that coherentism lacks can have a rational structure, McDowell insists that from the start—in receptivity, where world ﬁrst meets mind—conceptual capacities must be involved. The oscillation clearly depends, on the one hand, on concepts spinning without rational friction because they are cut off from sensibility, understood merely as causal impingement, and, on the other, concepts being constrained by a nonconceptual given. The solution is to bring concepts and sense experience together into an appropriate relationship with each other.47 In chapter 3 of M&W, McDowell targets Gareth Evans who, he believes, succumbs to the myth of the given insofar as he claims that the content of perceptual experience includes nonconceptual informational states provided independently of the operations of spontaneity, and that concepts are ﬁrst brought into play only when one makes a judgment of experience. Whereas for McDowell conceptual capacities are drawn into operation in experience and the content of perceptual experiences is already conceptual, Evans does not allow spontaneous conceptions to enter into the determination of the contents of perceptual states, and thus receptivity makes a separable contribution to its cooperation with spontaneity. Because Evans insulates perceptual experience from the work of conceptual capacities, it is difficult to see how such nonconceptual experience can be reason-constituting or how it could justify conceptually articulated claims.48 Although the myth of the given, represented by Evans, isolates perceptual contents, as bare givens, from conceptual experience, McDowell seeks

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a more holistic approach in which sensibility and understanding cooperate, understanding is inextricably implicated in the deliverances of sensibility, and having things appear at all can take place only through the actual operation of conceptual capacities. McDowell’s holism here resembles that of Sellars, whose “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” attempted to show that the reporting of sense impressions (e.g., of a red triangle) already depends on the use of concepts originating in intersubjective discourse.49 As a result of McDowell’s holism, “receptivity does not make an even notionally separable contribution to the cooperation”50 with spontaneity. Therefore, he tends not even to speak of nonconceptual contents, and, instead, he refers only to the contribution of receptivity to experience in conjunction with conceptualizing spontaneity. Of course, the fact that McDowell always speaks of the contents of experience as conceptual should not be taken to imply that receptivity and sensibility do not make their contribution to experience and its contents. Rather, he emphasizes the need for a role for receptivity and sensibility insofar as conceptual capacities only “ﬁgure”51 in the content of experience (as the external world “ﬁgures” also). Finally, one should bear in mind that if one looks at McDowell’s examples, the objects given in experience in the collaboration between receptivity and spontaneity are the objects and properties of common sense, of Sellars’s “manifest image,” such as red cubes or shades of color.52

2.3. Arguments against Nonconceptual Content 2.3.1. First Objection: Empty Conception and Perceptual Experience Indistinguishable without It McDowell analyzes three defenses of nonconceptual content in Lecture 3 of M&W that function, then, as objections to his own view that there is no such content. We will add a new objection discussed in the philosophical literature and then discuss the ﬁrst two objections McDowell discusses, leaving aside the third defense of nonconceptual content that he opposes, namely, that animal nonconceptual perception implies a correlative level of nonconceptual content in human beings. We omit this discussion due to the complexity of the issue and the limitations of space here.53 The one objection, not entertained by McDowell in M&W but certainly having a bearing on his work, has been proposed by Christopher Peacocke, who stresses the difference between the conceptual grasp of a property, for example, a way of being shaped, and the way in which this shape property is perceived. William Alston concurs with

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this view insofar as he takes perception to include a special (nonconceptual) component distinguishing it from other modes of cognition such as judgment, reasoning, and so on. One can visualize this difference between mere conceptualizing and actually perceiving by considering how the utterance of “that table,” when one is not seeing the table, differs from the perceptual demonstrative “that table” deployed in its presence. Recently, Walter Hopp has elaborated this criticism within a Husserlian perspective. Hopp accuses McDowell of intellectualizing perceptual acts so that they possess “nothing more than conceptual content”54 and assimilating perceptual consciousness to conceptual thought. Thus, these philosophers take it that there is more to perceptual content than conceptualization captures.55 McDowell could respond to this line of objecting by stating, ﬁrst of all, that perceptual experience depends not only on spontaneity and the exercise of conceptual capacities but also on contributions from receptivity and sensibility that ensure that such experience is not reducible to “mere” conceptual thought. The critics mistake his unwillingness to discuss these contributions in terms of separable contents as indicating that no contribution exists at all. Furthermore, he repeatedly differentiates between merely thinking about an object and actually perceiving it; he regularly insists on bringing judgments into perceptual confrontation with the world that may require their adjustment or revision.56 Furthermore, he could argue that the perceptual demonstrative “that,” whether used merely conceptually or perceptually, can pick out or individuate objects whether they are merely conceived or perceptually present; however, perceptual individuation takes place in a setting characterized by receptive and sensible dimensions absent in mere conceptual picking out. In addition, he could have given examples of objects upsetting or conﬁrming our expectations and resisting our ability to think of them arbitrarily to illustrate the passivity of perceptual experience, in which conceptual capacities are not exercised (as in judgment) but “actualized outside the control of their possessor, by the world’s impacts on sensibility.”57 It is, however, easy to interpret him as overintellectualizing perceptual experience insofar as he is reluctant to explain in what the contributions of receptivity and sensibility consist, for fear of implying some “given” independent of the engagement of conceptual capacities. In responding to the next objection (on perceptual discrimination), I will show on the basis of constitutive phenomenology how it might be possible to explain those contributions further without necessarily lapsing into the myth. In so doing I will attempt to illuminate what is involved in experiencing in receptivity and

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sensibility beyond McDowell’s acknowledgment, in M&W, that they contribute to experience. Here, though, I will consider more carefully Hopp’s case for nonconceptual content that allows one to differentiate perceptual experience from mere conceptual thought. Hopp begins by explaining intentional contents as those features in virtue of which an act is directed on an object, although they, in turn, are usually not thought about. My belief that my office is messy is about my office, but the content of my belief is reﬂectively captured in the proposition that my office is messy, even though that proposition, too, is about the office. Relying on Husserl’s Logical Investigations,58 Hopp explains intentional experience as consisting in two part-moments that make up the intentional essence of an act: matter and quality. The matter of an act determines which object is meant and its aspects (e.g., its properties, relations), and the ideal property instantiated in the matter of an act is a sense, like Frege’s, or a proposition. Hence, Hopp regularly articulates the contents of the matters of acts in terms of propositions (“Your house is white,” or “My office is messy.”) that are able to be conceptually articulated and that are expressed in ideal meanings (e.g., “white,” “house”) understandable by all. Besides the matter of an act, the quality of the act determines whether the act is presentative, interrogative, judgmental, desiderative, after the fashion of Frege’s view of assertoric force. Understanding a proposition differs, though, from actually perceiving what the proposition is about, and to account for this difference, Husserl claims that beyond the intentional essence are to be found further phenomenological features, including the intuitive content of acts, having to do with the fullness of the presentation and serving to distinguish thoughts that might be “empty” or “signitive” from those that are intuitively fulﬁlled when their objects are present (perceptually or categorially). The degree of fulﬁllment along with the matter and quality make up the epistemic essence of the act, which consists of the content relevant for knowledge. Hopp portrays what is experienced in the transition from a signitive intending to a correlative act of fulﬁllment by citing Husserl who claims that I “experience how the same objective item which was ‘merely thought of’ in symbol is now presented in intuition, and that it is intuited as being precisely the determinate so-andso that it was at ﬁrst merely thought or meant to be.”59 This extra, intuitive content, though, is “is not linguistically expressed or communicable in the same way senses or thoughts are.”60 For instance, if you tell me that your house is white, no matter how elaborate your description, “something

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additional” to that description is given to me when I situate myself perceptually before the house and experience my signitive thought being fulﬁlled, and that “something additional,” the intuitive contents, cannot be captured by concepts in the way that “white house” captures the matter of the intentional act. Such intuitive contents seem difficult to describe at all, though Hopp allows that they can be objects of discourse, since we must be able to speak about them, as we are now doing. McDowell, in Hopp’s view, cannot make sense of these intuitive contents, which are precisely nonconceptual (as opposed to conceptual contents like “house” and “white”) and take account of a unique way of being conscious of an object and include, in particular, the presentational character of perceptual consciousness. It is important to locate the level on which Husserl, in Hopp’s reading of him, introduces such intuitive contents, since Husserl’s and Hopp’s concern focuses on veriﬁcation—a central concern of McDowell’s—and the contrastive relationship between empty signitive intendings and the experience of those intendings being fulﬁlled by perceptual experience. Hopp recognizes how the fulﬁllment of signitive intendings requires much more complex intentional activity than the perceptual sensing and conceptualizing, which for McDowell make possible the objects of perceptual experience, insofar as several higher-level, temporally interconnected syntheses take place. After all, one must retain in memory one’s signitive anticipation, experience the object perceptually, and bring into relationship the anticipation and the experience to determine whether the latter fulﬁlls or thwarts the former. The fact, too, that fulﬁllment can take place in intuitions of categorial objects (e.g., the meaning of identity, plurality, a state of affairs, etc), which are not sensory in character, as well as sense objects, as the Logical Investigations indicates, further shows that fulﬁllment takes place on a higher level. The fact that fulﬁllment occurs in the case of two different kinds of objects that can fulﬁll signitive intendings shows that the point of Husserl’s treatment of fulﬁllment is not so much to explain what goes on in perception as to draw the contrast between signitive intending from afar and the immediate, intuitive having of what fulﬁlls that intending, whether that having be perceptual or categorial in nature. This is not to deny, though, that what goes on in perception (but not in categorial intuition), particularly its sensory and receptive dimensions, may play a role in producing the contrast between signitive intendings and perceptual experience. What is important is that Husserl’s and Hopp’s discussion of fulﬁllment provides a more encompassing context (e.g., veriﬁcation) to which perceptual experience belongs.61

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Furthermore, Hopp is right in concluding from his discussion of fulﬁllment to the existence of nonconceptual intuitive contents, and this becomes evident when one considers how Husserl and McDowell present the process of veriﬁcation and discuss what is added when one moves from the mere conceptual having to the perceptual having of them: neither of them describes in conceptual terms in what this added factor consists (and hence for Husserl they are nonconceptual intuitive contents), but rather both resort to a form of narrative. For instance, the typical Husserlian narrative would discuss how we would approach an object on the basis of previous signitive intending and on how we would ﬁnd ourselves vulnerable to the object’s action on us as it determines the contents that present themselves (e.g., its being blue on the backside upsets our anticipation that it would continue to be red). In addition, in perception continuous “veriﬁcation” occurs when our sense capacities mutually conﬁrm each other (e.g., when one touches an object that seemed visually smooth from a distance) or when the object is given consistently through a continuity of experiences as one walks around it or passes through a series of spatiotemporal perspectives with it in view (and, for example, conﬁrms that it is a house and not merely a stage prop with no backside). In these ways, Husserl offers a kind of narrative to show what happens when one experiences a “judicative having of such and such itself”62 as opposed to merely meaning it “from afar”63—language that itself doesn’t describe what is given but what it would be like for one to experience whatever is being given in these contrasting ways. Such a narrative depiction reminds one of McDowell’s narrative-like comments in “Having the World in View” about how the visible object, as it were, speaks to one, telling the viewer to see it as it is, as characterized by such and such properties and displaying them.64 Narrative and metaphor—and Peacocke and Alston, too, deploy both—may be the best one can do if one wants to have discourse at all about the difference between signitive intending and fulﬁllment that depends on intuitive contents that are nonconceptualizable in contrast to the way that Sinne are. It is not clear, though, that the introduction of such nonconceptual intuitive contents on the higher level of veriﬁcation, which Husserl and Hopp develop to a greater degree than McDowell (and so end up endorsing a kind of nonconceptual contents that McDowell might or might not accept), need not imply that there are nonconceptual contents of the kind McDowell rejects in perception, considered apart from its role as verifying merely signitively intended sentences. The contents McDowell resists are supposed to be given at the level of Husserl’s matter of the act of perception, through which

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one determines which object is meant and its aspects. At that level, McDowell denies that there is a structureless given, a bare presence, or the kinds of informational states that Evans thinks are there independently of concepts that only come on the scene when one formulates judgments. McDowell’s view is that at that level of encounter with the object the deliverances of receptivity are holistically and inseparably intertwined with spontaneous conceptualizing. This is clearly indicated by the fact that when we discuss the matter of perceptual acts by which we determine the object of the act or the object’s properties, we inevitably rely on concepts such as “shades of red” or “colored cubes.” Hopp would seem to concur, insofar as when he discusses the matter of the act, it is always in terms of conceptualized “white houses” or “messy offices” (i.e., Sinne in Frege’s sense), and no discussion of bare nonconceptualized contents occurs at this level. Hopp legitimately ﬁnds nonconceptual intuitive contents at the higher, overarching context in which a contrast between signitive intending and perceptual fulﬁllment takes place, but that does not imply that the perceptual experience that fulﬁlls such intendings (and contrasts with them) includes as a component within it nonconceptual contents given independently of concepts. Furthermore, it is questionable whether veriﬁcation, as Husserl, Hopp, and McDowell understand it, would be possible if those perceptual fulﬁlling experiences were bare givens apart from conceptualization. It is precisely because McDowell is intent on the kind of veriﬁcation, which Hopp also provides for, that he rejects a nonconceptual given that cannot verify anything. The entire project of establishing a minimal empiricism aims at ensuring that there is a rational connection between the empirical judgments about what is thus and so and perceptual experience, which is able to provide rational grounds for such judgments only insofar as conceptual capacities are drawn on in receptivity in relation to which commonsense objects appear. In this regard, all Hopp’s examples seem to agree in rejecting McDowell’s notion of nonconceptual content at the level of the matter of the act, since there is a continuity between the perceptual fulﬁllments and the signitive intendings they verify insofar as the validating perceptual contents always appear as conceptually articulated, as “white houses” or “messy offices” fulﬁlling their merely (but still) conceptual signitive counterparts. It is, as Husserl notes, the same objective item, the same determinate so-and-so that is thought of and presented in intuition—and his selection of terms here clearly suggests the conceptual character of what is given in both modes, though differently in each. One could say that McDowell’s purpose is to guarantee that what

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is judged be grounded in what is received in experience, and he does not really attempt to explain the difference between signitive intendings and fulﬁllment. Likewise, Hopp’s discussion of the latter problem is not attempting, as McDowell does, to explain what goes into the perceptual experience that fulﬁlls that empty intending.65 Moreover, the linkage between signitive intending and perceptual fulﬁllment indicates in other ways how conceptualizing and the fulﬁlling experience are linked. For example, “fulﬁlling” appears only after conceptual capacities have been extensively actualized insofar as the conceptualized contents of experience have been brought into relationship with each other in the formulating of sentences that are brought to bear on reality. Furthermore, it seems inescapable that conceptual dimensions of “fulﬁlling” would be pervasive if one simply thinks about all the concepts that would be involved in encountering, for instance, an “object’s-backside-as-blue-conﬁrming-aprevious-expectation-that-it-was-going-to-be-blue.” Thus, the character of “fulﬁlling” belongs to a conceptual network insofar as diverse meaning contents characterize the perceptual object, and hence “fulﬁlling” does not entail encountering a bare presence independent of any conceptual relations. Indeed, conceiving veriﬁcation in terms of Husserlian fulﬁllment suggests that any validating experience would have to be conceived as fulﬁlling empty, signitive statements, and that such an experience would have to play a conﬁrming role, or a negating one (e.g., if the object appears as “red” rather than the “blue” that was anticipated),66 in relation to the conceptual contents of the signitive intending it fulﬁlls (or frustrates). As result, the validating experience cannot involve reverting to the kind of bare presence unrelated to any conceptual structures that the myth of the given favors. For McDowell, then, perception is distinct from mere conception insofar as it includes the contributions of sensibility and receptivity, though he does not develop in detail in what these contributions consist. Hopp, relying on Husserl and utilizing a kind of narrative of “what it would be like,” explains what is involved is distinguishing mere conception from the sensory presentation of the same contents, particularly in the experience of fulﬁllment, and he shows why extra intuitive contents accompanying fulﬁllment are nonconceptual in nature. Although Hopp provides an explanation of the broader context within which McDowell’s analyses belong (and that McDowell himself, given his interest in veriﬁcation, might ﬁnd acceptable), the existence of intuitive nonconceptual contents does not undermine McDowell’s opposition to nonconceptual contents of the kind the myth of the given or Gareth Evans

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would call for. For McDowell’s focus seems to be on what Husserl calls the matter of the act, through which the act’s object is determined and in which ideal properties are instantiated that consist of the kinds of conceptually articulated senses or propositions that appear in Hopp’s examples of white houses or messy offices. McDowell’s opposition to nonconceptual content, then, may have led him to avoid explaining further the difference between signitive intendings and fulﬁllment that he himself believes in, but he need not have avoided such an explanation. For the nonconceptual contents to which Husserl and Hopp point (in fulﬁllment) differ from the kind McDowell resists, which would be involved in our experiences of objects (to which the matter of an act relates an act) and would supposedly be free of any conceptual content. In addition, the kind of nonconceptual contents McDowell opposes would seem to be precisely those that Husserl and Hopp would also have to oppose under pain of rendering veriﬁcation unintelligible. 2.3.2. Second Objection: Perceptual Discrimination Exceeds the Capacity of Concepts to Keep Up As did the ﬁrst set of proponents of nonconceptual content, Evans sets out to distinguish perception from conception, but he does so by pointing to how we make perceptual discriminations that outrun our ability to conceptually classify them, as when we perceptually recognize a particular shade but lack the word for it. For McDowell, though, concepts adequately capture whatever is discriminated: In the throes of an experience of the kind that putatively transcends one’s conceptual powers—an experience that ex hypothesi affords a suitable sample—one can give linguistic expression to a concept that is exactly as ﬁne-grained as the experience, by uttering a phrase like “that shade”, in which the demonstrative exploits the presence of the sample. . . . It is true that we do not have ready, in advance of the course our color experience actually takes, as many colour concepts as there are shades of color that we can sensibly discriminate. But if we have the concept of a shade, our conceptual powers are fully adequate to capture our colour experience in all its determinate detail.67 One could imagine here an objection against McDowell that discrimination in such cases appears to be nonconceptual insofar as one ﬁrst distinguishes the shade, ﬁnds oneself groping for an appropriate concept (e.g.,

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“burnt sienna”) within one’s conceptual repertoire, and then, not ﬁnding the appropriate concept, settles for the stop-gap demonstrative phrase, “that shade.” However, McDowell could answer that if one distinguishes that shade from others, even though one has not yet given “linguistic expression” to it, and then sets about searching one’s repertoire, the unexpressed concept “that shade,” instead of functioning as an after the fact stop-gap measure, has already been deployed to be able to hold on to that for which one seeks a more reﬁned concept. By extending the notion of “concept” to include perceptual demonstratives, McDowell undercuts a major commonsense defense of nonconceptual content, namely, that we can have a hold on something for whose appropriate concept we forage. McDowell simply shows how the commonsense defender of nonconceptual content deploys concepts (e.g., perceptual demonstratives) without recognizing them and consequently how cognition and sensibility cooperate in a more holistic fashion than is usually acknowledged. Husserl’s reﬂective constitutive methodology, in fact, provides a way to take account of sensible discrimination so that it functions inseparably from conceptual discrimination, a way that would be compatible with McDowell’s explanation of the perceptual demonstrative. In Experience and Judgment, a lengthy comment by Husserl on the relationship between receptive experience and predicative spontaneity provides a clue for understanding the intimate relationship between receptivity and conceptualization, although we can distinguish them “for the sake of analysis,” as we have mentioned earlier:68 When we distinguish two levels of interest and, corresponding to these, two levels of objectifying operations, viz., that belonging to receptive experience, on the one hand, and that of predicative spontaneity, on the other, this distinction of levels should not be construed as if the different operations were somehow separate from each other. On the contrary, things which must be treated separately for the sake of analysis and which, genetically, are recognized as belonging to different levels of objectiﬁcation are as a rule actually closely entwined. That receptivity precedes predicative spontaneity does not mean that the former is something independent, as if it was always necessary ﬁrst to run through a chain of receptive experiences before there could be any awakening of genuine interest in cognition. On the contrary, from the ﬁrst we can already thematize a pre-given object in the interest of cognition, not only to examine

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it carefully but in enduring cognitions “to conﬁrm how it is.” In this situation, predicative forming and cognizing go hand in hand with receptive apprehension, and what is distinguished from a genetic point of view as belonging to different levels is in fact inseparably entwined in the concrete consciousness. These levels are, to be sure, always erected one upon the other; each step of the predication presupposes a step of receptive experience and explication, for only that can be originally predicated which has been originally given in an intuition, apprehended, and explicated.69 If one thinks of the relationship between concepts and experience along the same lines that Husserl here thinks of the relationship between predicative spontaneity and receptive experience, one would experience objects holistically, with sensibility and conception being “inseparably entwined.” This holism in the cooperation of human capacities would certainly converge with McDowell’s opposition to any separable nonconceptual content. However, “for the sake of analysis” of what is involved in experiencing an object, Husserl undertakes to separate the levels by enacting a unique “reﬂective regard”70 that differs from naïve consciousness’s acceptance of the object. This analytic approach takes as its point of departure not only already formulated predicative judgments but also “straightforwardly” (geradehin)71 given objects, in which receptivity and spontaneity have already done their work. It takes such objects as a clue to the inﬁnite multiplicities of possible cogitationes, including passive syntheses, that are synthesized in the same meant object and inquires into the “history” (Geschichte)72 evinced in these objects, owing to which one is able to experience a thing at all. By this constitutive method,73 one begins with the sedimentations of sense in the world of present experience, “interrogates these sedimentations relative to the subjective sources out of which they have developed,”74 and uncovers a hidden subjectivity, not capable of being exhibited as present in reﬂection in its intentional activity but only in the sedimentations this activity leaves.75 In undertaking such interrogation, one seeks to “re-accomplish”76 or “re-experience”77 oneself the original experience of the world. To lay bare the constitutive levels involved in experiencing the world, Husserl reﬂects on imagined examples drawn from everyday life. For instance, to get at a basic perceptual experience of the world, he returns to our original encounter with worldly objects, describing how a mere “stimulus”78 proceeds from an existent in our environs, as, to use our previous example, the barking

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of a dog that “‘just breaks in on our ears,’ without our previously having given our attention to it, without our having turned toward it as a thematic object.”79 This description of experience, on the one hand, makes it entirely plausible that, in turning toward this object that breaks in on consciousness, the everyday-life perceiver does not ﬁrst have a nonconceptual given, as the myth of the given might contend, to which one subsequently applies concepts (e.g., the “barking” of a “dog”). Rather, the turning toward and conceptualizing of what one turns toward both appear simultaneously and indistinguishably, “inseparably entwined in the concrete consciousness.” On the other hand, via a distinctive reﬂective regard the phenomenologist engaged in constitutive analysis uncovers the subjective sources that must have already (in a structural rather than temporal sense) done their work so that this grasp of the barking could have occurred. For instance, when one conceptually grasps “barking” upon hearing it, that grasping could not have happened without the one conceptualizing having distinguished the barking from its (apparently) silent background. Such a distinction, in turn, would depend on, passive “receptive” processes in subjectivity, since the barking would draw one’s attention, and these passive processes would have to include a passive, associate “synthesis,” in the sense that the barking and its background would be held in association with each other. “Associating” here means simply that, without deliberation, one element (e.g., the barking) relates to the other (its background) by contrasting with it and standing out from it, while the other (the background) recedes in importance without disappearing from view. The synthesis thus produced is constitutive of a whole experiential consciousness that includes the engagement of conceptual capacities, since one can imagine how the concept of “barking” has here been simultaneously drawn into play and the mere having of the concept in one’s repertoire may have probably played a role in distinguishing the barking from its background, as Smith has suggested might be typical of all adult humans. It must be stressed that this Husserlian account does not imply that one has at some earlier point in time had a nonconceptual perception to which one subsequently decides to apply a concept, as Evans supposes and McDowell opposes. Rather, reﬂective constitutive phenomenology, starting with the world of presently given objects, disentangles sedimentations of sense, that is, contents correlative to various levels of subjective activity, which might never factually appear separately. Further, this retrogressive method that artiﬁcially separates what is found conjoined in the sediments, need not imply the coexistence of nonconceptual and conceptual content as juxtaposed parts—a view that Peacocke defends

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and that McDowell ﬁnds questionable, since it would imply that somehow the nonblindness that Kant might have attributed to the conceptual part would have to be able to spread mysteriously to the parts that are nonconceptual.80 I earlier made use of this reﬂective method to discuss how conceptual capacities could be actualized in simultaneity with the deliverances of sensibility to escape the poles of a causal explanation of concept application and one that might allow a gap between sense and concept application and thereby permit an overly deliberative description of such application.81 In this new context, constitutive phenomenological reﬂection carries implications for the debate between McDowell and Evans over whether conceptual discrimination follows on or falls short of perceptual discrimination. McDowell, of course, would oppose any temporal gap between experiencing a shade and the immediate and adequate conceptualization of it as “that shade.” Given his recognition of the holistic functioning of human capacities, Husserl could easily grant that perceptual discrimination and conception operate in tandem in the immediate application of “that shade” to the color it picks out. Following his retrogressive, constitutive method, however, Husserl can also admit the possibility of a reﬂective discrimination of a perceptual stratum of subjective activity and its correlates without, however, positing that one could ever ﬁnd them functioning separately, in different times, as Evans seems to claim. Husserl’s retrogressive method makes it possible here to see how sensibility and receptivity contribute to perceptual experience, beyond McDowell’s acknowledgement in M&W that they contribute. On the basis of this constitutive methodology, Husserl could contend that even to deploy the term “that shade” to separate one color from its neighbors, one must have also simultaneously effected an associative, passive synthesis, through which that shade is brought into a contrastive relationship with the colors proximate to it and on its horizon. Conversely, having “that shade” in one’s conceptual repertoire, at the same time, may affect the kinds of passive syntheses one would be inclined to make.82 One might object, however, that this use of constitutive methodology in fact ends up allowing receptivity to make the kind of “notionally separable” contribution in the cooperation with spontaneity that McDowell would not accept. While that may be so, Husserl’s reﬂective methodology at the same time could be taken to imply that the contributions of receptivity and spontaneity are never factually distinct. Husserl ensures by his self-awareness of the abstractive character of his own methodology that the kind of notional distinction the methodology permits need not be equated with the positing

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of a factual distinction. If McDowell would not ﬁnd this admission of the limited, abstractive, methodologically produced separation acceptable, one might ask whether McDowell himself, simply by distinguishing at all between the contributions of receptivity/sensibility and spontaneity, has not already made something of a notional distinction. Husserl, then, could be seen to be amplifying on a distinction McDowell has already implicitly made—just as we saw how Hopp’s in his explanation of the act of fulﬁllment elucidates what goes on in the “veriﬁcation” that McDowell endorses without developing. Against the background of this discussion it becomes clear that Husserl’s sense of philosophical responsibility would not allow him to refrain from giving the fullest possible account of how sensibility and receptivity contribute to experience (without conceding their factual separability), instead of resting content merely with the fact that they do so contribute, just as he found it necessary to examine the difference between signitive intending and fulﬁllment, despite the fact that the latter includes murky, nonconceptualizable intuitive contents, as Hopp has pointed out. If the contributions of sensibility and receptivity are taken to be factually inseparable from the experience that is also constituted by engaged conceptual capacities, it is difficult to see how Husserl could be endorsing the kind of pernicious given that McDowell thinks cannot be used to justify empirical claims. In fact, one could argue that the perceptual discriminations (e.g., between a shade and its background), which need not occur separately or prior to conceptual deployment, are subordinated to making possible both conceptualizing (since if we could not discriminate we would not be able to apply a concept) and the entire conceptualized experience that does fulﬁll a justiﬁcatory role. In another setting,83 McDowell allows as enabling conditions for perception the informational processing systems studied in cognitive science, though they do not constitute conscious contents. So here one might say that sensory, receptive, conscious processes function as intentional (rather than physiological) enabling conditions for the deployment of the concepts that coconstitute experience with these processes, without these processes implying separate nonconceptual contents. This reﬂective, constitutive methodology, which examines the intentional activities that have left their mark on ﬁnal outcomes and makes possible the distinguishing out of never factually separated sensible contributions (e.g., discrimination of an object from its background) to the perceptual experience in which conceptual capacities are also actualized, can make an additional contribution to McDowell’s project by rectifying a problem that appears in

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connection with his solution to the problem of intelligible empirical content. Recall his solution. According to his diagnosis of the present predicament,84 the problem was that a dominant natural scientiﬁc view looked upon the operations of sensibility, tied as they are to human bodiliness, as something to be explained scientiﬁcally, as belonging to the realm of law. As a result, it could “seem incoherent to suppose that they might be shaped by concepts,”85 with the result that free spontaneity had to be split off from sensibility and located in another logical space. McDowell’s answer is to refuse to identify nature with the realm of law and to conceive us as possessing an Aristotelian second nature according to which our animal natural being is permeated with the rationality deriving from the conceptual capacities into which we have been initiated by the communities in which we were raised. However, if the problem was that scientiﬁc naturalism interpreted sensibility as belonging to the realm of law, is it sufficient merely to transpose the working of sensibility to a domain of nature understood differently, the realm of second nature, which includes the habits of thought and action and conceptual capacities into which we are initiated by the communities that provide us with Bildung? To subsume sensibility under a new concept of nature or conjoin it to secondnatural conceptualizing, seems to do little to transform sensibility itself from the way it is understood as within the realm of law, that is, most probably as a matter of mechanistic responding to causal stimuli.86 Reﬂective, constitutive methodology might afford another way of approaching sensibility. Of course, Husserl throughout his writings often speaks of data of sensation immanent in consciousness, hyletic data, not themselves perceived as intermediaries, though, between subject and object (as Smith too contends) and yet animated by conscious acts that exhibit something objectively transcendent. Admitting that this account itself might dangerously imply a representative theory of knowledge positing intermediaries from which one might infer the external world, Husserl himself at times suggests an alternative. For instance, in Cartesian Meditations, he opposes the tradition of sensualism that begins interpreting consciousness as a complex of atomized sensations as external data that form-qualities combine into a whole, and instead, he begins with intentional cogitata of common sense (e.g., houses, a commotion in the street) and distills out of this experience, via a process of “uncovering and describing,”87 sensation moments88 as components of the experience that involves cogitations and cogitata in relationship. In addition to this explanation of sensation as belonging to intentional relationships with objects (as opposed to realm of law explanations), there

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are also kinesthetic intentionalities, which Smith discusses and that I will treat later, such as eyes turning toward the light or bodily adjustments unreﬂectively undertaken to better take in perceptual objects and to accommodate to the brightness and the angle from which such objects appear. Sensation in this setting pertains to a broad horizon of background lived experiences, intentional in nature and often taking place without the ego controlling them. Constitutive phenomenology thereby eschews realm of law-like explanations of sensations as a product of causal, mechanistic stimuli and interprets sensations, instead, as components of an intentional activity that preserves what McDowell calls openness to the world, that can play a founding role in perceiving the commonsense objects apprehensible in second nature, and that can function inseparably from second nature conceptualizing capacities. In brief, reﬂective, constitutive phenomenology transforms our understanding of sensation in a way that better accords with McDowell’s redeﬁnition of nature as second nature and his conjoining sensation with conceptualizing.89 It could be the case that McDowell himself could admit that sensation belongs to perceptual intentional activity when he alludes to the fact that we are animals, whose natural being is permeated with second-natural conceptual capacities, especially since he repeatedly acknowledges that animals share with us “perceptual sensitivity to features of environment”90 and he rejects forcefully Brandom’s behaviorist explanation of animals’ behavior in favor of a view that construes them as “being on to things”91 intentionally. Of course, McDowell is quick to insist that we cannot factorize out some core of perceptual activity to which our spontaneity adds an extra ingredient, as if we were able to impose conceptual form on our own already-there, world-representing, nonconceptual contents that we share with animals— that would be to revert to the myth of the given. Further, the acquisition of conceptual capacities transﬁgures our sensibility insofar as our lives come to embrace not just coping with problems but deciding what to think and do. Despite McDowell’s earlier reluctance to discuss what the contribution of receptivity to perceptual experience consisted of, perhaps in his discussion of the animal-human relationship in the later sections of M&W we are given a glimpse of what that contribution might be, beyond the fact that there is such a contribution. If so, the phenomenological view of sensibility, elaborated earlier through a constitutive method, would make things more explicit than McDowell does while converging with his view that receptivity and spontaneity cooperate from the start, without any return of the given. If so, we might conclude this consideration of the second objection to McDowell’s

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opposition to nonconceptual content, by affirming that McDowell’s view (enriched by Husserl’s reﬂective methodology) need not imply a prior, factually separable level of perceptual discrimination with which conceptual capacities cannot keep up.92 2.3.3. Third Objection: Nonconceptual Content on the Fringes of One’s Conceptual Focus Evans’s second argument for nonconceptual content is that belief is conceptual and represents a more sophisticated cognitive state than (nonconceptual) perception, as is clear in optical illusions in which perceptive content appears one way (e.g., the oar is bent in water), but our beliefs do not follow.93 Charles Taylor objects in like fashion by pointing to a nonconceptual preunderstanding of the world, described by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, that lies somewhere between full spontaneity and mere mechanism, enables world-coping, and undergoes modiﬁcation upon the introduction of language, by which we pick things out.94 These strategies draw a boundary between preconceptual experience and conceptualization, and to them McDowell’s writings offer a single line of response: conceptual processes are to be construed more loosely and pervasively, such that even within supposedly preconceptual experience conceptual capacities are already operative and the “neat” boundary cannot be maintained. For McDowell, conceptual capacities are at play even in illusions, since “having things appear to one a certain way is already itself a mode of actual operation of conceptual capacities.”95 In response to the idea that we experience perceptual content separately from conceptualization, McDowell’s strategy reiterates his holistic approach, since he contends that conceptual capacities are brought into play “in the content’s being available to one even before one has a choice in the matter” and before “one decides what to say about something.”96 He even discusses how the higher level exercise of conceptual capacities in thinking and judging makes it possible to recognize how these capacities are at play in experience. McDowell claims, “We would not be able to suppose that the capacities that are in play in experience are conceptual if they were manifested only in experience, only in operations of receptivity. They would not be recognizable as conceptual capacities at all unless they could also be exercised in active thinking, that is, in ways that do provide a good ﬁt for the idea of spontaneity.”97 Insisting on the functioning of conceptual capacities at a prejudgmental level and denying that conceptual capacities must be self-consciously exercised, McDowell concludes that “we

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can countenance cases in which capacities of that very kind are not exercised, but are nevertheless actualized, outside the control of their possessor.”98 McDowell adds a further twist to this argument when he accuses Taylor and others of working with too restricted a notion of conceptual capacities that operate only when things come into focus.99 McDowell elucidates this point in a comment on a criticism by J. M. Bernstein, “But contrary to what Bernstein suggests, this is no problem for my claim that the whole content of experience is actualization of conceptual capacities, because I do not connect actualization of conceptual capacities with bringing things into focus. . . . Why should we stipulate that conceptual capacities are operative only where there is ‘conceptual grasping’ in that sense? As far as I can see, it is only that stipulation that makes Bernstein think that my conception cannot accommodate the richness of experience.”100 To assess the adequacy of this repudiation of nonconceptual content, let us return to the reﬂective, constitutive methodology deployed with regard to the last objection regarding discrimination and let us grant, as we did there, that receptive and spontaneous capacities cocontribute to singling out an object (e.g., the barking). This singling out, however, follows on a temporal stage in the consciousness of internal time in which one had not been attending to or turned toward whatever it is to which one now applies the concept, and in the turning toward and applying a concept in the present, the contents of this previous stage revert to a kind of indeterminacy. The turning-toward occurs against the background of a broader temporal expanse within which it emerges and occurs as a moment. Here the content of what one has grasped (e.g., the barking) stands out against a background of indeterminacy to which one’s conscious conceptualizing does not seem to extend, a kind of excess or surplus beyond what has been conceptually singled out in experience. Furthermore, the broader expanse beyond whatever is conceptualized and whatever “comes into prominence”101out of an external perceptual ﬁeld also includes the multiplicity of coaffecting data that recede into the background. To these one may pay little attention; they may appear homogeneous in character; one may be at best only vaguely aware of them, let alone conceptualize them. Insofar as what lies on the temporal or environmental horizon of the singling out and conceptualizing of some prominent experiential object (e.g., the barking of the dog) is indistinct, it appears as “undetermined, but determinable”102 or, perhaps, to put it in terms pertinent to this discussion, not conceptualized but able to be conceptualized.

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Such horizons, then, constitute a kind of content that seems to fall outside the boundary of conceptual content. Husserl himself comments on the peculiarity of horizonal contents—a kind of countermode of intentionality: Horizon as a universal mode of consciousness is in opposition to thematic having in consciousness, to intention, to being directed to something as something, to be directed in some mode of validating. Here a closer reﬂection is called for. Horizon is a mode of having in consciousness, but over against intention in the directed sense, as a kind of counter mode to intention; it is not a matter of some kind of intention, but possibly can lead into one. I can “question each horizon” about its unthematized meaning.103 At the same time, such horizons, lying in the background of an experienced object, can be said to from the conditions of the possibility of such an experience, since any object experienced inevitably appears against some horizon from which it stands out. Whereas Hopp discusses higher levels of content accruing to experiential objects once veriﬁcation procedures are set in motion, the surplus content of a horizon accompanies the conceptualized, experienced object from the start—it is intrinsic to the experience of an object itself. One can further develop this idea of surplus horizons by attending more carefully to one’s consciousness of internal time and one’s bodily orientation. In the case of the conceptual ﬁxing of an experienced sound as identical (e.g., “the barking of the dog”), which lasts through its own period of objective time, phenomenological reﬂection illuminates how the grasping of this identical sound would not be thinkable (denkbar) unless it were apprehended as constant across a series of unthematized subjective intentional processes in a streaming continuum that constitute unnoticed backgrounds (“unbemerkte Hintergründe”).104 In this ﬂow of consciousness, the identity (e.g., the barking) is experienced as anticipated (through protentions), as present in the “now,” and as sinking into the past by means of a series of retentions in the form a “comet’s tail,”105 extending back in time from the ﬁrst moment of encounter; it remains identical across alterations in these modes of givenness (“Gegebenheitsweise”).106 Once again, there is more to any given conceptualized experiential content than simply grasping it as this kind of an experienced thing—as a color shade or a red cube—since horizons simultaneously make possible the very grasping of such things that would not

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appear without the presence of such horizonal conditions. Insofar as these horizonal, surplus contents are reﬂectively separated out from the original, naïve experience of an object as ingredients within the experience of it, they resemble the perceptual discriminations that Husserl reﬂectively would distill out of the conceptualized ﬁnal product “that shade,” as we have suggested.107 Moreover, just as the conceptualized object is accompanied by indeterminate horizons or as the conceptualized sound appears within unconceptualized passing temporal horizons, so any visually perceptible object must present itself from one angle of view and this angle clues me in to the tacit presence of my spatially located body, correlative to which such an object appears as “perceived from here.” My lived body is constantly there, functioning as the organ of perception (also in the case of nonvisual sense modalities), but “it does not come into consideration as a perceived spatial thing.”108 Rather, eye movements are deployed without me turning toward them attentively, and I move my eyes involuntarily while turned attentively toward the light that stands out from shades of darkness.109 Not only are we usually unaware of these bodily intentionalities and the way that content appears relative to them, but they cooperate in selecting out an object of attention and constituting at the same time that object’s accompanying unattended-to background and unrealized possibilities of focusing. Hence, being located at one point in space with reference to the object, I am also vaguely aware of further kinesthetic possibilities that are open to me and that ﬁll out what Smith suggested: eye positions that I might undertake and anticipations that moving my eyes or my head, walking around an object, or reaching out to touch it will yield a course of speciﬁc visual or tactile appearances. Correlative to such movements a vague set of possibilities form a horizonal fringe surrounding whatever we take in from the kinesthetic perspective we presently occupy. In addition, these spatial potentialities are accompanied by future, temporal anticipations. One expects that the backside of a ball will turn out to have some color, but one will only be able to apply whatever color concept one applies (e.g., “blue”) in the future moment when that side comes into view. Such anticipations, determinable but not yet determinate, in which more is meant than what is meant at the moment explicitly, involve an “intending-beyond-itself” that refers to an unexplored and undeﬁned horizon surrounding whatever object my consciousness directly intends.110 These anticipations of what would be seen or felt accompany as a horizon any object and play a crucial role in my being able to locate it in space and time with reference to myself.111

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This implicit spatiotemporal situatedness of the perceiver perhaps merely develops Gareth Evans’s idea that the deployment of perceptual demonstratives depends on locating objects in space with reference to our egocentric space, including our bodily actions and dispositions to react. McDowell, who endorses this idea as indicating how we can deal with the world without passing beyond the boundaries of the conceptual realm, sees Evans as describing “the thinker’s competent self-conscious presence in the world.”112 Such horizons of bodily intentional activities that we do not attend to are of a piece with the earlier discussed, not-reﬂected-on, discriminative perceptual syntheses that select a foreground out from its background, and by making such horizons explicit we elucidate the perceptual sensitivities to features of the environment that we share with animals and that McDowell also mentions.113 Husserl further recognizes that such horizon surpluses inescapably accompany any conceptualized content of experience: “Wakeful life has, so to speak, a background of non-wakefulness, constantly, and with eternal necessity. When I actually perceive an object, that is, look at it, take note of it, grasp it, regard it, it will never be without an unnoticed, ungrasped [unerfasst] background of objects.”114 Horizons contain a new kind of content, one that is not conceptualized but conceptualizable and one that contrasts with that characteristic of the conceptualized objects of experience such as the color shades or red cubes that are the standard fare of McDowell’s reﬂections, though such shades and cubes in McDowell’s explanations usually appear detached from such horizons. In his defense, McDowell could pick up the hint in Husserl’s own comment above to the effect that one can always inquire about the unthematized meaning of what belongs to a horizon. Hence, while one experiences focally and conceptualizes the barking of the dog, in a subsequent act of reﬂection it is possible to examine further that horizon of which one had been previously only vaguely aware, perhaps as merely a surrounding silence. One might recall (and conceptualize) other background features (e.g., the chirping of crickets, the hum of a passing car on the street) and in a later reﬂection one might even recall further background auditory conditions (e.g., the rustling of tree leaves). This process of exploring and progressively conceptualizing the background conditions of an experience of conceptualized objects actually turns up a whole new series of conceptualized experiences (“crickets,” “cars,” “streets,” and “rustling leaves”). Insofar as the experiences that we recuperate seem to emerge from memory into the present as already conceptualized, it makes plausible McDowell’s belief that conceptual capacities are engaged in experience even without our conscious focusing on them.115

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It is not as though Husserl would have to oppose the idea that the conceptualizing capacities could have been and are continually drawn into play beyond the control of consciousness, since he recognizes that (egoless) passive syntheses, the inescapable ﬂow of protentions into retentions, and other intentional processes operate independently of conscious control, and he admits that the formed self has been constituted in ways of which it is never fully aware—for example, by other persons (and the language they transmit) as much as it is by its own past.116 All this is perfectly compatible with the holism of experience basic to Husserl’s thought. The problem is, though, that even the newly conceptualized objects given in the horizon of a previously focused on object are accompanied by further unexplored (though able to be explored) horizons, and thus, for example, in bringing to light the crickets and cars, I might leave out the smell of rotting leaves (which might be later brought to mind and yet would have its own accompanying, unexamined horizon). But this entire process of recuperation in memory suggests that horizons cannot ﬁnally be conceptually exhausted, that there is always more than can be conceptualized in the unconceptualized horizon that accompanies any conceptualized experience and makes its possible as that from which any singling out occurs. Indeed, Husserl himself, while pondering how a present experience, while still being held in retention, sinks back in time and can still be held “in grip,”117 acknowledges that that grip often becomes looser and looser until the act and its contents reach a limit and until they pass into unconsciousness and are no longer functional or recoverablee within consciousness. The vast dark horizon of what we have forgotten, some of which can be surprisingly recovered years later (through association with a present occurrence, for example), but most of which is never recovered, lies beyond conceptualization and resembles the horizon in the present that continually exceeds our progressive efforts to conceptualize it. These two modes of horizons appear to constitute a kind of surplus content, exceeding conceptual content, on the fringes of conceptual focusing, without which such focusing would not be possible.118 Such content, though, has nothing to do with the kind of nonconceptual content that McDowell opposes and that would allow for a bare given, independent of conceptual content and unable to serve any justiﬁcatory purposes. On the contrary surplus horizonal content accompanies the perception of any object, which can always be conceived as the fruit of collaboration between receptivity and spontaneity and is only possible against the background from which it is singled out. Horizonal surplus content, far from

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being some nonconceptual content at odds with or outside of veriﬁcation procedures, plays a subordinate role in making it possible for the perceptual objects that do the verifying to stand out. We have pursued a course through objections to McDowell’s opposition to nonconceptual content, and in each case have found McDowell’s position against malign nonconceptual content, which launches the oscillation he resists, still standing. However, in our consideration of the objections, we have encountered richer dimensions of perception: the nonconceptual intuitive contents that differentiate signitive intending from the experience of fulﬁllment (in perceptual or categorial modes); the passive syntheses involved in perceptual discrimination and underpinning the conceptualizing perceptual demonstrative; and the horizons that are never exhaustively conceptualized even as they make the conceptualized contents of perceptual experience possible. These richer dimensions complement and develop several of the dimensions of perceptual experience that Smith elucidates in his approach to arguments from illusion and hallucination, an approach, as we have seen, that does not undermine but supports McDowell’s realism and that even concurs in ways with his disjunctive account of perception. Though the elucidation of all these dimensions is a matter of making explicit what is implicit in McDowell’s own analyses, these dimensions would go a long way to dispel the idea that his views on perception entail an arrogant anthropocentrism that threatens to bring the world completely within the reach of the power of thinking. However, our discussions of these dimensions might go in theoretical directions that he would not follow. His therapeutic view of philosophizing tends to say only what is necessary to unravel a puzzle that has resulted from the presuppositions of wrongheaded thinking. For instance, he might contend that one only needs to differentiate between a mere conceptual judgment and its perceptual validation, without having to discuss the intuitive contents of an act of fulﬁllment. Clearly, this chapter has opted for a less quietistic, more theoretically oriented approach, but the criticism of McDowell’s ultimate philosophy of philosophy will have to be taken up in chapter 5.

CHAPTER 4

tradition and discourse, i-we and i-thou McDowell and Brandom on Intersubjectivity

In examining the debate on perception between Robert Brandom and John McDowell, one issue appears interwoven throughout that debate and central to each of their differing systematic approaches, an issue that has been a basic one in the phenomenological tradition since its inception. This issue, the role of intersubjective relationships in knowledge, needs to be thematized in its own right by a book of this sort that seeks to address carefully from a phenomenological perspective the confrontation between these two philosophers across a number of philosophical questions. In section 1 of this chapter, I will show how the question of intersubjectivity is interconnected with the question of intelligible empirical content, discussed in chapter 1, and with Brandom’s and McDowell’s differing standards of rationality, to be discussed in the next chapter. I will argue that McDowell implicitly depends on Brandom’s scorekeeper sociality, even as he rightly and paradoxically asserts that an individual perceiver need not rely on it to know. In section 2, I will consider essays subsequent to this interchange on intersubjectivity in the perception debate, in one of which McDowell, following Gadamer, explains how individuals are shaped to be autonomous by the traditions to which they belong, in much the way that one’s community forms one’s second nature in M&W. Consequently, for McDowell the I-We relationship takes precedence over the I-Thou relationship, in terms of which he characterizes Brandom’s approach to intersubjectivity—though we must also ask whether Brandom’s approach is adequately characterized as an “I-Thou” one in McDowell’s sense. In a further essay on self-determining subjectivity, McDowell develops his idea of the tradition-formed, autonomous individual by drawing out some of the ethical implications implicit in his discussion of perception and by aligning himself in some ways with the German idealist tradition with which

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Brandom also associates himself. I will conclude section 2 by examining whether the various criticisms McDowell raises regarding Brandom on the basis of his I-We account of intersubjectivity are valid. Section 3 takes its cue from McDowell’s criticism in the ﬁnal stages of the perception debate that Brandom’s account of intersubjectivity amounts to a set of critical individuals keeping “one another under surveillance”1 and from his conviction that there is no reason to accept Brandom’s unhelpful picture of how sociality underlies objective purport.2 A careful consideration of the kind of intersubjectivity that Brandom’s epistemology requires will indicate that his view of intersubjectivity can be characterized, instead, by a surprising openness and vulnerability of individuals to each other and that it still has an important role to play in the question of objective purport, even after we have acknowledged the rightness of McDowell’s views on the intelligibility of empirical content. Indeed, the appealing aspects of Brandom’s understanding of intersubjectivity follow on the adoption of the critical scorekeeping perspective—the very thing that rendered empirical content unintelligible by removing it from the viewpoint of the perceiver. Clearly, the entire discussion of this chapter emerges out of the epistemology of perception and undertakes to consider the issue of intersubjective relationships in their own right—a theme that became important in McDowell’s papers subsequent to the perception debate. This topic also has important ramiﬁcations for ethics, as my reconstruction of Brandom’s account of intersubjectivity in response to McDowell’s criticism will, I hope, show and as I will explain even more fully in chapter 7. The question in section 4 will be whether my reconstruction of Brandom’s account of intersubjectivity can be traced back to an underlying ethical intersubjectivity—a basic way of encountering others—parallel to the way in which McDowell traces empirical judgments back to a basic encounter with the world.

1. intersubjectivity and the debate on perception In the early stage of the perception debate, as we saw in chapter 1, McDowell’s concern about strong inferentialism is that Brandom’s insistence that the scorekeeper establish the reliability of the perceiver—an intersubjective paradigm—ultimately removes the perceivable facts from the experiential viewpoint of the reporter, thereby rending empirical content unintelligible. Brandom’s comment that he cannot see why analyzing perception as an

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achievement within social practices with diverse perspectives implies denying that it is an achievement at all does not really address McDowell’s challenge regarding the intelligibility of empirical content. In chapter 2, we have seen in the second stage of the perception debate that in “Perception and Rational Constraint” Brandom argues that moderate reliabilism and Davidsonian coherentism could meet McDowell’s standard of the rational constraint constraint (thereby leaving his own position unmotivated). In McDowellian fashion, Brandom traces this oversight to McDowell’s blindness to the social dimension of the space of reasons and to his following in the steps of C. I. Lewis, who authored a work titled like McDowell’s basic text, namely, Mind and the World Order, and who also told “a story of a single mind confronting an alien reality. Cooperation with its fellow minds is simply not in the picture.”3 McDowell, showing that reliabilism and coherentism do not meet his standard of rational constraint and that his view is motivated and so needs no diagnosis, locates all thinkers within a linguistic tradition that equips them to know the world. He further denies that Brandom’s distribution of epistemic responsibilities between scorekeeper and perceiver renders empirical content intelligible. McDowell, however, acknowledges that there are occasions when someone from an external perspective can justify another’s beliefs, as when physiologists evaluate a competent cyclist’s unreﬂective adjustments to a rocky road. Brandom’s charges of individualism here simply miss the point insofar as McDowell’s argument is focused on the intelligibility of empirical content that requires precisely a ﬁrst-person perspective.4 In the third stage of the perception debate, the issue of intersubjectivity comes to the fore in Brandom’s “Knowledge and the Social Articulation of the Space of Reasons,” which we have explained above5 and, reacting to McDowell’s earlier “Knowledge and the Internal,” ﬁnds dogmatists and skeptics aggregating entitlement with truth and the hybrid view, which McDowell criticizes, and extreme externalism segregating them. Brandom resolves the problem by arguing for a social distribution of roles according to which a scorekeeper attributes knowledge to another when she attributes a commitment and entitlement to the other but undertakes it (i.e., endorses it as true) herself. Through this distribution of roles, knowledge entitlement and truth may be conjoined, within the perspective of the attributing scorekeeper, without being aggregated (since the roles are distributed). Similarly, in hybrid cases of moderate reliabilism, a scorekeeper attributes knowledge to a knower by supplying entitlement to the knower who might not feel entitled to his own

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commitment (e.g., in the chicken-sexer case). Instead of the problem with knowledge being the internalization of the space of reasons, as McDowell thinks, Brandom believes it results from individualizing the space of reasons. At this early stage of their encounter (1995), Brandom thinks that McDowell innocently omitted to develop the intersubjective dimensions, but the subsequent development of the debate reveals that they disagree quite strongly about the role of intersubjectivity in producing knowledge.6 McDowell’s “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” published eight years after Brandom’s essay, highlights their different views on intersubjectivity and it takes Brandom to task precisely for interiorizing the justiﬁcations that McDowell opposed in “Knowledge and the Internal.” McDowell focuses on an example Brandom himself uses in “Knowledge and the Social Articulation of the Space of Reasons” when he describes how a scorekeeper would withhold endorsement from a perceiver’s claim about a candle, since the perceiver thinks she sees a candle ten feet in front of her but does not see in the dark that there is a mirror ﬁve feet in front of her, which only makes it appear that the candle is ten feet away. Since all perceptual activity must be assessed from within the perspective of a scorekeeper, who always has access to the fuller panorama than the perceiver, the scorekeeping model inevitably interiorizes the perceiver’s entitlement to what she believes, since at best she will only be entitled to seem to see whatever it is she sees. By contrast, McDowell insists that someone who makes a statement of the form “I see that . . .” has a claim whose content is given in the embedded proposition, and her entitlement—one that is incompatible with any possibility of falsehood—consists in the visual availability of the fact that she would affirm. One’s reliability in such matters does not need to be established as a premise by oneself or an outside observer, as Wilfrid Sellars or Brandom respectively might argue, since my recognizing my own authority as a perceptual reporter pertains to my whole conception of the world with me in touch with it—it is one of those statuses that Ludwig Wittgenstein describes in On Certainty. As McDowell puts it, “I know that I can tell a green thing when I see one (in the right conditions of illumination). . . . I recognize my own authority as a reporter of greenness.”7 Because Brandom’s social perspectivalism produces just the interiorization of entitlements that McDowell criticizes, he at the end of his essay draws out the implications that their different epistemological views have for their views on intersubjectivity: A rational animal could not have acquired the conceptual capacities in whose possession its rationality consists except by being initiated

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into a social practice. But as I see things, the capacities transform their possessor into an individual who can achieve standings in the space of entitlements by her own efforts. . . . Which is closer to individualism: a position according to which initiation into a social practice yields individuals of a special kind, able to achieve standings in the space of reasons by, for instance, opening their eyes, or a position according to which we supposedly accommodate the very idea of such standings by contemplating subjects individually incapable of achieving them, who somehow nevertheless keep one another under surveillance?8 I have agreed with McDowell that Brandom’s perceiver cannot attain intelligible empirical content insofar as what is perceived is removed from her view—and this no doubt explains his comment about how Brandom’s subjects are incapable of achieving on their own standings in the space of reasons. But what is perceived is removed from the perceiver’s view in Brandom’s picture because of the peculiar reﬂective stance that characterizes MIE, namely, that the space of reasons requires one to adopt a scorekeeper’s perspective bent on assessing before endorsing commitments and entitlements attributed to others. This stance is comparable, perhaps, with what Husserl, in “The Vienna Lecture,” describes as the critical stance of the philosopher, namely, “his resolve not to accept unquestioningly any pre-given opinion or tradition so that he can inquire, in respect to the whole traditionally pre-given universe, after what is true in itself, an ideality.”9 Because of this overarching theoretical purpose, Brandom chooses examples, frequent in the literature, in which a critical scorekeeper refrains from endorsing the perceptual claims of a less critical or less informed perceiver or from attributing knowledge to her. In a sense, his reﬂective methodology anticipates the skeptic, who is adept at showing how—no matter what a perceiver claims or no matter what perceptual theory is utilized to explain how an individual perceives—it is always possible that unknown factors (e.g., mirrors) are at work. For Brandom, the scorekeeper viewpoint would seem to incorporate within itself such a skeptical moment, withholding endorsement of a perceiver’s claim if defeaters are in view, though this withholding is never complete, as the skeptic’s is, since if no such defeaters are in view, the scorekeeper will gladly endorse the perceiver’s claim. Clearly, McDowell’s theoretical purposes seem different from Brandom’s. He does not seem to assume the kinds of rigorous epistemic standards that might attempt to take

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account of any skeptical eventuality, but rather he is describing how perception ordinarily occurs in everyday life, that is, in the terms that Wittgenstein deploys in On Certainty or Husserl in presentations of the lifeworld. On that level, McDowell seems right to insist on someone’s ﬁrst-person ability to have knowledge of perceptual matters without waiting on another’s (i.e., a scorekeeper’s) endorsement. Though we will discuss Brandom’s account of rationality more fully in chapter 6, it does seem to be the case that different standards of rationality are at work in Brandom, who thinks that an intersubjective distribution of intellectual labor is involved, and McDowell, who does not. However, at times, Brandom’s scorekeeping approach to other knowers is not so skeptically inclined, as can be seen in his discussions of instances of reliable knowers, such as shard identiﬁers and chicken sexers, who are able to identify pottery shards of past civilizations or the sex of undeveloped hatchlings without being able to explain how it is that they recognize them and who may or may not even believe that they are in fact reliable knowers of shards and chicken sexes. In the cases of these reliable knowers, Brandom exhibits a kind of wonder involved in recognizing a knowing that is already there,10 as the colleagues of shard identiﬁers and chicken sexers readily and rightly acknowledge, although some philosophers might be diffident about attributing knowledge to them. In this exempliﬁcation of scorekeeping as “recognitional,” the scorekeeper appreciates a knowing achieved by the individual skilled ascertainments of shard and chicken-sex identiﬁers and not through an interpersonal scorekeeping process, though such a process is involved in recognizing the knowledge already there. To be sure, this recognitional scorekeeping itself is undertaken from within a philosophical standpoint in which doubts about the knowledge of such reliable knowers have already arisen. However, the scorekeeping position as Brandom presents it need not consist of suspecting another’s knowledge until that other adequately meets a standard for knowledge that the scorekeeper insists on but that might be inappropriate for the other’s knowing. Rather, it can also consist of vindicating the knowledge that others (e.g., skeptical philosophers) might suspect. Scorekeeping here is then a matter of taking up a philosophical posture toward another’s claims and determining one’s stand toward them, a stand with many possibilities: denying them, partaking or not in philosophical doubts about them, recognizing them as a matter of “already knowing,” or vindicating them. If this is so, then could it not be said that McDowell also functions in the role of a recognitional scorekeeper when he insists in “Knowledge and

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the Internal Revisited” that the commonsense perceiver recognizes her own authority as a perceptual reporter without having to provide premises for an argument concluding to her reliability? After all, her reliability is held in place, as Wittgenstein thought, by her whole conception of the world with herself in touch with it. While the everyday perceiver, on the common sense level, knows without relying on the scorekeeping framework, insofar as McDowell adopts a philosophical posture with reference to such an everyday perceiver, he seems to be involved, on a philosophical level, in a scorekeeping approach. Of course, his scorekeeping does not involve skeptically evaluating such perceiving but vindicating it, given the widespread philosophical suspicions about such commonsense claims to perceptual knowledge. It is also possible to vindicate one’s own knowledge as if one were another, as McDowell seems to do when he, for instance, claims that he can tell a green thing when he sees one. His position here seems to converge with Brandom’s vindication of reliable knowers about whose knowing there is also widespread philosophical suspicion. It might be objected, however, that McDowell’s defense of the commonsense perceiver does not itself involve scorekeeping because he is not evaluating the commonsense perceiver in the way skeptics do. Seen in this light, his “defense” might not even be a defense of the commonsense perceiver insofar as even to undertake such a defense would imply that one takes the skeptics’ question for a good one rather than questioning and rejecting the framework the question presupposes.11 McDowell’s quietism requires exorcism of the question rather than answering it, just as in M&W he refused to accept the underlying prejudice that sensibility pertains to the realm of law, as did Donald Davidson and the proponents of the myth of the given, who were consequently incapable of explaining intelligible empirical contents because receptivity and conceptualizing spontaneity were inevitably split off from each other. In response to this objection, one could perhaps say that McDowell is functioning as a scorekeeper—indeed an exemplary scorekeeper—insofar as he evaluates not commonsense perceiving ﬁrst of all but rather other philosophers’ skeptical scorekeeping approach to commonsense perceiving. These philosophers’ inferential approach to reliability has led to their forgetting the commonsense experience of perception that McDowell and Wittgenstein in On Certainty recall to mind. However, though McDowell may reject the appropriateness of skeptically evaluating commonsense perceiving, he occupies a philosophical terrain in which skeptical doubts about it have already

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arisen. His philosophical argument against such doubts consists in explaining, like Wittgenstein, how perception involves our whole conception of the world with us in touch with it, which precedes philosophical doubting, is the condition of the possibility of such doubting, and so lies beyond such doubting itself. This philosophical argument vindicates, even if indirectly, commonsense perceiving. Such a vindication of commonsense perceiving resembles his explanation in M&W of how sensibility and receptivity cooperate from the start within second nature as opposed to the view that subsumes sensibility under the realm of law, the only understanding of nature (as ﬁrst nature) that unfortunately has been allowed to prevail. McDowell’s similar constructive account of how commonsense perception takes place, an account that might exemplify a “constructive philosophy in another in sense,”12 converges, I believe, with Brandom’s recognitional mode of scorekeeping, which vindicates another’s knowing, already there. Although McDowell is more circuitous than Brandom, questioning even the framework within which a skeptical question is raised rather than answering it, his philosophical argument against the framework ﬁnally amounts to the vindication of another’s knowing about which skeptical questions have already arisen. The end result is that McDowell is correct in asserting that knowledge on the commonsense plane does not depend on intersubjective scorekeeping, since commonsense perceivers know without their reliability being guaranteed by a scorekeeper, just as for Brandom, chicken sexers and shard identiﬁers already know before their knowledge is philosophically recognized. However, on the philosophical plane, in which a scorekeeper recognizes and vindicates another’s knowledge, the intersubjective scorekeeping framework, understood in broader terms than scorekeepers skeptically suspecting another’s claim to knowledge, seems at play, even in McDowell’s vindication of commonsense perceiving as beyond philosophical doubt. It is as if Brandom has become reﬂectively aware of an interpersonal structure characteristic of philosophy itself, and, though McDowell is right to insist on kinds of knowing that need not involve scorekeeping, his lack of attention to his own philosophical position (and the scorekeeping it inevitably seems to entail) appears in other aspects of his systematic position (as I will show in chapter 5) and perhaps is the result of his own Wittgensteinian, quietist presuppositions.

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2. i-we intersubjectivity, its ethical dimensions, and the i-thou relationship In his paper, “Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism,” McDowell queries whether the kind of I-Thou relationship between two parties that Brandom favors could even be intelligibly in place without a shared language, something belonging to a we. Familiarity with a natural language, then, plays a role in constituting an individual stance that all on its own is oriented toward reality as his paper on internalism revisited showed, and consequently “there is no reason to accept that the way sociality underlies the possibility of objective purport is by way of multiple individuals keeping tabs on one another.”11 According to McDowell, Brandom suggests that I-We pictures are bound to be objectionable insofar as they treat the community as a superlative individual, though the “we” of which McDowell and Hans-Georg Gadamer speak, that is, the “we” of those who share a common tradition, is no such individual. McDowell attributes two fears to Brandom, the ﬁrst being that norms would have no binding power unless instituted by someone, that is, they would, as Brandom puts it, be “mysterious”13 without such institution. The second is that unless one reduces the necessary sociality of language to interactions between individuals, one will end up with a “we” that is a superperson. By contrast, McDowell concurs with Gadamer that languages are the “suprasubjective powers that dominate history,”14 shaping our “life-world,”15 and though they are not reducible to the activities of individuals, they require no positing of superpersons. In an important follow-up essay titled “Self-Determining Subjectivity and External Constraint,” McDowell ﬂeshes out more fully the place of tradition; links it to his discussion of perception, discussed in my ﬁrst three chapters; and gives an ethical twist to all these concepts, despite the fact that their original home may have been in a broadly construed epistemology (or transcendental empiricism, in McDowell’s terms)—in much the way that German idealism interwove epistemic and ethical concerns. McDowell interprets Wilfrid Sellars’s own opposition to the myth of the given as rejecting in Hegelian fashion acquiescence in anything merely given, such as de facto accepted dogmatism, and as affirming instead freedom and responsibility. McDowell takes Sellars’s antipathy to the Given to converge with his own views that in perceptual experience, conceptual capacities, inherited from one’s linguistic tradition, are actualized in receptivity. Although these capacities are

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actualized without our own doing and in accord with rules that are not up to us, the fact that they are engaged from the start ensures that what we encounter is rational and that intuitions possess the same logical structures as are to be found in the free exercises of judgment. In such judgment, we ﬁnd ourselves free and responsible to ensure that our acquiescence in concepts is not a matter of subjecting ourselves to an alien authority, exercised by dogma or tradition. On the basis of the second half of Kant’s B Deduction, which Hegel endorsed, McDowell rejects Sellars’s positing of sheer receptivity, a kind of relapse into the given, and concludes that it ﬁnally became possible for Kant to see his way clear to thinking that the forms of sensibility were not possessed independently of understanding. However, this freedom is not arbitrary. By making sure that the conceptual capacities that produce free judgments link back to their actualization in receptivity, McDowell ensures that that such judgments will be constrained by the world and that they will not be a frictionless spinning in the void, a mere unconstrained projection of our subjectivity onto nature. Hence, the freedom that McDowell upholds is not the arbitrary freedom that some idealists endorse, but rather a freedom capable of achieving the objectivity that is available to us as self-determining rational subjects.16 At this point, McDowell entertains Richard Rorty’s objection that the idea of being answerable to objects instead of fellow human beings betrays such self-determination. To answer this objection, McDowell argues that the norms that constitute the contents of empirical concepts are instituted by communal activity, as Brandom, too, states. To claim that such norms are self-legislated, however, is only to say that acknowledging these norms is not handing oneself over to an alien power. However, the self-legislation of these norms cannot be taken to mean that we confer authority on the norms of reason, since instead of us instituting such norms as thinkers, as soon as we are thinkers we are subject to these norms. In addition, the norms about the contents of empirical concepts authorize constraint by objects insofar as they shape the ways in which we take it to be correct that our thinking be controlled by its subject matter. In other words, contra Rorty, the justiﬁability of our answerability to objects must proceed indirectly, through the detour of the rational norms that constitute us as concept users and thinkers and that require such answerability to objects. While insisting that such rational norms are authoritative anyway, without owing their authoritativeness to being recognized, as Kant, too, would have believed, McDowell also cedes Hegel’s point that communal being matters, since through it “we can bring

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that rationalistic idea down to earth—in one sense naturalize it”17 insofar as the norms are acquired by initiation into communal practices. If one emphasizes too much the communal acquisition of rational norms, which renders it a historically situated achievement, one runs the risk of relativism—and this is the one-sidedness that Brandom’s talk of instituted norms emphasizes. On the other hand, if one insists that the norms are authoritative anyway, that they bind us despite our instituting them, the pitfall we could fall into is “a pre-critical platonism”18 that needs to be balanced by communal being. The trick, as Hegel knew, is to hold both in equilibrium.19 Despite the commendability of McDowell’s spelling out these ethical and emancipatory dimensions of his epistemological theory, I will suggest later, after considering more carefully Brandom’s development of the I-Thou relationship, how an I-Thou approach might enrich the ethical view presented here. Though by no means endorsing a view of a subjectivity arbitrary in its dealings with others, McDowell emphasizes not subjecting ourselves to an arbitrary authority and resisting any succumbing to the Given, but precisely these emphases can have the effect of lessening the importance of passivity before others that Brandom’s I-Thou epistemology encourages and that has its own distinctive ethical implications, different from those McDowell derives from his epistemology. At this point, though, I would simply like to consider whether the several criticisms he raises of Brandom are ultimately telling. Before considering these criticisms, I do need to acknowledge that there is a legitimate question as to whether it is accurate for McDowell to characterize Brandom’s account of sociality as “I-Thou.”20 After all, Jürgen Habermas has complained that Brandom lacks a second-person perspective because the interpreter keeping score on a speaker’s utterance is not directly addressing that speaker and does not necessarily expect any response from the speaker.21 In response to this objection, I will argue below that Brandom’s approach, which lacks a face-to-face view of intersubjectivity, as he himself admits,22 nevertheless has salutary implications for understanding intersubjectivity. One might defend Brandom’s view of intersubjectivity as at least having its roots in such a prior, pretheoretical face-to-face relationship, much in the way that Alfred Schutz did when he construed “They-Relationships,” such as that found among “Contemporaries” who share the same time but lack a spatially contiguous, face-to-face, I-Thou bodily connection, as derivative from and presupposing such a connection.23 Brandom, however, takes himself to be describing a discursive relationship, which indeed resembles the Contemporary relationship that Schutz speaks of, but in Brandom’s view this

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relationship pertains to discursive practice, which is more “fundamental” in the sense that it is presupposed by anyone who theorizes at all or who, for instance (as even Schutz himself does), sets about theoretically examining another’s claims and arguments about intersubjectivity.24 In other words, this discursive view of intersubjectivity is presupposed by any attempt to spell out theoretically what is involved in face-to-face relationships (to which discursive intersubjectivity, though, may trace its origins). Whether one considers a Schutzian explanation of Brandom’s approach to intersubjectivity (as between Contemporaries) or Brandom’s own understanding of discursive intersubjectivity, what is clear is that Brandom’s view emphasizes a kind of individualism that differs from McDowell’s I-We relationship of those belonging to a tradition. It is by reference to this individualism that McDowell’s description of Brandom’s idea of intersubjectivity as “I-Thou” as opposed to “I-We” must be understood, even though such an I-Thou relationship may not involve the second-person relationship that Habermas thinks is constitutive of it. Both Brandom and McDowell seem agreed in their opposition to conceiving the We as a supraperson, but when Brandom explicitly claims that I-We sociality arises out of the more primitive perspectival variety,25 one is inclined to think that he might be oblivious to the inﬂuence of tradition on his own thinking. But surely the whole account of normative pragmatics in the ﬁrst chapter of MIE, by emphasizing that we are already immersed in practices before we are able to articulate claims or the principles or rules governing such practices, in other words, that “knowing that” is derivative from a prior “knowing how,” would favor the view that we pertain ﬁrst to traditions that constitute us as opposed to an intellectualist view that somehow or other we, in concert with other individuals, deliberately decide on the principles we will follow together and thereby build up together from scratch a tradition. In addition, although our attitude toward a norm gives it a grip on us, Brandom is clear that what is correct according to such a norm is not simply made so because of what we take to be correct according to it, but rather norms have independent status, that “being authoritative anyway,” as McDowell puts it. If norms are so construed, it would not be foreign to Brandom’s outlook that we should ﬁnd ourselves already governed by traditional norms before we have anything to do with establishing them, even though the decision is ours ﬁnally to embrace them or not. Furthermore, insofar as Brandom acknowledges that the requirements of norms are not up to us, especially the norms of reason, he does seem to have a counterbalance to the relativism that might

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result if one were to emphasize the social institution of norms by itself and that McDowell cautions us against. In other settings beyond MIE, Brandom appears fully aware of the importance of tradition, for instance, when he considers how judges in the common law tradition ﬁnd their present judgments constrained by what they ﬁnd, namely, the precedent applications that these judges inherit and are responsible for administering. Moreover, in a paper on Gadamerian hermeneutics, he recognizes how the diligent de re interpreter must struggle through special de traditione ascriptions to take account of the context, series of texts, and sets of collateral commitments that affect the signiﬁcance of a text whose author pertains to a tradition with which that interpreter seeks a dialogue. Just as we undertake more commitments than we explicitly acknowledge or recognize, so interchanges between those of different traditions highlight the vast raft of collateral commitments and auxiliary hypotheses that inferentially underpin our and others’ present claims, that we ﬁnd ourselves sometimes to our surprise possessed of, and that are the loci in which the traditions we belong to have already left their mark on us.26 These views of how we ﬁnd ourselves already ﬁtted out with norms not of our deliberate making seem, then, to suggest that Brandom could well concur with the idea that an I and a Thou can only be intelligibly in place if they are constituted by a shared language belonging to a “we,” depending, of course, on how that we is understood. Of course, within the parameters of MIE, which attempts to lay out the structures of discourse, in which one adopts a critical scorekeeper stance toward another’s commitments, responsibly assessing whether to commit oneself to their validity or not, tradition is of less importance and the I-Thou relationship inevitably assumes prominence, but even there Brandom envisions a discursive “we” as possibly emerging. As to Brandom’s “fears,” ﬁrst, that norms would lack binding power unless they are instituted or unless there were someone “to hold speakers to the norms,”27 Brandom draws on Kant’s views that norms must be mediated—something McDowell too admits as long as we do not pretend that we confer authority on the norms of reason28—and on the anthropological fact that treating performances as correct or incorrect develops through positive or negative sanctions that can be normative in character instead of merely a matter of behaviorist reinforcement. But Brandom goes beyond these acknowledgments of the importance of means through which norms are appropriated, when he agrees with Hegel’s insistence that the authority of the Kantian-Rousseauian laws of reason can only be upheld if the implementers of those laws have the kind of sufficient distance from their own attitudes

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that is made possible if someone else administers those norms. None of this precludes that an individual in his or her attitudes might have internalized such sanctions and might be capable to a degree of self-critically administering rational norms, as McDowell no doubt would insist. However, McDowell’s emphasis on sociality only seems to be on the initiation into communal practices, as if having internalized standards at some beginning point suffices for all subsequent rational comportment, whereas Brandom calls for, in addition, an ongoing, self-critical administration of rational norms at the hands of others that can serve to maximize the kind of rational self-criticality of the rational norms that both McDowell and Brandom call for. Brandom then does not so much fear that norms without assessors would be powerless as hope that intersubjective assessment can enhance the very self-critical rationality to which the norms themselves already invite us.29 Furthermore, it is not clear that Brandom sets up as the only alternatives for sociality either individual interactions or a superperson. Though he opposes personiﬁcations of the community, as does McDowell, his criticisms of the “communal assessment approach” do not target or seek to eliminate (by reducing to individual interactions) the communal transmission of the traditional norms of rationalism that McDowell espouses. Rather, Brandom’s quarrel is with certain aberrant understandings of communal assessment practices. Brandom is worried, for example, that proponents of communal assessment might seek to translate norms into naturalized regularities of performance that would seem to rule out irregularities or violations, but normativity prescribes what ought to happen and leaves open the possibility of mistakes as well as the need for correction, in a way that causal regularities describing what in fact happens do not. Such aberrant views also risk conceiving communities as more unanimous than is possible. In addition, Brandom considers Crispin Wright’s views as representative of the communal assessment viewpoint gone wrong insofar as he identiﬁes the normative status of being a correct application of a concept with the community’s taking it to be correct or incorrect. As a result of this outlook, though individuals may be incorrect, the community is incorrigible when it comes to its own norms. Brandom grants that cultural groups can administer their own norms without error (e.g., the Kwakiutl can determine what is an appropriate greeting), but conceptual norms that incorporate objective commitments are different. In this case, an entire community could be wrong in its claims, as the history of science has repeatedly shown, and consequently such communities (e.g., the community of scientists) ought not to be privileged with

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immunity against any criticism. McDowell, in fact, concurs with this criticism of Wright, who, he believes, by ruling out the possibility for community correction, could undermine the possibility of meaning and understanding entirely. None of these criticisms by Brandom of some versions of the I-We perspective—namely, that they substitute naturalized regularities for norms, presuppose too much unanimity, and exempt communities from criticism— needs to be taken to apply to the tradition of rationalism that McDowell defends. That tradition, on the contrary, by requiring that one be on continual guard not to let one’s thinking be shaped by “an uncritically inherited tradition,”30 could not rest content with acquiescing in mindless regularities, stressing unanimity at the expense of critique, or immunizing communities against critique. That tradition, paradoxically, undermines traditionalism and other forms of dogmatism. When McDowell accuses Brandom of reducing the sociality of language to interactions between individuals, it seems to be because McDowell thinks some other version of relationships, I-We, is needed to secure the transcendence of norms, interpreted by Gadamer as suprasubjective forces across history. As we have seen, though, Brandom is clear, in concurrence with McDowell, that what is correct according to the rules we endorse is not simply determined by what we take to be correct—it is not up to us what the rules demand. Conceptual norms then seem to have an independence from us as individuals and even as interrelated dyads or communities, who could be mistaken about such norms; and further, the administration of conceptual norms that bind both administrators and recipients of their administration need to be negotiated across history, as Brandom affirms in his article on pragmatic themes in G. W. F. Hegel. Norms, then, have a transhistorical character, and that fact underlies, no doubt, Brandom’s own looking to historical ﬁgures, such as Immanuel Kant and Plato, for articulation of the very norms of rationality that he takes himself to be subject to, or his modeling his own practice of assessing inferential commitments for their consistency on the Socratic style of striving to live up to rational standards. As McDowell puts it, “Fundamental norms for thinking cannot be seen as instituted by thinkers; as soon as one is a thinker, one is already subject to such norms.”31 It is this sense of the transcendent character of norms that we recognize as inherited from previous generations that might tempt us mistakenly and unnecessarily (in both Brandom’s and McDowell’s view) to posit some superperson as responsible for these norms. However, if Brandom recognizes this transcendence of norms through history, he certainly isn’t reductively attributing the origin of such norms to presently interacting individuals.

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As a result, Brandom seems to be a least locating the origin of human norms in broader kinds of human interaction than that between two individuals in the here and now. Nevertheless, it is difficult to see how the norms of language or reason could be implemented other than through individuals who, even across different historical eras, through speech or writing, put them into practice, exemplify them, or hold others accountable to them. Perhaps McDowell himself comes close to agreeing with this point that concrete individuals must mediate norms, when he mentions that any take on what is a reason for what is always “a historically situated achievement.”32 Given the transcendence of norms, whose presence in Brandom’s work McDowell seems to have underestimated, it is not obvious that I-Thou relationships extending across time would be unable to achieve everything that McDowell hopes to bring about through his idea of I-We relationships. What becomes clear in all Brandom’s strategies—the insistence on the ongoing administration of norms by someone outside me, the refusal to grant a community immunity from criticism, and even the view that individuals, interacting individuals, and communities can be shown to be incorrect by the norms they endorse whether in their performances or assessments of how those norms apply—is the self-reﬂective, self-critical methodology pertinent to the space of reasons. But one objection McDowell raises needs further discussion, namely, that if initiation into a tradition yields individuals able on their own to achieve standings in the space of reasons, particularly with regard to intelligible empirical content, then “there is no reason to accept that the way sociality underlies the possibility of objective purport is by way of multiple individuals keeping tabs on one another.”33 Although it is the ﬁnal responsibility of the individual from a ﬁrst-person perspective to ground empirical judgments with regard to a reality external to thought, we have seen in this chapter that I-Thou relationships are involved in administering rational and conceptual norms and that philosophers, it would seem, cannot escape adopting the I-Thou scorekeeping structure that Brandom has made explicit. More needs to be said, perhaps, about how that “administration” takes place and about how Brandom’s I-Thou relationship plays a role in supporting and achieving objective purport. The question, though, is best pursued by considering more carefully how Brandom’s self-reﬂective, self-critical methodology depends on the I-Thou intersubjectivity presented in MIE.

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3. self-reflective methodology and i-thou relationships Brandom’s philosophical methodology, to be more fully discussed in chapter 6, undertakes a critical spectator attitude. MIE depends on the viewpoint of one attributing commitments (beliefs) and entitlements (justiﬁcations) to others whom one assesses, and so it trades in talk of being committed for talk about the proprieties of attributing commitments and entitlements to others, as well as observational authority and knowledge to them. Following Daniel Dennett, Brandom holds that one even attributes the status of being an intentional system to another if it exhibits the objective behavior that one would be able to predict from an intentional system. Indeed, this critical spectator position resembles the position occupied by the skeptic portrayed in various scenarios, such as the Twin Earth example where an earthling is transplanted to a twin earth and mistakenly takes to be water a ﬂuid on that planet that appears completely like water (but is not). Brandom’s spectator, who has access to what both the earthling and twin earthling counterpart do not, would refrain from endorsing any commitment the earthling might undertake regarding what she takes to be water on that other planet. Brandom incorporates the skeptic’s doubting into his own position insofar as he presents their scenarios not as undermining all belief, as skeptics might have hoped, but as simply suggesting the kind of situations in which a wary, but rational spectator ought to withhold endorsement.34 Clearly the critical spectator position belongs to what Brandom admits is “a particular model of language use: the deontic scorekeeping model of discursive practice,”35 a model he introduces within the context provided by his normative pragmatics and inferential semantics. Brandom emphasizes that this model of assertional and inferential practice developed in chapter 3 of MIE is not our actual practice but an “artiﬁcial idealization”36 of it. He also admits in other settings that his enterprise is quite unusual, throwing out much of ordinary discursive practice but not so much as to leave it unrecognizable as discursive practice. Insofar as discursive relationships are inescapably linguistic, the peculiar stringency of this critical stance appears in Brandom’s repeated refusal to take for granted the linguistic expression through which beliefs and types of intentionality are communicated, and this refusal, in turn, explains the priority he places on inferentialism over representationalism. As Brandom observes, the point of his inferentialism is not to object to representational locutions but to understand by reﬂection upon them what is

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said by their use. Finally, if one within the discursive space of reasons must assume an ultimately critical stance to assess the claims and entitlements one attributes to others (which as we have said, can also include vindicating their claims)—even the fact that the ﬁrst step involves striving to attribute accurately to them commitments and entitlements is part of that stance. It seems that one must adopt the scorekeeper perspective by oneself with the ﬁnal decision to endorse or not, to attribute knowledge to the other or not, resting with oneself alone. It is no wonder, then, that the I-Thou relationship should be preeminent in this discursive sphere, with the I tracking the Thou’s commitments and entitlements. Although the role of scorekeeper is reversible and others occupy it in relation to oneself, MIE could be said to present a self-reﬂective account of the peculiar, ﬁrst-person reﬂective stance adopted by anyone who enters the space of reasons—the kind of stance Edmund Husserl thought to be constitutive of philosophizing in his “Vienna Lecture.”37 One particularly instructive feature of this self-reﬂective methodology appears when Brandom recognizes that the model of discursive practice he presents reconstructs the expressive resources needed to describe the model itself. In other words, as Brandom engages in describing the various features of discursive practice—for example, commitments, entitlements, endorsement, the scorekeeper perspective—he becomes reﬂectively aware that all these features are being employed even as he describes them. Furthermore, and consequently, just as he himself has functioned as a critical scorekeeper on opposing views of discourse and endorsed the views that he now presents to others, the readers of his book, too, are invited to act as scorekeepers on his account of what it is to be a scorekeeper. MIE, then, makes explicit the discursive structures at work even as one reads and evaluates it. Here it is as though Brandom engages in an activity, describing discursive structures, and then, instead of simply being absorbed in this description, he stops and allows another, higher (reﬂective) viewpoint (in this case still his own) to emerge upon it, giving way, as it were to another perspective beyond the perspective focused on articulating discursive structures: namely, that he and his readers are making use of these structures even as he describes them. Here I deliberately describe this feature of intrasubjective self-reﬂectivity in intersubjective terms (e.g., another viewpoint being taken on one’s own view) in a way that anticipates and parallels another distinctive feature of Brandom’s account of discourse that will be discussed below, namely, his sensitivity to and inclusion of alternative intersubjective points of view. In addition, Brandom himself

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repeatedly throughout MIE draws parallels between intrasubjective and intersubjective processes.38 Only if one understands this self-critical methodology, can one make sense of Brandom’s concern at the opening and end of MIE to give an account of attributing original intentionality. From within the constraints of his project that require that everything depends on the scorekeeper’s normative attitude of taking or treating something as an intentional system, he distinguishes simple intentional systems (e.g., animals) from original, or interpreting, intentional systems (namely, human beings). Hence, a theorist who recognizes that members of a community adopt practical attitudes of treating each other in practice as adopting intentional contentful commitments realizes that the community can be interpreted as having original intentionality. Attributing such intentionality is not simply a matter of attributing to others propositionally contentful practical and doxastic commitments, as we might do with animals, to whom we attribute a belief (e.g., to the mouse the belief that the cat is waiting for it). Rather, in the case of original intentionality, we attribute to others attitudes also, such as acknowledging commitments or attributing commitments back to us, and thereby recognize that just as we keep score on them, they do so back toward us. This entire discussion can appear strange, as if we are trying to determine whether to treat other human beings as rational scorekeeping creatures like ourselves, when we do this in fact in everyday life without working through such deductive intricacies. But again, from within the self-critical stance of the scorekeeper, one must give an account of the intentional processes through which one attributes intentionality to others. One is reminded here of the highly self-critical and often badly understood attempt by Husserl in his Fifth Cartesian Meditation to give an account of the “explicit and implicit intentionality wherein the alter ego becomes evinced”39 within the constraints of having adopted the phenomenological reduction and therefore seeking to give “a transcendental theory of experiencing someone else.”40 In each case, the seeming strangeness, strainedness, and artiﬁciality of the descriptions is exactly correlative to the rigor of the methodology employed.41 Jürgen Habermas, sensitive to this seeming artiﬁciality of Brandom’s approach to intersubjectivity, objects, as we have seen, that Brandom lacks a second-person perspective insofar as he identiﬁes the interpreter with a public assessing a speaker’s utterance and “not with an addressee who is expected to give the speaker an answer.”42 Habermas proceeds to describe how a speaker not only wants another to understand that he believes some claim but also desires to be understood correctly and to reach understanding, since truth

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claims have a built-in orientation toward intersubjective recognition. Such recognition seems missing, for example, in the de re analysis, in chapter 8 of MIE, when Brandom, as a scorekeeper, keeps score on a prosecutor’s claim that the defense lawyer has introduced a pathological liar as a trustworthy witness. Brandom explains how the defense lawyer could not be so stupid as to say that a liar was trustworthy (an obvious contradiction), but rather he says of the witness, whom the prosecutor considers a liar, that he was trustworthy. Habermas’s problem, though, is that at no point in this analysis do the prosecutor and defense lawyer directly address each other’s claims. In reply to Habermas, Brandom disputes his view that the “point of linguistic communication”43 is to achieve mutual understanding, since he contests the idea that language as a whole has some aim or goal. Furthermore, he objects to Habermas’s postulating that a speaker possesses certain intentions and expectations “behind,” as it were, the making of an assertion, since these can become intelligible only through what is contained within the assertion itself. But more directly pertinent to our purposes, Brandom acknowledges that he makes nothing of face-to-face reciprocal interaction, though he believes he has the conceptual raw materials to characterize such interactions. Discursive practices, even if they lack a species of assertion that is issued with the expectation to receive an answer or reach agreement, can still be intelligible as making claims and inferences, that is, even if they fail to resemble our own sophisticated practices. The stringency of Brandom’s methodology clearly has its impact on the way intersubjectivity appears insofar as one must ﬁrst explain the fundamental discursive-argumentative practice and the type of intersubjectivity it presupposes, however rareﬁed it might appear, since this practice and its style of intersubjectivity are the presuppositions of any explanation of more concrete forms of intersubjectivity.44 One might think that Brandom’s methodological constraints and his emphasis on the perspective of a scorekeeper through whose ﬁrst-person perspective tabs are kept on others would leave one with a rather impoverished account of intersubjectivity, reducible to a picture in which persons merely “keep one another under surveillance,”45 as McDowell describes it. But the self-reﬂectivity of Brandom’s methodology achieves, to the contrary, a remarkable and surprising openness to others. First of all, scorekeeping, like every other performance, can itself be done correctly or incorrectly, and hence scorekeepers, far from assuming a position of some kind of voyeuristic power over those upon whom they keep score, as McDowell suggests, ﬁnd themselves bound by rules of scorekeeping that forbid them from necessarily

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equating how they have kept score with how score ought to have been kept. Scorekeeping, just because it is a normative activity, renders scorekeepers accountable to others for their scorekeeping. Moreover, just as the others’ commitments outrun those that they acknowledge, so scorekeepers, to avoid inconsistency, must admit that possibility for themselves, highlighting the ﬁnitude of their own knowledge insofar as they never fully grasp all the consequences of their own commitments. But such vulnerability to correction is heightened in Brandom’s normative framework because even if one factually does not recognize such consequences or stubbornly refuses to do so, one still ought to do so according to the norms of rationality not up to oneself. Insofar as scorekeepers seek constantly to ferret out what is (objectively) true from what is only (subjectively) taken to be true by others—so much so that Brandom claims that every scorekeeping perspective incorporates this distinction within itself— scorekeepers are always exposed to the possibility that their own views are only subjectively taken to be true. The constant possibility that the rigor the scorekeepers apply to others might apply to themselves implies the possibility that even what they attribute to themselves could be incorrect. Brandom explains, “Although grounded in essentially social, other-regarding scorekeeping, however, the possibility of a distinction between how things actually are and how they are merely taken to be by some interlocutor remains a structural feature, even, as will be seen below, in the case of attributions to oneself.”46 History serves to heighten the accountability and vulnerability to correction that characterizes the scorekeeping perspective by itself. Brandom, in “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism,” explains how present common law judges grapple with precedents whose authority constrains them, but at the same time in this reciprocal recognition between past and present, precedents only have authority to the extent that contemporary judges acknowledge them. However, this seems to give the present judges the last word, conferring an asymmetric authority on the present over the past, as if the only debts current judges owe to the past are the ones that they decide to acknowledge. The solution, though, to this apparent privileging of the present is that future judges will hold present judges accountable to the tradition that both sets of judges inherit. If later judges believe that their predecessors have decided wrongly in past cases, their predecessor’s verdicts will be deprived of authority. Once again, the process of scorekeeping, far from accentuating present scorekeepers’ arbitrary control over others, places them before an extended future of scorekeepers who will hold them accountable for the way they exercise their scorekeeping responsibility in the present.47

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Further, Brandom argues that the distinction that is constitutive of the scorekeeping perspective between what is merely held true and what is correctly held true is intimately related to the pursuit of objective truth so central in the ﬁrst three chapters of this book. He goes so far as to claim that the notion of objective truth-conditions, that is, the conditions a claim must meet in order to be objectively true, makes explicit what is implicit in this distinction constitutive of scorekeeping itself. Here the very structure of the scorekeeping perspective from within itself seems to direct it outside of itself toward the objective world before which questions arise about the correctness of its beliefs and to which it is accountable in much the way that it would be to other scorekeepers. Here perhaps we can glimpse something of an answer to McDowell’s question about the role that scorekeeping relationships can play with respect to objective purport, even if it is ﬁnally up to individuals to achieve their own standings in the space of reasons regarding the world’s intelligible empirical content. Scorekeeping relationships within the discursive setting normatively demand openness to correction by the world as much as they do correction by coscorekeepers. Not only do McDowell’s subjects, who engage in the ongoing and arduous work of ensuring that their empirical concepts pass muster, exhibit motivations akin to those of Brandom’s scorekeeping perspective, but that very perspective by its very structure would motivate and normatively bind them to just that work. What Brandom’s scorekeeping perspective loses regarding its direct linkage with the objective world by removing the world from the viewpoint of the perceiver, it to a degree regains, through the very structure of scorekeeping itself, in its power to motivate and bind scorekeepers from the side of the subject (or language user), as it were, to be open to and even to seek the world’s correction. If the dynamic within the scorekeeping point of view leads it toward the objective world, perhaps that dynamic can reach its telos if the scorekeeper would embrace at some level McDowell’s account of how we have direct access to intelligible empirical content. Or, otherwise said, perhaps Brandom’s account of discursive scorekeeping paints a picture of the space of reasons that by its own internal dynamism best accords with and requires McDowell’s answerability to things. In fact, McDowell in his essay on self-determining subjectivity grants that our answerability to the world passes through norms that mandate that our thinking be controlled by its subject matter. Brandom seems to have given account of just those norms as they originate in the scorekeeping attitude itself.48 Brandom’s self-reﬂective methodology not only implies a certain vulnerability to correction by others and the world; it also requires careful attention

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to understanding others in the German geisteswissenschaftlicher tradition of Verstehen. The problem that one undertakes more commitments than one acknowledges and that commitments are always attributed from one perspective and undertaken from another, as the basic scorekeeping perspective discloses, carries the implication that propositional contents can be speciﬁed only from some point of view. Because varying perspectives differ in their collateral commitments that in turn affect the meaning of one’s beliefs, what a sentence means in one person’s mouth may not be exactly the same in another’s. The scorekeeping perspective requires, then, the self-reﬂective recognition that I can never assume that my own commitments coincide with others’. The reﬂective stance of the scorekeeper thereby decenters one from an egocentric position that is liable to ignore others’ differences from oneself. Further, it reveals how complex the process of understanding and communicating with another is insofar as we will be required to keep “two sets of books, to move back and forth between the point of view of the speaker and the audience, while keeping straight on which doxastic, substitutional, and expressive commitments are undertaken and which are attributed by the various parties.”49 Though McDowell objects that this mind-boggling complex deployment of information seems implausible and should have deterred Brandom from claiming it, Brandom is just right to insist that such complexity is an implicit feature of the phenomenon of intersubjective understanding that he makes explicit. Instead of passing between us something nonperspectival, we end up coordinating systems of scorekeeping perspectives. Ironically, the self-reﬂective stance of the scorekeeper far from implying a detached scrutiny of others enjoins us scorekeepers to make inferential space for others’ differences from us and to go to great pains, to the point of keeping different sets of books, to ensure that their viewpoints are not uncritically assimilated to our own.50 Of course, Brandom achieves many of these goals quintessentially through de re speciﬁcations of propositional contents, which make the kinds of differentiation between perspectives that are lacking in de dicto speciﬁcations, in which an attributor simply attributes commitments that he thinks the one to whom the commitments are attributed would acknowledge. For instance, if A says “The freedom ﬁghters liberated the village,” a critical scorekeeper (call her B) could clarify these contents by specifying them through a de re statement, “A claims of those whom he calls freedom ﬁghters that they liberated the village.” Whereas A’s statement suppresses any difference in perspectives by seeming to require everyone to agree that those who liberated the village

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were freedom ﬁghters (and that they in fact liberated the village), the scorekeeper, B, attributes only to A the commitments that those who did what they did in the village were freedom ﬁghters and that what they did was liberate the village, and at the same time B indicates that she does not undertake these commitments herself. By thus distancing herself from A’s commitments, B, in effect, cancels A’s implicit expectation, veiled within his declarative statement, that everyone ought to agree with him about the freedom ﬁghters and their liberation of the village, and B thereby makes it possible for other divergent opinions, like her own, to emerge. Brandom, ever self-reﬂective, admits that even this reconstruction and assignment of commitments and responsibilities to provide entitlements, is developed from the perspective of B, the scorekeeper, leaving open the possibility that A may not concur with the reconstruction itself, particularly, we might imagine, the critical distance that B adopts with regard to A’s commitments. But even more is involved here insofar as Brandom, the scorekeeper and author of MIE, positions himself over against the lower level scorekeeper, B, who offers a de re speciﬁcation of A’s commitments and refrains from committing herself to them, and it is Brandom who raises the possibility that B may be as liable to correction as A is.51 As Brandom also points out, this lower-level scorekeeper’s de re speciﬁcation of A’s commitments also makes clear the truth conditions for A’s claim, that is, what would be required for the claim in question to be true. In this case, A would have to show that those who did what they did in the village really were freedom ﬁghters and that what they actually did was liberate the village. In other cases, where differences between perspectives are more extreme, for instance due to culture variances, Brandom allows for de re translation. For instance, an interlocutor may not understand the substitutional commitments (i.e., what words might be equivalently substituted for others) supposed when someone from another culture utters, “The seventh god graces us with his presence,” but after clarifying the two sets of books that need to be kept, this interlocutor, from within her own perspective, might proffer this de re translation of the other’s claim: “He claims of the sun that it is shining.” Such a translation enables the formulator of the de re speciﬁcation also to know what conditions would have to be fulﬁlled to make the claim of this person from another culture true. In addition, both the above examples show how the scorekeepers’ reconstructions, albeit from their point of view, at least offer the possibility for common ground. Both B, the scorekeeper, and A are talking about “the ones” that A designates as freedom ﬁghters, whether we will eventually decide that they are in fact freedom

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ﬁghters or not, and the translator/scorekeeper knows that when the person from the other culture speaks about “the seventh god” that person and the translator are both talking about the sun, however many collateral commitments on the side of the person from the other culture (e.g., that the sun is a god) must be laid aside to make such common ground possible.52 In these examples of the village liberation and the seventh god, one begins to see one possible answer to McDowell’s charge that there is no reason to accept the way sociality underlies objective purport is by way of multiple individuals keeping tabs. The problem is that objective purport, at least in the discursive space of reasons, appears in sentences whose meanings depend on often unacknowledged, collateral commitments and auxiliary hypotheses, of ideological or culturally speciﬁc types, as our examples suggest, that make it difficult to determine even what the objects of purport are. Brandom, in effect, recognizes that complex processes of understanding another underlie the very possibility of there being a claim about reality or facts on which one can judge. Just as in the previous chapter we saw the many aspects of perceptual experience that McDowell overlooks, here too he seems to pass over the intersubjective web in which claims about objective purport are embedded and the importance and subtlety of determining what even is at issue before one decides whether a claim is true or not. In section two, I argued against McDowell’s view that his I-We relationship is superior to the I-Thou relationship that Brandom espouses by arguing that the way Brandom understands norms as not up to us (despite their dependence on our attitudes to get a grip on us) converges with McDowell’s, that Brandom could account for tradition by extending I-Thou relationships across history, and that it is difficult anyhow to understand how there could be interactions between different proponents of a tradition across time unless they took an I-Thou form. This third section, then, has retrieved the challenge to Brandom that McDowell raised at the end of his essay “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” namely, that one could summarize Brandom’s view of intersubjectivity as a matter of keeping “one another under surveillance.” Here I have argued that despite the many constraints of the discursive scorekeeper perspective (e.g., ﬁrst person, critical scorekeeper, not even taking for granted that others are rational agents, and the lack of provision for any robust face-to-face communicative interaction), its reﬂective rigor, normativity, and mandate for consistency presents a view of human relationships in which interlocutors are required to be vulnerable to correction by the world and others and demands heightened sensitivity to the viewpoints of

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others—just the opposite of what the McDowellian metaphor seems to suggest. McDowell’s critique, which begins with the question “Which is closer to individualism?”53 also suggests that Brandom’s outlook and not his is excessively individualistic, presumably because it involves surveillance of individuals (though it ﬁnally renders them incapable of achieving standings in the space of reasons by themselves). Clearly, my reading of Brandom’s view, which emphasizes the normatively required, structural openness to world and others constitutive of the scorekeeper standpoint, hardly suggests that it is individualistic, despite the methodological constraints on discursive scorekeepers that might lead one to expect it to be so. McDowell’s critique, by contrasting his tradition-formed individual who can achieve standings in the space of reasons “by her own efforts” with Brandom’s view of agents under surveillance, suggests that his view produces a conﬁdent knower as opposed to Brandom’s knower who appears as a doubtridden, dispirited inmate of the panopticon. Brandom himself, however, recognizes the limits of doubt when he contends in Making It Explicit that sometimes doubt too needs to be justiﬁed, that pragmatism has been the opponent of hyperbolic Cartesian doubt, and that some prima facie entitlements are usually treated as “free moves” by members of our speech community, and in this latter case perhaps we have another example of what I called early “recognitional” scorekeeping. However, the charge that vulnerability to others, corrigibility, heightened sensitivity to their viewpoint lead to an individual less than conﬁdent in his or her own resources plays on a false supposition, to be disputed below, that accountability to others yields a weakened subjectivity. In fact, I will argue, such accountability produces strength.54 Finally, one might object that Brandom’s concerns in MIE are simply epistemological in character, interested in establishing only which claims are correct about the world or about what others are thinking or feeling. Indeed, Brandom himself in his reply to Habermas asserts that Making It Explicit is officially silent about moral commitments, particularly moral norms. Of course, McDowell’s criticisms of Brandom’s perspective are not merely epistemological; he clearly views Brandom’s perspective through the lens of ethics, broadly understood after the fashion of German idealism, namely, as resulting in the production of crippled human beings unlike those of his own view, which yields tradition-formed individuals who are self-determining and not subject to dogmatism or alien forces. To prepare to consider the ethical dimensions present in Brandom’s predominantly epistemological outlook, I have tried in this section to develop more fully and positively his notion of

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intersubjectivity. Despite Brandom’s disclaimer, the next section will attempt to inquire back from the account of his understanding of intersubjectivity to a stratum of ethical engagement with others that his understanding reﬂects, though this stratum need not be conceived in terms of ethical norms. By tracing his view of intersubjectivity back to an individual’s original ethical engagement with others, we will be doing something parallel to what we have done with regard to perception, namely, reﬂecting back from empirical judgments to an individual’s rational engagement with the world.55

4. ethical intersubjectivity: older than epistemic intersubjectivity56 Emmanuel Levinas in Otherwise than Being describes how in the very process of theorizing, including the theorizing of the ethical relationship, one risks losing sight of oneself as “a subject older than knowing or power.”57 In this section, I will develop this idea that there is an ethical intersubjectivity that is distinctive from the epistemic (and theorizing) intersubjectivity that is most prominent in Brandom’s approach. Further, I will explain how Levinas takes ethical intersubjectivity to be “older” than its epistemic counterpart. However, Levinas also conceives the two types of intersubjectivity as intimately interconnected, stating that epistemic intersubjectivity, such as Brandom’s, depends on “a forgotten experience from which it lives,”58 namely, ethical experience,59 despite Brandom’s preference to limit himself to questions of epistemic rather than ethical normativity.60 In this section, I will be doing for Brandom’s work what McDowell does for his own work by commenting on its ethical dimensions by showing, for instance, how his opposition to the given is part and parcel of an affirmation of self-determining subjectivity. To distinguish the two types of intersubjectivity, it is important at the start to understand the importance of phenomenological reﬂection. Levinas, much like Husserl, often begins with discursive statements and questions, and then reﬂects back on the human relationships that such statements presuppose, as Husserl inquired back, for instance, into the basic discriminations (e.g., the foregrounding against a background, etc.) that underlie the identiﬁcation of an object. Husserl, in his Fifth Cartesian Meditation, which treats intersubjectivity, undertook a similar phenomenological reﬂection back from the higher level of cultural interactions and our sharing of an objective world to the experience of the basic intersubjective relationship on which this higher

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level depends. At that founding level, he examines what is involved for me even to have another person within my view, in particular, the kind of bodily similarities prompting the immediate cognitive recognition of another person like myself, on the basis of passive syntheses and associations, without inferences or deductions.61 On this bodily level, Levinas believes that we encounter the other person ethically, as a kind of founding level for higherlevel intersubjective relationships such as those found in justice, discourse, politics, eros, and paternity. These higher-level relationships involve features, such as requiring symmetrical treatment in the case of justice or discourse, that are not found in the underlying ethical relationship, which, in Levinas’s special understanding of it, involves a summons to responsibility that is not (at ﬁrst) reciprocal. The planes of relationship, however, usually come intermingled, and a special kind of Rückfrage (questioning back) is called for, especially to dissociate the ethical level from the higher strata. One might say that this basic level on which human beings encounter each other ethically, lies on the same plane on which McDowell conceives our experience of empirical objects in which conceptual capacities are actualized in the knower without the participation of his or her freedom. To reach this plane, McDowell thinks back from empirical judgments to discover the conditions of the possibility of the intelligibility of empirical content. Brandom, who reduces the perceptual roots of the sentences with which he begins to stimuli evoking sentential responses takes account of neither the fundamental experience of the world necessary for intelligible empirical content nor the fundamental ethical experience of the other, which, in Levinas’s view, discursive relationships presuppose.62 But how does one characterize the ethical relationship that Levinas’s reﬂective inquiry uncovers? Although one must ﬁrst recognize the other person as a human being and not a table, for instance, as the intentional correlate of an act of disclosure, through an immediate act of knowing that is far removed from the higher level epistemological knowing in which one theorizes or keeps score on the inferential connections of an interlocutor’s claim, the very recognition that another person stands before me transforms this initial, immediate cognitive approach.63 As Levinas puts it, the phenomenality of the other person immediately “defects into a face,”64 in the sense that one straightaway experiences that one is summoned to ethical responsibility by the other and, as a consequence, one’s “serenity of consciousness”65 is broken up by the “the extreme urgency of assignation,”66 which “jostles the presence of mind.”67 One undertakes a very different attitude when one perceives an

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object present and when one recognizes a person and suddenly ﬁnds oneself cast into an attitude of being invited into responsibility by another. To tie this experience of one’s responsibility being elicited to the bodily level at which it occurs, Levinas considers sensation not principally as oriented toward cognition, as the history of philosophy has conceived it, but rather as “sensibility,” exposure to pain, vulnerability to the elements—all of which are more appropriate to the ethical relationship. On this physical level, on which one experiences hunger, thirst, desire, and enjoyment, a correlative ethical experience might consist in observing the other’s pain or hunger or poverty and feeling called on, as Levinas metaphorically puts it, to give to the other even “the bread from one’s mouth.”68 It should be kept in mind that Levinas’s notion of responsibility here is most general and does not prescribe how concretely one ought to implement responsibility to another. However, even when one legitimately begs off certain concrete responsibilities (e.g., because one is overcommitted elsewhere), that very “begging off” involves a recognition of the other’s summons that I be responsible to and for her, although in this concrete moment I cannot and even ought not comply with what she asks. This ethical dimension of intersubjectivity is what Habermas points to in his criticism of Brandom when he observes that a speaker not only wants to covey to a hearer that he believes p but wants to be understood correctly and to reach understanding with someone about p. Though Brandom objects methodologically because Habermas imputes an intention to the speaker over and above that to which she gives linguistic expression and because he attributes a single purpose to language, it does seem that in normal, everyday conversation a constitutive feature of the relationship between speaker and hearer— and not necessarily a deliberate intention on the part of the speaker—involves the speaker’s intervention functioning as a summons to the hearer to exhibit some uptake or response. To simply allow the other’s statement to fall to the ﬂoor inertly between interlocutors or to be indifferent to what another has said, would ordinarily be taken to be rude or at least to call for some explanation of the type that imagined counterexamples might provide (e.g., the speaker’s statement might be intended to provoke an argument and therefore the listener rightly ignores it). Of course, Brandom, insofar as he admits in his reply to Habermas that in MIE nothing is made of face-to-face reciprocal communicative interaction, simply passes over these kinds of ethical demands that Levinas ﬁnds central. In brief, Habermas does put his ﬁnger on the kind of second person ethical relationship that belongs to our richer, actual sophisticated practices, from which Brandom abstracts his artiﬁcial idealization, and that

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pertains to a type of intersubjectivity different from that involved in “making claims and inferences”69 as part of “discursive practices.”70 But to return to the citation from Levinas with which this section began, in what sense is the ethical intersubjectivity that Levinas depicts “older” than epistemic intersubjectivity? One might understand this “older” ethical intersubjectivity by reﬂecting back from theoretical responses that one has made to others, for instance, in reviews given of another’s work, and considering phenomenologically what was involved in such responses. However much in such situations my focus may be on the content of my response and so may seem to be purely theoretical in nature, I can also ﬁnd entangled in my response (possibly even with accompanying feelings of competition or disdain for the other’s work) the sense that another person is involved, the author of the theoretical expression I am evaluating. Even though this other person is not a personal acquaintance of mine, it seems incontrovertible that she would desire that I review her work fairly, thoroughly, with the intention of helping her to improve by providing constructive criticism. Giving a theoretical response to someone’s work is not detachable from a summons of the other, even a stranger, to be treated responsibly; indeed that summons seems to precede the theoretical response and to require that a reviewer be motivated and guided by it. Hence, Levinas claims that the ethical experience of the other, this being responsible to and for them, represents a primordial discourse that obliges the very entering into theoretical discourse in the ﬁrst place, and he asserts that the condition of thought is a moral consciousness.71 Jean-Francois Lyotard illustrates this point with regard to practical theorizing, which emerges from an earlier, older ethical moment in relation to the other. For Lyotard, one ﬁrst experiences oneself as the passive recipient of another’s summons to responsibility (e.g., open the door), or what Lyotard calls the other’s “prescriptive.” However, in theorizing, for example, assessing the validity of the other’s prescriptive, one sets aside the passive moment of receiving the prescriptive and becomes an active commentator on it, engaging in the kind of theoretical argumentation found in, for instance, Kant’s second critique. One converts oneself from the position of being a passive addressee to that of being an active addressor of claims to another.72 This summons to responsibility is also “older” in a deeper sense, in Levinas’s view, insofar as it precedes any decision on my part to assume responsibility, since the responsibility asked of me is not derivative from some commitment I have made to the other, some initiative I have already undertaken toward the other, or some wrong that I have done to the other that requires restitution. In

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this way, Levinas’s description of the ethical encounter of the other runs counter to that of the contract theorists, who believe that responsibility begins in my free decision to commit myself to the other, without which commitment there would be no responsibility, instead of seeing that even that commitment itself would be a response to another’s prior request. The origin of one’s responsibility for the other, then, does not begin in oneself, in something one has done or failed to do, but in the other’s summons. Levinas symbolizes this origin of responsibility through a metaphor of temporality that also permits him to contrast the theorizing of epistemic intersubjectivity with older ethical intersubjectivity. Theorizing involves a synchronizing, an assembling of all my thoughts into a present moment, comparable to my capacity to bring past moments into my present in memory. By contrast, moral responsibility is a matter of diachrony insofar as my responsibility to and for the other is never brought into the present in the sense that it never begins with some present decision of mine, but always seems already there, as a summons to which I must decide how to respond and with which I am constantly trying to keep up, always coming, as it were, too late. Hence, Levinas describes this ethical relationship, dubbed “proximity,” in the following terms: “Proximity thus signiﬁes a reason before the thematization of signiﬁcation [i.e., my ethical relationship to the other as signifying to her] by a thinking subject, before the assembling of terms in a present, a pre-original reason that does not proceed from any initiative of the subject, an anarchic reason. It is a reason before the beginning, before any present, for my responsibility for the other commands me before any decision, any deliberation.”73 Up to this point, I have been distinguishing ethical intersubjectivity from epistemic intersubjectivity (according to Brandom) insofar as the former includes the experience of an ethical summons to responsibility, impacting one bodily and affecting one in one’s passivity, with a degree of urgency, at the base of one’s theoretical responsiveness, and before one’s taking up the summons to theorize. However, Levinas suggests that the two types of intersubjectivity are also intimately related in that thought “lives”74 from the forgotten experience of ethics. He often explains such “living from” in the sense that the entrance into epistemic discourse is already a matter of ethically responding to an interlocutor, as we have seen, whose “face opens the primordial discourse . . . that obliges the entering into discourse,”75 which Thrasymachus tries to evade, unsuccessfully, at the outset of the Republic. In addition, like Levinas, Brandom recognizes the interweaving—not necessarily ethical in character—of interpersonal perspectives in discursive practices,

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acknowledging, for instance, that for someone to undertake a commitment is to do something that makes it appropriate for someone else to attribute that commitment to her. He thereby implies that she who expresses a commitment does so only in relation to another whose perspective she is aware of as willing to attribute it to her. Although Brandom refrains from discussing what motives might prompt one to introduce one’s commitments into discursive space, the expression of such commitments is described as if it were already a response to perceived attitudes on the part of one’s interlocutor. It is at this juncture that he leaves an opening for another manner in which thought might live from ethics, namely, that the very expression of commitments may depend on the interlocutor’s invitation or summons or even just the sense of responsibility that the interlocutor’s presence stirs up and that prompts one to express one’s thought to this interlocutor. Brandom is clear that linguistic asserting involves undertaking responsibility, but of a kind that is epistemic in nature, a responsibility to justify that follows on one’s asserting, but what we are suggesting is that an ethical responsibility to the other precedes the asserting, in other words, that thought lives from ethics.76 A further story about how an epistemic intersubjectivity such as Brandom’s might live from ethical intersubjectivity can be teased out of Levinas’s work. To be sure the ethical relationship begins with one ﬁnding oneself accountable to another without one having done anything on one’s own part to explain that accountability, but a major difference appears in that the epistemological scorekeeper, in Brandom’s view, now demands that the other be epistemically responsible—and it is this holding another accountable, seemingly apart from any ethical responsibility to the other, that perhaps raises McDowell’s concerns about surveillance. How is it, one must ask, that one moves from the ethical moment of being held responsible by another to the epistemic status of holding others accountable? In Levinas’s attempt to think back from epistemic intersubjectivity to its ethical origins, he argues that in the initial moment of the ethical encounter, one ﬁnds oneself enjoined to be responsible regardless of how the other will respond, that is, without surety that the other will treat oneself with reciprocity. Imagine, for instance, an individual who approaches one’s car explaining that his car with his family in it has run out of gas and that he needs a few dollars to get to his destination. In the initial moment, before one decides whether to give money, one ﬁnds oneself summoned at least to be receptive, to give a sympathetic hearing. However, immediately suspicions might arise that this request for help is nothing more than a ruse or even that this request

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is but the ﬁrst stage in a process of carjacking and so one would resolve to keep one’s car windows shut. The moment in which one stops and calculates whether one ought to do what the other bids, whether, for instance, the other is deceiving me or setting me up for something worse—and such calculating may be prudently necessary for one’s own survival—one is placing oneself at one remove from the simple reception of the other’s prescriptive, in this case, the receptive openness that the other invites as he presents his needs. Such calculation, removing me from the initial reception of the prescriptive, might also involve inquiring whether the other might reciprocate my generosity or whether my response should be contingent on his possible reciprocation—and indeed there are cases, discoverable in reﬂection, where it is in the interest of the other’s ethical well-being that he or she be held so accountable for reciprocating. However, instead of the I’s being held responsible by the other in the initial moment of the encounter, this stopping and calculating constitutes a new attitude that conceives the roles of the I and the other as reversible and equal, and asymmetrical obligation yields to a demand for reciprocity. Such a reﬂective take on the initial moment of the encounter consists of something like what McDowell calls a sideways-on view, in which instead of considering how the other appears ethically to the perspective of the I and how I ﬁnd myself summoned to responsibility regardless of what the other’s response to me may be, I look upon myself from a third-person perspective outside the relationship and see myself as an other alongside this other. From this reﬂective stance, I think that my rights are equal to the other’s rights and that I deserve from him the same treatment I give to him, or in Levinas’s terms, as I think about my “going unto” the other, I set about “recording the correspondence or the non-correspondence of this going with this return.”77 Levinas, however, does not explain the transition from my initial ethical encounter of the other to the insistence that the other treat me responsibly and reciprocally in terms of my stepping back from my obligations and solitarily calculating what the other owes me, since such stepping back and calculating can easily be governed simply by one’s self-interest, that is, in too detached a manner from the original ethical obligation to the other. Instead, Levinas achieves the transition, within the realm of practical rationality, from the original ethical responsibility to the other to equality of treatment by hypothesizing the presence of a third person, whom the other person, whom I serve, is serving. Now I recognize that we are equally responsible for each other and equally capable of making demands on each other, but only in a context that is fundamentally shaped by each other’s responsibility for the

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other. At that point, especially when there are conﬂicting demands, I am compelled to reﬂect, to compare and weigh claims, and to search for principles that might govern all our relationships, not out of self-protection but because of ethical responsibility to all—myself included. In other words, the same kind of ethical responsibility to another, to which I was bound in the dyad, is now (because of the other’s dedication to the Third) what moves me beyond the dyad. To follow our earlier example, I might think of my child who would be fatherless were I to be killed in a carjacking and who in this way summons me to responsibility too, and hence I might keep my windows shut despite my concern for the man approaching my car, on whose behalf I might call the police to report his predicament so that they might come to his assistance. The end effect of this hypothetical introduction of a third person is that thinking (i.e., reﬂection, the weighing of conﬂicting arguments) is assumed out of ethical responsibility to others (the other, the Third). Levinas is not claiming that this hypothetical reconstruction represents historical or anthropological fact, rather it is advanced as a way of accounting for how we might get from the asymmetrical ethical responsibility, to which one is summoned in the face-to-face relation and of which Levinas has ﬁrst made us aware, to the possibility that I can sit in judgment on others’ claims (and they on mine), as common sense tells us is the case, without completely breaking links with the original asymmetrical ethical relationship. As Levinas expresses it, “This means that nothing is outside of the control of the responsibility of the one for the other.”78 Furthermore, Levinas insists that after the Third’s appearance, one can even be called on to be concerned with oneself, recognizing in reﬂection that one too is an other among others. Paradoxically, reﬂection in this practical context of responsibility ends up to a degree relaxing the asymmetry of responsibility the ﬁrst other elicits, since my lot is now important too. Moreover, although this balancing of claims seems at ﬁrst aimed at matters of practical rationality, determining how equilibrium can be established between conﬂicting practical claims, Levinas conceives theoretical philosophy, including epistemology, as arising at this point also insofar as it consists of thematizing, the building of intelligible systems, searching for principles, and the exchanging of arguments among equal interlocutors.79 Consequently, Levinas’s genealogy of theory out of ethics would imply that even for the scorekeeper to hold another epistemically accountable, she must already have been already pried away from the experience of being held accountable herself in the ethical relationship—the experience of responsibility to many others must have widened her responsibilities beyond the dyad

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and provoked reﬂection. It is, of course, true that one can conduct epistemological discussions independently from this genealogy and ultimately from ethics. However, Levinas’s purpose, to ensure that philosophy not detach itself from ethical responsibility—a critique of the present mode of compartmentalizing one’s philosophizing off from one’s ethics—no doubt explains the motive for his reﬂective reconstruction of the transition from ethical intersubjectivity to epistemic intersubjectivity. Despite the break that takes place when one moves from ethical intersubjectivity to its epistemological counterpart, the generation of the second out of the ﬁrst makes it possible that one can ﬁnd traces of the former in the latter. In the ﬁrst place, it is easily imaginable how the whole notion of accountability and the normative language of responsibility used in keeping score of others could ultimately be traced back to an originary experience of being held ethically accountable by others. This detecting of connections between epistemology and ethics runs counter to Brandom’s desire to keep the two types of normativity separate, since the understanding of conceptual normativity has been hampered by too close an association with moral normativity; nevertheless, he does admit to a natural hope for their mutual illumination.80 Following that hope and given Levinas’s genealogy, one might speculate that the scorekeeper has internalized her being held ethically accountable and across the structures of the Third has learned to project such accountability outward, to hold others accountable regarding their claims to knowledge, with the result that moral normativity becomes something like a hidden origin of normativity itself. Similarly, as we have seen, both McDowell, in his account of intelligible empirical content, and Brandom, in his description of the scorekeeper’s responsibility, place at the center of their epistemological endeavors, the ﬁrst-person perspective of the knower responsible for endorsing claims, which as Brandom observes “is something that no one but I can do.”81 Of course, a parallel emphasis on the ﬁrst-person perspective is preeminent in ethical intersubjectivity such that, according to Levinas, I experience myself ethically as summoned to responsibilities “for which no one can replace me and from which no one can release me,”82 and the “I” is even deﬁned as being a point in the universe where responsibilities converge. So basic is the ﬁrst-person perspective for Levinas that he resists any reﬂective distancing that would take one outside the experience of the other’s summons to responsibility, visible only to the ﬁrst-person I, the “point of departure of relationship,”83 and that would allow one to think about the relationship from outside it, as if one

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were not involved in it. Moreover, in our earlier reﬂection, we remarked on how Brandom’s intrasubjective metareﬂection on his descriptions of the features of discursive practice (namely, that they are being used while he is describing them) is comparable to the supervenience of another interpersonal viewpoint upon one’s own and on how intrasubjectivity and intersubjectivity are interconnected throughout Brandom’s work. This intertwining of intrasubjective and intersubjective ﬁnds its parallel in Levinas’s genealogy, in which intrasubjective reﬂection is born when a third person breaks in upon a dyadic relationship in which the other’s summons seemed allpreoccupying; consequently, intersubjectivity gives birth to intrasubjective reﬂection. Indeed, a further interlacing between these dimensions appears in McDowell’s defense of the individual knower, who knows intrasubjectively without having to wait on an external scorekeeper’s endorsement, since that defense actually depends on McDowell’s undertaking an intersubjective philosophical scorekeeping perspective to vindicate the intrasubjective perspective of common sense. By drawing parallels between the notions of accountability, ﬁrst-person responsibility, and intrasubjectiveintersubjective linkages that characterize both epistemology and ethics, I suggest that Levinas’s thesis that epistemological intersubjectivity is rooted in ethical intersubjectivity becomes all the more plausible. An interesting asymmetry, however, emerges with regard to how reﬂection functions within these two different types of intersubjectivity, and this asymmetry highlights their distinctiveness at the same time that it suggests their connectedness. In the case of ethical intersubjectivity, one ﬁnds oneself accountable asymmetrically to another, but, due to the appearance of the Third, one commences reﬂection, in which there is a “co-presence on an equal footing before a court of justice,”84 thereby mitigating the demandingness of the face, although Levinas insists that the anarchic responsibility to and for the other is by no means eliminated. By contrast, epistemic intersubjectivity, as Brandom presents it through his scorekeeping model, which functions independently of the kind of ethical motivations that Levinas’s genealogy portrays, starts with an individual holding the other on whom one keeps score accountable and critically attributing to this other intentionality, commitments and entitlements, and knowledge (if the scorekeeper also undertakes the other’s commitments). One has the sense that all authority here rests with the scorekeeper, and I have demonstrated that this seeming predominance is but the underside of Brandom’s reﬂective rigor, his “resolve not to accept unquestioningly any pregiven opinion.”85 Insofar as

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this scorekeeper perspective appears detached from any underlying ethics, it no doubt prompts McDowell’s concern about surveillance. However, Brandom radically transforms this scorekeeper’s perspective when he includes within it a moment of self-reﬂection, which we have said even in its intrasubjective form resembles the supervenience of another personal perspective, similar to the way in which the Third in Levinas offsets the preoccupation with the dyadic other. This moment of reﬂection occurs, for instance, when Brandom points out that the scorekeeper cannot necessarily equate how she has kept score with how it ought to have been kept because scorekeeping, itself a normative activity, renders her accountable to another for her scorekeeping. Because of this self-reﬂection, the scorekeeper recognizes that she never fully grasps all the consequences of her commitments (though she ought to do so in cases where another scorekeeper points them out) and that she may only be subjectively taking something to be true that isn’t. In other words, self-reﬂection on oneself as a scorekeeper, who from one’s ﬁrst-person perspective exercises authority over others, suddenly makes one beholden to the authority of others. In sum, the asymmetry appears in this: in the ethical attitude one begins beholden to the authority of the other and reﬂection induced by the third modiﬁes the other’s authority (making one even beholden also to oneself), whereas in epistemological intersubjectivity one begins holding the other accountable and reﬂection on one’s accountability for one’s scorekeeping makes one accountable to others. This contrast at once throws into relief the difference between the starting points of the epistemic and ethical ﬁrst-person perspectives, in which one holds others accountable and is held accountable respectively. At the same time, the interconnection between these types of intersubjectivity is suggested by the inverse parallels in accountability structures introduced by reﬂection, in which subsequent to reﬂection in the epistemic sphere the scorekeeper becomes more accountable, albeit epistemically, to others, in a way that resembles the moment of ethical responsibility before the thirdinduced reﬂection. Conversely, ethical self-reﬂection, in which others can become beholden to oneself, converges to a degree with the prereﬂective scorekeeper to whose authority others are beholden. Again, these inverse parallels highlight connections and differences together, though it must always be kept in mind that epistemic accountability to others is much more limited in scope and less intrusive on the self than ethical responsibility to another, as Levinas’s description of the phenomenality of the other defecting into a face suggests.

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The sense of accountability to others characterizing reﬂective scorekeeping has many other parallels with the sense of ethical responsibility prior to the appearance of the Third. For example, in reﬂective scorekeeping, according to both Brandom and McDowell, one recognizes that one does not confer authority on the epistemic norms one is bound by, much like Levinas’s account of the initial ethical moment in which I ﬁnd myself summoned to a responsibility that doesn’t begin with anything I have contracted for. Likewise, when the scorekeeper turns reﬂective and becomes aware that she is accountable to others for her scorekeeping, her holding others accountable appears now to be situated in a prior context of being held accountable ﬁrst by others, much like ethical experience in which being held accountable provides the context for all subsequent activity, even theorizing itself. In addition, the kind of epistemic restlessness resulting from the fact that every scorekeeper incorporates a distinction between what is objectively and merely subjectively true is reminiscent of the ethical restlessness of the “other in the same,” the model characterizing Otherwise than Being, in which (in contrast to Totality and Inﬁnity) the experience of being faced with a summons to responsibility emerges from within oneself, despite oneself, as opposed to this summons being placed at a comfortable distance from oneself.86 Many other diverse parallels can be drawn between epistemology and ethics. The fact, for instance, that one is responsible for holding others responsible in the epistemic context mirrors one of the ethical responsibilities that Levinas stresses, namely, that one is ethically responsible for the other’s ethical responsibility. Furthermore, Brandom’s epistemological awareness of the necessity (1) to take account of the other’s differing point of view and (2) to seek for a common ground that make communication possible echoes Levinas’s recognition (1) that the knowledge that absorbs the other is addressed to the other who “upsurges inevitably behind”87 what is said, asking to be taken account of, and (2) that language involves offering “things which are mine to the other.”88 Levinas would argue that not only does philosophy derive from ethical origins, but in the light of those origins, it is possible to assess higher level rational and cultural endeavors and institutions, such as the state, law, and even philosophy itself. Such institutions, while always on the point of having their center of gravitation in themselves, can always be “recovered”89 beginning with the ethical relationship. For instance, Levinas recognizes that philosophy inevitably betrays the ethical saying relationship in the said since reﬂecting about the ethical relationship involves an inevitable distancing of

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oneself from its pressing demands, or, to put it in Lyotard’s words, commenting through denotatives about another’s prescriptives involves a different attitude than simply receiving those prescriptives. Nevertheless, insofar as Levinas’s philosophy takes account of the other’s ethical demands—which it must have done in order even to recognize that a betrayal of sorts has occurred—it recovers philosophy itself beginning with the ethical relationship. It, thereby, as he puts it, reduces the betrayal of the saying in the said. One, could, therefore, assess its performance as “better” than other philosophies that take no account of the ethical relationship. Similarly, one might be able to assess Brandom’s epistemology favorably for its taking account of the other’s often overlooked viewpoint and seeking bases for communication. Brandom’s philosophy realizes ethical goals, although this realization might seem to him only a consequence of observing epistemic norms regarding selfcriticism and objectivity.90 Of course, McDowell could object that the ethical dimensions of Brandom’s thought, which I took in the previous section to tell against any reduction of his epistemology to surveillance, are merely the chance outcome of defensive, nonethical processes whose only motive is to keep watch on others for fear that they will be keeping watch on me. In such a case, it would still be possible to assess as ethical in character the objective effects of Brandom’s viewpoint, for example, the openness to correction and inclusion of other perspectives, regardless of the motivations of the scorekeepers. However, one might wonder that if scorekeeping, for which Brandom provides no motives other than seeming compliance with epistemic normativity itself, were understood ethically, as a service undertaken on the other’s behalf, it might be possible to assuage McDowell’s view that scorekeeping fosters panoptic debilitation or to mitigate Nietzschean suspicions that the pursuit of truth only extends and conceals a will to power. Furthermore the ethical motivations of responsibility to the other that Levinas suggests could reinforce what normative scorekeeping requires, since those motivations would require that one’s scorekeeping be the best possible on the other’s behalf and that one strive to ensure that other’s viewpoint is not subsumed within one’s own. Our critical focus in this ﬁnal section of the chapter has been on the ways in which ethical intersubjectivity might underlie Brandom’s epistemic intersubjectivity, but we might attempt to consider McDowell’s position on epistemic intersubjectivity through a similar Levinasian prism. There are, however, obstacles to such an approach insofar as McDowell’s I-We model tends to deemphasize the multiperspectival administration of norms that brings

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Brandom closer to the Levinasian orbit. In addition, although McDowell recognizes that we are bound by norms not of our own making, the ethical dimensions he uncovers in his epistemology seem weighted toward keeping a subject from not being subjugated by the authority of dogma or tradition. While opposition to such subjugation is perfectly appropriate, it results in McDowell not emphasizing sufficiently the passivity before the other that we have derived from Brandom’s recognition that epistemic scorekeeping unfolds in a context in which the scorekeeper is also kept score on. Nevertheless, there some possible parallels between Levinas’s ethics and McDowell’s epistemology insofar as the latter takes its start from a direct encounter with objects at a foundational bodily level—a locus similar to that where one encounters the other ethically in Levinas’s viewpoint. It is further imaginable that an ethics based in the other’s summons could converge with McDowell epistemic stance, given his frequent references to the Sellarsian idea that objects makes a claim on us, that they “wring”91 a response from us, and that they are even portrayed as speaking to us. It is almost as if McDowell has metaphorically transferred the features of a prior original ethical experience of persons to the objects we experience. To be sure, Levinas reverses this directionality, moving from things to persons, when, beginning with the forcefulness of the way in which things act upon us—something captured by Sellars’s and McDowell’s language of their “wringing” a response from us—he goes on to argue that in ethical encounter one encounters what is “more objective than objectivity.”92 Moreover, one can ﬁnd similarities between McDowell’s ethical thought, which we will treat in the ﬁnal chapter, and a view that commences with an ethical encounter with another insofar as he insists, for example, that ethics is absorbed and lived before it is theorized about and that ethics depends on “reliable sensitivity to a certain sort of requirement that situations impose on behavior.”93 How close this convergence is and how much of the total picture of ethics the sensitivity to the demands of persons or situations constitutes can only be fully addressed, however, in our seventh chapter.94 One ﬁnal comment has to do with a possible underlying supposition of McDowell’s charge that Brandom’s insistence on holding others accountable seems coupled with producing individuals incapable of achieving on their own the kinds of standings in the space of reasons of which McDowell’s agents are capable. One might draw the mistaken conclusion from McDowell’s argument that being held accountable diminishes personal strength. But such a supposition cannot really hold for McDowell’s own view insofar as it is initiation into a social practice or tradition that yields his conﬁdent

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individuals, and if one believes that tradition must be mediated through those who administer it, as Brandom suggested earlier, then that conﬁdence results from being held accountable by “initiators,” such as educators or exemplars within a tradition who challenge us to live up to the standards that are not up to us. Similarly, one might suggest that the self-reﬂective turn in Brandom’s account of scorekeeping suggests that one will do the best scorekeeping when one has other competent scorekeepers holding one accountable and that those who administer normative standards help make possible the best thinking in accord with those standards. Indeed, a central argument in Brandom’s “Freedom and Constraint by Norms” is that one exercises and expands expressive freedom by subjecting oneself to the discipline of social and political norms. These arguments suggest that being held accountable produces strength rather than undermines it. Levinas makes a similar argument regarding ethics when he describes the overwhelming personal power possessed by one who has become so accountable to others as to fear for their murder rather than one’s own death. For instance, moral heroes such Gandhi or King were so taken up with the plight of those for whom they were accountable and for whom they spoke that they deﬁed daily threats to their own lives. Consequently, they lived as individuals with nothing to fear. Ultimately accountability to others need not debilitate at all—just the contrary.95

CHAPTER 5

mcdowell’s wittgensteinian quietism

One cannot really understand John McDowell’s position on intelligible empirical content in contrast to Robert Brandom’s views on perception, unless one understands their broader philosophies of philosophy, that is, McDowell’s Wittgensteinian quietism and Brandom’s approach to discourse in terms of a normative pragmatics and inferential semantics. Consequently, in this chapter I will examine McDowell’s philosophy of philosophy, beginning with a residual question from the perception debate that was left unaddressed at the end of chapter 2, namely, whether Brandom’s scorekeeper perspective internalizes the entitlements of the everyday perceiver. By situating the scorekeeping perspective on a higher-level philosophical plane, I will allot, in agreement with McDowell, to the perceiver a kind of knowing that scorekeeping only recognizes without creating, but by distinguishing these levels I will be able to show also that Brandom need not succumb to McDowell’s charge that he internalizes all knowledge. However, I will also attempt to elucidate McDowell’s philosophical standpoint by characterizing it as itself what I have called earlier a recognitional scorekeeping stance that answers skeptics (by refusing to be ensnared by their questions) in a different way than Brandom does. However, McDowell’s lack of sensitivity to the features of his own philosophical position, particularly its scorekeeping dimensions, raises additional questions about the Wittgensteinian quietism through which he characterizes his own philosophy.1 The second part of the chapter will explore why McDowell presents his view as a Wittgensteinan nonconstructivism, namely, that his method involves not answering philosophical questions as posed but rather in questioning the framework in which they are posed and posed in such a way as to be impossible to answer; rather than answering questions he exorcises them. Insofar as this dismantling of philosophical questions often leads McDowell to vindicate the commonsense experience that philosophical explanations overlay and often render invisible, he resembles Husserl in returning to the “things

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themselves” and to the lifeworld at the base of theory. His antipathy toward philosophical theory, however, leads him to overlook the theoretical stance by which he upholds the rights of common sense, whose many concepts require further philosophical elaboration. Such philosophical development is possible without falling back into the errors of philosophical theory from which he rescued common sense in the ﬁrst place, and it is necessary if he is to be consistent with his endeavor not to take philosophical presuppositions for granted, in this case, those of the common sense he simply affirms. In the ﬁnal section, I show how McDowell criticizes philosophical theories too much under the inﬂuence of the natural sciences by bringing to the surface the commonsense perspective that they presuppose but conceal from sight. Finally, McDowell’s tendency to mark out the limits of philosophical theory inclined to scientism runs the risk of making it appear that he is antipathetic to science itself—something that could be avoided by demonstrating some of the continuities between science and philosophy. Such continuities can be revealed if there is a symmetry of self-reﬂectivity, in which even McDowell’s philosophy would acknowledge the features of its own stance even as it requires science to be reﬂective about its own limits. This symmetry of selfreﬂectivity can be achieved if one sees science, philosophy, and common sense as representing different attitudes of a single transcendental subject, which have as their correlate diverse regions of being requiring different, irreducible methods of investigation.

1. interiorization and metaphilosophy McDowell’s and Brandom’s exchange about perception ends with McDowell accusing Brandom of engaging in precisely the kind of interiorization, particularly with regard to entitlements, which he criticizes in his early “Knowledge and the Internal.” As we have seen, McDowell, in “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” rejects Wilfrid Sellars’s and Brandom’s idea that someone, oneself or another, must establish the authority of an observation report as an inferential conclusion. This overinferentialized approach to the perceptual process overlooks how I recognize my own authority as a reporter of greenness and how I would be at a loss if asked to justify my own reliability—a point that Ludwig Wittgenstein already recognized. McDowell explains Wittgenstein’s idea: “My reliability about that kind of thing has for me, rather, a sort of status that Wittgenstein considers in On Certainty. It is held ﬁrm for

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me by my whole conception of the world with myself in touch with it, and not as the conclusion of an inference from some of that conception.”2 Indeed, Wittgenstein speaks of the “system” within which all testing and conﬁrmation or disconﬁrmation of hypotheses take place, a system that is not itself a more or less arbitrary or doubtful point of departure, but the locus within which arguments “have their life.”3 From the perspective of a phenomenologist, Alfred Schutz could be seen to concur with Wittgenstein, locating the almost doubt-free point of departure with the everyday natural attitude, whose denizens implement a peculiar epoché (suspension of modes of thinking or acting), through which they suspend doubt regarding the existence of the outer world and regarding the possibility that objects might be otherwise than they appear. Schutz contrasts this epoché with the phenomenological epoché that suspends belief in the reality of the world as a method of radicalizing Cartesian philosophical doubt. McDowell’s reﬂections tend then to head back toward everyday life experience, from which philosophy takes its start, but in which particular philosophical interests and questions are not operative and into which philosophers ought not to read their philosophical preoccupations.4 However, McDowell adopts a modiﬁed view of this everyday knowing earlier in this essay when he considers Brandom’s example of the person who seems to see a candle ten feet in front of her but is unaware of the mirror ﬁve feet in front of her, of which a presumable scorekeeper is aware—an example that for McDowell interiorizes a subject’s entitlement, relegating all seeing to only seeming to see and all knowing to only believing truly. At that point, he insists that (in cases where there is no intervening mirror) it is possible for one who holds a claim embedded in the that-clause of an “I see that . . .” statement to be entitled to that claim simply due to the visual availability to her of the embedded fact.5 However, this perceiver differs somewhat from the earlier described everyday perceiver, who would have no doubts and so would have no reason even to claim entitlement to an embedded claim; indeed it is unlikely that anyone would claim entitlement unless someone else had challenged a previous claim or had expressed a belief contrary to his or her own and thus requiring some adjudication. Because this second perceiver seems to lay claim to being entitled to the embedded claim and so belongs to at least an atmosphere in which doubts have arisen, she seems to stand at one remove from simply knowing a green thing when she sees it (i.e., from the Wittgensteinian certainties involved in being in touch with the world). Nevertheless, given this second perceiver’s conﬁdence in her perceptual belief and in her

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belief in her own entitlement to it even after being challenged (unless she discovers an error), one might still argue that she still abides within the everyday life attitude, which falls short of the plane of philosophical skeptics and those responding to them. After all, even within everyday life the possibility always remains that some other everyday perceiver could challenge one’s perceptual claim and that one could show this challenger why one’s claim still holds (though the everyday life perceiver would probably not use the philosophical-semantic vocabulary McDowell does regarding claims embedded in that clauses or “entitlements”). Everyday life experience does not rule out thinking and questioning—and hence my comment that it is “almost” doubt free—but it does ban the wholesale Cartesian philosophical doubt about the world that Schutz’s comments suggest.6 What, though, is the connection between this everyday life knowledge and knowledge described on the philosophical plane, as in MIE? One might say that the everyday experience of being questioned by another commonsense perceiver and offering justiﬁcations anticipates the kind of philosophical rigor exhibited in MIE in which a scorekeeper adopts the critical, philosophical attitude “not to accept unquestioningly any pregiven opinion or tradition.”7 After such a challenge from someone else in everyday life prompts an individual perceiver to claim entitlement for her commitments (or to revise them if called for), one might say that she has already experienced being kept score on and responded to such scorekeeping and hence already experienced something of what is involved in Brandom’s notion of the scorekeeper. Moreover, insofar as she takes herself to be entitled, as if she were an outside scorekeeper on herself, she seems to be operating with an inchoate version of the scorekeeper perspective nascent in everyday life. Nevertheless, McDowell seems right in claiming that an individual in everyday life—let us say before her perceptual claims have been questioned by another—can know what she perceives without depending on an external scorekeeper to attribute knowledge to her. Such unquestioning perceiving would constitute one extreme, and Brandom’s philosophical position that an external scorekeeper is needed to attribute knowledge to someone stands at the other. In this latter extreme, the rigor of the reﬂective methodology leads to an externalism in contrast to the internalism of McDowell’s commonsense perceiver who has no questions about her perceiving. A middle ground, though, is marked out by the case of the everyday perceiver who has been questioned and has given reasons for why she is entitled to hold her beliefs, without, however, embracing the full philosophical attitude.

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But what about the philosophical stance that McDowell undertakes in his essay “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited”? I asked earlier8 whether it could be claimed that McDowell occupies a version of the scorekeeping perspective, since he seems to be vindicating commonsense perceivers, whether those whose reliability pertains to their whole conception of their being in touch with the world or those who are entitled to their perceptual beliefs by the availability to them of the perceptual facts. One could deny that McDowell is scorekeeping (understood as evaluating another’s claims) insofar as he thinks it inappropriate even to evaluate whether commonsense perceivers know, since that cedes too much to skeptical questions that ought to be examined and exorcised rather than answered. I have argued in response to such a denial that McDowell’s philosophical position actually involves exemplary scorekeeping on those who keep score in this skeptical sense on commonsense perceivers, either giving a philosophical argument that these skeptics overlook the Wittgensteinian certainties their very questioning presupposes or reasserting what is involved in commonsense perceptual entitlement.9 Through this scorekeeping on skeptical scorekeepers regarding commonsense perceivers, McDowell at least indirectly vindicates commonsense perceivers, not doubting their perceiving, but dismantling the presuppositions of skeptical questions that have already arisen in their regard. Furthermore, I have also argued that Brandom’s scorekeeping stance need not be taken only in a skeptical vein, but that it can also consist of recognizing knowledge already there, as in cases of reliable knowers (e.g., shard identiﬁers), whose colleagues with good reason recognize their knowledge as a knowing already there. As a consequence, one could argue that scorekeeping should be understood to be a matter of assuming a philosophical posture toward another’s claims and determining one’s stand toward them, a stand that comes in many varieties— for example, doubting, refusing to doubt, vindicating, or indirectly vindicating. In other words, if one understands McDowell’s unique philosophical outlook (scorekeeping on other skeptical scorekeepers, indirect vindication of commonsense perceivers) and if one possesses a sufficiently comprehensive grasp of what scorekeeping consists of (that includes recognizing a knowing already there, adopting a philosophically reﬂective posture in regard to another’s claims), it seems legitimate to assert that McDowell occupies a scorekeeping stance when he vindicates against critics the commonsense perceptual standpoint, whose knowing itself is not scorekeeping dependent.10 This discussion suggests that there are varieties of levels of knowing. There is the level of commonsense perceivers, without doubts, in touch with

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their world, who are possessed of a knowing already there, such as that found among Brandom’s instances of reliable knowers. In such instances, it need not be the case that, until scorekeepers decide, the best such perceivers can achieve is merely to seem to see what appears; it need not be the case that the best they can do falls short of the world or that their entitlements must be internalized until endorsed by scorekeepers. Because of this level, Brandom would not be able to claim that all brands of knowledge consist in scorekeeping; indeed, he seems to have already recognized this point insofar as he appeals to examples of reliable shard identiﬁers and chicken sexers who already know before a scorekeeper recognizes their knowing. Then there are those moments in everyday life, where one experiences incipient scorekeeping at the hands of another commonsense perceiver who questions one’s perceptual accuracy, although the certainty, speed, and sense of obviousness with which commonsense perceivers resolve such moments of being placed in question reveals that they really have not left the realm of common sense. Then there is the philosophical plane, which involves taking up a rigorous reﬂective posture toward another’s claims and determining what stand to take toward them. On this philosophical level one might question common sense or question those who question common sense (and thereby vindicate common sense) or one might undertake a scorekeeping that might be skeptical or recognitional in character. Brandom’s point here seems correct, namely, that philosophy itself involves the adoption of an external scorekeeping position in regard to the claims of others. McDowell seems so intent on doing battle with philosophers who doubt commonsense perceiving or so intent upon upholding commonsense knowing that is achieved without scorekeeping, that he is not as sensitive as he should be to the philosophical terrain he himself occupies and, in particular, its own scorekeeping dimensions. The kinds of questions that I am arriving at here and that I will pursue in the rest of this chapter, though, have been repeatedly raised against the Wittgensteinian quietism by which he characterizes his own philosophy, namely, that its antipathy to philosophy itself involves the covert adoption of a philosophical position. In laying out these levels of knowing, I am particularly indebted to Alfred Schutz, who distinguished the lifeworld (or natural attitude) from philosophy, and then reﬂectively distinguished his brand of philosophizing (a constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude) from others on a “higher” plane (transcendental phenomenology).11

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2. mcdowell’s nonconstructivism If one were to take McDowell’s M&W as treating three opponents, namely, coherentism, the myth of the given, and bald naturalism, one risks conﬂating the differences between these positions and, in fact, failing to understand precisely what McDowell’s takes to be the task of philosophy. He thinks that the philosophical anxieties about the relationship between mind and world originate in the often unarticulated insight that the structure of the logical space of reasons is sui generis as compared with the framework of naturalscientiﬁc understanding. How, in other words, is it possible that the subject’s spontaneous conceptualizing in the space of reasons relates normatively to the world, that her thinking be answerable to experience, when she is also to be understood as belonging to nature, naturalistically understood as constituted by the causal processes and impacts that determine her experiencing and conceptualizing passively and that leave no room for spontaneity or normativity? The desire to uphold the insight into the sui generis space of reasons motivates those who think that the philosophical anxieties intellectually oblige them to go on to offer some new theory of how mind relates to world (e.g., Donald Davidson’s coherence view). McDowell, by contrast, tries merely to exorcise the philosophical anxieties by simply undermining the presuppositions that led to them in the ﬁrst place. Thus, he takes proponents of coherentism and the myth of given to be in possession of the insight into the uniqueness of the space of reasons, but also to be laboring under the illusory obligation of developing some countertheory. Bald naturalism, although it resembles McDowell’s view insofar as it believes that the supposed obligations (to offer a new theory of how mind relates to world) are illusory, does not acknowledge the insight (into the sui generic space of reasons) as McDowell does and instead sets about reconstructing the space of reasons in terms of the logical space of natural-scientiﬁc understanding. While McDowell conceives his response to the protagonists of coherentism and the myth as applauding their insight into the sui generis nature of the space of reasons but as also seeking to convince them that the intellectual obligations (to explain theoretically the mind-world relationship) that they take the anxieties to pose are illusory, his approach to bald naturalism is quite different. There the task is not to refute the reductionistic program of bald naturalism but simply to show that his more satisfying alternative, namely, the exorcism of the mind-world gap by refraining from the presuppositions

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leading to it (the naturalistic interpretation of sensibility), undercuts its motivation. The reductionism is motivated by the effort to show that reason is, in fact, natural, but McDowell shows how it could be natural in another sense of “natural” than that of bald naturalism.12 Bald naturalism, for McDowell, simply refuses to feel the problems that Davidson and Gareth Evans feel insofar as they seek to hang on to a notion of rationality that is appropriately conceived in Kantian terms but that is difficult to reconcile with the scientiﬁc naturalism that bald naturalists think explains the space of reasons. Just as bald naturalists opt out of this whole area with which Davidson and Evans grapple, so Richard Rorty opts out insofar as he regards the whole question regarding how minds contrive to be in touch with reality as illusory. Like the bald naturalists, Rorty too grants no force to the distinctive intuition that the idea of objective purport belongs in the sui generis space of reasons. Consequently, he believes that Tarskian equivalences, such as “Snow is white” if and only if snow is white, function merely descriptively and that they have nothing to do with the normative links that require that what we say ought to conform with the way the world is and that are constitutive of any idea of objective purport. Because he “plugs his ears” when it comes to the such problems as how mind relates to world, it remains impossible for him to appreciate how McDowell upholds the sui generis space of reasons (the insight) and wriggles free from the question of how this space of reasons relates to nature as bald naturalism conceives it. McDowell bypasses this question by reconceiving the nature to which the space of reasons relates in terms of Aristotelian second nature whose concepts are deployed from the start in perceptual receptivity. By reconceiving nature in this way, McDowell is able to see that the intellectual obligation posed by anxieties about mind-world relations, namely, that one has to reconcile spontaneous concepts with bald naturalistic nature, is illusory. Furthermore, equipped with an understanding of the role of second-nature concepts actualized in receptivity, one can defend the idea of intelligible empirical content that becomes impossible under all the other ways of conceiving mind’s relationship to nature. Although McDowell comes to the same conclusion as Rorty and bald naturalism concerning the illusoriness of the problems, he also recognizes the insight that the space of reasons is sui generis, as they fail to do.13 McDowell further explains his own philosophical tack as not involving a constructive philosophy, which attempts to answer (rather than exorcise) questions about how it is possible for mind to be directed toward world,

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that is, how spontaneous conceptual capacities could belong to a materially constituted perceiver. Such a “how is it possible” question is asked usually against a naturalistic background (that would make spontaneous capacities ultimately impossible), such that if one examines the background of the question one would eventually come to see the impossibility of ever answering it. Hence, to try to answer such a question indicates that either one does not understand the underlying predicament motivating the question or, in other words, one does not see that if that naturalistic frame of mind is left in place, one will be unable to answer the question. Rather than answer the question, one ought to dislodge the framework, showing thereby that question of “how is it possible?” no longer has its bite. One dissolves the problem by recognizing that exercises of spontaneity are not natural in the sense of belonging to the realm of law (impossibility) but are natural in the sense of second nature. McDowell asserts, though, that exorcising such questions is hard work, “constructive philosophy in another sense.”14 In an interview with Jakob Lindgaard, McDowell claims that disagreement over whether philosophy ought to be constructive or not basically differentiates him from Brandom: I do not think that the chief difference between us consists in the fact that Brandom is a pragmatist. It consists much more in the fact that Brandom does not agree with the Wittgensteinian thought that the work of the philosopher lies in speaking out what is obvious, in calling humanity back from a kind of spiritual sickness in which they take seriously certain merely illusory problems and calling them to a kind of spiritual health. Brandom’s attitude is, on the contrary, that the problems are good problems, and that the work of the philosopher consists in resolving well-placed kinds of puzzles, instead of trying to unmask this kind of puzzle or mystery as grounding itself in a previous mistake.15 Much as he did with the problem of how spontaneous concepts can be operative within nature by undermining the polarizations (our belonging to realm of law that drives spontaneity away from any collaboration with receptivity) that framed the question and made it impossible to answer, he repeats this pattern of philosophizing with regard to many other supposed problems, one of the clearest examples of which appears in his treatment of the question of knowledge of other minds in his essay “Criteria, Defeasibility, and

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Knowledge.” The “criterial” position that McDowell opposes argues that knowing another’s inner states is a matter of satisfying certain defeasible criteria based on observable bodily behaviors that permit one to claim to know what those inner states are, though, as a good skeptic might point out, it is always possible, given the defeasibility, that the person known may not be in that inner state despite the fact that the criteria have been met. Wondering in what sense one could be said to have knowledge of another’s states under such conditions, McDowell resists those who offer what they take to be a Wittgensteinian response to the skeptical challenge to the criterial stance by suggesting that one might bridge the gap between inner states and bodily behaviors insofar as bodily behaviors are conventionally linked to the presence of inner states. Those who believe that Wittgenstein would endorse such a conventional linkage as answering the skeptic’s challenge to the criterial viewpoint fail to appreciate his whole approach, which would have been not to accept the criterial account that leads to the skeptical challenge in the ﬁrst place, let alone then introducing an additional element, the conventional linkage, to answer the skeptic. Rather, he would reject the assumptions underlying the criterial standpoint whose weaknesses allow the skeptic to exploit it. In this case, the criterial position displaces “the concept of human being from its focal position in an account of our experience of our fellows,”16 and replaces it with the philosophically restricted concept of a human being taken for an unexpressive, mere material object, from whose movements we are somehow or other to infer its inner states. The way to handle this skeptical critique of the criterial position is to avoid the philosophical underpinnings of the position that make it vulnerable to the skeptic—not to answer the skeptical question, which emerges from a particular framework, but to exorcise the question by disputing its very framework. As McDowell comments, “In these terms, Wittgenstein’s response to the skeptic is to restore the concept of a human being to its proper place, not as something laboriously reconstituted, out of the fragments to which the skeptic reduces it, by a subtle epistemological and metaphysical construction, but as a seamless whole of whose unity we ought not to have allowed ourselves to lose sight in the ﬁrst place.”17 At the conclusion of the essay, McDowell diagnoses the formulation of the problem as itself the result of extending an objectifying view of reality to human beings, which views human behavior as no more expressing inner states than the behavior of planets would, with the result that mental states end up being withdrawn inward, located “in the head” only. The culprit responsible for this objectifying is the same culprit that cut mind off from the world in the

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previous example, namely, the rise of modern science, whose view of nature ruled out the possibility that spontaneous conceptual capacities could cooperate with receptivity in delivering intelligible empirical content.18 This discussion on knowledge of other minds clearly reveals the motives for McDowell’s preference for a nonconstructivist philosophy. By taking the terms in which philosophical problems have been posed for granted and setting about to answer them, one overlooks how the underlying philosophical-theoretical frameworks and often the natural scientiﬁc point of view underlying those frameworks provide us with a distorted picture of what goes on in everyday life (e.g., that sensing involves meaningless causal impacts or that we grasp unexpressive bodies ﬁrst) with the result that what we do easily and effortlessly in everyday life (grasp intelligible empirical content or understand others) becomes philosophically impossible. The more radical critique that McDowell undertakes involves a rather extensive detheorization of philosophy that, in effect, returns, as Edmund Husserl expressed it, to our experience of the things themselves. Like McDowell, Husserl recommended that, with regard to such things, we “consult them in their self-givenness and to set aside all prejudices alien to them.”19 It is this effort to get at what is given originaliter (as it presents itself without being overlain with theory), and to allow no authority to block one’s right to accept all kinds of intuition as validating sources of cognition, not even the authority of modern natural science, that eventually leads Husserl to explore the lifeworld. That lifeworld furnishes the origins from which natural science abstracts, and, forgetful of its own origins, scientiﬁcally guided philosophy often ends up substituting its constructions for everyday life experience, reducing subjective experience, for example, to mere causal effects or forgetting that we experience others ﬁrst as our fellow human beings and not as organisms and their overt behavior as human action rather than occurrences in outer-world space-time. There is a distinct trajectory in McDowell’s thought, whether it is a matter of refusing to answer the question that Davidson and Evans strive to resolve and instead pointing to an option that is overlooked in the way the question is asked, thinking back to the sources of intelligible empirical content that Brandom presupposes without accounting for, or not having to prove one’s own perceptual reliability, since it comes with being in touch with the world. He moves toward the common sense, which “questionable philosophy”20 puts at risk, and toward everyday life experience beneath the level of theories that overlay it with their philosophical constructions. It is highly plausible that one could describe McDowell’s work, in Husserlian terms, as an effort to vindicate the lifeworld against its theoretical obfuscators.21

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But one might object that even though McDowell seeks to exorcise rather than answer questions and thereby to avoid constructivist philosophy, still it would seem that he himself is making philosophical claims about how we encounter the world or how we understand others. By these claims, isn’t he himself venturing out on the constructive ﬁeld? He himself answers this charge when he avoids the constructivist dilemma between the standpoint of the naturalized realm of law and the independent, normative meanings that from that standpoint of that naturalism appear to be a species of rampant Platonism. Instead, he posits a kind of “naturalized Platonism,” with meanings irreducible to causal effects (and so relatively Platonic) but naturalized insofar as they pertain to second nature. His “naturalized Platonism,” though, he asserts, is not a label for constructive philosophy, but a “‘reminder,’ an attempt to recall our thinking from running in grooves that make it look as if we need reconstructive philosophy.”22 Here it is as if he advises his reader not to attend to the fact that he is positively making claims about meaning and second nature but rather to keep focused on the dangers of reverting to the dilemma and its presuppositions that his “hard work”23 has already gotten us out from under. McDowell is even clearer about the role of philosophical quietism in avoiding the danger of succumbing to the presuppositions one has just overcome, as this rather lengthy quotation suggests: When I describe the relaxed Platonism made possible by a naturalism of second nature, I say things like this: the structure of the space of reasons is not constituted in splendid isolation from anything merely human. Wittgenstein’s “quietism,” properly understood, is a good context in which to stress that remarks like that should not invite the question, “So what does constitute the structure of the space of reasons?” If we take ourselves to be addressing that question, my invocation of second nature, sketchy and unsystematic as it is, will seem at best a promissory note toward a proper response. But that would miss my point. I think the response we should aim at being entitled to, if someone raises a question like “What constitutes the structure of the space of reasons?”, is something like a shrug of the shoulders. It is a thought well expressed by Rorty that questions like that should not be taken to be in order without further ado, just because it is standard for them to be asked in philosophy, as we have been educated into it. Their sheer traditional status cannot by

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itself oblige us to take such questions seriously. Rather, there is an assumed background that is supposed to make them urgent. When I invoke second nature, that is meant to dislodge the background that makes such questions look pressing, the dualism of reason and nature. It is not meant to be a move—which could be at best a ﬁrst move—in constructing a response to that question.24 This quotation expresses once again McDowell’s suspicion of leaping back into a discussion whose underlying premises might be the very ones he has just overcome, and the immediate and perhaps contentiously phrased “So what does constitute . . . ?” seems to suggest that the questioner rushes to question without having quite fathomed how McDowell has already liberated the discussion from presuppositions to which the questioner may still be captive. Indeed, what McDowell seems to claim is that his invocation of second nature, sketchy at it is, must be appreciated in its own right, not as an answer to a question, whose background rather needed to be questioned, but as a new way of seeing things so that the question itself becomes unnecessary. The reason for greeting the new question with a shrug has to do with being critical about what the new question presupposes, even though the philosophers have been inclined by the philosophical tradition to ask such questions. Here McDowell, the traditionalist, shows himself wary of “letting one’s thinking be shaped by an uncritically inherited tradition”25—something, paradoxically, required by the tradition of philosophy itself, namely, that it be critical even of its own traditions. However, let us suppose that one were aware of the limits of what McDowell intended and achieved on some topic (e.g., naturalized Platonism), or, for that matter, in the discussions that make up the whole of M&W. Let us suppose that one were aware of the framework suppositions that he has rightly criticized in that work and let us suppose that one were sufficiently apprehensive of their covert return. Would it not still be possible to embark on a fuller investigation of what constitutes the space of reasons or what meaning understood in terms of naturalized Platonism consists of? McDowell, in the above quotation, does not necessarily rule out such a possibility insofar as he recognizes that what he has done might be at best a ﬁrst move in some other project. One has the impression that giving a further constructive account of the concepts he has used to describe the experiences of knowing the world or understanding others might not be part of the kind of constructive philosophy that he disdains because it proceeds with all the mistaken presuppositions

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still intact. In fact, if McDowell himself has lived up to the standards of the philosophical tradition by being critical of and not taking for granted the mistaken suppositions transmitted within the philosophical tradition itself, would it not be consistent to attempt to provide an account of the concepts that provide an alternative way of seeing things, instead of just presenting them as given, almost dogmatically assumed, without any further conceptual articulation? Wouldn’t a more systematic, constructive account of what is involved in McDowell’s ideas of understanding others and the intelligible understanding of the empirical world, seen as part of a philosophical project not to accept presuppositions without examination, be in continuity with that same refusal to take things for granted that characterized McDowell’s repeated repudiation of taken-for-granted assumptions, such as those regarding the dualism between nature and reason underlying coherentism and the myth of the given? The vigilance regarding the mistaken presuppositions concealed within a question and regarding concepts that are affirmed but stand in need of further scrutiny lies at the heart of the philosophical tradition that opposes the unexamined life and that resolves “not to accept unquestioningly any pre-given opinion or tradition.”26 Perhaps one might think that once McDowell has given his admittedly sketchy account of meaning, understanding others, or intelligible empirical content, no further articulation is necessary, since his explanations recover, as we suggested above, the lifeworld that is obvious to us all. However, getting back to that lifeworld so easily covered over by constructive philosophy requires a kind of reﬂective rigor much at odds with the intellectual complacency typical of everyday life. McDowell’s affirmation of the role of common sense, like his defense of the ﬁrst-person everyday knower who does not depend on an external scorekeeper to know, is itself developed from within a philosophical standpoint at one reﬂective remove from common sense. In a similar fashion, Husserl’s thinking back from the natural sciences to recover the intuitively given surrounding world that science forgets represents a sophisticated philosophical achievement. To conclude, then, that this everyday life world, itself rediscovered after rigorous philosophical effort, now requires no further philosophical examination is to succumb to a paradoxical reﬂective inertia. It is to take for granted the realm of common sense, which, as Maurice Natanson has shown, is itself characterized by a tendency to protect itself against reﬂection. Natanson states, “The make of commonsense life, the very essence of its style of being, is its failure to make itself an object for its own inspection. Commonsense life does not reﬂect upon

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commonsense life; at best it makes some particular event within the stream of daily life a topic for analysis and reﬂective scrutiny. That commonsense life has a style, has an essential structure, is an insight that necessarily transcends the understanding of commonsense men.”27 A further argument as to why it is possible that a properly conducted philosophy might undertake further to elaborate the descriptions of commonsense experience that belie the categories deployed in asking the questions that ought to be bypassed is that McDowell himself is already engaged in such elaboration himself or that he relies on it. For instance, he offers descriptions of: second nature and our initiation into ethical thinking and the exercise of conceptual capacities that Aristotle ﬁrst explained; our animal character that is necessary for any adequate philosophical anthropology, as Aristotle revealed; the rationality that permeates our natural, animal being and that Immanuel Kant appropriately conceived; and the basic differences between human beings who relate to a world and animals that relate to the “environment,” a concept that Hans-Georg Gadamer clariﬁed. Not only does McDowell provide descriptions that go beyond merely mentioning these concepts and that are already philosophical in character, but he draws on other philosophers who have extensively developed these concepts in works such as the Nichomachean Ethics and Truth and Method. For instance, the Gadamerian distinction between the animal mode of life in an environment and the human mode in the world depends on distinctions and vocabulary already developed by Max Scheler, who undertakes the method of phenomenological reduction to determine and justify, beyond both “ordinary language”28 and the deﬁnitions of natural science, in what “the essential nature of man”29 consists. Hence, if one were to think that McDowell’s sketchy and unsystematic accounts suffice and that anything further would be a matter of pernicious constructive philosophy, one would be ignoring the complex philosophical sources on which he already draws. Even when he rightly refuses to answer the skeptic’s question as to how one knows that one is really seeing the world (since the question hooks one into the mistaken premises of the argument from illusion that denies our openness to the world) and when he insists that the sheer intelligibility of openness to the world allows one to ignore (rather than answer) the skeptic’s questions, it would still be possible to give a philosophical account of such openness. Indeed, Husserlian accounts of intentionality have done just that and discussed the kind of evidence one has in experiencing one’s own intentionality, whether such accounts convince the determined skeptic or not.30

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Finally, various thinkers have taken Wittgenstein to task for his quietism. For example, Karl-Otto Apel argues that Wittgenstein in both the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations downplays the philosophical signiﬁcance of his own work and denies to his own statements the status of a theory even though, in Apel’s view, both works in effect provide the conditions of the possibility for their being a world, which can only be given with reference to the use of language. Furthermore, in Apel’s view, the notion of the language game (including form of life, social relationships, etc.) in general concretizes a kind of transcendental philosophy of the conditions of the possibility and validity of meaning and understanding. Furthermore, far from the language game of philosophical argumentation being just one game among others, it rather presents the structural features characterizing all other language games whose claims to validity can be exposed as debatable, redeemed or refuted within it. Similarly, Crispin Wright argues that Wittgenstein never seems to proffer a theoretical basis for his own quietism and never therefore explains why he declines rather than rises to the challenges posed to his thought. One such challenge, in Wright’s view, has to do with what makes rules ultimately binding if they don’t bind as through we were on iron rails and if we can be wrong in following them despite communal agreement that we are following them.31 McDowell, by contrast, does seem to offer reasons for his quietism: to attempt to answer philosophical questions as posed runs the risk of enmeshing one in misleading presuppositions and one would do better to provide an alternative, question-bypassing account, returning often to the commonsense experience that a mistaken philosophy overlays with its own construction that would make such experience impossible. In addition, one needs to be cautious about answering subsequent questions calling for explanations of one’s alternative. For McDowell, philosophy could be deﬁned as requiring both that one be critical of the presuppositions underlying questions and ultimately the traditional practice of philosophy itself (a critical attitude, paradoxically that the tradition of philosophy itself calls for) and that one present an alternative that evades those presuppositions. My criticism of McDowell here is that this critical attitude cannot rest content only with suggesting an alternative, highlighting features of human experience that do not require constructive philosophy, but rather it is possible to provide philosophical elaborations of that experience, as long as these elaborations do not involve succumbing uncritically to presuppositions one may have already evaded. To do otherwise, to leave unexamined the commonsense experience

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philosophically brought to the surface to dispel philosophical cobwebs is to abandon the very critical endeavor that prompted one to bring that experience to the surface in the ﬁrst place. Taking a hint from Apel’s critique of Wittgenstein, we might say that McDowell’s own view of his own philosophy is more minimalist than it in fact is, given its use of other philosophers’ elaborations, or than it ought to be, given its opposition to taking presuppositions for granted. The danger, though, is not only in taking for granted the concepts and experiences one introduces but also in taking for granted the viewpoint within which one introduces those concepts, and hence it is important to recognize the philosophical viewpoint from which one affirms the importance of and explains commonsense experience, which is lived at a different level than the philosophy that affirms its importance. McDowell is not particularly clear about his own philosophical perspective in this regard; it is we who have made this point above about these different levels. Similarly, his criticism of Brandom’s view on how a scorekeeper is needed to recognize someone’s reliability as a perceiver neglects how he himself implicitly occupies a philosophical scorekeeping stance, scorekeeping on the scorekeeping of common sense and indirectly vindicating the commonsense perceiver. McDowell, it would seem, falls prey to a degree to the kind of lack of self-reﬂection on his own philosophical stance that Apel attributes to Wittgenstein. In the next and ﬁnal section, I will endeavor to show that McDowell’s philosophical stance often aims at revealing, correctly in my view, how philosophers relying on natural science have allowed it to overstep its boundaries. However without sufficient reﬂection on the philosophical framework within which he demarcates the boundaries and on the connections between philosophy and common sense, his philosophical project is liable to appear as antiscientiﬁc.

3. mcdowell and natural science In many ways—more than can be enumerated here—McDowell criticizes opposing philosophical positions via a diagnostic that reveals how the problematic character of those positions depends on having uncritically absorbed natural scientiﬁc presuppositions. Of course, the quintessential example of such a diagnostic happens in M&W in which McDowell, in the ﬁrst three chapters, opposes both the myth of the given and coherentism because receptivity is taken to occur without spontaneity in the ﬁrst case and spontaneity

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without receptivity in the second. Of course, the reason one could not even envision his alternative—namely, that conceptual capacities are drawn on in receptivity—depends on a “deep-rooted mental block”32 that calls for diagnosis and treatment and this is ultimately produced by the meteoric rise of the natural sciences that locate the working of sensibility in the realm of law and reduce the whole meaning of nature to that realm. In that realm, our sensibility is passively determined by causes beyond our control or even recognition, and this domain of nature appears separated by an uncrossable gap from the spontaneous domain of meaning and concepts in the logical space of reasons. It then seems incomprehensible how spontaneity, shaping by concepts, could be operative in sensibility at all. Modern philosophy, too much under the sway of the natural sciences, is incapable of even envisioning McDowell’s alternative, namely, that one needs to adopt another view of nature (e.g., Aristotelian second nature) within which spontaneous concepts can be operative in sensibility. Philosophy, captive of natural science, excludes options of envisioning the world that would make the fruitless oscillation between unsatisfactory positions unnecessary. Not only are we blinded to options, but scientiﬁc and naturalistically oriented philosophy obscures lifeworld experiences. We have already seen this in the way our understanding of others is made nearly impossible once we assume that another’s unexpressive body is given ﬁrst and we must resort to criterial bases to attribute inner states to that other. McDowell also shows how the scientiﬁc perspective underlies the view of Hilary Putnam, who, though he asserts that “‘meanings just ain’t in the head!”33 and though he opposes scientism’s inﬂuence on philosophical understandings of the mental, nevertheless, never challenges the view inclined to scientism that the mind is a kind of organ. Similarly, he views mental representations as symbols, which might be taken to be directed to the object they represent but are not intrinsically endowed with a representational aboutness directed to what they are about. McDowell objects that Putnam’s phenomenological claim is not an “unprejudiced introspective report”34 but is “theory-driven,”35 not reporting on what is found in the stream of consciousness, but what he thinks must be there. He speculates that Putnam’s mode of portraying representations as isolated, inner occurrences makes it easier to map them on to the underlying physiological, causal processes that evoke them. Here McDowell shows how philosophy under scientistic sway obscures what is phenomenologically given, and his analysis reveals why Husserl insisted on the phenomenological reduction as means of returning to the things themselves beneath the theoretical accretions overlaying them.36

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Philosophical theories leaning toward scientism also effectively deny their life world origin. McDowell illustrates this in criticisms of the treatments of secondary qualities by Bernard Williams and J. L. Mackie. For instance, if Williams is correct in denying that colors are properties things have, McDowell argues that “we would no longer understand what we were supposed to be explaining.”37 He also objects to Mackie’s contradictory explanation of secondary qualities that requires that we should form the notion of a feature of objects that resembles secondary qualities but that is adequately conceivable otherwise than in terms of how that feature would look. What McDowell sees here is that we must begin with our everyday experience of secondary qualities from which science takes its start and that we must continue to make use of our experience of them to describe whatever processes we think explain them. Scientistic-leaning philosophies may explain secondary qualities away, but such explanations in the end seem to be left hanging in the air, having eliminated what they set out to elucidate. These philosophical views, which McDowell accuses of casting “a gratuitous slur on perceptual ‘common sense,’”38 ought to recognize that secondary qualities, which are not exclusively phenomenal, can only be given with reference to our sensibility and that nevertheless they are independent of any of our particular experiences of them. Instead of espousing the view that the scientiﬁc image of reality tells us what really exists and everything else is projective error of the manifest image onto it, McDowell (like Husserl) effects a kind of reversal, starting with everyday life experience, pertaining essentially to subjectivity, and envisioning natural science as taking up its explanatory role within this context.39 Philosophies that depend uncritically on natural scientiﬁc presuppositions exclude alternative views (e.g., of nature), end up denying lifeworld experience (e.g., representational intentionality), and explain away the lifeworld that is their origin (e.g., secondary qualities). McDowell’s strategy, in each of these cases, is to posit a basis of human experience at something of a lifeworldly level that theoretical perspectives ignore or suppress. In each case, it would seem that theoretical philosophy is at fault and that the best approach is to avoid the terms in which it frames philosophical questions and to return to sane common sense—as a philosophical quietism might insist. My concern, though, is that the ﬁnal unintentional result of this strategy may be to pitch philosophy against natural science as its “enemy.” I say “unintentional” because at various junctures McDowell bears witness personally to his own admiration for the natural sciences, forbidding us from trying to return to Aristotle’s innocence or to discard science’s intellectual inheritance that has raised us above medieval

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superstition. However, avoiding a polarization between common sense and science depends not only on personal goodwill but also on the development of a methodological approach that explores the connection between science and common sense. This methodology would depend on becoming self-reﬂective on the fact that the positing of common sense or the everyday lifeworld at the basis of science is achieved by a philosophical stance that is itself neither common sense, as Natanson suggested, nor science. In other words, it would depend on articulating more concisely the stance from which the claims of M&W are made. What this methodology might consist of and how it might show the connection between common sense and science will become more evident when we consider two other places where McDowell circumscribes the role of science, but in a different way than what have seen up to now, insofar as he does not insist on the lifeworld experiences that lie at the basis of the philosophical theories that repress them.40 One place where McDowell in this manner limits the role of science in philosophy takes place in a discussion of a position adopted by Bernard Williams, who, following Charles Peirce, envisions science as an intrinsically nondistorting method that provides a pure or transparent access to reality, an Archimedean point yielding the world in itself to which other particular representations of the world might be compared. McDowell criticizes Williams’ absolute conception of reality insofar as it cannot explain away the phenomenal perspectives of subjective consciousness and insofar as it must make use of the historically situated concepts of the natural sciences. The use of such concepts undermines the idea of an impersonal, ahistorical Archimedean point, but it need not imply that it is impossible to establish objective truths from within that scientiﬁc framework or that natural science is no better at establishing truths about reality than, say, an animistic worldview. McDowell concludes, “In short: the idea of the Archimedean point, in its Peircean version, appears to constitute a metaphysical underpinning for the tendency of science to arrogate to itself ﬁnal authority over the use of the notion of the world (which is a metaphysical notion, not ex officio a scientiﬁc one); without the idea of the Archimedean point, that tendency stands revealed as nothing but a familiar scientism—which we can recognize as such without that relativistic disrespect for science itself that Williams rightly deplores.”41 McDowell is just right in recognizing how Williams’s claim to an Archimedean perspective for science involves not a scientiﬁc claim but a metaphysical one, and in this his claim parallels Husserl’s insight, “it is not always natural science that speaks when natural scientists are speaking.”42 In typical quietist style, McDowell’s comments

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are critical of natural science, claiming it oversteps its limits (and rightly so); however there is little reﬂection on the perspective from which the statements in the previous citation are made. Presumably, if science is not entitled to assume ﬁnal authority over the use of the notion of world because it is a metaphysical notion, then metaphysics is able to arrogate such ﬁnal authority to itself. That is, the above statements are undertaken from a philosophical perspective, which like science relies on historically situated categories and makes claims that are able nevertheless to be objectively assessed for their validity but, unlike science, seems able to assume not an ahistorical Archimedean point, but a perspective beyond the scientiﬁc framework. From this perspective, philosophy is able to identify the limited context within which scientiﬁc activity is carried on and scientiﬁc objectivity is legitimately established, and it possesses the jurisdiction to determine when science has exceeded its boundaries and ventured illicitly into philosophical waters. Philosophy here assumes a reﬂective metaperspective with relation to science in much the same way that we saw earlier McDowell’s philosophy taking up an attitude beyond commonsense experience, and for that matter beyond the philosophical theories that suppress it, and then placing commonsense experience at the basis of philosophical theory whose divagations can be avoided by paying attention to it. Here I am simply reﬂecting on and making explicit what McDowell himself is doing in his correct opposition to Williams’s “absolute conception of reality.” But one might object that surely allowing philosophy to “arrogate” to itself ﬁnal authority over the notion of world will only accentuate the kind of antiscientiﬁc tendencies that a quietism critical of scientism’s overreaching might encourage. However, our reﬂections here, which involve philosophical reﬂections on philosophy’s own role, put philosophy, in a way, on all fours with the natural sciences. Philosophy’s critique of scientism, that is, a philosophical perspective like Williams’s that is so under the sway of the natural sciences as to overreach itself, is that it is not self-reﬂective on its own moves. However, for a philosophical stance such as McDowell’s and ours (insofar as we here concur with McDowell) to chide scientism in this regard, without self-reﬂection on itself, without as honestly as possible admitting what it itself is engaged in, is to establish a kind of asymmetry between itself and scientism. It would be as if this philosophy were to claim that the scientistic outlook needs to be self-reﬂective, but that it is enough for this philosophy to be simply critical of scientism without being reﬂective on itself. Reestablishing symmetrical demands for self-reﬂectivity in this way reveals a linkage between science and philosophy, though it is questionable whether

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the arbitrative role philosophy seems destined to assume, as McDowell’s and my analyses suggest, could ever escape being perceived as “antiscience,” especially to those who are inclined to scientism. But merely demarcating boundaries on the basis of self-reﬂection on what scientism and philosophy in critical response to scientism are already doing, as I have done here, need not imply a particularly antiscientiﬁc bias. McDowell’s critical view, which merely marks out the limits of a scientiﬁcally based philosophy, need not imply antagonism to science either. My point is rather that without sufficient self-reﬂection on itself, McDowell’s philosophical perspective is more likely to have the unintended result of appearing to make asymmetrical demands on scientiﬁcally based views and so to be at enmity with science. The argument here is that showing the symmetries between philosophy and science can help dispel the appearance of enmity. To appreciate a further way in which a less quietistic approach might reconcile science and philosophy, let me consider one last way in which McDowell circumscribes the role of science. Simon Blackburn defends the idea that ethical values are merely projected on a world that is evacuated of values as opposed to a view, which Blackburn takes to be McDowell’s, that would cite truths on the basis of mysterious quasi-sensory capacities to intuit values. In response, McDowell begins by insisting that one must give an account of how ethical “verdicts and judgments are located in the appropriate region of the space of reasons.”43 McDowell, as we will see in chapter 7, recognizes that the domain of ethics is constituted by distinctive rational requirements, the criticism of which can only be undertaken from within the speciﬁc ethical outlook in which one has been brought up. The virtues with which one has been raised produce a reliable sensitivity to certain sorts of requirements that situations impose and that are open to discussion insofar as one might try to help an interlocutor see certain saliences that imply requirements through “Don’t you see” efforts at persuasion. Contrary to Blackburn, ethics is not a matter of projection on a valueless world, but of subjective activity discerning the responses that objective value-laden features require of it. Here McDowell demarcates a certain “region” of the space of reasons in which certain types of reasons, ethical in character, are appropriate and to which other types are irrelevant (e.g., scientiﬁc ones or, as we will see, those that might seek to establish universal principles binding on all persons). Although McDowell does not make it explicit, clearly it is from a philosophical perspective that this region is set off from others that require correlative types of rationality, even as it was philosophy that demarcated common sense from

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philosophical theory or that situated the natural sciences in relationship to itself. Philosophy then constitutes a kind of metaperspective locating various regions, similar to what Husserl called “regional ontologies,” with their distinctive modes of living and reasoning and objects of investigation, in relationship to each other.44 But how does this recognition that there are various ontological regions diminish the dichotomy between science and philosophy? Husserl, whose Crisis most explicitly distinguished the everyday lifeworld from the realms of science and philosophy, also and paradoxically, recognized the continuity between them all. For Husserl, each of these domains represents a certain “attitude”45—that is, a mode of being, living, thinking, and acting, with correlative ways of knowing and standards of evidence—toward the world and experience that a subject might take up. Husserl asserts, “It is precisely the result of inquiry with the epoché—a strange but self-evident result, which can be ultimately clariﬁed only through our present reﬂection—that the natural, objective world-life is only a particular mode of the transcendental life which forever constitutes46 the world [but] in such a way that transcendental subjectivity, while living on in this mode, has not yet become conscious of the constituting horizons.”47 It is the same subject that takes up different approaches to experience when it lives head-on in everyday life, understanding others and taking in intelligible empirical content (without being aware of the problems philosophy believes to be bound up with such activities); when it reﬂects on (and sometimes distorts or corrects distortions of) everyday life; when it adopts the attitude of the natural sciences and explains everyday experiences of secondary qualities; and when it intuits the ethical responses appropriate to situations and undertakes the style of reﬂection on those intuitions that is distinctive of ethics. In the end, the one ﬁnal deployment of subjective life is that of philosophy itself, the particular attitude at work in these reﬂections right now, the deployment of subjective life that becomes reﬂectively conscious of the subject’s life itself, which lives anonymously, present but unreﬂected on, within these other deployments. Science, then, is not just an activity whose inﬂuence on an uncritical philosophy might make possible an overweening scientism that might end up denying or distorting commonsense experience—although that possibility is there—but it is also one stance toward experience that subjectivity can undertake. Furthermore, this positioning of science on a continuum with other possible deployments, such as that of common sense or philosophy, as well as the entire continuum itself, is revealed by the self-reﬂective transcendental phenomenology being

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recommended here. The same transcendental subject operative in different ways within science and commonsense is also at work in philosophy, in which it makes itself explicit, and a philosophical quietism that tends to deemphasize its own philosophical accomplishment is more likely to overlook the connections transcendental phenomenology establishes.48 McDowell verges on the recognition of these possibilities for transcendental subjectivity when he contrasts the kinds of intelligibility characterizing the logical space of reasons and the logical realm of law (natural science), but his focus is on the kind of intelligibility “we ﬁnd in something when we place it in relation to other occupants”49 of these different logical spaces. Hence, the human being in the space of reasons appears free and spontaneous and in the realm of law causally determined, and it could be said that the within second nature, the human being appears in a different way, one more compatible with the space of reasons. McDowell’s interest, though, is how an object (including the human subject) would appear in these realms, as opposed to the underlying subjective attitudes in the light of which whatever is correlative to such attitudes appears the way it does. Again, a self-reﬂective turn toward the subjective activities through which objects are given, typical of phenomenological reﬂection, leading back ultimately to the subjective attitude through which one becomes aware of subjective attitudes in general, would reveal a continuity between different ontological regions, as domains within which a single subjectivity assumes its different attitudes, domains whose differences and autonomy need to be preserved and protected. In a way this chapter has not objected so much to McDowell’s philosophical conclusions, but it takes issue with his philosophical methodology and ultimately his philosophy of what philosophy is. It has pressed for greater self-reﬂective clarity about the philosophical framework within which he attributes knowledge to the everyday perceiver who knows without needing an external scorekeeper. It has disputed his view of philosophy if it be taken to entail that philosophical work is ﬁnished when one makes manifest commonsense experience and thereby dispenses with the labyrinths into which constructivist philosophy misleads us, since the very self-critical character of philosophy returning us to that experience requires more. Finally, it has argued that increased self-reﬂectivity about McDowell’s own philosophical approach, a kind of self-reﬂectivity to which philosophical quietism is not inclined, would put science, philosophy, and common sense in a broader framework that would show their continuities in addition to the differences that McDowell’s critical defense of common sense makes abundantly clear.

CHAPTER 6

self-reflectivity, radical reflection, and consciousness Brandom’s Philosophy of Philosophy

At numerous points in the preceding chapters, I have remarked on the importance of Robert Brandom’s theoretical stance (his self-reﬂective approach to discourse) and I have indicated how his approach to philosophy (his philosophy of philosophy) underpins his opposition to John McDowell in their whole debate on perception and his views on intersubjectivity. At this point, after having discussed McDowell’s philosophy of philosophy, which we found to be particularly important for his critique of Brandom’s internalization of entitlements, it is appropriate to turn our attention to Brandom’s philosophy of philosophy as a topic in its own right. Paradoxically, Brandom’s emphasis on self-reﬂectivity is precisely what I found shortchanged in McDowell’s philosophy of philosophy; his quietism, as if Brandom’s MIE represents a counterpole to McDowell’s M&W. According to Brandom’s essay “Reason, Expression, and the Philosophic Enterprise,” he believes it is one of philosophy’s “deﬁning obligations”1 to provide concepts that make explicit aspects of rationality and normativity in general and, consequently, the philosophy of philosophy itself. This chapter will begin by examining the self-reﬂectivity involved in MIE. Then, following Thorsten Gubatz’s critique of Brandom’s appropriation of Martin Heidegger, which emphasizes the domain of Zuhandensein (readiness-to-hand, things taken pragmatically) as explaining our pragmatic relation to the world whose stimuli evoke our socially formed type responses, I will show how Heidegger’s categories depend on phenomenological insight rather than being merely socially developed responses to stimuli. I will then reﬂect on the status of Brandom’s own claims in MIE and argue that they are to be characterized as ultimate and eidetic, or essential, in Edmund Husserl’s sense of the term. In other words, reﬂection on these claims will show them to possess the kind of ultimacy and accessibility to phenomenological evidence and insight that characterizes Heidegger’s account of Dasein (the

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being-there of the human being) and fundamental ontology as well as the ultimate, eidetic plane of Husserlian transcendental intersubjectivity. In the second section of this chapter, taking a cue from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of radical reﬂection—that is, “reﬂection-on-an-unreﬂective-experience”2—and appreciating the transformation that philosophical reﬂection brings with it in the spectacle of the world, I will demonstrate that Brandom does a better job of considering this unreﬂected-on experience not in MIE but rather in his earlier writings on Heidegger, particularly his discussion of Zuhandensein. However, I believe that his criticisms of the domain of Zuhandensein, for example, its seemingly nonlinguistic nature, do not apply to the Husserlian lifeworld. I will also illustrate that Brandom’s thoughtexperimental distinctions (e.g., between semantic and logical beings) would not have drawn his critics’ ﬁre if he had presented the lifeworld with which the various capacities he separates out in his thought experiments are already thoroughly intermingled. By specifying the levels of philosophical reﬂection and the unreﬂected on from which it emerges, I will reconstruct a possible response to the criticism of his view of “objective knowledge” developed by Cristina Lafont, whose view of Brandom’s phenomenalism converges with McDowell’s objection that he internalizes entitlements and whose point has merit in referring to a layer of experience that Brandom’s theory leaves behind. In this chapter, then, I work at both extremes, taking phenomenological stock of the status of the concepts of Brandom’s philosophy of philosophy and also pointing to the need for him to situate his philosophy with reference to the lifeworld, the unreﬂected on, from which it emerges. Finally, I will consider whether there is room to include phenomenological methods and themes, such as the domain of consciousness, within Brandom’s predominantly linguistic approach. One caveat: I am not in this chapter trying to settle the question of whether human life is mainly theoretical or practical, but rather I am trying to locate Brandom’s highly self-reﬂective philosophy in relation to the lifeworld from which it emerges. Such an examination resembles Husserl’s effort to root logic and Galilean science in the lifeworld they presuppose, Merleau-Ponty’s return to the foundational role of perception, and even McDowell’s endeavor to rehabilitate the commonsense origins that philosophical theory has forgotten.

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1. self-reflectivity: ultimacy and essentiality Brandom conceives MIE as a normative pragmatics that describes how attitudes (attributing, undertaking) institute normative statuses (e.g., commitments and entitlements) in such a way that such statuses are not just there but depend on our activities, that is, our attitudes, in attributing them to others (though our attributing or not attributing must be constrained by the behaviors of the one to whom we attribute statuses exhibits) or undertaking them ourselves. Similarly the states we are in (e.g., a commitment expressible in an assertion), the attitudes we or others adopt (e.g., acknowledging my commitment or attributing one to another), or the performances we undertake (e.g., driving to the airport) can be given expression in contentful propositions. However, we do not confer propositional content on these states, attitudes, and peformances in isolation but are able to do so only as participants in often unrecognized social practices that have trained us to confer such propositional contents when the appropriate behaviors are exhibited. Following this trajectory of becoming self-aware of one’s implicit activity and the often implicit practices making such activity possible, one cannot rest content as a scorekeeper with simply attributing the statuses or undertaking the attitudes that a social practice deﬁnes, but one must become self-reﬂectively aware, as if an exterior viewpoint emerged about the activity in which one was previously immersed, about what is involved generally in scorekeeping itself, and about which resources are needed to describe it. Paradoxically, Brandom’s account of the scorekeeping activity that involves statuses and attitudes will itself have to be conveyed through the commitments, entitlements, statuses, and attitudes that make up MIE. In other words, within the language game of giving and asking for reasons, one makes explicit, reﬂectively, the very scorekeeping process one has been engaged in before it was made explicit. In addition, by explicating in particular the inferential dimensions of our concept-using capacities, philosophy makes explicit what is implicit in making anything explicit at all, since any act of making something explicit must rely on concepts.3 Brandom acknowledges that scorekeeping goes on in other specialized disciplines and even regarding substantive commitments implicit in concepts deployed throughout the culture. Membrane physiologists, for instance, unpack and criticize each other’s implicit inferential commitments in concepts such as those dealing with the lipid soluble, but philosophical reﬂection

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makes explicit the structure of commitments, entitlements, responsibilities, and reason-giving processes that such disciplines presuppose. Hence, by making explicit the discursive practices implicit in other disciplines, philosophy does for them what MIE does for the discursive practice of philosophy itself, namely, it makes explicit a discursive structure already there but not yet explicit. When MIE makes explicit the discursive practice in which it— and philosophy in general—is involved, it sets up a pattern that philosophy can follow with regard to other disciplines, revealing the discursive structures they already make use of.4 This reﬂective capacity to detect and make a kind of rationality explicit in an activity in which it had been implicit enables Brandom to criticize those who could be taken to be enemies of rationality. For instance, Brandom points out against the opponents of logocentrism that the artists and writers whom these opponents admire actually depend on prosaic uses of inferential networks of concepts, whose patterns poets can creatively alter to create novel but no less inferentially connected arrangements (if they are to make sense at all) and whose inferential relations are a principal theme of philosophy itself. Similarly, to those who might think that all reason giving can be reduced to and replaced by reliable processes of belief formation, Brandom suggests that even to attribute reliability to another (e.g., the other reliably distinguishes chicken sexes), in conjunction with some claim the reliable person makes (this reliable identiﬁer claims that this chicken is male), is already part of an inference aimed at a conclusion (the chicken is male). The very attribution of reliability, into which extreme reliabilists hope to absorb all reason-giving processes, itself already pertains to an inferential process aimed at a conclusion. Both postmodern skeptics and extreme reliabilists, then, neglect the inferential connections of concepts that philosophy makes explicit, implying that even before we recognize it, we are more rational than rationality’s detractors might recognize. This recognition of an implicit rationality ﬁts with Brandom’s overall pragmatism according to which we implicitly master the proprieties of a practice without having to ﬁrst appeal explicitly to some prior grasp of principles.5 Brandom’s self-reﬂectivity also enables him to resolve philosophical conﬂicts, such as the division between naturalists (who wish to explain social processes as the products of objective, causally controlled facts) and nonnaturalists (who think that such processes must be explained as normgoverned practices). Brandom refuses to consider the difference between these realms, which are traditionally understood to be those of nature and

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of freedom, in the ways that they have usually been treated, namely, as matters of objective, ontological differences. Instead, he asserts that we depend on classiﬁcation schemes when we treat human beings as mere objects who behave according to the laws of cause and effect or as subjects who act freely in accord with social norms. Such different ways of classifying, which depend on distinctive inferential networks, pertain themselves to the norm-governed socially inherited languages on which the nonnaturalists focus. As a result, when one reduces social processes to objective, causally controlled facts, one classiﬁes human beings in accord with the normatively governed inferential system of natural science. Consequently, the distinction between “objective” and “social scientiﬁc” is itself a meta-level conceptual distinction that differentiates entire explanatory and inferential networks from each other, but insofar as it itself is conceptual in character, it involves observing the norms that govern the use of concepts. Reﬂection on the different socially developed and inherited classiﬁcation systems thus leads us to recognize that “the social/objective distinction is social rather than objective.”6 These classiﬁcation differences, involving communally shaped ways of responding to the same behavior, determine whether we will view another as engaging in social practices with us, and hence as being bound by norms, or whether we will adopt the attitude we take up toward the things we causally manipulate—an attitude typical of the social practices that constitute the natural sciences.7 Although Brandom’s method here is reﬂective and counters naturalistic reductionism by showing that even the naturalist is bound by socially shaped classiﬁcation norms, as is the nonreductionist approach to human behavior, the fact that he rejects ontological differentiation and instead relies on socially shaped manners of appropriately treating things has come under ﬁre from Thorsten Gubatz in a perceptive essay titled “Ein Philosoph namens Brandegger: Ontologische Differenzen zwischen Heidegger und Heidegger in Robert Brandoms Interpretation” (A philosopher by the name of Brandom: Ontological differences between Heidegger and Heidegger in Robert Brandom’s interpretation). The essay criticizes Brandom’s “Heidegger’s Categories in Sein und Zeit,” in which Brandom attempts to show how the category of the “social” is most basic for Heidegger in Division 1 of Being and Time. Gubatz singles out three areas in which Brandom and Heidegger differ: whether their starting points are tokens or types; whether truth is to be found through phenomenological insight or causal explanation; and whether their overall approaches are that of a fundamental ontology or transcendental pragmatics. Regarding the ﬁrst difference, for Brandom, the

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ascribing of intentional states, for example, depends on the presence of a token of a stimulus type, which evokes a response in terms of a token of a reaction type with the identiﬁcation of types and coordination of stimulus types with reaction types resulting from the “differential responsive dispositions” with which societies equip their members. We begin with tokens, but the move to types depends on the social training we have received to identify tokens as instances of types. Thus, when stimulated by the appearance of a cat pursuing a mouse, I respond (react) with the appropriate attribution of intentionality to the cat (i.e., “The cat is intending to capture the mouse”) and this attribution depends on typical identiﬁcations (“cat” and “mouse”) and typical reactions (to utter typically such a statement in the presence of such objects)—all this typicality depending on my society having outﬁtted me with the dispositions to exhibit token behaviors (of the appropriate type) in the presence of token objects (also characterizable in typical terms). As a consequence of this explanatory model in terms of stimulus-reaction tokens, Brandom makes it possible that ascriptions of intentional states can be causally explained. Heidegger, however, does not follow this empirical approach, according to which observable tokens elicit tokens of a socially learned reaction type. Rather Heidegger begins with the structure of Dasein, which is disclosed through the intuitive grasp of phenomenological evidence, and he then goes on to constitute various types of intentionality—Sorge, Fürsorge, or Besorgen—all derived from the fundamental type of Being-in-the-World, which itself can then be individuated in tokens. Ontological presentation, consequently, grasps ﬁrst the types and then is able to move to tokens, whereas Brandom’s approach proceeds from empirical tokens to the socially shaped types they evoke.8 This difference between the type-token relationship reﬂects wider methodological differences between Brandom and Heidegger. Brandom’s concept of truth adopts a discursive approach, such as what one might adopt in reaction to the skeptic’s query about how we know that we can ascribe intentionality to another. A response to this question would consist of arguing that one is permitted to ascribe intentionality as an effective causal explanation of the other’s observable behavior. Heidegger’s notion of truth, by contrast, depends on an a priori fundament that is established through the phenomenological having of evidence regarding Dasein, through which other human beings as possessors of intentionality have been revealed, discovered, and deﬁned in their being. As far as Heidegger’s and Brandom’s overall approaches are concerned (the third area of difference), Heidegger’s fundamental ontological

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approach cannot resolve problems that are legitimately discussed on the ontic level—such as whether an individual being is human or a manikin—the level at which Gubatz takes Brandom’s approach to function. Instead of establishing the kind of being Dasein is, particularly with regard to its intentional character, Brandom begins with a being whose ontological status is not ﬁrst established but whose act-tokens are able to be given an empirical explanation by attributing intentionality to them. As Gubatz summarizes it, “Instead of leading back all ontological and epistemological categories ontologically to their evident a priori fundament, Brandom delivers only an explanation model (Erklärungsmodell), which grounds itself transcendentally in the kind of being of Dasein possesses, without having thematized that fundament.”9 Brandom, while recognizing that Dasein is ontologically fundamental, claims that he, as a pragmatist, will take the criterial distinctions between ontological categories to be social in nature, as he did in the previously mentioned distinction between the traditional categories of freedom and nature. He immediately takes up the ontological category of Zuhandensein, whose account of how we take or treat things practically requires that such interpretationsbe public performances according with social practices, that such performances are individuated as responses, and that the responsive dispositions that constitute social practices appear systematically interrelated with each other. Although one’s ﬁrst encounter with the world involves this nonCartesian, practical manner of having socially learned to respond to objects appropriately, Brandom acknowledges that we adopt a special stance when we relate to things as present-at-hand (vorhanden) and author assertions and offer justiﬁcations about them, engaging in the kind of theorizing typical of MIE. He construes the realm of Vorhandensein (approaching things as theoretical, a-practical objects) as no less social in nature than that of Zuhandensein, and its assertions, though their justiﬁability does not answer to practical needs, nevertheless constitute equipment for communicating and a higher level of responsive recognition and performance type in regard to signiﬁcations. Habermas correctly observes that whereas for Heidegger Vorhandensein is pejoratively linked to objectivism, Brandom, after acknowledging the prepredicative practical engagements of the lifeworld, recognizes the importance of propositional speech and discursive practices and thereby “liberates Heidegger’s equipment analysis from its culture-critical schmalz.”10 There is a difficulty, though, in that, as Gubatz shows, the categories of Heidegger’s ontological framework (e.g., Dasein, Sorge) are only knowable through phenomenology, which aims “to let that which shows itself be

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seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself,”11 and what shows itself is “the Being of entities, its meaning, its modiﬁcations and derivatives.”12 In other words, whereas the objects within the framework of Zuhandensein are taken as equipment to which one practically responds (e.g., taking a hammer to pound nails) in accord with socially constituted categories and responsive dispositions, for Heidegger the framework of Zuhandensein, which consists of this pragmatic way of relating to the world, is itself established through phenomenological insight into Dasein and its possibilities. The category of Zuhandensein, then, would not itself be evoked by an object eliciting the application of socially learned types or dispositions to respond to tools. As a category, it is not itself determined in the same way that the classiﬁcations that fall under its purview are. To Heidegger’s credit, he employs the unique theoretical stance of phenomenology that discovers ontological structures of Dasein (irreducible to the kinds of objects usually falling under Vorhandensein, since Dasein is not reducible to a thing or a substance, as the history of philosophy has often treated it). Zuhandensein, as one of the structures of Dasein, however, concerns the antisubjectivist, socially determined, nontheoretical, and pragmatically immediately responsive manner in which Dasein relates to the world before it ever theorizes about it. Paradoxically, Heidegger uses philosophical theorizing of the phenomenological sort to spell out a pretheoretical, commonsense way of relating to the world that does not itself depend on phenomenological insight—and one is reminded of the scorekeeping theoretical stance McDowell depends on to indirectly vindicate a primordial way of knowing that does not depend on scorekeeping itself. However, it is as if Brandom is so interested in the pragmatic dimensions that Heidegger’s ontological categories provide for that he neglects that those categories themselves are established in a different way than the classiﬁcations falling under their scope.13 The ontological, phenomenologically developed domain of Vorhandensein, in which assertions appear as prominent, includes the responsibility to justify (without necessarily answering to practical needs) and defend claims and therefore so resembles the space of reasons presented in MIE. However, Brandom, following Heidegger, suggests that assertions, too, are equipment. In his own terms, he suggests that assertions require responding differentially, but in this case, to other signiﬁcations in accord with socially approved patterns of inference. While the rules of discourse are socially inherited and administered through social relationships, as Brandom holds, it would seem to me that more is needed to differentiate the social-typical

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responses elicited by tools in the domain of Zuhandensein, from assertional responses to signiﬁcations in Vorhandensein. The very idea of a deliberate scorekeeper who is not to take whatever is proposed for granted and who is capable of freely withholding endorsement while critically examining the commitments and entitlements presented by an interlocutor leaves room for a free evaluation of the (other’s) signiﬁcations that we respond to in the way that our automatic, undeliberated responses to hammers (e.g., pounding) or chairs (sitting) do not. Perhaps I might take it as a conﬁrmation of my point that Brandom, in MIE, eleven years after his Heidegger essay, conﬁnes “differential responsive dispositions” to the perceptual response to stimuli that we share with parrots and acknowledges that we, unlike parrots, can freely (but in accord with inferential norms) follow up on the inferences entailed by noninferential reports. In Brandom’s later work, space-of-reason responsiveness would appear to be far different from its immediate perceptual or pragmatic counterparts. Furthermore, in that work, it is important to recall that norms do not govern us after the fashion of a causal regularism because, on the contrary, a norm’s power over us depends on our endorsement of it and normative status depends on our attitudes toward it, though what is correct according to that rule, once endorsed, is not up to us. Of course, assertions based on the phenomenological evidences to which Gubatz refers, no less than the careful giving and taking of reasons in the space of reasons according to the Brandom of MIE, also ought not to be taken to be the fruit of crude social-behaviorist determinisms.14 Just as Brandom seems to overlook the phenomenological, ontological basis through which Heidegger attributes to us a ready-to-hand relation to the world in which objects as tools immediately evoke the appropriate socially shaped type responses, so I will argue that it is possible to become reﬂectively clearer about the status of Brandom’s claims about the scorekeeping model of discursive practice, which MIE develops. I will argue that reﬂection on these claims will show them to possess the kind of ultimacy and accessibility to phenomenological evidence and insight that characterize Heidegger’s account of Dasein and fundamental ontology. To establish ﬁrst of all that the scorekeeping model possesses a kind of ultimacy, much like Dasein, which also provides a kind of ultimate framework, insofar as all modes of relating to the world are relative to it, I will begin with Kevin Scharp’s assessment of the superiority of Brandom’s account of meaning over Habermas’s, insofar as Brandom provides for meaning being understandable across different perspectives. Brandom believes that a community’s

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norms can determine its members to associate one particular content with one expression and not another, even though an external interpreter can see how the contents attached to any expression always outrun the dispositions of community members to apply that expression. This external interpreter can understand what an expression means to community members while at the same time, from her perspective, seeing meaning implications that community members cannot see—all as part of a process of keeping double books, as Brandom describes it. Scharp insists that this solution depends on I-Thou sociality, on someone using an expression being considered from the viewpoint of an external interpreter. Habermas, Scharp suggests, could embrace Brandom’s correct solution about how interpersonal understanding is possible given that the inferential commitments of different interlocutors never completely coincide, but he would have to forsake his own I-We model of sociality. This would be problematic for Habermas, for whom there is a globally privileged position—namely, the consensus at which the members of a community under ideal conditions would arrive—in contrast to Brandom, for whom I-Thou sociality implies that no one perspective is globally privileged when it comes to distinguishing what is taken to be correct from what is not correct (as we have seen, communities for Brandom can be wrong).15 It would be even more difficult for Habermas to abandon his I-We model of sociality, since that would entail abandoning his moral theory insofar as it privileges a moral claim (incapable of being mistaken) as long as all rational agents under the conditions of the ideal speech situation would endorse it. We will discuss this view of Habermas’s moral theory in the next chapter, but here it suffices simply to notice that contrary to Scharp Brandom believes that his I-Thou approach to sociality would be compatible with Habermas’s moral theory.16 At this point, Scharp argues that Brandom’s theory itself would not be able to claim any privilege, since its I-Thou sociality would require that the distinction between being taken to be correct and actually being correct would have to apply to the theory itself. Brandom’s theory, then, by its own standards, must be susceptible to scorekeeping. Scharp concludes, “Thus the conditions for discursive practice according to Brandom’s theory are not universal according to the standards of his own theory.”17 Scharp further justiﬁes this claim by pointing to Brandom’s pragmatic justiﬁcation for his theory in the Preface to MIE in which he claims only that his account of discursive practice yields a distinctive understanding and explanatory power rather than “that one is somehow rationally obliged to talk this way.”18

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But let us imagine the kind of scenario that Scharp suggests, namely, that someone would challenge Brandom’s theory about discursive practice. Wouldn’t that critic have to offer some commitment countering one of Brandom’s claims or conclusions and some entitlement for that commitment that the critic would endorse but that would also appeal to interlocutors, including Brandom, for either endorsement or reasoned opposition? Wouldn’t that critic’s commitment depend on an inferentially articulated network of concepts? In brief, this critic would presuppose precisely the very structures of discursive practice provided by Brandom’s account, which she is criticizing. Wouldn’t a perfectly good argumentative strategy be to invite the critic to reﬂect on what she presupposes as she criticizes Brandom’s account of discursive practice? Wouldn’t imputing the possibility to Brandom’s account of discursive practice that it might take itself to be true, when in fact it is not, be equivalent to ascribing a feature that that account itself attributes to every statement or theory appearing within the space of reasons—thereby proving the rightness of the account? Consequently, it would seem to be impossible to place Brandom’s account of discursive practice in question apart from a discursive context, which would rely precisely on the presuppositions that the account articulates. Brandom’s account of discursive practice, then, shares the kind of ultimacy that Karl-Otto Apel attributes to the core statements of Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action (e.g., regarding the four types of validity claims, the ideal of the redeemability of validity claims, the primacy of communicative rationality over strategic rationality) insofar as they describe the conditions necessary for every conceivable testing of hypotheses. Even a process of falsiﬁcation, that is, even a process that tried to falsify the core statements, would presuppose the context of discourse that the core statements describe: “In summary, one could say that the discourse principle, which includes everything pertaining to validity claims and their redemption, is a transcendental-pragmatic presupposition of the falsiﬁcation principle. The discourse principle can possibly be explicated in a mistaken or incomplete fashion, as is trivially true of every theory or statement subject to human ﬁnitude. But as a transcendental-pragmatic condition for the meaning of the falsiﬁcation principle, and hence as a condition for the principle of fallibilism as well, it cannot be empirically testable, falsiﬁable, or fallible.”19 One might well rebel against Apel’s unfashionable claim to “infallibilism” here and immediately imagine oneself or another as a scorekeeper ferreting out some mistake that might deal a deathblow to Brandom’s account

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of discourse, depriving it of any such imputed infallibilism. However, once again the very structure whose features he makes explicit would have already been implicit in this imagined scenario of rebellion. For Apel, the ultimacy of the core statements that even processes of falsiﬁcation presuppose depends on those core statements belonging to the language game of philosophical argumentation, which cannot be thought of as just one contingent language game among innumerable others. Apel observes, “And as far as philosophical discourses are supposed to make sense at all, the participants must also always in principle impute that, only in this language game, all claims to validity that in other language games may be exposed as debatable, can be redeemed or refuted in a sense that is not a conventional one. In short, philosophers must honor the fact that the language game of argumentative discourse is foundational, since it is unsurpassable, or otherwise risk a performative contradiction.”20 Despite Brandom’s recognition of different reﬂective levels and his willingness to distinguish between conceptually and empirically based claims and inferences, one could mistakenly reduce his claims in MIE to the same status as all other kinds of claims insofar as MIE presents all claims univocally, namely, as conceptually articulated commitments, standing in need of entitlement, and awaiting endorsement. Scharp is willing to submit to scorekeeping Brandom’s claims about the structure of scorekeeping, as if they were the same as every other kind of claim on which we keep score, that is, empirical perceptual claims or even philosophical claims, for example, like those in the Brandom-McDowell debate about what perception consists of. But these claims about the conditions under which scorekeeping itself must be conducted are not like those other claims because they, unlike the others, would be presupposed even as one keeps score on them. Consequently, Scharp in the end reduces the language game of philosophical discourse to one among others in just the way that Apel warns against. Brandom’s attempt to justify his theory of discourse on the basis of its pragmatic beneﬁts (e.g., understanding and explanatory power), as itself a justiﬁcatory argument, already presupposes the structures the theory articulates. This pragmatic justiﬁcation of his own theory, neglecting the ultimacy and inescapability of the discursive framework he explains and presupposes even in giving this justiﬁcation, constitutes an avoidance of self-reﬂection that is rather untypical for Brandom. Moreover, Brandom and Scharp seem unwilling to acknowledge the ultimacy of the claims of MIE for semi-ethical reasons, since they are both hesitant about attributing any privileged position to Brandom’s view or about

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obliging one to embrace the theory. Simply and honestly making explicit one’s implicit presuppositions, though, including recognizing the status of the claims through which those presuppositions are laid out, need not be coercive. There is something paradoxical about the fact that this account of the normative discursive structure on an ultimate plane becomes the means for mandating precisely an I-Thou, perspectival structure of discourse that privileges no position. However, recognizing the ultimate character of what is stated in the ultimate claims about the character of discourse need not imperil the fact that these claims in turn affirm that lower-level claims are always contingent, not privileged, and open to adjudication. On the contrary, the former places all its ultimate weight behind the latter.21 Of course, Scharp could respond that such a way of reading Brandom would place any of his descriptions of the structure of discourse beyond question, but that isn’t implied here. The argument here simply suggests that the level on which Brandom’s work is pitched is what gives it its ultimacy. Even if one were to decide to revise one or another of Brandom’s descriptions, the discursive level would be presupposed by such revision. Scharp’s criticism, however, does not address any speciﬁc element of Brandom’s analysis, but suggests that merely for Brandom’s system to be kept score on at all would deprivilege it of its universality. Such a criticism, it seems to me, neglects how Brandom’s work is situated on a kind of ultimate level and how the structures it articulates, none of which in particular seems in question here, would be presupposed even by someone who would seek to keep score of it. In this discussion of an ultimate level, one is reminded of the discussion in the previous chapter on how McDowell, in demarcating the boundaries between science, philosophy, common sense, and ethics was actually involved in spelling out the limits and methods of different regional ontologies—all of which would have to be established relative to the ultimate perspective of a transcendental self or ego, who would grasp the essential, distinguishing features of each area and who itself would be implicitly active in all these areas. Such an approach, focused on an individualized transcendental ego, would seem totally foreign, though, to Brandom’s outlook that makes social relationships focal. On the one hand, however, Brandom’s thought converges with the idea of the transcendental ego insofar as it is with reference to my own scorekeeper perspective that I must refuse to accept unquestioningly pregiven opinions and, that I, as absolutely self-responsible, must shape myself according to the ultimate evidences I have produced, indeed, that I am even responsible for endorsing Brandom’s account of discursive practice (whose

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tenets I presuppose in adopting my scorekeeping attitude in the ﬁrst place). On the other hand, the later Husserl for his part seemed to recognize the importance of transcendental intersubjectivity, the transcendental ego in concert with all other egos, as the context within which all claims to truth surface and are adjudicated. Perhaps the notion of transcendental intersubjectivity affords a point within Husserl’s thought that might converge with Brandom’s account of discursive practice. These convergences will be considered in our ﬁnal chapter. For now, though, the suggestion is that the discursive practice that Brandom explains is located on an ultimate plane akin to that of Husserlian transcendental subjectivity and intersubjectivity—they form the background presupposed by all other rational investigations. But not only does discourse, in Brandom’s analysis, assume a level of ultimacy (as, by the way, Dasein also occupies for Heidegger), but Brandom’s understanding of the structural features of discourse also seems to rely on the kind of phenomenological insight, that is, that letting what is being seen show itself from itself, through which Heidegger grasped the structure of Dasein and its modes of relating to the world. Husserl, who introduced this kind of insight, systematized it via his method of “free variation,” in which the investigator—in an effort to determine the essential, or eidetic, features of a “cube,” for instance—would vary the features of a cube (e.g., color, shape, lengths of sides, number of sides) in order ﬁnally to arrive at an insight into those structural features that, if absent, would make it impossible for the object to be a cube. One could interpret Brandom as implicitly employing this Husserlian method of free variation in the following way: He seeks to ﬁnd a structure of discursive practice across a multiplicity of discourses (e.g., membrane physiologists discussing lipid soluble, philosophers pursuing their preoccupying themes, or reliabilists who seek to replace reasons with reliable processes). On the basis of considering these possibilities of discourse, he discovers the essential structures of discursive practice laid out in MIE (e.g., commitment, entitlement, endorsement, inferentially articulated concepts, perspectival adjudication), and in the end it becomes difficult to imagine how one might have a discourse without these features being in place.22 The discussion of the ultimacy of Brandom’s treatment of discourse resembles this method of eidetic variation in that we consider counterpossibilities, as in the case of Apel entertaining the fallibilist perspective that would deny any inescapable presuppositions or of my entertaining Scharp’s keeping score on Brandom’s scorekeeping structure and supposedly undermining its universality. In and across the variety of these counterpossibilities,

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however, we ﬁnd the ultimate structure “surviving,” as the eidos survives across its variations. There is also a sense in which the eidos of discursive structure emerges into visibility out of a particular embodiment of it, for example, in the case of the challenges from fallibilism and Scharp, just as the eidos “cube” would emerge from consideration of a particular cube. The parallel to eidetic analysis breaks down, though, insofar as it is not as though the counterpossibilities that Scharp and the fallibilist represent are considered as part of a process in which I am varying the idea of discourse across a variety of exempliﬁcations of it, trying to determine which properties necessarily belong to it and which do not. Such a variation would correspond to imaginatively changing the color (e.g., from blue to red) of the cube and then seeing whether the eidos of “cube” persists intact across the change—which it does, thereby indicating that the color blue is not an essential feature of being a cube. Scharp and the fallibilist seem more engaged in projects of showing how the claims about discourse made by Brandom and Apel are revisable claims like any others, but the persistence of the discursive structure as the inescapable, looming background of their very projects proves its distinctiveness and its ultimacy in that it is not revisable as other structures might be insofar as it is the condition of the possibility of revisability. The establishment of the ultimacy of the discourse is a different kind of task than showing what the essential structures of discourse are. Further evidence that Brandom is implicitly relying on phenomenological insight, of the kind Husserl requires to grasp eidetic features or Heidegger insists on to apprehend Dasein, can be found in his own reﬂections on his own methodology. For example, after discussing the normative pragmatics and inferential semantics that are operative in several domains of action and language outside of discourse, he turns his attention to “a particular model of language use: the deontic scorekeeping model of discursive practice.”23 He characterizes his own approach as unusual, but aimed at giving an account of this speciﬁc realm: “This methodological approach invites an unusual enterprise: demolishing Neurath’s boat at sea. The challenge is to see how much of ordinary discursive practice one can detach and throw overboard without sinking the vessel—that is, without so denuding it as to render it unrecognizable as a discursive practice, one in which one can make claims, say how things are, make something explicit, assess reasons for what one says and does. The stripped-down skeleton of practices that survives as necessary to remain aﬂoat as minimally discursive is unlike our own in many important ways.”24 On the one hand, the goal is not to reproduce actual discursive

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practice but to produce an “artiﬁcial idealization of it.”25 On the other, Brandom is concerned about leaving too much out, which also becomes evident when he faces a challenge from Daniel Laurier who thinks that his description of deontic scorekeeping prior to the ascription of attitudes is impossible, since the scorekeeper would have to be able to distinguish the commitments she acknowledges from those she would attribute to herself, if error is to be possible, and so she would have to be aware of attitudes of acknowledging and attributing. Brandom asks, without answering his question, “Have we at this point thrown overboard what turns out to be an absolutely essential component of Neurath’s boat and left ourselves with nothing that deserves to count as a discursive (that is, concept-using) practice?”26 Brandom’s comments here make it plausible to interpret his project along phenomenological lines, namely, that he is trying to determine what are the essential features pertinent to an idealized region of being on an ultimate plane, particularly that of discursive practice. To see ﬁnally how the distinctive claims (commitments) about discursive structure expressed in MIE have both an eidetic and an ultimate character, let us consider how a scorekeeper evaluating such claims experiences these kinds of claims by contrast to the others that we have seen Brandom discussing. These claims about discursive structure themselves do not appear as noninferential propositions evoked by perceptual stimulation, although one could keep score on such sentences in accord with the structure of scorekeeping Brandom presents. Nor do the claims about the structure of discourse in MIE invite the kind of immediate pragmatic responses that tools, to which one has been socially trained to respond, elicit. Nor do they appear as empirical claims regarding the presence of whales or lipid soluble, as if there were some empirical evidence one might consult before endorsing them, though such empirical claims can also be kept track of on the basis of the scorekeeping structure. The claims of MIE do resemble to a greater degree those to be found in the earlier presented, less empirical and more conceptual discussions between Brandom and McDowell about what perception consists of or how intelligible empirical content is possible. The claims about the structure of discourse resemble these earlier claims insofar as they all seem to be eidetic in nature. The claims about discursive structure, however, seem to deal with the more abstract framework within which those earlier discussions were carried on and hence pertain to a different level than the discussions on perception. The statements about the structure of discourse occupy, then, an ultimate level within a system of eidetic disciplines because they make

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explicit the discursive framework within which the discussion and determination of other eidetic issues (e.g., what is perception or intelligible content) are considered. In conclusion, with regard to the commitments of MIE about discourse, a scorekeeper is faced with the prospect of endorsing claims much like Heidegger’s claims about Dasein and fundamental ontology, depending on phenomenological insight into eidos and concerned with whether what shows itself, here the structure of discursive practice itself, lets itself be seen “from itself in the very way in which its shows itself from itself.”27 The eidetic question facing a scorekeeper, then, is whether a discourse, whose structure is ultimate in that any discussion would make use of it, would be imaginable without the features Brandom thinks ought to be in place.28 In showing that the claims of MIE about the structure of discourse are of an ultimate and eidetic nature, I have not undermined in any way Brandom’s account of discursive practice. The focus has been on inquiring into the status of those claims. However, if the language game of discursive practice constitutes a distinctive, ultimate ontological region, carved out from a broader context of language uses and actions, a question arises that cannot be responsibly neglected: what is its relationship to other ontological regions, particularly the pretheoretical regions, such as the common sense that is McDowell’s central focus from which it emerges?

2. theorizing the pretheoretical Merleau-Ponty argues that radical reﬂection must reﬂect on its own reﬂectivity, and this entails knowing itself as “reﬂection-on-an-unreﬂective-experience”29 and seeking to appreciate the transformation that reﬂection brings with it in the spectacle of the world and our existence when it follows upon that unreﬂective experience. One could argue that in MIE, Brandom’s focus is to describe that particular model of language use that is reﬂective, scorekeeping, discursive practice; but as a result, he is less concerned about the unreﬂected on that precedes it. But perhaps the notion of normative pragmatics, the ruledirected character of our lives that constitutes the theme of Chapter 1, could be construed as discussing the broader context of life prior to the particular, narrower normativity governing discursive practice. One might even say that Chapter 2, on inferential semantics, also implicitly treats our everyday life, whose uses of language no doubt deploy, unreﬂectively though, the inferential net of concepts that that chapter lays out.

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As a result, when Brandom discusses assertions, or doxastic commitments in Chapter 2, which constitute the basis of discursive practice, he argues that we must deﬁne “contents” or “concepts” inferentially but such deﬁnition makes explicit a kind of practical mastery over inferential networks that is already at work before such theoretical deﬁnitions. To explain contents and concepts, Brandom explains how human beings follow out the inferential relationships between their concepts (e.g., “red” is not “blue” but is a “color”) in ways that animals and measuring instruments cannot.30 Consequently, the practical use of inferences precedes the inferential account of concepts in chapter 2, and that account, which lays the basis for assertions, is the presupposition of the scorekeeping, discursive framework that will be introduced at the opening of chapter 3, though the giving of the inferential account could only take place within an implicitly functioning scorekeeping framework. But if it would come to tracing back from such assertions about the empirical world to what may have preceded them, Brandom seems content with attributing to human beings the same capacities that animals and measuring instruments share when it comes to reacting to physical stimuli, namely, merely differential responsive dispositions, which in the case of humans, certain animals (e.g., parrots), and certain machines (a spectrophotometer designed to produce a noise) might include the ability to produce utterances. To argue that what precedes assertions introduced into the space of reasons and therefore the space of reasons itself is nothing more than stimuli evoking responsive dispositions, as opposed to certain intentional activity, seems indeed minimal, and, as we have seen, this account meets resistance by McDowell for the way it reduces animals to mechanisms and, as we have argued, it risks making empirical content unintelligible.31 But there is a better place to ﬁnd Brandom treating what precedes theory than MIE, and that is in his handling of Heidegger in Tales of the Mighty Dead. There, as we have seen, Brandom applauds Heidegger’s recognition of the importance of Zuhandensein, which brings us through the pragmatist doorway. He takes Heidegger to be propounding a normative pragmatism, by presenting Dasein in a thoroughly non-Cartesian, nonsubjective way, as possessed with a kind of preconceptual, prepropositional, prelinguistic intentionality for treating, or appropriating things, taken from the start as tools in accord with socially developed, holistically functioning systems of norms. Brandom shows how gradually deliberation about the serviceability of equipment leads to treating things as occurrent within Vorhandensein whose assertional language is “an essential structure of the basic constitution of

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Dasein” (as was Zuhandensein).32 Vorhandensein then is precipitated out of Zuhandensein, from which it is distinct in that it rigorously subtracts from the richer signiﬁcances of the Zuhandensein, uses assertions as its tools, and requires that one adopt a spectatorial-theoretical viewpoint for justifying and defending one’s claims. Vorhandensein, which one might equate with the discursive practice outlined in MIE, consists of socially determined practices in which the appropriateness of claims is no longer assessed in terms of their usefulness for practical ends.33 What is of central concern to Brandom is how these two possibilities of Dasein are interrelated. The things that ﬁrst show up to us practically, once they are introduced within the stratum of Vorhandensein, appear through an assertional, and, therefore, theoretical ﬁlter, as something merely present or occurrent about which claims have been made—here Heidegger makes explicit precisely the kinds of change that reﬂection introduces into the unreﬂected-on experience that Merleau-Ponty called for. What bothers Brandom, though, is that Heidegger seems to be defending a “layer cake” linkage between Zuhandensein and Vorhandensein that would see conceptual, theoretical, and representational intentionality succeeding on a separate, basic, autonomous, preconceptual, and practical intentionality. The problem, though, is that if these two potentialities of Dasein are separate, as if linguistic Vorhandensein is but an optional layer that could be added to human existence, there would be no necessity that Dasein in its readyto-hand mode has to participate in linguistic practices and be able to talk. However, Brandom opposes such a view by showing that there is no Dasein without language for Heidegger, that all the existentiale of Dasein are interconnected, and that ready-to-hand practice therefore cannot be separated from language, which cannot, therefore, be relegated to the present-at-hand level alone. Further, Brandom rejects the view that practical intentionality depends asymmetrically on conceptual intentionality in a reference-dependent way, as if mass or electrons—what language refers to when it ﬁnally comes on the scene—would not exist until language referred to it. Rather it is a matter of sense dependence such that we apply an assertional-theoretical ﬁlter to things available to us practically so that those things will not have any meaning apart from language. The priority of Zuhandensein to Vorhandensein is only an explanatory one, especially insofar as assertions are understood as a kind of equipment governed by proprieties implicit in a practice and thus the present-at-hand already bears the marks of the ready-to-hand. In the end, both Zuhandensein and Vorhandensein rest on different authority

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structures, that is, communities prescribe different types of norms according to which their different behaviors are correct or not. In ready-to-hand we are accountable for our use of tools, and in present-at-hand we are responsible for things or states of affairs in assessments of objective truth. Insofar as both structures involve normativity, the category of the social is at the root of both categories; it would be the primus inter pares of categories. Brandom, with Heidegger, asserts, though, that present-at-hand Rede (discourse) can undergo a kind of falsifying modiﬁcation by falling into Gerede (idle talk), insofar as it becomes just a matter of passing things along, whose essential failure is that one refrains from taking responsibility for what one says other than by appeal to what others say.34 What is interesting here for our purposes is that Brandom does not deny the possibility of a level of experience that precedes present-at-hand discourse; his difficulty is with the way Heidegger conceives such a pretheoretical stratum; namely, consisting in preconceptual, prepropositional, and especially prelinguistic intentionality that is cut off from language. In the name of the holism of human experience, Brandom denies that there could be such a prelinguistic stratum. Suppose, however, that we do not conceive this pretheoretical stratum as nonlinguistic Zuhandensein (as Brandom takes Heidegger to do) but instead conceive it (as Husserl does), that is, as consisting in the pretheoretical lifeworld that is characterized by socially shaped norms, already thoroughly linguistic in character—such a supposition would imply no deleterious layer-cake effect between the lifeworld as nonlinguistic domain and its theoretical philosophical counterpart, though the lifeworld is governed ultimately by the pragmatic motive. The Husserlian lifeworld, it seems, would capture better than Zuhandensein what Brandom seems willing to accept as a pretheoretical domain. Not only would the Husserlian lifeworld converge with Brandom’s idea of what a pretheoretical domain would look like, but Husserl’s notion of the theoretical domain would also converge with Brandom’s, which involves understanding Heideggerian Vorhandensein as theoretical in nature. This convergence takes place regarding common structures of normativity, sociality, and individual responsibility. First of all, a structure of normativity, different from the lifeworld, is to be found when one undertakes the philosophical attitude (or adopts phenomenological reduction), since one is bound not to accept unquestioningly pregiven opinions or traditions and to inquire about truth. This philosophical domain that Husserl opens through the phenomenological reduction resembles presentness-at-hand for

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Heidegger, which for Brandom represents theorizing, insofar as phenomenological reduction and Vorhandensein (as theory) require that claims not be assessed merely in terms of their usefulness for practical ends. Second, the norms governing this realm of philosophy are actually explained by Husserl as social, as they are by Heidegger and Brandom. After all, Husserl is clear that they are inherited from the traditions of the Greeks and one’s philosophical endeavor is described by Husserl as a mutual, collaborative undertaking, for which one will be held accountable. Often the social basis of these norms in Husserl’s writings are obscured because of his emphasis on the personal, individual responsibility of the philosopher who is ultimately responsible even for critically examining sociality, that is, inquiring into how it supposedly appears and acts on her. However, the social nature of the theoretical domain in Husserl, Heidegger, and Brandom cannot be denied. Third, Husserl’s emphasis on personal responsibility, though, converges with Brandom’s idea of the scorekeeper who is required to keep score even on MIE and on its claims about social relationships. This critical, reﬂective attitude, however, might appear to be deemphasized when Brandom considers Vorhandensein, since his focus is on its socially normative authority structures, especially insofar as he takes the category of the social as primary. Nevertheless, the distinction between Gerede and responsible Rede, developed by Heidegger and endorsed by Brandom, anticipates the emphasis on the ﬁrst-person scorekeeper’s responsibility that Brandom stresses in MIE.35 Paradoxically, in both Brandom and Husserl, the personal responsibility of the philosopher is ineluctably bound up with social relationships. For instance, the phenomenological attitude, which demands reﬂective, critical rigor, is actually the way in which the philosopher for Husserl experiences the social normativity ruling in philosophy: one lives up to the normative expectations of philosophy by being as critical of claims as possible and not taking things for granted. In addition, by emphasizing the attitude of personal responsibility for not taking things for granted, both Husserl in the phenomenological reduction and Brandom in the perspective of the scorekeeper ensure that social relationships at some point themselves will no longer be taken for granted but will be examined philosophically, that is, in terms of how they are experienced and explained. One wonders if Brandom’s stronger emphasis on the social in the essays on Heidegger (although that responsibility appears at least indirectly when he highlights the importance of the distinction between Gerede and Rede)—is of a piece with his overlooking of the method of individual phenomenological insight in the establishment

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of Heidegger’s basic categories in Sein und Zeit in favor of socially shaped responsive dispositions—theoretical moves for which Gubatz criticizes him. Finally, Brandom’s opposition to the layer-cake approach hinges on understanding his Zuhandensein and Vorhandensein as two distinctive possible modalities belonging, however, to the one holistically acting Dasein. It seems to me that for Husserl, too, it is the same ego that takes up the pragmatic attitude of the natural attitude and that executes phenomenological reduction. Moreover, it is that ego that reﬂects on itself from the perspective of transcendental self-reﬂection and discovers itself as able to deploy itself in these two different ways. Indeed, recent Husserlian scholarship, such as Steven Crowell’s, has tried to bring closer the transcendental ego of Husserl and Dasein by interpreting both Husserl and Heidegger as attempting to grasp the universal and necessary features of that being whose essence it is to be. And in Crowell’s view, Heidegger could be said to have developed an ontological transcendental philosophy.36 One could imagine the kinds of topics that could be addressed in a philosophical account of the lifeworld. And it does seem to me that such a theoretical account of what is pretheoretical would have to be philosophical in character, much as McDowell’s earlier attempt—whose philosophical dimensions we had to point out—to recover the commonsense experience of perceptual knowledge in which one recognizes one’s own reliability as a reporter on the basis of one’s whole conception of the world with oneself in touch with it and without the need for an external scorekeeper’s endorsement. The lifeworld would be ﬁlled with the kinds of intentionality beyond linguistic intentionality (though inevitably intertwined with it in the case of human beings) that Ruth Millikan describes in a way that Brandom praises as “one of the wonders of our philosophical age,”37 Practically oriented intentionality for Millikan is involved when bees seek nectar, bodies reestablish their balance, coffee cups are safely transported to one’s lips. It might include the unreﬂected-on preceding reﬂection that Merleau-Ponty’s reﬂection uncovers when it illustrates how, prior to the bifurcation between subject and object and lying as a stratum within any knowledge of an object, the body is functioning as a thing among things, passively affected by them, even as things become ﬂesh in relation to it. In these cases, whether one attributes speciﬁc intentionality to individuals or simply discusses types of intentionalities in general, philosophy itself is indispensable and one would be occupying a scorekeeper perspective, addressing commitments and entitlements to others in this very endeavor to capture philosophically what precedes philosophy.38

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In addition, it seems that Brandom’s lack of the development of an account of the pretheoretical lifeworld could explain some of the criticisms that give him pause. There are two examples. First, McDowell objects to Brandom’s idea that there could be creatures who would use logical conditionals only to make explicit the inferential proprieties of semantic norms but who would not be capable of any speciﬁcally logical reasoning. McDowell argues, instead, for logic being the organ of rational self-consciousness in general such that a subject would have to be aware of logic if she possesses the capacity to be responsive to any reasons at all. Then, insofar as semantic self-consciousness requires that the subject be aware of the rational requirements involved in semantic norms, McDowell thinks we should say that logic is also the organ of semantic selfconsciousness. He rejects the idea of any semantic foundationalism, which might posit the existence of semantic norms before logic makes explicit their proprieties or before any speciﬁcally logical reasoning occurs. In other words, McDowell thinks that semantically self-conscious agents would already be logical. There are not distinct levels; rather, there is a homogeneous mixture. Brandom thinks there is room for debate about whether there can be rational and material-inference-endorsing creatures that do not yet possess a speciﬁc capacity for logical reasoning, despite the fact that this “layer-cake”39 approach would resemble the same kind of strategy that Brandom rejected in Heidegger. Finally, though, Brandom seems to cede the argument to McDowell that logic is bound up with semantic rule following, insofar as he ﬁnally acknowledges his admittedly constructive methodology of entertaining the possibility of such nonlogical creatures is merely useful for clarifying the relationship between logic and semantics. A second example of this type appears when Daniel Laurier points to a puzzle, which Brandom entertains without resolving, regarding another layer-cake problem. Brandom seeks to posit a phase in which we attribute deontic statuses to others, but only later arrive at the point where it is possible to ascribe attitudes to them. The question is whether it would be possible to explain corrigibility and still maintain the existence of such distinct phases. We could imagine a scorekeeper, who could not yet ascribe attitudes, distinguishing between someone else’s commitment and what is in fact true or we could imagine a difference between that scorekeeper’s earlier commitments and later revisions of them on the basis of new statuses, in which any attributions of attitudes would remain implicit. However, Laurier argues, in regard to the scorekeeper’s own present commitments, if

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error is to be possible, he would have to be able to distinguish the commitments he attributes to himself (which might be false) and those that he actually acknowledges (which he would take to be true). However, this would involve ascribing attitudes himself—something that was supposed to be impossible prior to the availability of attitude ascription. Once again the problem is that Brandom seems to strive to separate out artificially distinct stages of development that, it seems, cannot exist separately from each other.40 The problem in both the above criticisms is that Brandom, in an effort to show how the reﬂective process of making it explicit is performed with reference to what is implicit ends up positing hypothetical stages in which certain activities are implicit, but not yet being explicitly used (e.g., logical vocabulary or attitude ascribing) until presumably they are recognized by the higher level, philosophical reﬂection that one ﬁnds in place by the end of MIE. To be sure, Brandom seems to admit that these are only hypothetical thought experiments designed to make it possible to ask whether the observance of semantic norms could take place without logical reasoning or whether the attribution of statuses can take place apart from ascribing attitudes. His critics, though, seem to take his thought experiments as descriptions of everyday life practices, and they criticize his theoretical distinctions as being false to that experience insofar as they draw pure distinctions between layers when what is distinguished is actually found mixed together in everyday experience. McDowell and Laurier both seem to have a point in that everyday language users do seem to possess minimal capacities for logical reasoning and that it is difficult to conceive everyday life actors who are completely incapable of ascribing attitudes to each other or themselves even though they are able to attribute statuses (even though Brandom can give many examples of cases in which statuses or attitudes are implicit but not yet explicit). However, what if, instead of positing prior evolutionary stages for “creatures” in which certain capacities were not even present or in which the unlikely scenario is thought to obtain that they engage in certain activities without any vague self-awareness or minimal reﬂectivity about what they are doing, Brandom were to have developed a theory of the everyday lifeworld in which there was a homogenous mixture of these capacities and activities? Once he admitted this starting point and put his critics to rest, it would then be possible from within a scorekeeping framework to make the theoretical distinctions (e.g., between formal logic and material inferences) he wishes to make and to clarify the different manners

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of making what is implicit explicit (e.g., what is involved in semantic and rational self-consciousness and the role of logic in such self-consciousness). What would distinguish the pretheoretical from the theoretical spheres would have to do with the different motivations governing everyday actors and scorekeepers, especially the thoroughness, consistency, and precise distinctions for which scorekeeping reﬂection strives in contrast to that of everyday actors. Everyday actors, under this way of considering things, need not then be construed as less evolved creatures but as agents whose pragmatic needs do not require the rigorous reﬂectivity of philosophy—a thesis that would in fact be more in line with Brandom’s pragmatism. Finally, demarcating the pretheoretical from the theoretical sphere might help illuminate Brandom’s project in regard to an interesting criticism by Cristina Lafont of what she takes to be Brandom’s phenomenalism regarding objective knowledge that converges in ways with McDowell’s accusation that Brandom internalizes entitlements. Lafont criticizes Brandom’s perspectival account of objective knowledge by arguing that anyone who attributes objective knowledge to another must also be willing to affirm: If S knows that the swatch is red, then the swatch is red. That is, the justiﬁed belief one attributes to another must also be true if there is to be knowledge, as the tradition of philosophy has taught. However, Brandom’s hybrid account of such knowledge consists of three factors: 1. 2. 3.

I attribute a commitment to S that the swatch is red. I attribute an entitlement to S that the swatch is red. I, the scorekeeper, would undertake a commitment to the claim that the swatch is red myself.

But this third condition would fall short of what is required in that it is, on Brandom’s own terms, always possible that just because one is committed or even entitled to something, as I might take myself to be in the third factor, the possibility that the swatch is not red is not ruled out there. That possibility can only be ruled out if the swatch is red and is not just taken to be red by me, the scorekeeper. Hence, Lafont argues that to attribute objective knowledge to S, the following conditions must be fulﬁlled: 1. 2. 3.

I attribute a commitment to S that the swatch is red. I attribute an entitlement to S that the swatch is red. The swatch is red.41

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Lafont’s objections resemble those of McDowell’s that we have discussed earlier, namely, that insofar as the scorekeeping model removes any ﬁnal verdict on what is perceived from the viewpoint of the perceiver, an inﬁnite regress of scorekeepers is generated or that for Brandom perception is internalized and cut off from the object perceived, so what any scorekeeper has at best is a perceptual phenomenalism in which perceivers can at most be entitled to seem to perceive what they perceive. In Chapter 2, I agreed with McDowell that the condition of being a scorekeeper on someone else’s perceptual commitment and entitlement requires that that scorekeeper be a responder at some level and that this responder empirically engage the world in the way that that McDowell insists on. I further argued that empirical judgments in the space of reasons and the intelligibility of empirical content in general presuppose as a founding level of such empirical engagement, which one might be able to separate out from the judgments themselves via a species of the retrogressive reﬂection that Husserl deploys as we have seen in Chapter 2.42 The third condition of Lafont’s ﬁnal listing of the conditions to be fulﬁlled for the attribution of objective knowledge (in the second set of conditions above) includes a claim that the swatch is red; however, that claim appears detached from any perspective, including the perspective of the scorekeeper who attributes knowledge to S in the ﬁrst listing of conditions. Such a claim, detached from any perspective, though, is ruled out by the kind of reﬂection put in place once one adopts the scorekeeper perspective in discursive practice. Once one adopts that reﬂective stance, any objective fact must come into view from within some perspective, that is, as a commitment that is correlative to the attitude of someone whom one attributes it to (the one kept score on) or who undertakes or endorses that commitment (the scorekeeper). In fact, Brandom is actually describing from a philosophical metaperspective what is involved when a lower level scorekeeper attributes perceptual knowledge to a perceiver. Consequently, Brandom’s metalevel scorekeeper is at one remove from the lower-level scorekeeper’s endorsement of the claim that allows that lower-level scorekeeper to attribute perceptual knowledge to the perceiver; hence, the metalevel scorekeeper does not necessarily share the lower-level scorekeeper’s endorsement or attribution of perceptual knowledge to the perceiver. Hence, the metalevel scorekeeper, without deciding herself, simply observes that the lower-level scorekeeper endorses the claim of the one to whom she attributes knowledge. Hence, in the third condition in the ﬁrst set of conditions above, Brandom from a metalevel-scorekeeper

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perspective is describing how a lower-level scorekeeper (an “I” that is not Brandom) “would undertake a commitment to the claim that the swatch is red,” though Brandom himself, as describing that lower-level scorekeeper, is not necessarily undertaking that commitment. The higher level perspective of Brandom in effect converts the perspective of the lower-level scorekeeper into a phenomenal viewpoint. Lafont’s third condition in her second listing of conditions above resembles the kind of claim that McDowell’s commonsense perceiver would make, that is, the one who “can tell a green thing when she sees one” and whose reliability is held ﬁrm by her whole conception of the world with herself in touch with it and whose knowledge is not susceptible to interiorization. Indeed, the very deﬁnition of knowledge that Lafont begins with—namely, “If S knows the swatch is red, then the swatch is red”—accurately states what we mean by everyday life, commonsense, objective knowledge. Lafont here adopts (implicitly) a kind of philosophical stance similar to McDowell’s insofar as she attributes to an everyday knower, a kind of knowing that does not rely on the kind of scorekeeping and perspectivalism endemic to Brandom’s theoretical position. When Brandom undertakes the philosophical stance of the scorekeeper, the objects we meet at ﬁrst in everyday practical life or the kind of knowledge we possess as certain in everyday life undergo a transformation, they are given through “an assertional-theoretical ﬁlter,”43 as Heidegger noted in the transition from Zuhandensein to Vorhandensein. Although the adoption of the philosophical scorekeeper’s stance differs from that assumed in Husserlian phenomenological reduction in many ways, each transforms the meaning of everyday knowledge, which now must be understood in terms of statuses perspectivally attributed and undertaken, in Brandom’s case, or phenomena given to intentional acts in Husserl’s case. In each case, the commonsense realism, from which they would start, comes to appear as phenomenal contents or phenomenological correlates. Knowledge then needs to be indexed, depending on whether one is speaking of it, on the one hand, in the realm of common sense or the natural attitude or, on the other hand, within discursive practice and the reduced phenomenological sphere. I have argued that Brandom and Husserl (in the reduced sphere) presuppose as a founding level the direct engagement with the world that McDowell and Lafont point to but that such engagement is to a degree anonymized when the reﬂective stance supervenes on everyday life, and hence Brandom’s scorekeeping on empirical claims anonymizes questions about how those claims depend on engagement with the world because the emphasis is placed on whether

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to endorse or not already formulated claims. By drawing a parallel between Brandom’s adoption of the scorekeeper stance and Husserl’s phenomenological reduction with reference to the lifeworld, I can clarify and defend Brandom’s theoretical framework in the face of criticisms such as those of Lafont’s, while granting Lafont’s point, if it is properly indexed. Of course, drawing such a parallel exceeds anything that Brandom’s texts would explicitly warrant. What the train of my thoughts here suggests, though, is that to the extent that Brandom could clarify the pretheoretical origins of his own theory, it would render that theory more plausible.

3. a philosophy of language or of consciousness? The demand to be self-reﬂective about the discursive practices in which we are already engaged also requires that, once we approach the themes of discursive practice, we should not take for granted the language through which we make those themes explicit, since “talk of what is implicit involves tacit reference to the process by which it can be made explicit.”44 Although one might consider mental beliefs prior to assertions of them because one need not avow them, nevertheless, one cannot make sense of the contents of such beliefs apart from their linguistic expressions. Hence, Brandom rejects agentsemantical approaches that posit the content of beliefs or intentions prior to their being asserted, since as soon as one discusses what their contents are, one is already asserting them (and taking one’s asserting for granted). Because the contentfulness of intentional states consists of the contentfulness of the speech acts expressing them and because the contentfulness of speech acts depends on the linguistic practices in which speakers and interpreters exchange and interpret such speech acts, the beliefs attributed to nonlinguistic animals will always be derivative, although Brandom maintains that there is “a sense in which nonlinguistic animals can be said to have beliefs.”45 This demand to make focal the assertions through which one attributes beliefs to others or to nonlinguistic creatures simply follows on the reﬂective rigor pertinent to the scorekeeper perspective on which Brandom’s entire project depends.46 This focus on language, however, need not do away with intentionality. In fact, this is clearly shown in Brandom’s analysis of de re speciﬁcations of assertional contents, that is, the way of attributing an assertion to another by making the object about which the assertion is made focal. For example, let

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us assume that someone reports the claim of someone else in this way: “She said of those who liberated the village that they were freedom ﬁghters.” The reporter of this claim speciﬁes the speaker’s claim in a de re way, that is, with a focus on the object about which the assertion was made, namely, “those who liberated the village.” In this statement, the reporter of the assertion attributes intentionality to the “she” (the speaker) in two ways, ﬁrst, insofar as she is speaking “of” the “those” (de re speciﬁcation) and second insofar as she adopts an intentional stance (of endorsement) toward the belief that “those ones” are freedom ﬁghters. But the reporter, too, adopts an intentional stance, toward this “she,” the object of the reporter’s intention, and, at the same time the reporter intentionally “takes account of” her intentional stances toward “those” and toward the belief she has about them. This rich web of intentional relationships bears all the marks of the kind of implication of intentionalities that Husserl highlighted, which occurs, for example, when an individual has a memory of a perception of an object. This analysis further indicates that although one might think that reference is simply a matter of talking about an object presented before a subject, such as the “freedom ﬁghters,” Brandom makes explicit an entire system of commitments that vary from one interlocutor’s perspective to another’s, depend on the different interlocutors’ undertaking and attributing activity, and determine what the “object” is only in correlation to the activity of such “subjects” speaking to each other. In this way, Brandom’s analysis resembles phenomenological reﬂection, which takes account not just of the object but the intentional activities on the subjective side to which that object is correlative. Furthermore, the very structure of attitudes undertaken and attributed regarding statuses reﬂects an intentional structure. It is no wonder, then, that Brandom can claim that MIE presents “not only an account of linguistic intentionality . . . but a linguistic account of intentionality generally.”47 For these methodological reasons, Brandom objects when Habermas attributes to a speaker the intention connected to an utterance that the interpreter respond by taking a “yes” or “no” stand regarding what that speaker utters. For Brandom, Habermas seems to help himself to this intention or expectation, which could be intelligible only in the context of assertional practice, that is, in a context in which a scorekeeper assesses what performances and responses are appropriate or correct. Though we have argued above that the responsibilities between interlocutors is a structural feature of conversations rather than a matter of an individual speaker’s intentions, the point of Brandom’s discussion is not to do away with intentionalities (including intentions

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or expectations) but to ensure that one does not treat them as intelligible apart from and antecedently to the assertions in which they are expressed. In other words, one ought not take for granted such things as whether the content of such intentionalities is accurately formulated or appropriately attributed to the speaker. Rather the point is to subject such intentionalities to scrutiny, which depends on making them explicit through assertions whose correctness can be assessed. In such a scorekeeping context, Brandom concludes, the notion of a species of assertion asserted with the intent of receiving a response, in fact, becomes intelligible.48 In the paragraph in which Brandom criticizes Habermas’s “helping himself to” the concept of “intention,” there are roughly ﬁve references to the “intelligibility” or “sense” of such concepts. It is not as though Brandom denies that intentionality is there; his emphasis is on how that intentionality can be made intelligible by being introduced through an assertion into the domain of scorekeeping. One wonders if Brandom might be willing to admit the existence of intentional activity prior to its being introduced into the sphere of deontic scorekeeping, just as we argued earlier that there can be kinds of knowing prior to their recognition and attribution, which, however, inevitably take place within the philosophical, assertional domain, as we have seen with McDowell’s attribution of knowledge to the everyday perceiver who knows a green thing when she sees it or, for that matter, Brandom’s attribution of knowledge to chicken-sexers who might not think that they know. One comes on the scene and makes sense of an activity that was already there (as might happen, for instance, with nonlinguistic animals), while one recognizes that such activity can only have sense when expressed in assertions. If this interpretation of Brandom is correct, one might then further inquire whether the other’s observable behavior should be the sole basis for attributing intentionality, or whether ﬁrst-person reports depending on one’s self-reﬂection would also be permissible? Or are these reports themselves considered to be a species of observable behavior? Furthermore, if one grants an evidential propriety to a ﬁrst-person report that one is experiencing an individual, “empirical,” intentional act (e.g., of memory), would it be permissible on the basis of such experiences and free variation to articulate the necessary features involved in memory? The evidential “havings” that would win endorsement for such articulated commitments and entitlements would depend on the kind of phenomenological insight that we saw Heidegger employed in understanding Dasein and its modalities. Such possibilities would also depend on there being a regional ontology of consciousness

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in which one’s endorsement of commitments and entitlements would depend on a kind of evidence that differs from the evidence permissible in the domain of physical objects, studied for example by the natural sciences. One could argue for such a possibility on the basis of Brandom’s discussion of existential commitments in connection with what he calls canonical designators. Such designators (i.e., expressions within a set), which are able to pick out objects that have an address in the structured space mapped out by the totality of expressions, make it possible to say that those objects that have such an address exist. He considers three existential realms in which a set of expressions maps out a structure: physical objects, numbers, and ﬁctional objects. In the realm of ﬁction, for instance, Sherlock Holmes’s stories, the phrase “Professor Moriarty” appearing in the text is a canonical designator and any term intersubstitutable for it, like “Holmes’s archenemy,” which may never appear in the text, would successfully pick out an object that could be said to exist ﬁctionally. However, the expression “Holmes’s fairy godmother,” which cannot substitute for any canonical designator in the text, could not pick out any ﬁctional existent. These three realms within which varied existential commitments can be undertaken resemble Husserl’s regional ontologies about whose objects claims can be adjudicated; of course, on the basis of the different kinds of evidence appropriate for those ontologies (e.g., the evidence appropriate in the natural sciences is not the same as that appropriate for intersubjective understanding). On this basis, one might then argue for a region of consciousness, whose intentional activities can be articulated in careful assertions (e.g., of an empirical type [e.g., about whether one possesses a particular intentional state in question] or of a more eidetic type [e.g., about what memory consists of]) whose correctness can be assessed by scorekeepers in accord with evidence permissible within that region. If such a possibility is ruled out a priori, it may be that one has allowed the methods appropriate to another ontological region (e.g., physical objects investigated by the natural sciences) to overstep their boundary, as was the case in the views of Bernard Williams and J. L. Mackie whom McDowell criticized. If a region of consciousness would be admissible, then what has traditionally been known as phenomenological investigations could be conducted within the framework of the deontic scorekeeping model of discursive practice, provided, of course, that one be sensitive to the linguistic expressions and their inferential relationships through which such investigations are conducted.49 Moreover, if it is the case that the processes of attributing intentionality and describing it through assertion can be a matter of recognizing and

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making intelligible an intentionality that is already there, then discursive practice itself is but a small, narrow, ontological region carved out of a vast sea of intentionalities of the kind that Millikan, Merleau-Ponty, and McDowell point to. However, even to point out and describe this vast domain of intentionalities, which appear in activities such as my bodily capacity to raise the cup of coffee to my lips, would presuppose that one is already engaged in a discursive scorekeeping practice and attempting to develop an account of various domains of intentionality and their interrelationships. Hence, to claim that there this vast domain of intentionalities beyond discursive practice can only be made from with discursive space. Discourse, from within its own perspective, assumes priority, and there is nothing that seems to be outside of it, insofar as it is the domain from within which I locate it in reference to other domains. It is also the place where all that is implicit beyond what is explicit is made explicit. In conclusion, I have argued that Brandom’s admirable self-reﬂective methodology, which distinguishes his philosophy of philosophy from McDowell’s and surpasses quietism, could have proﬁted from the kind of reﬂection on his ultimate and eidetic claims that phenomenology affords. At the same time, his work would beneﬁt from radical reﬂection that would situate his philosophical reﬂection with reference to the unreﬂected on that it emerges from, that would give him a sociolinguistic underpinning akin to the Husserlian lifeworld, and that might equip him better to respond to critics who take his thought experiments for lifeworld descriptions or who, converging with McDowell’s internalization critique, dispute that his phenomenalism can ever yield objective knowledge. While Brandom does better on the philosophy of philosophy pole, McDowell remains faithful to common sense—and Husserl’s intentional spectrum encompasses both these poles, from transcendental intersubjective phenomenology to the lifeworld. Having considered in depth the poles of their theoretical foci and their notions of intersubjectivity—all of which emerge out of their debate on perception—we are now able to see how all these differences play themselves out in a completely different, nonepistemological or nonmetaphilosophical ﬁeld, namely, ethics.

CHAPTER 7

the levels of ethics

My discussion throughout this book, with the possible exception of chapter 4, section 4, has been predominantly an epistemological one, with the ﬁrst three chapters dealing with the debate between McDowell and Brandom about perception and setting the stage for what follows insofar as their discussions of perception are intimately intertwined with their views on role of intersubjectivity in knowledge (the central topic of chapter 4) and their philosophies of philosophy (chapters 5 and 6). In chapters 4–6, I have shown the relevance of their views on intersubjectivity and philosophy for the perception debate, but also broadened the debate itself by reconstructing how this debate would continue into the areas of intersubjectivity and the philosophy of philosophy. I have developed my own position in reaction to their own stands, favoring McDowell’s account of intelligible empirical content but giving a fuller, phenomenological account of perception and defending against McDowell’s criticisms Brandom’s views on intersubjectivity, which converge in some ways with Levinas’s understanding of ethics. I have argued too that they complement each other in their philosophies of philosophy, with McDowell correctly insisting on the importance of common sense and Brandom upholding the self-reﬂective ultimacy of the structure of discourse that lower-level arguments presuppose. I have illustrate how Husserlian phenomenology that encompasses the poles of the lifeworld and transcendental intersubjectivity has already taken account of the levels on which McDowell and Brandom develop their philosophies of philosophies, though it is also obvious how my own phenomenological position has been at work in assessing the discussions on perception and intersubjectivity. In this chapter, I hope to bring all these thematic strands, namely, the perceptual level, intersubjectivity, and the philosophies of philosophy, to bear on an area that is distinct from epistemology, namely, ethics. Because Brandom has only made ﬂeeting comments about ethics, my concentration here will be on McDowell, who has produced a signiﬁcant body of work in this area.

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I will illustrate how McDowell is a thoroughly consistent thinker insofar as he develops an account of virtues as perceptual in character and a correlative notion of quite limited practical rationality. His ethical views bear all the marks of his epistemology, such as its reliance on intentionality in perception and its endeavor to vindicate common sense against mistaken theoretical detours. This chapter illustrates the difference an epistemic stance makes for ethics. While appreciating the intentional approach he adopts, I will argue for an alternative account of moral experience that emphasizes different features and saliences of that experience and that might underlie a different understanding of and motivation for a kind of practical rationality that McDowell disallows. Finally, in criticizing Kevin Scharp’s criticisms of Jürgen Habermas’s ethics, I will try to show how Habermas’s notion of discourse ethics is compatible with Brandom’s account of discourse and his I-Thou approach to intersubjectivity, as Brandom himself admits, as well as with the view of moral experience and practical rationality that I will develop in criticizing aspects of McDowell’s views on ethics.

1. mcdowell: ethics and practical rationality1 McDowell follows Socrates in holding that virtue is knowledge insofar as virtues are states of character providing their possessor with a kind of perceptual capacity, that is, “reliable sensitivity to a certain sort of requirement that situations impose on behavior.”2 For instance, the kind person responds reliably with the type of kindness that a situation requires, even though the kind person need not be able either to conceptualize the requisite behavior as “kind” or to explain the other virtues and their connection to kindness; the commonsense virtuous person is not an ethical theorist. Nevertheless, she is able to exercise virtues that function in unity with each other, as part of a complex sensitivity. For instance, the virtuous person would be attentive to another’s feelings insofar as she is kind, but she would not indulge those feelings if such indulgence would lead the recipient of her kindness to violate another’s rights and thereby result in a failure to heed the situational requisites called for by the virtue of fairness. If a person fails to act according to what virtue requires, it is not that there is an additional appetitive aspect that she lacks; instead, McDowell, following Aristotle, argues that she simply lacks the virtue. Furthermore, whereas the continent person balances reasons for and against what is to be done, virtue prompts the virtuous to silence all

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other reasons, such as happens when the courageous person, for example, does not consider even dangers to life or limb as any reason to ﬂee a perilous situation. McDowell allows that motivation for the appropriate action may ﬂow from one of a set of noncognitive concerns (e.g., concern for one’s friend) that meshes with a virtue-guided perception of a situational salience (e.g., a friend being in need) to provide a “core” explanation of the action in question (e.g., to spend time with one’s friend). Such concerns, in turn, have as their background the virtuous person’s overall conception of the kind of life one should lead, which is not, though, codiﬁable in principles (as we will see below) and which is not intelligible independently of one’s perception of salience in particular situations. McDowell accentuates the cognitive emphasis of his viewpoint insofar as knowing what to do evokes an action without requiring some noncognitive incentive beyond the concerns pertaining to one’s overall conception of how to live virtuously, such as a desire for satisfaction. According to the viewpoint McDowell rejects, this desire for satisfaction, visible to an outside observer, would have to intervene to set an action recognized as situationally required in motion. On the contrary, to understand the virtuous person’s actions, one must consult her distinctive (i.e., virtuous) way of viewing particular situations.3 Insofar as McDowell’s practical philosophy depends on virtuous capacities in direct intentional relationship with the objective requisites of situations, it parallels his epistemological account of how conceptual capacities are drawn into play in receptivity in direct intentional relationship with objects. He insists on the intentional character of our relationship with such objective demands, since mere causal mechanistic explanations of our responses are unsatisfactory and run counter to our “attempt to understand ourselves.”4 Moreover, following his criticism of Mackie’s reduction of secondary qualities to mere causal products, McDowell argues that experiences of fearfulness or comedy resemble the experience of secondary qualities insofar as they both involve responses appropriate to objective features. Finally, he extends this approach to values, including ethical situational requisites, which he observes are not brutely there, independently of our subjectivity, though they are there independently of any particular experience of them in the sense that our subjectivity ﬁnds its own response evoked by such objective features.5 On the one hand, McDowell opposes an objectivism, that is, a scientistic “metaphysics” that eliminates from the start values and the objective features evoking our experiences of fearfulness or the comic and that then reduces what we do experience to our mere projections on the world. McDowell

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insists that we cannot even describe the subjective state that is supposed to project the seeming feature in question onto the world without the aid of the concept that seems drawn from experience of that feature as independent of us. Hence, learning to identify cases as amusing, for example, is indistinguishable from ﬁnding some things objectively comical. On the other hand, this assertion of objective features need not revert to a bad, naive intuitionism that would neglect the subjective acts to which such features are given and that would therefore assume that we could simply help ourselves to truth without earning it. Rather, McDowell focuses on how we deploy the conceptual resources pertaining to the second nature constituting our subjectivity and enabling us to come to terms with what is given and on how we give reasons to defend our evaluations. The problem is that a projectionist view would try to articulate, for instance, what is funny by constructing principles about what being funny consists of, but it would do so outside the propensity to ﬁnd things funny, since such a propensity for the projectionist is only a matter of subjective projections onto a world devoid of funny things. For McDowell, the elaboration of what is funny takes place within the propensity to ﬁnd things funny, just as ethical values cannot be scrutinized apart from an ethical sensibility to features requiring an ethical response. The underlying opponent here, as in McDowell’s approach to intelligible empirical content in M&W, is a natural scientiﬁc view, which cuts sensibility off from spontaneous conceptualizing and ends up evacuating the world of conceptual structure (the Given) or allowing us to project ourselves idealistically on it without friction (coherentism). In the case of values, this natural scientiﬁc perspective strips the world of value and meaning to pave the way for our projections on it. Instead of seeing our sentiments as the parents of apparent features, as Hume and projectionists hold, McDowell opts to interpret Hume’s idea of “new creation” as perhaps consisting in “understanding an interlocking complex of subjective and objective, of response and feature responded to.”6 There is a danger, though, if one takes virtue to involve knowledge on the part of the virtuous person, that one might assimilate virtue to a deductive paradigm; that is, one might construe the virtuous person as operating with some blueprint for deducing obligations: some universal ethical knowledge, codiﬁable in principles as a major premise; and some knowledge of the particular situation as a minor premise and then the virtuous person would deduce from these premises the action he or she ought to take. McDowell rejects the view, ﬁrst of all, that any adult moral outlook admits of such codiﬁcation, since generalizations hold only for the most part and, second, that

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the mechanical application of rules yields a conclusion about what to do. To explain how we carry on with moral rules without reliance on formulable universal principles, he appeals to Wittgenstein’s notion of following a rule according to which there is no underlying psychological mechanism that conducts us inexorably like a machine on rails and according to which we rather exhibit ﬂexibility in following rules and yet conﬁdence in their continuity. The conﬁdence in rules depends on what Stanley Cavell called the “whirl of organism,”7 or Wittgenstein’s “forms of life,”8 which we inherit from the communities we are raised in. However, the thought that it is only our community upbringing that imbues us with second nature and that keeps us on moral track can induce a kind of vertigo that makes us look for iron-rail psychological mechanisms or think that there must be deductive principles at work (or sometimes in despair over ﬁnding convincing deductive principles, one might go so far as to think that the idea of following rules, like that of applying concepts, isn’t involved at all).9 In McDowell’s view, however, the dependence on community norms need not induce vertigo, and instead he recommends that we abandon philosophical aspirations to ﬁnd something more ﬁrm; that we not be seduced, consequently, by the question that leads one to think that the whirl of organism isn’t enough; and, as a result, that we be content with “familiar forms of life.”10 As McDowell comments, “We cannot be whole-heartedly engaged in the relevant parts of the ‘whirl of organism’, and at the same time achieve the detachment necessary to query whether our unreﬂective view of what we are doing is illusory. The cure for the vertigo, then, is to give up the idea that philosophical thought, about the sorts of practice in question, should be undertaken from some external standpoint, outside our immersion in our familiar forms of life.”11 By describing his recommendation as part of a “cure,” McDowell links it to the therapeutic, philosophical quietism in his epistemological writings in which, as we have seen, he refuses to try to reconcile the natural scientiﬁc approach to sensibility with the space of reasons or to explain intersubjective understanding by trying to infer mental states from scientiﬁcally described observable behavior and reverts, instead, to commonsense experience. Given this quietism and given McDowell’s alternative to principled ethics (namely, that “occasion by occasion, one knows what to do, if one does, not by applying universal principles but being a certain kind of person, one who sees situations in a certain distinctive way”12), one might think there would be little room for any type of practical rationality at all. However, he

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does allow that one can and ought to step back and adopt a critical attitude toward considerations about how one ought to act in particular situations, even though such reﬂection remains within the inherited way of thinking constituting one’s second nature. Such reﬂection, a kind of Neurathian rebuilding of a boat at sea, might, for instance, require weighing one part of an ethical system against other aspects, but it never suspends in entirety the ethical outlook that is one’s starting point. There is a possibility of considering things aright that involves offering “Don’t you see?” reﬂections or persuasive arguments that might lead someone to appreciate better a particular situation, to give certain considerations the right deliberative weight, or to see reasons one misses (e.g., as when, to take an aesthetic example, one might try to lead one to grasp the reasons that might explain the beauty of twelve-tone music). One can also consider things aright by recognizing how particular practical matters or ends intelligibly hang together or by seeking to realize a notion of “doing well,” understood not as some prior, universal notion that might serve as a blueprint for action, the premise of a deduction, or a method to determine the correct action, but rather as a vague guide that isn’t isolable from the speciﬁc situation at hand. McDowell recognizes that such deliberations “fall short of rationally necessitating acceptance of their conclusion in the way a proof does,”13 but they also show that he does not assume, as he comments in his response to Axel Honneth, “That unreﬂective perception always suffices to handle any ethical situation.”14 In fact, the possibility of such deliberation from within the ethical scheme, into which one was initiated as a member of a particular moral community, enables him to oppose in part the view of Bernard Williams who argues that practical reasoning can make use only of internal arguments that appeal to one’s subjective motivational set as opposed to external reasons that are supposed to motivate one simply by an appeal to reason apart from that motivational set. Worrying that deliberation according to Williams might end up being reduced to reading off what one is to do from one’s speciﬁc motivations as they stand, McDowell believes that he has offered an alternative account of “considering the matter aright” that can remain within the bounds of an inherited ethical framework without succumbing to a kind of uncritical psychologism that assumes that things are right simply because they accord with one’s extant motivational set.15 It is, however, precisely the kind of psychologistic account that Williams offers, namely, that whatever one takes to be the correct reasons for acting is derivative from one’s present psychic motivational set, that prompts others to

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argue for a kind of reason that is not shaped at all by the motivations of its reasoners—the kind of dispassionate Reason that Hume opposed. But neither of these views, that of Williams’s psychologism or the apsychologism of its counterpole, take account of the kinds of middle-range, deliberative type of reasons for which McDowell provides.16 Despite his differences with Williams, McDowell concurs with his suspicion of “external” reasons that might be offered apart from the particular ethical system in which we were initiated. He advances three arguments that will be stated here (and analyzed later): (1) there is no such thing as an external standpoint for practical rationality; (2) moralist philosophers, apprehensive of there being no such external standpoint yet resisting this possibility on a conscious level and acting out of a kind of bad faith, resort to accusing falsely their opponents of being irrational; and (3) Aristotle was unconcerned about providing rational foundations for ethics, and we need to follow his example. To argue that there is no external standpoint in practical rationality, McDowell considers the “hard” case, in which arguments seem unable to produce any resolution, and he thinks that one who ﬁnds oneself unable to convince others might erroneously attribute this fact to his own inability to articulate successfully enough a universal principle. For McDowell, though, the aspiration to providing such a universal ﬁrst principle in the deductive paradigm is a way of avoiding the vertigo that comes with recognizing that the real glue holding moral practices together is the whirl of organism. The interlocutor in search of a ﬁrst universal principle is, thus, under an illusion. “The illusion is the misconception of the deductive paradigm: the idea that deductive explication characterizes an exercise of reason in which it is, as it were, automatically compelling, without dependence on our partially shared ‘whirl of organism.’”17 Even in cases that are not hard, a similar dependence is at work, though it is less obvious, presumably because the hard cases of disagreement reveal more clearly our dependence on different forms of life. Insofar as the mistake consists of believing that one ought to be able to convince others in practical matters with “unaided reason,” the more robust form of external-reasons practical rationality for McDowell seems to play something of an epiphenomenal role, appearing to function on a plane by itself, all the while being deceptively detached from the underlying whirl of organism that actually plays the determining role in what we take to be the appropriate moral action. McDowell brings home this point by repeatedly stressing that reason cannot issue commands to just anyone, whatever his or her motivational makeup, and that it cannot be “motivationally efficacious,”18 without owing its cogency to preexisting motivations.19

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As far as the second reason against external-reasons practical rationality goes, McDowell seems to suggest that at some level we all know that we lack a knockdown practical argument and that we are dependent therefore ultimately on the whirl of organism. However, at that point, we can succumb to the temptation to talk as if we can possess or actually do now possess such an argument, and this provides us with the opportunity to bring a charge of irrationality against anyhow who disagrees with our view about the requirement to do the act in question. Indeed, according to Williams, whom McDowell follows here, bringing such a charge of irrationality against such an opponent is “the only point of believing in external reasons.”20 This accusation of irrationality, however, is only a “bluff,”21 a way of impressing outsiders even when one cannot convince them or of browbeating others into morality by fraudulently accusing them, as moralists are prone to do. McDowell acknowledges that within an internal-reasons framework in which one shares an ethical outlook with another but still ﬁnds oneself unable to lead this other to recognize the relevant aspects of the particular situation, it might be appropriate to accuse one’s interlocutor of irrationality, but there is no need to classify people this way, and it is safest not to do so.22 Finally, one need not be troubled by one’s inability to provide ultimate foundations for one’s ethics, since it is unnecessary for practical reason to do so. McDowell attempts to substantiate this thesis by appealing to Aristotle who stipulates from the start that he is only addressing people already brought up within a particular ethical framework, which has been ingrained in them. Aristotle does not even have any interest in defending the way things look to the virtuous person, and he seems to lack any inkling that ethical conscience might be fragile. Those who might be disappointed in the apparent circularity of Aristotle’s understanding of practical rationality are actually themselves entrapped by the view that one cannot have a “justiﬁed conviction of objective correctness”23 from within a historically conditioned conceptual scheme. This view, though, is typically modern, and its hope for a contact with the real by transcending our historicity grows out of emulation for a misunderstood notion of science, much like that we saw earlier when Williams claimed that science furnishes an ahistorical Archimedean perspective. Such emulation for science is, in turn, motivated, at least in part, by the lack of conﬁdence in the kinds of internal reasons that Aristotle upheld. In the end, we need simply to imitate Aristotle’s innocence, as McDowell states: “We ﬁnd it difficult not to want a foundation, but that is because of a location in the history of thought that separates us from Aristotle. To understand

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his naturalism correctly, we need to achieve a willed immunity to some of the inﬂuence of our intellectual inheritance, an inﬂuence of which Aristotle himself was simply innocent. That way, we can stop supposing the rationality of virtue needs a foundation outside the formed evaluative outlook of a virtuous person.”24 Indeed, this talk of “willed immunity” to the questions that might be posed to us reﬂects once again McDowell’s quietist tendency not to engage the questions that will only lead us into a blind cul-de-sac. In an interesting self-reﬂective moment, he denies that he himself is covertly providing us with a foundation for ethics via the idea of a proper upbringing. In his view, there could not be any access to what might constitute a good ethical upbringing independently of the ethical upbringing already informing one’s evaluation of what is a good ethical upbringing.25

2. an alternative view of ethical experience and practical rationality McDowell focuses on moral epistemology, in particular on virtues as modes of immediate, perceptual knowing and as reliable sensitivities to the requirements that situations impose on behavior, and he rejects external reasons that seem to rely on a dispassionate, neutral type of rationality, that might construe ethics as depending on deduction from ﬁrst principles such as the categorical imperative or Mill’s principle of utility. As a result, he opposes Williams’s interpretation of Aristotle as presenting a foundational natural law system of ethics that might provide an Archimedean point for deducing ethical obligations, articulated through a view from “nowhere,” as Thomas Nagel called it. McDowell dubs Williams’s effort here a “historical monstrosity,”26 reading back into Aristotle modern concerns and portraying him as trying to answer these concerns with an archaic concept of nature.27 McDowell’s interest in virtues and their responsiveness to particular situations reﬂects current, broader trends in the philosophical subdiscipline of ethics to adopt versions of virtue ethics. Even those sympathetic to the ethics of Kant, who might be the representative of an external-reasons approach to ethics par excellence, have attempted to illuminate the virtue-ethical dimensions in Kant’s own thought. Nancy Sherman and Barbara Herman, for example, have acknowledged that Kantian ethics must rely on a supporting structure of affect and emotion that, when built up within a self over time and through communal inﬂuences, would be, as Talcott Brewer states

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it, “partially constitutive of our practical commitments.”28 In the view of these commentators, such emotions and affects serve as modes of attention, tracking what is morally salient in particular situations, and, just as emotions can be shaped by one’s upbringing, they believe that one’s desires, too, are susceptible of being shaped in reason-responsive ways. Conceiving the categorical imperative to furnish a framework for moral perception, deliberation, and internal criticism, Herman interprets it as according with rules of moral salience structuring moral sensitivities, on whose basis one sees without theorizing ﬁrst, for instance, that human distress is morally signiﬁcant or that one’s desires for a new computer ought not even range over computers that others own. Like McDowell, Herman thinks that a Kantian moral agent needs “a characteristic way of seeing if he is to judge at all,”29 and she insists that the formation of one’s character shapes one’s moral judgment. Similarly, Sherman construes the categorical imperative, not as affording a universal rule of conduct for deductive purposes or an external procedural method, but as constituting an informal mode of reﬂection, shaping routine moral judgments about what respect for rational agency calls for in particular situations. Like McDowell, these interpreters of Kant admit that one acquires the rules determining what is morally salient from the moral communities in which one has been raised. There, then, seems to be a convergence among all these authors on what might be called the area of ethical experience, as opposed to theoretical moral-practical rationality.30 Emmanuel Levinas could be taken to share in this convergence, insofar as he attempts to describe phenomenologically the ethical experience31 of the other person that is located on the horizon of thought, rather than to provide any theoretically developed ethics of principles. This ethical experience of the other summoning one to responsibility is only comprehensible from the ﬁrst-person point of view of someone who cannot pretend to be an “uninvolved onlooker”32 in a manner reminiscent of McDowell’s prohibition to think of ethics from outside an ethical framework one already inhabits. In addition, for Levinas, even to think about what responsibilities the other person owes me in return is already to have put myself at one remove from the experience of being summoned. Levinas, as we have seen, tries to distinguish this ethical relationship to the other from a knowing or theorizing relationship insofar as it is characterized not by the serenity of consciousness knowing an object but by a disturbing urgency and insofar as the phenomenality of another, recognized as human, immediately defects into a face in which one feels oneself responsible to and for the other. While

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a self/other framework seems preserved to a degree in this defection, the reversal of a cognitive going unto an object into a ﬁnding oneself summoned to responsibility, which leads Levinas to give up speaking of intentionality, parallels in some aspects the way in which for McDowell virtue involves a cognitive recognizing that places one immediately under the demands for action that a particular situation imposes. Sharing McDowell’s disinclination for ethical theory, Levinas too recognizes that the very theory through which he articulates this experience of the other is aloof from the experience itself of the other, “betraying it” by its aloofness, even as it is nevertheless necessary to make that experience manifest. Interpreting Levinas, Lyotard presents theorizing about the other’s command, evaluating whether one ought to comply with it, as engaging in “denotative” language use, in contrast to the passive reception of another’s prescriptive to which Levinas points. Only at the end of Otherwise than Being does Levinas admit that the appearance of a second other motivates the one ethically experiencing the ﬁrst other to balance competing claims, and at that point, one needs to revert to ethical theory and to develop principles— something with which McDowell probably would not concur.33 The views of McDowell, the Kantian interpreters, and Levinas differ in their stances toward theoretical practical rationality, with the Kantian interpreters tending to conceive their development of experiential (emotional, virtue) dimensions as supplementing Kant’s theoretical outlook and with Levinas recognizing the necessity for eventual adjudication and theoretical articulation in contrast with McDowell’s belief that the elaboration of a theoretical, principled ethics is unnecessary. Despite these different emphases, McDowell points to a basic similarity between his views and the Kantian categorical imperative in the categoricality of the demands of virtue. The person who struggles with inclinations running counter to a virtue exhibits continence but still lacks the virtue, whereas the virtuous person acts on what she recognizes as called for by a situation without any struggle, not pursuing what she might otherwise highly value. This virtuous person is so ﬁxed on what Aristotle calls the “noble” that the counter inclinations do not even count as reasons for acting. For example, for the courageous person, for whom self-preservation might be important in other settings, the recognition of what she ought to do, in a particular case demanding courage, silences (rather than overrides or weighs against) other reasons for action, and her courage thus requires that she act unconditionally, in a way that resembles the manner in which the categorical imperative commands.34

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Despite sharing this aspect of categoricality, a fundamental difference in focus remains between McDowell and his Kantian-Levinasian counterparts. If virtue consists of an intentional relationship involving sensitivity to requirements that situations impose, the focus of McDowell’s analysis is on the subjective side of that relationship, on the sensitivity rather than the requirements. For instance, in his discussion of categoricality, his emphasis is on how a virtue, such as temperance or courage, enables one to act steadfastly, but without struggle, in such a way that other reasons for acting are simply silenced. The emphasis is on discussing how the virtue possessed interacts with other considerations (which aren’t even considered, let alone struggled against) and on establishing whether or not one actually possesses the virtue or only a species of continence, in accord with which one might ﬁnd oneself still struggling against counterinclinations or weighing them. Again the subjective side of the intentional relationship is stressed insofar as the virtuous response, for instance of courageousness, is considered as primarily a matter of being a certain kind of person. Another concern of McDowell’s in analyzing the virtues has to do with the interaction between different virtues, such as between kindness and fairness, which takes place within the system of virtues pertaining to the virtuous subject. Even in considering charity, McDowell’s focus is not on the others who evoke the virtuous response, but rather on whether a further desire must be added to motivate one to do what the virtue opens one’s eyes to seeing that one ought to do.35 By contrast, though the Kantian interpreters have attempted to include in their discussions the kinds of virtuous sensitivities to the demands evoked by situations, they also direct a great deal of their attention to the “objective” side of the intentional relationship, whose features they articulate in greater detail than the “requirement that situations impose on behavior,”36 as McDowell depicts it. Thus, for these interpreters the object toward which our moral sensitivities are directed consists of “what respect for rational agency requires of us in the circumstances before us.”37 What are experienced as duties on the subjective side have to do with what limits or threatens or what promotes and maintains the fundamental value of a person as a rational agent on the objective side, especially in the face of his or her ability to be hurt, deceived, tempted, or coerced. It is the value of rational agency that our desires do not outweigh and that requires that we not make an exception in our case but comport ourselves with impartiality so as not to disrespect the rational agency of others. Since deliberation ought to be undertaken when a maxim of action seems to offend against a rational agent (even if it ﬁnally

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proves not to), and so requires justiﬁcation, or when the duties owed to rational agents conﬂict, one could say that it is respect for rational agency that occasions the undertaking of deliberation in the ﬁrst place. Indeed, when McDowell comments on how in deciding on an action one ought to balance kindness (e.g., being gentle to A’s feelings) with fairness (e.g., ensuring that the rights of B are not trampled on by one’s gentle support for A’s action), he exempliﬁes just such deliberation born in the demands exacted by different rational agents, despite the fact that McDowell’s focus is on the relationship between the virtues rather than “objects” giving rise to the deliberation. One can imagine also cases in which a maxim of action is not directly aimed at the rational agency of the others but in which the execution of such an action directed at objects (e.g., the other’s property) will impact the rational agency of others, and there too deliberation is called for. Hence, accountability to the rational agency of another takes precedence over my pursuit of my own projects insofar as I cannot merely push ahead with my projects if there is a possibility that they will deleteriously affect other rational agents; rather, I ought to stop and deliberate and perhaps, even better, consult with them. One might explain Levinas’s lack of attention to subjective, virtuous sensitivities in contrast with McDowell’s and the Kantian commentators’ fuller treatment of them, by his preoccupation with the other whose very presence raises questions about one’s pursuit of projects, whether we are talking about how the other in his face resists the murderer, obliges the entrance into discourse, requests a share of one’s bread, or evokes the simple “After you, sir” that one utters while allowing the other to pass through the doorway ﬁrst. So powerful and subversive is the impact on the self by the other that Levinas resists interpreting the self-other relationship as intentional, in the sense of an untroubled cognitive act aiming at an object. His resorting to the term “other” is meant to recapture this original experience of being commanded, and hence he avoids terms like “rational agent” that seem to import theoretical presuppositions (e.g., Kantian or natural law) into the experience. Kant, according to Sherman’s portrayal of him, would share this focus on the objective side insofar as he orders the virtues (e.g., in The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue) in relation to free practical agency as their pinnacle, in contrast to Aristotle (and McDowell following Aristotle) whose descriptions of the “virtues do not appeal to the preservation of our rational nature as primary.”38 If one considers the experience of an ethical relationship as an intentional one, between subjective virtuous sensitivities and objective demands, it is clear that McDowell is more focused on the operations and interrelations of the

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sensitivities themselves rather than that to which they respond and that he construes that to which they respond more vaguely than do the Kantian commentators and Levinas, who place a primacy on the impressive ethical force of the presence of the other person.39 In accord with Sherman’s repeated cautions about interpreting Aristotle accurately, I agree with her that we ought not to take Aristotle to have overlooked the necessity to pay heed to others; to have failed to have seen that altruism pertains to virtues such as kindness, magnanimity, and courage; or to have propounded a view reducible to ethical egoism. Likewise, McDowell has a place for other-regarding virtues such as justice, kindness, fairness, and charity. Though he discusses many other virtues that are not necessarily otherregarding, such as practical wisdom, temperance, prudence (to be aware of the likely effects of one’s action on the future), or courage (described as making it possible to stick to one’s worthwhile projects), it is also conceivable that the other-regarding virtues, functioning as a component of the complex of sensitivities that constitute virtuous life, might give an other-oriented shape to these non-other-oriented virtues by interacting with them in the way that kindness interacts with fairness. Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that the emphases of McDowell and the Levinas/Kantian commentators are different. McDowell allows a role to others in ethical experience and especially in learning how to live ethically; however, in part due to the focus of his analyses, he does not share to the same degree the appreciation that Levinas and the Kantian commentators manifest for the moral forcefulness with which others enter our ethical experience, the questions they pose, and the way in which they limit the projects we choose and execute. For McDowell, one might say the exigencies of others are one set among the many other requirements of virtue, whereas for his counterparts, who also focus on ethical experience, the other person is experienced in Kant’s words as “the supreme limiting condition of all subjective ends.”40 As a conclusion, one might say that the pursuit of the end of being a virtuous agent is not in itself ultimate insofar as we continue to experience ourselves summoned to take into account the claims with which other persons confront us—claims that place limits even on how we go about pursuing our own virtuosity.41 In my view, Levinas and the Kantian commentators are correct about how the appearance of the other person in my experience claims a precedence that evokes an immediate response or at the minimum gives me pause about pursuing the project I have at hand. How though would one establish this claim to precedence that accompanies the other’s presence? McDowell argues that

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via virtuous sensitivities, that is, via a kind of intuitive directedness to situations, we recognize what a situation requires immediately, but these intuitive directednesses deal with concrete empirical situations, for instance, in a particular situation I, if I possessed the virtue of kindness, would recognize the inappropriateness of a hurtful comment. Of course, it might be necessary for me to explain such an empirical intuition, trying to point out to a critic of the correctness of my response particular features that she might have neglected, and so on. However, McDowell’s general account of the virtues itself presents us not with empirical intuitions, but with eidetic ones, including the idea that all virtues consist of reliable sensitivities to requirements that situations impose. To develop such an account, McDowell must have adopted a theoretical stance, striving as much as possible not to allow distorting prejudices to blind his description to how we experience the virtues, and any critic of McDowell’s must do the same. If someone were to disagree with this general account of the virtues, one would have to try to lead McDowell to an (eidetic) insight into what is wrong or missing from his general account and one would be appealing to evidences or aspects overlooked in much the way that one might try to guide one to correct a mistaken empirical intuition about an empirical situation, though one’s arguments would appeal to more general considerations on the eidetic plane. When Levinas and the Kantian commentators assert the precedenceclaiming of the other’s appearance, they, like McDowell, are making theoretical claims about what takes place in immediate experience, but on the same level as McDowell’s general explanation of the virtues, that is, they appeal to eidetic rather than empirical intuitions. We would have to consult our experience in agreeing or disagreeing with these claims and, if we disagree, to point to features of experience or counterexamples that might undermine such eidetic claims. This consultation of experience and appealing to different features of experience, if one disagrees, in order to lead one’s interlocutor to see which one is the right account (or, in phenomenological terms, in order to appreciate the self-exhibiting of the affair under consideration) is similar in both the eidetic and empirical cases. However, knowing what the fair response is when one’s two children make conﬂicting claims about their property requires an empirical, moral intuition in contrast with knowing what virtue in general consists of or what the experience of another person in general demands, both of which require practical-theoretical eidetic intuitions. While socially developed moral sensitivities may inﬂuence one to see eidetic features of moral experience, especially by removing the distorting

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inﬂuences to which a morally undeveloped person might be prone, the intuitions themselves are not determined by such inﬂuences (indeed, one must presuppose that one has already had the intuitions to be able to identify an inﬂuence as distorting). If one thinks that the inﬂuences completely determine one’s intuitions about virtues or the appearance of the others (e.g., that Levinas’s Jewish background explains fully his attunement to the other’s ethical summons), one would succumb to a version of psychologism, which would reduce the validity of one’s eidetic claims to whatever one’s social background might dictate one to believe. In sum, our affirmation that the other enters our experience claiming precedence corresponds to what I take to be correct eidetic intuitions to which Levinas leads us by making appeals to all sorts of concrete ethical experiences (e.g., the “After you, sir” or the resistance offered the murderer in the eyes of the victim) that lead us to see what occurs when another enters our experience, though the experiences on which Levinas focuses cannot be presented here in their fullness. Theoretical disagreements (e.g., whether the ethical summons of the other takes a certain precedence over other concerns) here can only be resolved by appealing to evidences similar to those we use on the level of conﬂicts about what everyday situations demand, though appeals to evidence on the theoretical level aim at establishing eidetic features of experience. Despite McDowell’s acknowledgement of the importance of a socially transmitted tradition, it would seem that, in this area of ethical experience, as we saw in regard to the role of intersubjectivity in epistemology, he does not appreciate as well as Brandom, who works on a more theoretical plane, the need for the ongoing administration of responsibilities through others and the importance of I-Thou relationships in fostering vulnerability to correction by others and heightened sensitivity to their differing points of view. When McDowell criticizes Honneth’s proposal for theoretically evaluating progress in ethical reﬂection on the basis of the greater inclusiveness achieved, he is right to mention that merely including more claims will not improve things, since some claims may not deserve respect (although Honneth seems to make the same point). Although McDowell here seems to be rejecting the kind of social adjudication of ethical beliefs that Honneth proposes; in fact, McDowell’s criticism seems to presuppose a standard for theoretical interactions that is in perfect accord with Levinas’s suggestion that the level of the Third, the level of philosophy and theory, depends on weighing and correcting claims. Given Levinas’s description of the level of the Third, we could say that respecting persons on the theoretical plane requires that we take their

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claims seriously and show how we disagree with them. But this kind of inclusion, which McDowell presupposes and Honneth, at his best, requires, is not limited to the theoretical plane but it begins earlier in the moment of the encounter with others, when their ethical claims impinge on us and we ﬁnd ourselves not necessarily agreeing with what they ask, but receiving their prescriptions and allowing them to give us pause in the pursuit of our projects and to elicit deliberation from us. It is these features of ethical experience that McDowell does not sufficiently accentuate.42 Taking account of this imperativeness experienced in the encounter with the other, even the other who is foreign to me, carries even further implications having to do with the entrance into theoretical discourse. Sherman points out how Aristotle, on whom McDowell relies, differs from Kant regarding the treatment due those who are not part of our community, since for Aristotle: There are forms of good will (eunoia) toward strangers and the like, but we do not realize ourselves as fully in these forms of virtue. For we do not, in addition, share a life or common good with these beneﬁciaries. Signiﬁcantly, on Aristotle’s view, philanthropic feelings that go out to persons whom we do not know, such as in the case of pity or kindness, still reach out to others on the basis of some shared context—that we could suffer similar fates, or that the beneﬁciaries are those who have a characteristic we admire or to which we can relate. In a sense, on the Aristotelian view, our moral interest must connect with others whom we can appreciate from our own corner of the universe, who are part of our lives, relevant to our conception of good living, in a set of circumstances that we broadly share. The idea of being morally interested in persons, simply as such, in virtue of a source of value that is not dependent on circumstance or shared context, is, I take it, at the heart of Kant’s break with Aristotle.43 Levinas would certainly side in this dispute with Kant, since he often compares the other summoning me ethically to the stranger who disturbs my feeling at home with myself. Levinas draws this comparison because he believes that theoretical perspectives, like Aristotle’s, justify our responsibilities to others on the basis of their similarity to ourselves, for instance, arguing that we owe ethical treatment to others because they are like us or because they have a human nature like our own. However, for Levinas, our responsibility to the other is evoked in the moment of the encounter, prior to any

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theoretical justiﬁcation of that responsibility that might appeal to our sharing a common nature. Hence, Levinas asserts that the other experienced ethically (as opposed to experienced epistemologically or considered as part of a theoretical project of justiﬁcation) is “without genus” or lacks a “concept in common” with me. On this pretheoretical level, before I begin to deliberate about what action I ought to take, encountering ethically someone even within my community is paradoxically a matter of encountering a stranger without a genus. Consequently, one might say that for Levinas on a general plane there would seem to be no difference in my ethical responsibility to someone within my community or someone beyond it. Among the things to which the other, whether stranger or compatriot, summons us is the very entering into theoretical discourse, and we suggested earlier that on the basis of this summons we would be able to explain how Brandomian epistemic intersubjectivity might “live from” ethical intersubjectivity. In sum, within the Levinasian-Kantian framework, there is an ethical summons from the stranger, whether from beyond my home group or from within it; and one thing to which the stranger summons us is to enter into discourse, which, as Levinas observes, the fulminating Thrasymachus at ﬁrst resisted, though unsuccessfully.44 McDowell’s idea of practical rationality, which in concurrence with Williams, seems to eschew efforts to give neutral reasons regarding one’s ethical practices to someone from beyond one’s own “whirl of organism,” would seem to align him on the Aristotelian side of the above division. It is precisely this de-emphasis of ethico-theoretical discourse across intercultural differences that prompts Honneth’s criticism of McDowell’s approach. This minimal nature of practical rationality reﬂects McDowell’s quietism as well as his Aristotelian patrimony in regard to practical rationality and perhaps also in regard to its placing a lesser priority on rational agency and the demands it issues in ethical experience. McDowell, though, might respond that distinctive features are involved in offering theoretical practical reasons (e.g., their inability to convince others, the covert motivations of domination that some reasons serve) that make the entire enterprise not worthwhile. To decide who is correct here, we must consider more carefully the three reasons he offers for his suspicion of any “external reasons” that one might offer apart from the particular ethical system in which one is brought up.45 Regarding the ﬁrst reason for suspicion, McDowell’s argument against an external standpoint in practical philosophy seems predicated on the reason-giver’s assuming that external reasons are supposed to be effective

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and convincing in complete independence from the social conditioning of the different whirls of organism into which each interlocutor was initiated and educated. He emphasizes the powerlessness of such theoretical endeavors whose reasons cannot be motivationally efficacious and are incapable of “generating the motivations that are characteristic of someone who has been properly brought up.”46 These comments, as well as McDowell’s criticism of those who would use the charge of irrationality to browbeat others into being moral as they think these others ought to be, gives one the impression that in his view the effort to develop moral principles is part of a project of converting others over to one’s own moral point of view. Such a project could indeed pertain to the everyday lifeworld in which one is bent on pragmatic goals, even though it is surely not clear how effective such efforts to convert through reasons would be even at that level. However, when one adopts the philosophical attitude (comparable to implementing phenomenological reduction or assuming the standpoint of the deontic scorekeeper), one’s purpose is a more restrained and careful one, namely, testing ethical commitments for their justiﬁability or developing justiﬁcations for them that one thinks might withstand rational criticism. One mistakes the level and purpose of such justiﬁcations if one conceives them as aimed at motivating persons to act in ways for which they have not been equipped by their ethical upbringing. One might say that the development of high-level theoretical justiﬁcations, for example, the development of ethical principles that might justify one’s actions and then the offering of a justiﬁcation for such principles, would proceed on the same abstract level on which McDowell offers his account of virtues. Such theoretical accounts are not aimed at motivating moral action, though perhaps McDowell’s description of the “noble” or Kant’s account of the categorical imperative (particularly, the examples of moral agents) might, as a byproduct, have such motivational power. Furthermore, although offering such justiﬁcations might be able to furnish some guidance for future action, one need not construe such a practical signiﬁcance for their principal purpose, nor need one think that such justiﬁcations provide a blueprint for all future occasions, as McDowell suggests.47 A further way to stress the powerlessness of theoretical reason-giving in ethics appears when McDowell asserts that the whirl of organism really is the glue holding moral practices together. One could easily concur insofar as everyday moral practices depend for their maintenance on social learning and social reinforcement. But no one, with the possible exception of Plato, ever expected philosophy to hold a society together; philosophy’s role has been

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the less grandiose and nevertheless socially important one of examining the rationality of the claims emergent from such practices. In sum, McDowell criticizes theoretical ethics for not having the pragmatic, lifeworld efficacy that it was never intended to have. The effort to offer theoretical justiﬁcation for one’s ethical beliefs, like McDowell’s own effort to give an account of the virtues, depends on assuming the kind of responsibility to give as accurate and thorough an account as possible. Whatever the psychological or affective factors that may have been at play, inﬂuencing in part what arguments one gives or ﬁnds convincing, the arguments themselves lay claim to validity and deserve to be considered on their own terms, unless one wishes to espouse a kind of psychological genetic fallacy that the validity of one’s arguments are completely determined by one’s psychological, educational background. Furthermore, to the extent that McDowell seems to allow that we can escape Williams’s psychologism by claiming that we can consider things aright in some degree independently of our internal motivational set, it seems unclear why the same possibility could not exist for higher level practical theoretical reasons regarding ultimate principles of ethics, or, for that matter for his own arguments about how the virtues function. To be sure, the history of philosophy points to the fact that those proffering practical theoretical arguments (e.g., regarding deontological, utilitarian, or natural law principles) have had great difficulty convincing their opponents—a feature that characterizes, though, many other philosophical areas besides ethics. But such a perspective involves standing outside or witnessing from above the fray, as it were, the failures to convince on the part of those who from within the frameworks they are committed to, even in the face of resistance, still strive to present them. This detached perspective that capitalizes on others’ failures to convince appears to be a higher level version of the sideways on viewpoint that McDowell himself rejected when it came to the ﬁrst person, responsible engagement with the world necessary for there to be intelligible empirical content. In trying to provide others with reasons for beliefs one is convinced of, one adopts a ﬁrst-person, responsible point of view, remaining true to what one takes to be true no matter how things might look to an outside observer. Moreover this argument that theoretical-practical arguments are worthless because unconvincing seems premised on the dubious idea that unless one successfully convinces others, the endeavor to give others a philosophical justiﬁcation of one’s beliefs and practices is not worth it. Certainly one could conceive the giving of reasons as a matter of philosophical responsibility

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whether one convinces other or not. In addition, it seems an overgeneralization to contend that philosophical arguments and, in particular, theoretical arguments in ethics have never convinced interlocutors. As regards the second reason for suspicion of a principled theoretical ethics, McDowell, along with Williams, displays an almost Nietzschean acumen in discussing how one’s terror at the vertigo prompts one to develop external reasons through which one conceals the fragility of the rational basis of one’s own commitments and through which one is able to impress others or to exercise domination over them by browbeating them and accusing them of irrationality. However, if it is possible to offer the kind of philosophical justiﬁcation of one’s inherited ethical beliefs to which we have been pointing, apart from the moralizing zealotry that Williams and McDowell oppose, then it seems dubious that the only point of believing in universalizable reasons is to be able to bring a charge of irrationality against opponents. Moreover, these criticisms of the external reasons approach by McDowell and Williams highlight precisely the inappropriateness of relating to interlocutors within a discursive setting by offering arguments intended narcissistically to impress outsiders or the wrongness of concealing and protecting one’s own fragility by browbeating others or belittling them as irrational. It is almost as if McDowell and Williams themselves recognize how such behaviors fail to respond to the ideal of theorizing that the other summons, according to Levinas, or end up denying the kind of respect due rational agency in a discursive context according to the Kantian commentators. It is surprising, though, that McDowell, a virtue ethicist, would not discuss how such treatment reﬂects insensitivity to the situational demands of the discursive setting and that, instead, he recommends abandoning the entire effort to articulate a principled ethics as part of a project of justifying commitments about how one ought to act. Instead of envisioning the possibility that providing justiﬁcation of one’s beliefs might be a response to another ethically obliging the entrance into discourse, McDowell and Williams read the endeavor to give justiﬁcations as a “bluff,” as if such reason-giving were comparable to manipulating another in a game of cards or to searching desperately for a “knockdown” argument, as if discourse were a version of pugilism. The philosophical effort to give another a justiﬁcation of one’s ethical beliefs, freed from any lifeworldly motives to convert that other, need not be characterized by a kind of anxiety about convincing another that might resort to manipulation to achieve its goals. The offer of a justiﬁcation, without the expectation that the recipient comply with some covert purpose of the offerer, as well as

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with ample space allowed for the recipient’s free rejection of the justiﬁcation, would make the giving of practical theoretical arguments appear more as an instance of an exemplary giving of a gift, without hooks. The third reason against practical theoretical ethics holds that we ought to imitate Aristotle who addressed only those already brought up within a particular ethical setting and who lacked modern doubts and anxieties as well as that modern deterioration of conﬁdence in the ethical beliefs in which was one raised that paradoxically prompts desperate searches for external foundations. Insofar as the evaluative outlook of virtuous persons seems to sufﬁce for the rationality of virtue, McDowell seems to believe that our present moral practices will survive quite well without further “foundations.” He may be quite right about the survival of our moral practices, but there are other possible motivations for developing justiﬁcations for one’s moral practices other than the self-preservation of one’s in-group’s moral codes. The attempt to give an account, a rational explanation, to someone who does not belong to one’s moral-cultural community, in universal terms less speciﬁc to one’s own tradition and more capable of making one’s own tradition understandable in the other’s terms—and calling the arguments used in such an account “neutral” is a pejorative way of characterizing them—could be an example of being responsible to the stranger beyond one’s culture. One need not refrain from giving an account to another just because the self-preservation of one’s own moral practices does not require it, and, instead, one could give such an account as a matter of extending oneself in risk and generosity to another. Furthermore, it need not be the case that an anxiety about one’s own ethical tradition fostered by modern doubts underlies the offering of philosophical justiﬁcations for one’s belief; in fact the generous going unto the stranger may reﬂect an overﬂowing of conﬁdence in one’s own moral practices in which one is so secure, as Aristotle was in his own, that one feels free to take the risk of reaching out to another. Indeed, it is conceivable that one’s own traditional ethical practices and beliefs might require such an extension of oneself to the stranger, as is the case with the traditional Jewish ethical practices underlying and inﬂuencing Levinas’s account of ethical experience. Moreover, it is at least a question of historical accuracy whether the interest in giving a philosophical account of one’s commonsense beliefs originated in modern fears or, rather, as Husserl argues in “The Vienna Lecture,” in the capacity of the conﬁdent Greeks, Plato in particular, to refuse to take their norms from naïve experience or the unexamined life, a norm that McDowell himself seems to acknowledge repeatedly in his essay on self-determining subjectivity.48

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Offering such practical theoretical justiﬁcations of one’s moral practices need not depend on what McDowell characterizes as the modern ideal of escaping from a historically conditioned conceptual scheme in emulation of science, or at least science as someone like Williams thinks of it, that is, as furnishing some ahistorical Archimedean point. Theoretical ethics can grow out of one’s everyday moral practices, draw on the insights they generate, make use of historically developed categories and arguments, and not pretend that its arguments can convince those lacking the appropriate affective dispositions and therefore it need not be taken to exemplify the bloodless, dispassionate reason that Hume and McDowell impugn. However, McDowell was perfectly correct to contend that a proper understanding of the natural sciences as socially historically conditioned need not undermine the objectivity of their claims, any more than recognizing the social-historical conditioning of the philosophy, which we claimed assumes something of the Archimedean role it denied to natural science, should undermine its validity. There is no reason the arguments of theoretical ethics—which are no less socially or historically conditioned than science and philosophy, are arrived at by adopting a theoretical stance toward everyday practices, and therefore occupy a higher theoretical terrain than McDowell’s more concrete deliberative “don’t you see” arguments—should be any less entitled to lay claim to objectivity. Finally, one might consider McDowell’s observation that he himself is suggesting no foundational idea of a proper upbringing, since such a proposal would have to be evaluated by one who would engage in such evaluation on the basis of his upbringing which he would take to be the proper one. While McDowell might claim not to be giving any foundation insofar as he refrains from giving any particular example of what a proper upbringing consists of, there is a sense in which he is saying that ethics itself is always a matter of some whirl of organism into which persons are initiated and within which they acquire the virtuous sensitivities that are essentially deﬁned as leading their possessors to respond appropriately to situational demands. He is telling us what is essentially involved in ethics, how this “appropriate region of the space of reasons” is constituted and what type of rationality is or is not appropriately deployed within it.49 Clearly, the types of activities and forms of rationality pertinent to ethics are not those of the natural sciences, but differentiating between these domains of ethics and the natural sciences depends precisely on the practice of philosophy, that as we saw, denied to natural science that “ﬁnal authority over the use of the notion of the world”50 that Williams sought to give it. Despite McDowell’s quietism, it does seem that he

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implicitly occupies a standpoint from which he assigns various regions their autonomy vis-à-vis other domains, their speciﬁc activities, and their distinctive modes of rationality—and in this sense he certainly seems to be providing something of a foundation for ethics. I fully agree with him that the methods appropriate to the natural sciences are not appropriate in ethics and that, at least at the level of lived ethics, he is certainly correct about the role of the whirl of organism, the virtues, and the communal modes of deliberation. Where I differ with him has to do with the possibility of a practical theoretical ethics that might articulate an ethics of principles. His opposition to such a theoretical ethics reﬂects his quietism, which ought not be understood as rejecting the possibility of situating various “regional ontologies” with reference to each other. Rather, his quietism has to do with refraining from entering philosophical discussions framed by the skeptic’s questions, placing in question that skeptical framework itself, and, as a result, avoiding being subsumed within a black hole from which there is no exit. As we have seen, this quietism makes sense in dealing with questions about how to reconcile normative meanings with the realm of law or how to explain interpersonal understanding if one starts with a nonexpressive human body from which one seeks to infer mental states. But after my comments in this section, it is not clear why attempting to provide a theoretical justiﬁcation for one’s moral practices necessarily ensnares one in a skeptical sinkhole from which there is no escape. One might interpret such a justiﬁcation as succumbing to skeptical beguilement if one took it, as McDowell does, as motivated merely by one’s distress at looking into the vertigo, as practically unnecessary, as sprung from misguided anxieties, or as aimed at the domination of others. However, I have argued against all these reasons for not offering theoretical practical justiﬁcations, and some other argument would have to be made for a quietism that would dispense with such justiﬁcations. Finally, the objection might be raised that I have spoken of the responsibility to some nebulous other who is supposed to be asking for my justiﬁcations for the moral practices that I live out as part of my whirl of organism. A defender of McDowell might ask who such interlocutors might be, especially because (if McDowell’s views prevail) there will be fewer, if any, of them. In fact, however, such questions have been raised in the past, and the history of philosophy is ﬁlled with philosophers who have sought to answer such questions, and once asked, there is always the possibility that such questions will be asked over and over again in the future. Besides, according to the

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standards of rational reﬂection that McDowell himself embraces in his essay on self-determining subjectivity, it is perfectly legitimate to ask about rational justiﬁcations of inherited tradition insofar as self-determination requires that we not take anything on blind trust from them. Indeed, McDowell himself recognizes such questioners, it is just that his response to their query, his mode of undertaking philosophical-ethical responsibility in their regard, is to try to convince them that the questions that they have asked throughout their history are unnecessary and to lead them to, as Wittgenstein described it, “The discovery that gives philosophy peace.”51 While McDowell’s theory of the virtues has much valuable to say about commonsense ethics and the virtues as subjective, semiperceptual sensitivities to objective situational demands, I have argued that Levinas and the commentators on Kant single out, on the objective side, the impressive ethical force with which the other person enters our experience. In the Levinasian scheme, it is precisely the summons of this other person that provides motives for undertaking theoretical-practical justiﬁcation of one’s ethical views, to which McDowell the quietist would not be particularly inclined, regardless of the many justiﬁcations that he has presented against such justiﬁcation and that I have discussed above. In line with his own philosophy of philosophy, one would expect that Brandom would be more open to such practical-theoretical justiﬁcation, and it is to his own comments on ethics, which are rather inchoate in character, that I will now turn.

3. a discursive ethics of principles In the ﬁnal section of his reply to Habermas, Brandom acknowledges that he has omitted discussions of ethics, in part because people have failed to understand normativity, particularly epistemic and discursive normativity by associating it too closely with moral normativity. But he also gestures toward two different, diametrically opposed directions in which one interested in ethical questions might develop his epistemology: either toward skepticism about whether distinctively moral norms even exist or toward the transcendental moral theory elaborated by Kant and Habermas. His point is not to endorse either position but to show how his neutrality on ethical topics opens up possibilities rather than closes them down. In this concluding section of the chapter on ethics, I would like to brieﬂy consider a possible response based on the lifeworld theory distinction developed in this book to the natural kinds skepticism against there

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being distinctive moral norms, but I will develop this response on the basis of the discussion of this topic that took place between Honneth and McDowell. Finally, I will defend Brandom’s claim that MIE is compatible with Habermas’s discourse ethics against Kevin Scharp who holds that because Habermas’s ethics is based on I-We sociality it is incompatible with the I-Thou sociality crucial to Brandom’s approach. I will also show that discourse ethics is particularly compatible with the view of ethical experience and practical rationality developed in the ﬁrst two parts of this chapter.52 As regards skepticism about natural kinds, that is, whether the kind “moral norms” even exists, Honneth charges McDowell with being unable to establish in any universal way the difference between moral facts and other types of normative facts (e.g., politeness norms) insofar as such a distinction would depend only on the “internal perspective of a particular tradition.”53 If McDowell were to base this difference on the fact that moral norms command categorically and silence other reasons, Honneth still contends that every object perceived as an imperative internal to some lifeworld would have to be taken to be some “moral” fact, whether or not this fact further requires that other persons be taken equally into consideration—and this requirement would apparently distinguish moral obligations from other kinds for Honneth. McDowell’s response consists of reverting to the level of commonsense experience (as one might expect), querying whether we even need a theoretical deﬁnition of the moral, denying further that he would offer such a deﬁnition in terms of the categorical imperative, and asserting that those who care about moral living are quite capable of telling a moral question when they see one. McDowell seems to be correct in arguing that those in everyday life who live morally will know a moral question when they see one. But in my view, this everyday sensitivity has to be construed in relation to the everyday experience of demands for respect evoked by rational agency in myself or others, as our previous section suggested. One could go further, as Honneth does, however, by theoretically clarifying the differences between moral and other normative systems. Here one would have to differentiate the demands of respect appropriate to rational agency qua rational agency and those requiring responses to someone because he or she is playing a certain role within a conventional practice, such as the norms of politeness that might require one to wear a shirt in attending a formal dinner in honor of the Queen of England. But showing up without a shirt need not necessarily disrespect the queen qua rational agent, though it would violate the conventional norms of etiquette governing how she ought to be treated qua queen and how she and

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other dinner guests ought to be treated qua participants in a formal dinner. A much more thorough theoretical explanation is needed, though, including a development of these different “qua” roles and the kind of demands correlative to them to demarcate the domain of the moral, “a motley, gerrymandered concept,”54 in Brandom’s view. All that I have tried to do here is to illustrate how on the experiential and theoretical levels, as they have been described so far in this chapter, one might go about constructing an account of the distinctiveness of moral norms.55 Contrary to Brandom’s admissions that one could ground one’s ethics in commitments implicitly assumed in engaging in discourse at all and that Habermas’s and Kant’s transcendental moral theory is entirely compatible with MIE, Scharp makes the case that they are incompatible because Habermas’s I-We account of communicative action is not available to a viewpoint depending on I-Thou sociality like Brandom’s. As we have seen, his argument is part of a larger discussion showing how Brandom is able to reconcile interpersonal communication with his inferential account of meaning (in which interlocutors’ inferential commitments may not overlap) via the notion of scorekeeper keeping a different set of books on himself and his interlocutor with whom he shares an I-Thou relationship. For Scharp, though, Habermas’s theory of communicative action represents I-We sociality insofar as “it deﬁnes truth and rightness as what is taken to be correct by the members of a community under ideal conditions”56 and insofar as whatever this privileged viewpoint would take to be correct would be correct. Scharp points out that Habermas recanted his discourse theory of truth because of problems with the notion of an ideal communication community—and we might add that his new view allows for a kind of interaction between discursive theorizing and everyday life that resembles in several ways the position being developed here. Discourse ethics, though, according to Scharp, would still have to maintain that it would be impossible for there to be a situation in which all relevant people under ideal conditions would accept a norm and yet it would turn out to be morally not right. Consequently, discourse ethics privileges the We perspective.57 But does Habermas really privilege the We perspective and is the mode of sociality underpinning discourse ethics really I-We? It is important, ﬁrst of all, to recall the structure of the argument in his “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justiﬁcation”—an essay that exempliﬁes, by the way, what we have repeatedly referred to earlier as a theoretical practical justiﬁcation of a principled ethics. The essay begins with a phenomenology

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of the moral in which the everyday lifeworld is shown to motivate the turn to the rational justiﬁcation of moral beliefs that noncognitivists deny. After distinguishing the moral-practical type of rationality involved in justifying rightness claims from the cognitive-instrumental rationality that justiﬁes truth claims and after showing that ethical rationality must articulate a ﬁrst principle in the light of which ﬁrst-level norms can be justiﬁed, that is, proved right, Habermas defends as his ﬁrst principle “U.” According to U, which Habermas takes to implement Kant’s concern for impersonality and impartiality, every valid subnorm must be such that all affected can accept the consequences and side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for satisfying everyone’s interests. Habermas then sets about justifying U by showing that anyone who enters an argumentation process (including anyone arguing whether or how to justify U) must have already accepted procedural conditions of arguing that amount to implicitly recognizing U. For instance, in argumentation one is normatively required to refrain from imposing one’s own view on others without taking account of how they think and engaging their reasons. In addition, one must not coerce another but appeal to their free assent, just as according to U one ought not to impose one’s own moral norm on others but instead preserve their freedom to accept or not the consequences of observing whatever concrete norm is at stake. Consequently, if someone were to question U in a discourse, he or she would presuppose that the kinds of conditions U calls for (e.g., noncoercion, a place for dissent and free assent, etc.) would already be in place. To be sure, Habermas speaks of argumentation in ethics as aimed at “repairing a disrupted consensus”58 and trying to achieve a “common will,”59 and it might seem as if the point is to arrive at some privileged “We,” which will get things right beyond any possible contestation. However, Habermas never speaks of what it would be like if such a consensus were arrived at, and, if it were, it certainly seems that he would have provided for the possibility that a later questioner might raise questions that might lead to a new consensus that the former consensus was mistaken, thereby suggesting that any consensus is at best fallible. However, Habermas’s concern is on the process by which interlocutors might arrive at a consensus rather than what it would be like to have arrived at it. Furthermore, when one looks at what is involved in a process pursuing consensus, one can see that the spirit of Habermas’s remarks seem to depend more on I-Thou sociality rather than the I-We form that Scharp attributes to him. If the ideal of impartiality, as we have suggested above, has to do

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with me not making an exception in my case and so disrespecting the rational agency of others, so in Habermas the ideal aims at preventing me from imposing my view on others without any regard for their objections (or their assent either) and from, consequently, disregarding their rational agency. Such regard for others’ points of view is required when one person by herself tries to determine whether her maxim of action is universalizable, but “It is not sufficient, therefore, for one person to test whether he can will the adoption of a contested norm after considering the consequences and side effects that would occur if all persons followed that norm or whether every person in an identical position could will the adoption of such a norm.”60 Such judging would still be relative to only one standpoint, and hence the best way of ensuring that one is being impartial and taking into account the standpoint of others is to leave behind the monological framework in which Kant frames moral deliberation and to embark on a “real” process of cooperative argumentation. In that argumentation process, “Rather than ascribing as valid to all other any maxim that I can will to be a universal law, I must submit my action to all others for purposes of discursively testing its claims to university.”61 One has the impression that the ideal of consensus, calling for a kind of universal agreement that Habermas never claims to have been realized, is designed to ensure that one suspect like Brandom’s scorekeeper that one’s own perspective is not necessarily universal or correct and that it needs to be submitted to testing by others. If this is so, then I-Thou sociality takes precedence over the I-We version in the Habermasian framework, and, in addition, U, the principle of universalization seems to mandate perspectivalism and is, therefore, reminiscent of Brandom’s own account of the structure of discourse, which is presupposed even by those who deny it and, as we have said, eidetically enshrines the deprivileging of perspectives. We are interpreting Habermas’s principle of universalization in terms of the respect for the rational agency of one’s interlocutors that it mandates. By so doing we are following a suggestion of Kant’s in the Groundwork, namely, that the various formulations of the categorical imperative, that is, in terms of universalization, humanity as an end in itself, and the kingdom of ends, ought to be read together, “as so many formulas of the very same law.”62 Kant recognizes clearly that principle of universalization never ought to be separated from the formula of humanity as an end in itself because, whenever we are subject to universal laws, we ought to be subject in such a way that we are also regarded as legislating for ourselves and that we maintain our character as ends. This inescapable entwinement of the formulations of the

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categorical imperative appears clearly in Habermas when he ﬁnally justiﬁes U by showing how in argumentation itself we observe “procedural conditions that amount to implicitly acknowledging (U).”63 Those procedural conditions include such things as ensuring that others be allowed to take part in discourse; to introduce assertions; to express attitudes, desires, and needs and that no internal or external force be employed to compel or manipulate their assent. One’s argument is normatively bound to appeal to the free assent of one’s interlocutor, as opposed to the coercive picture of theoretical-practical discourse that Williams and McDowell reject. The emphasis in the procedural conditions, which amount to acknowledging U, on the respect due the rational agency of one’s interlocutor implies the legitimacy of the above interpretation of U itself, as placing a priority on respect for rational agency and on exposure of one’s own viewpoint to the criticism of others rather than seeking a consensus among an “us” that might disqualify as incorrect any dissenting perspective.64 Furthermore, discourse ethics, which we have argued, following Brandom’s own statement, is compatible with MIE, reﬂects ethical experience as Levinas and the Kantian commentators present it, though McDowell, in developing the idea of virtues as modes of sensitivity on the subjective side has much to offer in developing a full account of ethical experience. Of course, Habermas’s discourse ethics presents an ethical theory with a universal ﬁrst principle in which the I counts as much as the other—something that Levinas thought to be perfectly appropriate on the plane of the Third where the asymmetrical obligation of the face-to-face experience of the other is assumed, modiﬁed, and distributed across many others deserving symmetrical treatment. Moreover, just as we saw with Brandom’s account of epistemic intersubjectivity, in which we found the traces of an older ethical intersubjectivity, traces of the asymmetrical summons of the other exist within the symmetry of discourse ethics, especially insofar as it seems to depend on an I-Thou model of sociality attuned to the other’s claims and questions. When the participant in discourses is troubled about imposing what she takes to be universal on the other, worries about ensuring that the other’s participation is protected, or refrains from manipulating or coercing the interlocutor, that participant may well ﬁnd her own plans and projects circumscribed by the other in much the way that Levinas depicts. Insofar as Habermas’s ethical theory seems to include just such dimensions, it would seem to be among the theoretical ethical frameworks that would be more congenial to a Levinasian account of ethical experience. Lyotard found such congeniality between Kant

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and Levinas by detecting in Kant’s account of the fact of reason in The Critique of Practical Reason the idea that we are seized by the other’s prescriptive before we undertake any denotative, theoretical commentary on it. As our discussion of the debate between McDowell and Brandom on perception has suggested, the different levels, purposes, and attitudes of experience and theory—here in the case of ethics—do not rule out the possibility of some continuities between them.65

CHAPTER 8

phenomenology, the intentional spectrum, and intersubjectivity

I have repeatedly relied on phenomenological analyses to mediate the debates between John McDowell and Robert Brandom or to criticize or support various aspects of their thought. I have argued that McDowell’s account of perception and intelligible empirical content is better than Brandom’s, though I have elaborated that account through phenomenological analyses. Whereas McDowell rightly asserts the rights of common sense, in much the way that Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz restore the importance of the lifeworld to philosophical discourse, he does not develop adequately the philosophical perspective he occupies. Though Brandom is more cognizant of his own philosophical outlook and the discursive domain from which he speaks, I have used phenomenological analyses to clarify the ultimacy and eidetic nature of the claims of MIE, whose structures resemble those of Husserlian transcendental intersubjectivity, and I have also suggested how his theory is in need of supplementation from phenomenological explanations of perception and common sense (or the lifeworld). In this ﬁnal chapter, I will present more systematically the phenomenological outlook on which I have been relying and to show it as examining a spectrum that extends from encounters with perceptual objects to the eidetic objects and features discovered in phenomenological theoretical self-reﬂection. At the same time, I will be recapitulating the positive and negative criticisms of Brandom and McDowell advanced earlier in the book, and hence this ﬁnal chapter presents a summary of the entire argument of the book. Finally, this book has brought into synthesis several different perspectives, which may not ﬁt together as comfortably as the book might suggest and all of which have to do basically with intersubjectivity. In the third section of this chapter, I will examine some of these neuralgic points, for example, the connections between Levinas’s ethics and transcendental phenomenology, between transcendental intersubjectivity and Apel’s transcendental pragmatics, and ﬁnally between Husserl’s ethics and the different-leveled ethics presupposed in this book that synthesizes the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas and Jürgen Habermas, the latter of which converges with Apel’s transcendental pragmatics.

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1. phenomenology and the intentional spectrum: the perceptual pole Philosophy, and phenomenology as a branch of it, begins for Husserl in responsibility. Following the normative ideal of philosophy, the philosopher as beginner cannot allow claims just to be taken as valid without having established them as justiﬁed, and this applies even to the testimony of others. As Descartes urged, one needs, at least once in her life, to overthrow and build anew what one has been naively accepting, since humanity, whether in individuals or in community, “is not permitted to remain living, so to speak, naively each day.”1 If one is to think for oneself, one has to free oneself from prejudices (i.e., the things one takes for granted that arise out of sedimented traditions) and one has to resist depending on presuppositions that one refrains from interrogating. It is not surprising, then, that Husserl repeatedly characterizes philosophy as a vocation of “critical position-taking” with regard to commonsense or theoretical presuppositions, calling for the kind of rigorous commitment that is comparable to a religious vocation. This prospect of a philosophy whose normative ideal demands complete justiﬁcation gives even Husserl pause, “I am terriﬁed (erschrecke) before this radicalism, and still I see that I must begin this way and no other,”2 and, though he admits that what one holds one day can be devalued in the light of new evidence the next, he still espouses the limit-idea of this absolutely justiﬁed evidence as the normative guide under which he will allow himself to be led. Of course, even to challenge this ideal of philosophy because factual experience shows that such an ideal has been rarely reached need not impugn its normative character. In addition, if we were to challenge this ideal because our reﬂection depends on an unreﬂective life that it is impossible to master completely, as Merleau-Ponty thought—without himself giving up the ideal, we might add—the very challenge of the ideal partakes in the ideal insofar as one refuses to take for granted even the presuppositions of the ideal that might underlie Husserl’s articulation of it. Even if the ideal cannot be completely achieved, the striving to be critical itself may yield a greater freedom from naively accepted presuppositions than we possessed prior to such reﬂection.3 Phenomenology, implementing this spirit of not taking presuppositions for granted, also attempts to give a positive account of how and what we experience, but it can do so only insofar as it accepts only what presents itself before us, step by step, in an insightful seeing or the intuitive having of the

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state of affairs being considered. Thus, as opposed to Immanuel Kant, who establishes transcendental subjectivity regressively, as what must be presupposed, given that we know the world and achieve scientiﬁc truth, Husserl demands that we not take knowledge or the world or science for granted as starting points, but rather we need to build up to such results, transposing such results into intuitive concepts, that is, beginning with originally and purely self-intuitions, “seeing for ourselves” from the bottom up.4 The very use of the term “intuition,” though, conjures up images of “mythic fanaticism (mythischen Schwärmereien).”5 To correct this misinterpretation, Husserl, who insists on as open a deﬁnition of intuition as possible in order to ensure that one not impose any presuppositions on whatever it is that presents itself for critical examination, deﬁnes his methodological intuitionism. He claims, “In phenomenology, the ‘method of intuition’ has a simple and modest meaning, it claims that I must only trustworthily judge, where I, with regard to what I mean, can show (ausweisen) it in itself for myself or simply show it itself, and the ﬁnal showing is a seeing or something analogous to usual seeing, and even that [the seeing] must be shown again in a pure intuiting showing; and all kinds and forms of this seeing, of the evidence of seeing, must be studied.”6 At each stage, step by step, one has to see for oneself whether what the state of affairs one is concerned with is accurately presented. Throughout this book, we have observed the ways in which McDowell and Brandom have exempliﬁed a sense of philosophical responsibility akin to Husserl’s. As we have seen, McDowell exempliﬁes this responsibility at the root of philosophy insofar as he insists on a direct, ﬁrst-person engagement with the world, as opposed to a sideways on view, as part of a process of acquiring intelligible empirical content, which enables one to conﬁrm or adjust one’s worldview in response to experience. Similarly, he exhibits a radical examination of presuppositions in his quietistic refusal to entertain philosophical questions whose hidden philosophical premises make the answering of those questions impossible Likewise Brandom’s spelling out of the features of the scorekeeper, who decides whether to endorse other’s claims, and Brandom’s self-reﬂection on the very claims of MIE as making explicit the discursive structure in which one is involved while stating, reading, and evaluating the contents of the book itself—both exemplify the responsible philosophizing for which Husserl advocates. Of course, we have questioned the completeness with which they exercise such philosophical responsibility, inquiring, for example, whether McDowell’s quietism leads him to leave unexamined common sense and its features, usually just after he has liberated

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common sense from its distortion at the hands of theoretical reconstructions and even though such examination need not imply a succumbing once again to the skeptical predicaments from which one has just escaped. Furthermore, I have argued that it would be possible to clarify more sufficiently the fullness of perception or to offer philosophical justiﬁcation for one’s ethics, not necessarily because one has fallen prey to modern anxieties that ought not to trouble us because they never troubled Aristotle. I have raised objections as to whether Brandom simply takes for granted the engagement with the world that his own discursive account of perception presupposes and that McDowell has explained as yielding intelligible empirical content or whether he has taken sufficient account of the intentional activity sedimented within the perceptual claims introduced into the space of reasons. When Husserl strives for the freedom from prejudices that his notion of philosophical responsibility calls for and seeks positively to grasp what experience consists of through step-by-step intuitions he regularly resorts to the procedure of phenomenological reduction. In the Cartesian Meditations, he interprets this reduction in a Cartesian way, namely, that one endeavors to refrain from the natural belief in the existence of the world and thereby attends to the subjective processes through which the world is given, not as it is naturally believed to exist but as meant in those processes (i.e., as phenomena). In this way, by refraining from taking a stance toward what is objectively valid for these processes, one focuses on and takes interest in what is going on within those processes and what appears in relation to them. In section IIIA of his Crisis, however, Husserl integrates the reduction within a reﬂective constitutive phenomenology that is particularly pertinent to the questions we just raised with regard to McDowell and Brandom respectively, namely, about the fullness of perception and the engagement with the world included as a stratum within discourse. Starting with and contrasting with Kant, who begins with the natural sciences and recursively inquires into the structures of knowing that one must possess to do science at all and whose account of knowing may be skewed in a scientiﬁc direction, Husserl undertakes a constitutive investigation by means of an inquiring back (Rückfrage) into what was taken for granted by Kant, namely, the lifeworld that is there in the plain certainty of experience before anything is studied by the natural sciences. Husserl insists that the responsible philosopher cannot leave anonymous and uninterrogated this “realm of the subjective”7 that no one before has made thematic or therefore discovered. He argues that it is false that the objective, positive sciences stand on their own, fully self-sufficient because of their supposed

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self-grounding, but rather the lifeworld serves as the experiential ground of all scientiﬁc objectivity, the unspoken ground of the cognitive accomplishments of philosophers and scientists alike. For instance, he explains that the pregeometrical practical art of surveying was the basis out of which theoretical geometry emerged, just as prescientiﬁc experiencing establishes the world that the natural sciences build on in their search for the “objectively true”8 world. In other words, Husserl reﬂects back to the lifeworld from which geometrical theory and the natural sciences emerge, on which they rely, and in relation to which they develop their idea of objective truth.9 This tracing back to the lifeworld that precedes the emergence of science depends on the implementation of two stages of the phenomenological epoché, that is, “a refraining from belief,” in this ﬁrst stage, a refraining from participating in the cognitions of the objective sciences and in scientiﬁctheoretical interests—that is, one lets go of every interest in the being of what one’s scientiﬁc acts aim at and the validity of scientiﬁc claims. This letting go leaves nothing to be focused on but the subjective (scientiﬁc) acts themselves and the content immanent in them. This reﬂective distancing ourselves from immersion in scientiﬁc pursuits and results enables us to see these scientiﬁc activities as pertaining to subjectivity and, further, as connected to a broader swath of lifeworldly subjective activity, which up until now had been only on the horizon of scientiﬁc pursuits and not itself thematized. As Husserl puts it, “If we cease being immersed in our scientiﬁc thinking, we become aware that we scientists are, after all, human beings, and as such are among the components of the life-world which always exists for us, ever pregiven.”10 But then, insofar as the ﬁrst epoché of the objective sciences still leaves consciousness in the lifeworld taking for granted the world and the objects appearing with it, we must undertake a new epoché, a total, universal epoché by which we refrain from participating in belief even in the world and come to see the world itself as a correlate of conscious activity. Just as the recognition of the subjective formations of science in relation to their immanent contents made possible seeing those subjective formations in relation to the lifeworld, subjective activities from which they originated, so recognizing lifeworld subjective activity in relation to its immanent contents (through this universal epoché) is a step toward seeing it in its completed state as traceable to deeper substrata of intentional activity. Just as one traces back from the sciences to their origins in the lifeworld, so one takes the life world itself “as an index or guideline for inquiring back into the multiplicities of manners of appearing and their intentional structures,”11 which Husserl describes in the following way:

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Thus the particular object of our active consciousness, and correlatively the active, conscious having of it, being directed toward it, and dealing with it—all this is forever surrounded by an atmosphere of mute, concealed, but co-functioning validities, a vital horizon into which the active ego can also direct itself voluntarily, reactivating old acquisitions, consciously grasping new apperceptive ideas, transforming them into intuitions. Because of this constantly ﬂowing horizonal character, then, every straightforwardly performed validity in natural world-life always presupposes validities extending back, immediately or mediately, into a necessary subsoil of obscure but occasionally available, reactivatable validities, all of which together, including the present acts, make up a single indivisible, interrelated complex of life.12 In sum, this double epoché involves a kind of reﬂective withdrawing oneself from immersion in theoretical scientiﬁc and every day lifeworld subjective activities that had been taken up with the correlative objects as existing or known, and in such withdrawing the subjectivity activities and their contents become more visible. But in each case, Husserl sees these epochés as also freeing us for the possibility of seeing how the higher level subjective activities of science, and even lifeworld subjective activities, can be genetically traced back to more basic subjective activities on which they depend and from which they have emerged. Furthermore, as the above quotation suggests, the basic subjective activities, although discoverable and analyzable separately from their higher level counterparts, are cofunctioning within the higher-level subjective activities, as strata of experience. Hence, the scientist does not cease functioning within the intuitive surrounding world of life insofar as she sees, hears, or touches scientiﬁc instruments or the everyday objects that are relied on to validate theories. Conversely, since the subject undertaking science is the same subject that has been formed in the lifeworld, the distinctive modes of acting, experiencing, and verifying that are constitutive of a lifeworld subject, are taken up in a transformed manner (e.g., governed or reﬁned by different, scientiﬁc interests or purposes) into the higher level subjective activities of objective science. These previous subjective accomplishments are, thus, “sedimented” within the scientiﬁc subject.13 I have argued above that the peculiar self-reﬂective stance Brandom adopts in MIE, which pertains to his sense of philosophical responsibility and is exempliﬁed by the scorekeeper’s “resolve not to accept unquestioningly” another’s

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claim, resembles the self-critical stance Husserl adopts in the phenomenological epoché. By situating Brandom’s work on a transcendental plane, I have suggested a more sympathetic interpretation of what McDowell takes to be his “interiorization” of entitlements insofar as his reﬂective stance withdraws him from the commonsense commitments of lifeworldly perceivers and ends up “reducing” perceptual contents to the correlates of a perspective. My “transcendental” reading of Brandom also makes more plausible his rather strangeseeming attempt to give an account of others as intentional systems insofar as this attempt is comparable to the transcendental constitution of the other in Husserl’s ﬁfth Cartesian meditation. Finally, because of his scorekeeping rigor, Brandom pulls us back from immersion in the world and makes us reﬂective about the linguistic activity (and intentionality) through which the world is given us, prioritizing inferentialism over representationalism, in much the way that the Husserlian reduction rescues us from world immersion and brings to light the intentional subjective activities in relation to which the world appears as a correlate, that is, those immanent contents, of which we spoke above. But what is missing in Brandom is the constitutive Rückfrage, which Husserl in his Crisis ﬁnds himself impelled to undertake by his sense of philosophical responsibility. Hence, when the scorekeeper attributes perceptual knowledge to another, if that other’s articulated commitment is appropriate to the fact that p, a phenomenological constitutive analysis might disclose how that scorekeeper herself must at some level have encountered the world, if empirical content is to be intelligible, as McDowell claims. Similarly, if Brandom’s reﬂective framework only permits perspective-relative claims about the objective world, a genetic treatment would suggest that such claims depend on the scorekeeper’s direct intentional contact with the real world pretheoretically experienced, in a manner that might take account of Lafont’s objections. Thus, the linguistic judgment formulated immediately in the presence of what is perceived and endorsing the perceptual claim of another on whom one keeps score and to whom one attributes perceptual knowledge, could be subjected to constitutive analysis. Such an analysis would disclose as strata within that judging activity regarding perceptual objects (and not necessarily existing before the utterance of the judgment): the scorekeeper’s turning toward an object, the focusing of appropriate sense capacities, the mobilization of kinesthetic anticipations, the selection out of what is perceived from its background, and the actualization of conceptual capacities in receptivity. Husserl’s epoché of the objective sciences and higher level theory to make visible lifeworld subjectivity indicates the kind of trajectory that characterizes

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McDowell’s thought insofar he believes that Brandom has overtheorized perceptual activity of the everyday perceiver who need not inferentially warrant her reliability. Likewise, for McDowell, philosophy inclined to scientism has overlain commonsense experience with theoretical accretions with the result that the intersubjective understanding of others becomes impossible and the spontaneous deployment of conceptual capacities must be cut off from sensation mechanistically understood. Rather than attempting to answer the problems posed by such accretions, McDowell recommends recovering commonsense experience expounded through the idea of Aristotelian second nature that the accretions have buried. In addition, McDowell seeks to correct the worldviews tending toward scientism that explain away the everyday experience precisely by resorting to careful phenomenological description of commonsense experience of secondary qualities and the objective situational features, including values, which evoke or require appropriate subjective responses, including ethical ones. Husserl would concur with McDowell insofar as he too notices that “the power of historical prejudices also plays a constant role here, especially of those which, coming from the origin of the modern positive sciences, dominate us all.”14 One could ascribe to McDowell an aptness for constitutive phenomenological analysis that appears from the start in his criticism of Brandom’s notion of perception, but, as we have suggested in chapter 3, McDowell’s view of how conceptual capacities are holistically actualized in receptivity could proﬁt itself, without taking away his holism, from a similar analysis that would illuminate what is involved in receptivity, namely, the intentionality of perception itself, which Smith explained, and the passive syntheses involved in sense discrimination, the ﬂow of temporality, kinesthetic intentionality, and the horizons accompanying any perceptual activity.15 The point at which Brandom’s lack of constitutive analysis appears most evidently is in his account of perception in which a noninferential report is elicited through reliable differential responsive reporting dispositions activated by stimuli in the same way that iron ﬁlings rust as a response to moisture stimuli or parrots can be trained to utter sentences in the presence of stimuli, though, to be sure, the difference is that human beings can follow up on the inferential relationships of which their reports are a part. Conceivably, it is regularly the case that we do not experience a stimulus ﬁrst and then formulate a sentence but rather that in experiencing a red object, for instance, we express the utterance “This is red” so immediately that it appears to be a simultaneous component of the perceptual experience itself. However,

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Husserl, from within the phenomenological attitude, would describe the experience, as including, in addition to the uttering of the sentence and as a stratum within it, a passive synthesis that depends on the subjective activities (presupposing operations in internal time-consciousness), through which we from a ﬁrst person perspective apprehend an identity (e.g., color, shape, object) coming to prominence from out of its background and “striking”16 us, “knocking at the door of consciousness,”17 in a way that motivates, rather than causes us to turn toward the object (and utter the expression).18 Obviously Brandom’s “stimulus-response” characterization of the experience in the same terms as moisture causing iron ﬁlings to rust is a naturalscientiﬁc causal one. It describes perception according to a model of interaction that occurs between things (neither of which possesses consciousness), that would be visible to a third-person outside observer, and that would thereby bypass the ﬁrst-person viewpoint that both Husserl and McDowell favor. In addition, whereas Husserl’s phenomenological reduction involves clarifying ﬁrst of all everyday experience, much like McDowell’s account of secondary qualities, upon which one is able subsequently to adopt a scientiﬁc, explanatory attitude (giving a causal account of the experience, for example, in terms of light waves or stimuli impacting dispositions), Brandom, in effect, substitutes the scientiﬁc account from the start for the phenomenological one. As a consequence, the uttered sentence is only something causally produced by the world, without intentional engagement on our part, behind our backs as it were, about which we can always raise the question of whether what we utter is really linked to the way things are. Things would be different, though, if that utterance were a component of an experiential encounter that consists at its basic level in subjective, intentional activity that reaches out to the world and takes it in as it is. Even if one thinks back, as does Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to a moment when the differentiation between subject and object, between ﬂesh encompassing the world and the world, is not so clear, subjectivity would still be involved—a far cry from an interaction between two physical things (as opposed to, for instance, a mere physical, subjectless relation between something affecting light waves and the chemical reactions in a retina or optic nerve). In discussing Brandom’s lack of a constitutive account of what is sedimented within noninferential reports, we have been supposing that the more common experience would be that the noninferential utterance would be simultaneous with the occurrence of whatever elicits it, but were we to suppose a temporal gap between the response and the stimulus, such a gap would seem to render the subject’s relationship to the

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world even less intentional in character. Consciousness would then come into view only in the utterance, now introduced into the space of reasons, after the stimulus would have impacted us at some level prior to consciousness, seemingly in an even greater independence from consciousness than would be the case if the utterance took place in simultaneity with whatever elicits it. In Husserl’s account, by contrast, the turning toward occurs with reference to a correlate that motivates the turning (and that can motivate insofar as it stands out from a foreground passively synthesized with its background) and that thus already bears the mark of the conscious synthetic activity that makes its appearance possible. For Husserl, there is no experience of the world except in relation to conscious, subjective activity intentionally related to it, and it is in objects’ correlation with conscious activity that Husserl deﬁnes his transcendental idealism, which does not imply that we “create” the world out of our conscious activity.19

2. phenomenology and the intentional spectrum: the eidetic-theoretic reflective pole The natural attitude, or the attitude according to which we live our daily lives, is governed by a pragmatic motive prompting us to realize goals and to come to terms with the people and situations we encounter. Husserl himself admits that our predominant concerns in the lifeworld are practical and evaluative rather than cognitive and judicative and that things are given in immediate experience as useful, beautiful, alarming, attractive, and so on. However, for something to be given in these ways, it must also be sensuously apprehensible, and it awakens practical or affective interest on the basis, or foundation, of its sensuous presence, even if we never engage in theoretical explication of its sensible and perceptive characteristics because we are so immediately taken up with our practical purposes. The fact that something can be given as perceived and desired at the same time, with the desiring trumping in importance the perceiving, suggests that acts are complex and multidimensional and that diverse features can simultaneously appear in the objects (as perceived and desired) correlative to those acts. Husserl illustrates this complexity of acts correlative to their objects when he points out how a whole act of perception, for example, could have for its object the “knife on the table” with the table being a correlate of a part-act or in a secondary sense an intentional object of the whole act, which is primarily focused on

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the knife. Finally, in the natural attitude, a subject’s affective and pragmatic interests appear as more or less systematized in relation to her cognitive stock of knowledge. A full account of this natural attitude would have to go on to explain how these interacting structures of knowledge and interest affect perception and action, how action unfolds in its temporal dimensions, and how interpersonal relations are structured in everyday life—for example, as between face-to-face consociates or contemporaries (who share our time but not our space) and successors or predecessors (who share neither our time nor space). In other words, the lifeworld affords a vast region for the kinds of philosophical investigation that Maurice Natanson suggested.20 Natanson’s earlier comment also makes it clear that this entire description of the intentional acts of everyday common sense must be undertaken from beyond the perspective of one engaged with commonsense reality, who would have no interest in giving theoretical descriptions of his own intentional activity. In other words, the discussion of commonsense intentionality is being presented by one who has assumed a philosophical stance toward lower-level commonsense intentionality, and as making this lower-level intentionality thematic with the goal of clarifying it, such a philosophical stance itself constitutes a mode of intentionality. Hence, Husserl depicts the philosophical stance of phenomenology as the adopting of an attitude, with cognitive interests, a focus, a way of being toward commonsense reality. Further, having clariﬁed the stance of phenomenology as an attitude, he was able to recognize that those who are living immersed in commonsense reality are themselves engaged in a contrasting attitude, namely, that of the natural attitude, a way of being toward the world practically. But one could only have recognized the natural attitude after having assumed the phenomenological one; the commonsense person does not realize that she is in the natural attitude as the phenomenologist does. Having assumed the phenomenological stance, one discovers that many kinds of I-acts are possible within the natural attitude, such as those of not only perceiving, meaning, and knowing but also loving and hating, having as pleasing or displeasing, wishing, desiring, fearing, and willing, and so on. Furthermore, all these I-acts are intentional in character, that is, they aim at objects, with “object” being understood in the widest possible sense to include, for instance, a thing, a psychic experience, a property, a relationship, a connection, a proposition, a conclusion, a theory, a science, an artwork, a state, or a church. The unique essence of consciousness, which Locke’s account of experience overlooked, lies in the fact that its various acts involve

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consciousness of something. In addition, every kind of intentional act of consciousness has its own manner of being fulﬁlled or satisﬁed or not, whether we speak of striving for values that are either achieved or thwarted, or memory that searches for past events that it suddenly ﬁnds, or the expression of empty statements that are perceptually validated or invalidated in the presence of their objects. Husserl deﬁnes the ideal of epistemic justiﬁcation, of adequate evidence (the self-exhibiting of the emptily intended state of affairs), through this idea of fulﬁllment. He explains, “A complete justiﬁcation for a judgment cannot be thought of otherwise than as that we not only generally make something evident for ourselves, but that we are also convinced of the fact that what we mean in judgments, exactly as we mean it, is intuited and grasped, so to say, in its living presence, and that we are convinced, too, as a proof of adequation, that for what is thus intuited every evidence for its nonbeing or its doubtfulness is eliminated in absolute evidence.”21 Of course, in cases that fall short of absolute evidence (or in cases whose evidence was mistaken for absolute) subsequent evidence could prove us wrong, but when we ﬁnd that experiences of knowing thus fulﬁlled, we would have to claim justiﬁcation for our judgments within the limits in which that justiﬁcation presents itself, that is, unless future counterevidence emerges.22 McDowell’s insistence that we are at the most basic level open to the world and his refusal to start from some data in consciousness to work up to certifying how such data yield knowledge of the objective world—which he terms a rejection of the skeptical predicament and not an answer to it—converges with the phenomenological tradition. From his early writing on perception, Husserl insisted that sensations are not themselves directly perceived in outer perception, which instead reaches directly to an object that does not belong to the “I,” although such sensations could be perceived by an inner perception that grasps them as belonging to the “I.” Later, he denies the possibility of deriving through proof the outer world on the basis of experiences causally produced by the world, since the immediate perception of that world is the fundament for any science of the external world and the determination of such causal relationships. Similar to McDowell, Husserl thinks that perception ﬁrst grasps houses or commotions in the street and the objects of the manifest image as cogitata; after that he thinks it would be possible to explain, through an effort of uncovering or describing, the data of sensation as components of that experience. Despite Husserl’s resistance to any intermediary between subject and world, Husserl, as John Drummond rightly points out, remains ambiguous about appearances and “hyletic data,” which

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were taken both to pertain to the subject side of a perceptual experience and yet to “present” the external object. The ambiguous character of such data could easily lead one to take them for intermediaries between subject and world. Through a complicated argument and in concurrence with Aron Gurwitsch, Drummond both undermines Husserl’s argument for a distinction between hyletic data and organizing apprehension on the subjective side and relocates the manifold of sense appearances (e.g., color, shape, etc), across and through which the identical object appears, on the noematic, object side (in correlation, of course, to subjective acts). He thereby heads off precisely the kind of idealism that Husserl generally seems intent on denying.23 Our presentation of the phenomenological spectrum up to now has focused on the empirical intuitions of concrete, material objects in the terms of which Husserl describes perception, but even as early as Logical Investigations, he expands this notion of intuition by recognizing new kinds of acts in which new objects are set up and appear as actual and self-given. Developing succinctly this idea at the outset of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, he begins with the empirical perception of an individual object that is given from one particular angle, one particular perspective. But then, in an act of reﬂection, he recognizes how it is an essential fact about any individual, empirical object perceptually given that it must always be given from one perspective, that is, that one can never embrace all the perspectives through which it presents itself all at once, but must always pass through a series of spatiotemporal perspectives to take it in completely. At this point, he grasps the essence of how an empirical object gives itself in perception, and, in reﬂection, he compares and the intuition of such an essence with perceptual intuition of a concrete, material object: The essence (Eidos) is a new sort of object. Just as the datum of individual or experiencing intuition is an individual object, so the datum of eidetic intuition is a pure essence. Not a merely external analogy but a radical community is present here. Seeing an essence is also precisely intuition, just as an eidetic object is precisely an object. The universalization of the correlatively interrelated concepts “intuition” and “object” is not an arbitrary conceit but compellingly demanded by the nature of the matter in question. Empirical intuition, or speciﬁcally, experience, is consciousness of an individual object; and as an intuitive consciousness it “makes this object given,” and as perception it makes

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an individual object given originarily in the consciousness of seizing upon this object “originarily,” in its personal selfhood. In quite the same manner, intuition of an essence is consciousness of something, an “object,” a Something, to which the intuitional regard is directed and which is “itself given” in the intuition.24 Husserl here attempts to lead the reader to the point of having an essential intuition into what essential intuition and empirical intuition are and therefore into what the differences between them are. Furthermore, he acknowledges elsewhere that forms of judgments (e.g., syllogisms), species unities, or categorial forms (e.g., aggregates, pluralities, totalities, numbers, disjunction, states of affairs) can also be given through intuitions. Of course, there can be fulﬁllment or frustration of one’s anticipations about what one takes to be essential, when, for instance, an interlocutor accurately describes features that are essential or leaves out essential features that should be included or includes nonessential features as if they were essential (e.g., recent discussions in analytic philosophy, begun by a famous article by Harry Frankfurt, have argued that it is not essential for actors to be able to exercise free choice that they have genuine alternative possibilities to choose from), as there can be fulﬁllment or frustration in the case of empirical intuitions (when what appeared to be a woman in the window turns out to be a manikin). What is signiﬁcant is that this recognition of the eidetic character of the objects one considers or the claims one has made (e.g., “All empirical objects are given perspectively”) results from reﬂection on processes in which one has already been engaged (e.g., considering one’s repeated experience of particular empirical objects or imagining counterexamples to see if perspectival givenness must pertain to any such object). Hence, Husserl, reﬂecting on eidetic insight in the middle of the fourth Cartesian meditation, mentions that he will now—almost four-ﬁfths of the way through the book—take up a fundamental methodological point that he has delayed mentioning and that has been implicit in all the previous meditations. That is, he points out how in the course of his earlier descriptions expressions such as “essential necessary” “forced themselves upon us”25—in other words, the reader through his guidance and implicitly eidetic claims has already been having eidetic insights into the essential features of acts, experiences, and objects. The descriptions that occur after executing the reduction often await explicit recognition as eidetic, as he explains in Einleitung in die Philosophie: “We completed step for step systematic descriptions and chose the describing concepts and words

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according to the principle that they ﬁt purely and intuitively what was seen. Now, every such description was from the start an essence description, without us knowing it. We need to make it clear that what we say there in fact and what there appears as a factual type, obviously is wholly to be taken up into a pure possibility and then it expresses an essence form or an essential law.”26 Recognizing and admitting the eidetic nature of our claims, owning up, as it were, to what is entailed by what we are seeing, acknowledging what is “compellingly demanded by the nature of the matter in question” is actually called for by that same philosophical responsibility that from the start of philosophy itself required us not to live naively. As we suggested above, McDowell’s comments about the intelligibility of empirical content, or Brandom’s claims about what is constitutive of discourse, or their comments on the nature of perception are implicitly eidetic, and in each case, they have proposed to each other and to us readers claims that we must responsibly query, to ﬁnd out if what the realities about which the claims are about fulﬁll the expectations those claims create, to ask, in other words, whether they capture the reality about which they are made.27 There can be eidetic intuitions into essence types of the diverse intentional acts already mentioned (e.g., of perception, memory, phantasy) and even subdivisions, such as perceptions of objects and other persons. Indeed, distinguishing categorial intuitions (e.g., into unity, plurality, etc.), which resemble essential intuitions, from empirical intuitions and empirical knowledge, as Husserl does at the end of the Logical Investigations, makes possible his defense in the “Prolegomena” at the beginning of the Investigations against psychologism, which McDowell too opposes in his discussion of Williams’s view of internal reasons. According to these comments at the end of the Logical Investigations, logical (and, by extension, eidetic) features are grasped necessarily, not contingently, involving insight as opposed to inductive determination of causal sequences; issuing in a priori rather than a posteriori laws; and yielding intrinsic truths that anyone, regardless of cultural background, ought to recognize and that seem to obtain validly independently of one’s act of recognition of them.28 Husserl extends his method of eidetic reﬂection to the various sciences whose primitive concepts have evolved historically, often unreﬂectively, and have determined the sense of their spheres of objects and theories. He suggests that it would be possible to develop eidetic accounts of the objects, fundamental concepts, and methods of these sciences—and let us take for our example here the two “science types” that he investigates in his Einleitung in

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die Philosophie, namely, the sciences of nature (Naturwissenschaften) and the sciences of spirit (Geisteswissenschaften). These science-types have to do with two fundamentally different overarching objects: nature and spirit [although one could break down these objects into further objects presupposed by various scientiﬁc subdisciplines such as the animate organism (biology), which would pertain to a subdivision of nature, or psychophysical being (psychology) or culture (anthropology), which would pertain to subdivisions of spirit]. By separating these overarching object-types, each of which require differing modes of investigation, Husserl attempts to ensure that the sciences of nature do not assume that their methods of investigation are the only ones admissible or that the worldview associated with such sciences be taken for absolute. But the perspective from which one is deﬁning these two science types and the objects correlative to them (nature and spirit) would not fall under either of them, that is, this perspective itself is not itself natural scientiﬁc or social scientiﬁc in character, but a “scientiﬁc” (wissenschaftliches) perspective above them, namely, one that makes both general areas its theme and examines the attitudes and experience types through which nature and spirit are given to those laboring within these domains. It would be, in other words, a descriptive phenomenology that would serve as a philosophical Wissensschaftslehre, a science about the sciences itself.29 And yet these “regional ontologies” developed within this ultimate phenomenological perspective, would presuppose the subject to whom these eidetic objects (e.g., nature and spirit) would be given and by whom claims about them would be elaborated and evaluated. One could further by eidetic reﬂection determine the eidetic structure of this I “for whom all and every intentional object is,”30 including whatever is judged, taken for true, or validated as true. This ultimate I, the transcendental subjectivity, “is not a particular a priori,”31 one among many others, “but it is the universe of all a prioris generally.32 In relation to it belong also all regional ground concepts, which differentiate the ontological disciplines from each other,”33 such as the real thing in time and space, animals, humanity, sociality, and culture. However, the transcendental subjectivity made explicit on this ultimate level would also be instantiated in the subjectivities of those scientists who might not reﬂect on their subjectivity but who would take up the attitudes appropriate to their distinctive sciences, just as Husserl is clear, as we mentioned earlier, that the person engaged in attitude of everyday life is already transcendental intersubjectivity, though unaware of herself as such, at least until implementing the phenomenological reduction. What becomes evident in Husserl’s work is the relentless refusal to take for

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granted questions of eidos and of subjectivity, and the ultimate level on which such questions must be addressed—this inexhaustible questioning represents Husserl’s effort to remain faithful to the sense of philosophical responsibility that inspired his project from the beginning.34 What emerges in the end is a spectrum of intentionality pertaining to a subject often concealed from itself and extending from its passive syntheses at the juncture where mind meets world to the transcendental subject come to full self-consciousness and having for its objects the essences that whole regions of investigation presuppose. McDowell, in returning to the ﬁrstperson perspective of the perceiver for whom empirical content is intelligible and to whom the world is given at once intentionally and conceptually without intermediary, is at his best when it comes to dealing with this perceptual, lifeworld, pretheoretical pole, though we have argued that Husserl via the Rückfrage of constitutive phenomenology captures even better the fullness of the perceptual experience without necessarily denying the holism of that experience to which McDowell points. In the face of the scientiﬁc pretension to explain away or overlay commonsense experience (itself a region of being), McDowell’s strategy is generally to return to commonsense experience, to second nature, to our noninferentially based perception of the world and understanding of others, and to the kinds of relations with the world Wittgenstein describes in On Certainty, and to defend common sense against scientiﬁc incursions on its turf. However, when we turn to the higher levels of intentionality beyond that experienced by inhabitants of common sense, McDowell’s approach appears less adequate. For instance, I have questioned to what degree he is aware that he himself occupies a philosophical perspective, a philosophical-intentional stance, much like that of Brandom’s philosophical scorekeeper, when, for instance, he recognizes the knowledge of the everyday perceiver who need not employ the scorekeeper paradigm in order to know and when he keeps score on skeptics who would deny common sense. In line with this criticism, we have suggested that McDowell’s quietism leads him to emphasize the antipathy between common sense and philosophical theory under the sway of skeptical inﬂuences, but that he himself does not acknowledge sufficiently that he is less quietistic in the sense that he occupies a philosophical-theoretical intentional stance from beyond common sense to affirm it, that his view of common sense draws on other sophisticated philosophical sources that have already attended theoretically to common sense, and that this domain of common sense offers the opportunity for further theoretical explorations as long as

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one is careful to avoid skeptically informed theoretical presuppositions. This pattern reappears in his ethics insofar as the unique stance of theoretical practical reason, in which one seeks to offer a justiﬁcation for one’s ethics, as a gift, without browbeating one’s discursive partner by accusing her of irrationality, is too easily and readily assimilated to a natural attitude stance in which one’s reasons might be more pragmatically directed toward converting an interlocutor. Furthermore, while he rightly recognizes how Williams’s scientism disguises an underlying metaphysics, he fails to recognize that this refutation of scientism depends positively on philosophy assuming a metaposition from which it can circumscribe the role of science and establish regional ontologies with their own appropriate and limited intentional stances (e.g., the attitude one adopts in considering and living ethics differs from that taken up in the natural sciences). Of course, as Husserl argued, the metastance of philosophy is assumed by the transcendental subject to whom the essences underlying these ontologies are correlative and by whom they are elaborated and assessed, and this transcendental subject assumes the diverse intentional stances of common sense, philosophy, and science, even as it makes possible continuity between them. In sum, McDowell’s strength lies in recovering the intentionality of everyday life that scientiﬁc theory often covers over, but he tends, perhaps because of his quietistic inclinations, to be less perceptive regarding the types of intentionality at the theoretical end of the intentional spectrum. With Brandom, things are just the other way around. As we have seen, Brandom construes the meeting point of mind and world in terms not of intentionality but of stimuli causally eliciting reliable differential responses, but we have suggested that insofar as a scorekeeper must assess empirical claims, Brandom could proﬁt from a constitutive account that might allow as a stratum of intentional activity, which such claims presuppose and build on, the direct encounter with reality that Lafont calls for and that McDowell makes central for there being intelligible empirical content at all. Nevertheless, Brandom, much like Husserl in his implementation of the reduction, strives to be self-reﬂective about what takes place above the level of common sense and perception, especially the discursive domain into which common sense and perceptual claims are introduced, examined for entitlement, and endorsed. Just as Husserl makes explicit the ultimate essences presupposed by various disciplines and the transcendental subjectivity operative with these disciplines, so Brandom makes explicit the structures of discourse implicit in lower-level disciplines (e.g., in membrane physiology). Similarly,

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just as the structures of MIE would be implicitly presupposed by anyone reading the book itself, so the structures of transcendental subjectivity (e.g., intentionality, temporality) would have to be implicitly at play within anyone who might set about to examine those structures themselves. The deontic scorekeeper perspective, whose delineation involves in Husserl’s terms a selfreﬂective, eidetic portrayal of the attitude that anyone who enters discursive space assumes, deﬁnes discourse and involves the kind of intentional posture that we have correlated with phenomenological reduction that opens the ﬁeld of transcendental subjectivity. In Husserl’s terms, this attitude requires that one not accept unquestioningly any pregiven opinion or tradition to determine what is true in much the same way that for Brandom one is to determine critically whether to recognize a knowledge that is already there or to attribute statuses, attitudes, or knowledge to others and whether to endorse or not the commitments and entitlements proposed for one’s consideration. Within the well-determined ﬁeld of discourse, marked out by the adoption of scorekeeper attitude and by a refusal to take for granted the language expressing belief or representing the world, the world itself is transformed into (without being reduced to) the set of whatever linguistic commitments are perspectivally endorsed, somewhat parallel to the manner in which the phenomenological reduction converts the world into phenomena. We have argued that the realm of discourse is an ontological region whose parameters Brandom spells out, but like the realm of transcendental subjectivity, it is not just one a priori structure among others but an ultimate one, insofar as both realms, like Apel’s view of the philosophical language game, are the locus for articulating the structures on which all the other ontological regions depend. Of course, Brandom’s eidetic depiction of discourse, like Husserl’s portrayal of transcendental subjectivity, involves the affirmation of a variety of intentional structures, beginning with the scorekeeper attitude that deﬁnes the discursive domain and including such elements as the linguistic attributions of intentional acts to others, the statuses toward which one undertakes various attitudes, and the de re and de dicto speciﬁcations of assertions. Such speciﬁcations take account of intentional relations to objects and facts believed as well as interlocutors’ intentional taking account of each other’s intentional relations to objects and beliefs and to each other. The strength of Brandom’s analysis clearly lies at the theoretical end of the intentional spectrum. Nevertheless, Brandom’s self-reﬂection on theoretical intentionality is not always as complete as one might wish, insofar as one might wonder why he offers a pragmatic justiﬁcation of his theory of discursive practice, that is, in

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terms of the understanding and explanatory power it yields, instead of summoning his interlocutor to reﬂect on the discursive scorekeeper attitude that she has already adopted and the discursive domain she already inhabits, and must have already inhabited, even to have asked for a justiﬁcation (and that Brandom must have inhabited even to have offered one). I have argued in chapter 6 that the reader’s accepting (or not) of Brandom’s own claims about the essential structures of the discursive sphere (or, for that matter, of the character of perception in his debate with McDowell) rely on phenomenological insight, that is the kind of evidential having (or not) of the eidetic structures he describes. Such acceptance or rejection, I contend, is not a matter of merely differentially responding to signiﬁcations in accord with socially approved patterns in a way similar to the social-typical responses one makes to tools within the framework of Zuhandenheit, as Brandom suggests in the essay on Heidegger’s categories. Indeed, the very categories specifying the ontological structures of Zuhandenheit, Vorhandenheit, and Dasein are grasped through phenomenological insight. By the time of writing MIE, however, Brandom relegates the language of “differential responsive dispositions” to perception and interprets the discursive sphere in terms of norms that are not reducible to causal regularism and that depend for their acceptance (but not for what they require) on our free endorsement, as Kant argued. What, though, is the connection between being governed by norms and phenomenological insight? In his 2007 Locke lectures, Brandom himself recognizes a distinction between insight and norms insofar as he attempts to illustrate Wilfrid Sellars’s comment that the “language of modality is a ‘transposed’ language of norms.”35 Brandom suggests that one could begin with grasping a logical relationship of incompatibility between p and q— and let us suppose that this grasping involves insight—but this modal claim could be transposed into a pragmatic, normative vocabulary in which one could claim that if one were committed to p, one would be precluded from being entitled to q, or in other words, it would be normatively inappropriate to claim entitlement for q.36 Although Brandom seems to preserve two distinctive approaches here, one could imagine another philosophical outlook that might attempt to reduce the notion of phenomenological insight to a following of norms. For instance, I might imagine myself intuitively grasping that Brandom’s description of the scorekeeper accurately captures the attitude that anyone who enters discourse takes up. But then perhaps another person might object that my affirming that description when asked about it is really only a matter of my having mastered the norms for applying of

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the term “scorekeeper” that I have learned through repeated participation in discursive practices that have taught me to identify “scorekeeping,” whether my own or others’, when confronted with instances of it. Such a reduction of insight to norms might ﬁnd a parallel in Wittgenstein’s suggestion that knowing that something “red” is in front of me is a matter of having mastered (the norms of) the English language, as if no empirical intuition were also involved.37 Perhaps there is a way to avoid the reduction of insight to norms that Brandom, too, seems to resist in upholding Sellars’s dictum. I would suggest that Husserl’s idea of an insightful grasp of eidetic features attempts to explain the ﬁrst-person experience of apprehending eidetic relationships, even though someone from a third-person perspective might always be able to point out the norms governing one’s intellectual behavior, behind one’s back, as it were. A parallel to this differentiation of ﬁrst-person seeing and the third-person observer’s pointing out of norms, which indicate how the observed ought to have acted and may well have been acting, is to be found in an explanation of social role by Alfred Schutz.38 Schutz points out how an actor from a ﬁrst-person perspective responds to the requirements of the situation (e.g., what is required of medical personnel when a patient is brought into an emergency room), as McDowell might put it, whereas the sociological observer from a third-person perspective can explain how the actor has been fulﬁlling normative role expectations (for example, those of an emergency room nurse), even though the actor would not deﬁne her own action in such terms. Husserl, however, is not merely interested in preventing a reduction of insight to rule-following, but rather his insistence on ﬁrst-person seeing also is part and parcel of his radical sense of philosophical responsibility that also characterizes Brandom’s scorekeeper, namely, one has to see for oneself, step by step, from the bottom up, before endorsing any claim, even the claims presenting the norms governing every discourse. By preserving this sphere of ﬁrst-person responsibility and insight, one ensures a maximal possibility for criticism over against norms, which, insofar as they are socially transmitted to anyone entering philosophy (or any discipline for that matter) before such novices have the wherewithal to criticize them and insofar as these norms are therefore generally accepted within philosophy, are liable to foster a certain complacency and epistemic inertia. Paradoxically, emphasizing ﬁrst-person responsibility and insight is fully in accord with the traditional norms of philosophy itself, which demands that one be critical of even the norms of philosophy itself. This corrigibility of norms also underlies McDowell’s insistence

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on preserving a place for ﬁrst-person critical responsibility, since it is always possible that how things are could be independent of what communal norms say those things are.39 McDowell’s and Lafont’s criticism of Brandom point to a pretheoretical domain that lies outside the sphere circumscribed by the adoption of the scorekeeper attitude and that cannot responsibly be left in anonymity. However, responsibility also requires that one recognize that one cannot even talk of the kinds of nondiscursive intentional relations we have with the world and with others without doing so from within some kind of theoretical, reﬂective stance. What is called for, then, is what Merleau-Ponty called radical reﬂection, not just reﬂection from within an impregnable Cogito, but reﬂection on that reﬂection itself, reﬂection on the unreﬂective fund of experience from which reﬂection itself emerges. It seems that such reﬂection would be possible in Brandom’s case, given his appreciation for Heidegger’s view that discursive Vorhandenheit emerges from pragmatic Zuhandenheit, and that both modalities pertain to a holistically acting Dasein, just as it is the same transcendental subjectivity for Husserl in whom passive syntheses take place and lifeworld interests are pursued and to whom eidetic analyses even of itself are ﬁnally presented for appraisal—the very transcendental subjectivity that is also self-aware of these poles of its own intentionality. It is transcendental subjectivity, including the intersubjective dimensions of transcendental intersubjectivity, as we will see below, that situates discursive practice within the vast spectrum of intentionality.

3. points of tension: intersubjectivity and ethics Virtually every area of tension mentioned at the outset of this chapter, between Levinasian ethics and transcendental phenomenology, between Husserlian transcendental intersubjectivity and Apel’s transcendental pragmatics, and between Husserl’s and Habermas’s ethics have to do with the question of intersubjectivity in Husserl. What I would like to suggest is that bridges can be built, if one understands properly the view of intersubjectivity that emerges from Husserl’s later phenomenology—a view to which Levinas rarely makes reference and Habermas and Apel had no access. I have already touched on how constitutive phenomenology uncovers the passive syntheses presupposed in grasping everyday objects (e.g., the barking of a dog) and accounting for the discrimination of an object from its background and makes visible the

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ﬂow of consciousness through protentions and retentions, without which no identical content of experience would be possible. Constitutive phenomenology also can uncover within the transcendental ego itself the intentionally implied constitution of others and within the phenomena of the world the achievement of transcendental intersubjectivity realizing itself.40 In Husserl’s Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, published in 2006, one can see clearly a further link between reﬂective phenomenology and intersubjectivity. While the manuscripts begin by stressing the importance of thinking back from the phenomenon of the world that is given in everyday experience to discovering the stream of time modalities (or timing, Zeitigung) and the constant change of subjective modes of givenness (e.g., from protention to retention) that make such a phenomenon possible, Husserl also explores the past horizons out of which the present emerges. This leads him to develop his genetic phenomenology, separating out distinct, past stages in the development of the ego, such as one’s birth or one’s movement toward death, for example. This genetic phenomenology that takes its start from static phenomenology that begins with present phenomena inevitably leads to recognition of the pervasive importance of intersubjectivity, as he states, “The questioning back from the phenomenon world leads to transcendental intersubjectivity as the universe of wide-awake subjects, the wide-awake universe.”41 Repeatedly Husserl insists that nature as we experience it has the character of “thereness-for-everyone,”42 and, when one executes the second epoché in the ﬁfth Cartesian meditation to focus on what pertains to the ego as an individual, disregarding what is related to other subjectivities, Husserl admits from the start that this is a strange procedure, an artiﬁcial abstraction from the way we ﬁrst experience the world, that is, as intersubjectively “objective.” Once one executes that second epoché, the world is experienced as a primordial transcendency, that is, as transcendent insofar as it is not reducible to my subjective acts, and this stratum of experiencing the world, namely, from within my own subjective perspective as independent of me, plays a founding role (implying that it may never be given separately) for the actual experience of the objective world that will build on it. That objective world includes a superaddition of sense that appears once other persons are reincorporated into the picture—and it is a central point that we could not even have an objective world without other persons—and hence Husserl asserts that the intrinsically ﬁrst other (in regard to objectively given other objects) is the other Ego. In the Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, the intersubjective bases of objectivity are stressed even further insofar as the other is spoken of as

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second primordiality and insofar as nature within my primordial ownness, it is acknowledged, really does not have the actual sense of nature. Not only is the world originally given as there for everyone, but each one’s subjectivity is such that it carries the other person’s in it in the same way that every subjectivity carries its past within itself, and this analogy suggests that others inﬂuence and constitute one’s identity and belong inseparably to one’s sense of one’s self in the same way one’s past does. Furthermore, just as without a basic community with my past, I would not be able to make sense of it, so I share an empathetic—in the cognitive sense of recognizing others rather than emotively sympathizing with them—community with other persons as copresent I-subjects in my primordial, original living present, without which I could not begin to understand their subsequent conscious acts. This empathetic bond between persons, based on analogical apperception of their lived embodiment that takes place immediately and unreﬂectively, contrasts with a view that might see human relationships as a matter of two objects ﬁrst standing over against each other and then having to work out their subjective, intersubjective connections with each other. Consequently, Lanei Rodemeyer correctly points out that even before Husserl through a formal technical argument describes how the other is constituted in the ﬁfth meditation (and he certainly does not conceive the I and Other there to be related as two objects), the other and the I are already connected. Finally, transcendental subjectivity here does not expand to intersubjectivity, as Husserl notes and Rodemeyer cites him, but rather it understands itself as already transcendental intersubjectivity. Consequently, transcendental subjectivity discovers the world it experiences as overlain with intersubjective meanings, ﬁnds itself linked with others before it even begins to reﬂect on that fact, and realizes that these others have shaped its identity as much as its past has.43 Given this understanding of the pervasively and essentially intersubjective character of subjectivity, it comes as no surprise that for Husserl the sphere of ﬁnally true actuality, the ﬁnally true (letztwahres) life, depends on justiﬁcation achieved not only on the basis of the unpretentious (unscheinbaren) evidence of the individual cogito but also on the basis of “evidence pertaining to transcendental intersubjectivity that is to be grounded mediately,”44 that is, presumably through interchanges between individuals. As Husserl himself expressed it in “The Amsterdam Lectures,” “Transcendental intersubjectivity is the absolute and only self-sufficient ontological foundation [Seinsboden]. Out of it are created the meaning and validity of everything objective.”45 Like transcendental subjectivity, transcendental intersubjectivity is not only

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something we philosophically examine; it is something that we are, even as we examine it. Husserl reiterates this point in his Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution in a text that could have been written by Robert Brandom insofar as it addresses how the individual knower’s position, even at a prediscursive level, is constituted by a relationship to others, since one is constantly aware of possible corrigibility by other. Husserl states, “Before science, the conviction already governs in the human conscious subject, in the natural human life, and this conviction is that one ought to distinguish between, on the one hand, the subjective validating and the subjectively to be validated, and [on the other] the objectively correctly validating, that is, in relation to a true being corresponding to the subjective. This conviction includes the idea that it is possible to demonstrate true being subjectively, that is, intersubjectively.”46 Finally, Rodemeyer is correct to observe that the notion of intersubjectivity discoverable in these later Husserl texts might be of service for the further development of his own ethics; we will argue that they make possible greater convergence between his own ethics and that of Apel and Habermas.47

3.1. Transcendental Intersubjectivity and the Levinasian Ethical Relationship In present day phenomenology, the work of Emmanuel Levinas is taken to be the antithesis of Husserl’s transcendental philosophy, especially given Husserl’s focus on the seemingly solipsistic transcendental ego, and Theodore de Boer even suggests that some might take any rapprochement between these viewpoints as an imperialistic subsumption of Levinas’s thought under Husserl’s. Here I would like to argue that Levinas’s account of the ethical relationship with the other can actually be seen as taking place within a framework marked out by transcendental subjectivity and intersubjectivity, even though the ethical relationship Levinas ﬁnds has subversive effects on the philosopher demarcating from the perspective of transcendental subjectivity the context within which the ethical relationship is to be explained.48 To begin, it is important to recognize that one can ﬁnd many methodological convergences between the two thinkers. For instance, Levinas engages in a form of constitutive analysis in search of founding relationships in Otherwise than Being, which begins with the system in which one has already formulated a set of propositions, the Said, within which the ethical plot of the Saying relationship is absorbed, but not exhausted. Levinas then seeks to disentangle this Saying relationship, which the Said presupposes, since its

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formulations take place within the context of an ethical Saying relationship between two interlocutors, as we have seen in our discussion of “a subject older than knowing” in chapter 4. Though this ethical relationship introduces ambiguity into the tranquility of the Said, Levinas thinks that “forgetting this ambiguity would be as little philosophical”49 as a naïve idealism, and, thus, it would represent, as such forgetting would have for Husserl, a lack of philosophical responsibility. Once he has distinguished out the ethical Saying relationship and commented on its features extensively, at the end of the book he shows how this saying relationship involving responsibility to another via the structure of the Third (which itself depends on the other’s ethical relationship to another) leads back to the Said, to discourse, thematization, universals, and philosophy—from which the book started and in which the Saying relationship was implicit. The structure of Otherwise than Being, then, could be said to make the general point that “the ego that thematizes is also founded in this responsibility and substitution”50 that belong to the ethical relationship. The Said for Levinas is the place where one authors propositions systematically in the rational pursuit of truth, where Being shows itself and entities are, and where the persistence of essence rules out nonbeing, Being’s dialectical counterpart, insofar as it “ﬁlls every interval of nothingness that would interrupt it.”51 The Saying, the ethical relationship, however, cannot be understood out of ontology and epistemology but must be approached through a special language, ethical language, whose tropes alone are adequate for capturing this ethical relationship, and, hence, for instance, Levinas speaks of the “approach” as opposed to knowing, or the “face” in contrast to cognitively grasped phenomena. While Nonbeing stands opposed to Being, the dialectic between them plays out on the same map of ontology, and so Levinas, in seeking to uphold the distinctiveness of the ethical experience, situates it in a region that is otherwise than being, in the domain of the Saying relationship that is otherwise than the Said. It is as if Levinas demarcates and explains a special ethical “region” that is otherwise than Being, though one might hesitate to call it one of Husserl’s regional ontologies insofar as Levinas sets it off from ontology, which is found in Being and in the Said where Being shows itself. Yet, while trying to preserve the distinctiveness of this ethical relationship, Levinas himself admits that insofar as he talks about it and distinguishes it from other regions to which it is nevertheless related, he in effect is treating it as a kind of ontological region (correlative to transcendental subjectivity and intersubjectivity), that is, in his terms, bringing it

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under the domain of being. As Levinas puts it, “The very discussion which we are at this moment elaborating about signiﬁcation, diachrony and the transcendence of the approach beyond being, a discussion that means to be philosophy, is a thematizing, a synchronizing of terms, a recourse to systematic language, a constant use of the verb being, a bringing back into the bosom of being all signiﬁcation allegedly conceived beyond being.”52 One might take it as further evidence that Levinas’s reﬂections on the ethical relationship in Otherwise than Being have the character of demarcating one region among a system of regions insofar as he ends up on the basis of these reﬂections articulating a whole philosophy of philosophy, whose purpose he claims is to reduce the betrayal of the Saying in the Said.53 While for Husserl the regions of being (e.g., the natural attitude, communal life, psychological being, the material object investigated by physics and chemistry) depend on the intentional activities of subjects who operate within these spheres, as well as the intentional activities of the philosopher who describes them, the philosopher’s own anonymous, intentional transcendental subjectivity may not be illuminated until a later transcendental self-reﬂection. Though all these regions consist of intentional activities in relation to the objects within the regions, for Levinas the ethical region appears distinctive in that it does not seem to operate in accord with the laws of intentionality characterizing the other spheres. He is quite clear that what happens to subjectivity in the ethical encounter contrasts with how transcendental subjectivity acts in intending the world. Levinas observes, “The ‘never enough’ of proximity, the restlessness of this peace, is the acute uniqueness of subjectivity. The subject arising in the passivity of unconditionality, in the expulsion outside of it being at home with itself, is undeclinable. This undeclinability is not that of transcendental subjectivity, is not an intentionality or openness of the world, not even a world that overﬂows me, and in which the alleged ecstatic subjectivity is only dissimulated.”54 Then the Saying relationship and the entire ethical region are actually characterized by, as Levinas describes it, an “inversion of intentionality.”55 He deﬁnes intentionality, which is operant in the other regions and the transcendental domain, as aspiring to fulﬁllment, bearing the trace of the voluntary and teleological, and initiating and assuming everything, even one’s undergoing. But when the other appears summoning one to ethical responsibility, something entirely different occurs: there is a reversion from grasping to suddenly being grasped as one becomes a being obsessed (which is known but not a knowing), a being turned inside out as one is turned toward

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another, and a being disturbed to the point of no longer having an intention. Of course, perhaps the best place to view this inversion is to be found when the cognitive intentional correlate of disclosure, phenomenality, defects into a face, that is, when one’s original intentional recognition that grasps the other cognitively as another human being (and not a table) gives way to being obligated. Repeatedly, Levinas insists that the ethical encounter is not a matter of conjoining cognition and intentionality in which one stands as a subject over against an object. He affirms, further, that the passivity of saying cannot be reduced to the experience of that passivity even if it makes possible such an experience. I take this comment to suggest that while being summoned, I am, as Drummond puts it, prereﬂectively aware of myself (otherwise how could I subsequently discuss what I was experiencing while being summoned) and no doubt other intentionalities are at play while I am summoned (e.g., noticing the other’s hunger or having feelings of sorrow for her plight). While it is true that I focally experience being summoned, the overridingness of the other’s summons so dominates that I notice my experiencing, if at all and perhaps only subsequently, only insofar as it is conveying and revealing the other’s summons, just as in other situations, say of fear or erotic attraction, the experiencing itself recedes in prominence in comparison to the object feared or desired. Hence, in ethical experience, the bread I eat becomes bread that the other is asking for, the other wrings from me an acknowledgment of his or her presence, my tranquility is disturbed by the urgency of the other’s need, and I ﬁnd myself responsible to the other without being able to ﬁnd any commitment or choice in my past that would explain that responsibility. Whatever experiencing may be going on in me is subordinated to the other’s striking, response-demanding presence, whose effects in me, though, differ from what the objects of fear or attraction, which also marginalize my experiencing of them, produce. In the ethical moment, I am invited into becoming one for the other and into a disinterested “going to the other without concerning oneself with his movement toward me”56—a “going toward” that sounds like an almost intentional orientation produced by the encounter rather than producing it. Consequently, to reduce being summoned to the “experience of” or “thematization of” being summoned gives too much prominence to the “experiencing of” and assimilates the distinctiveness of being summoned to a more detached cognitive relationship to the other. In the ethical encounter, we do not cease to be the intentional beings we are, but if the encounter is too closely likened to cognitive intentionality, the encounter loses its distinctiveness.57

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Since the ethical region involves an inversion of intentionality, Levinas proceeds to develop contrasts between what happens in the ethical relationship and the intentional processes that might go on in other regions. For instance, although subjective memory is capable of recalling history and bringing its past into synchrony with its present, in the ethical experience one ﬁnds that a past that is diachronous, never able to be assembled in the present, insofar as my responsibility to the other is always already there, never derivable from some past commitment to the other that I have undertaken (as the contract theorists would have it) or some past wrong I have done that then makes me responsible to the other. Hence, the other’s summons comes from a past more past than any past recoverable in my memory. Likewise, whereas sensation in the other regions is cognitively oriented toward knowledge through sense data, in the ethical domain sensation is construed in terms of vulnerability to pain. Finally, Levinas ﬁnds two entirely different types of intelligibility at stake, that of the impersonal logos versus intelligibility as proximity. One could say that Levinas presupposes all the traditional structures in the standard phenomenological understanding of them, namely, intentionality, temporality, sensation, subjectivity, and intelligibility, insofar as he uses them all as foils against which to contrast what goes on in ethical experience and in the light of which he can clarify the distinctiveness of that experience. Hence, when one conceives the ethical as a region, one seems to place it in company with which it really does not belong. Perhaps it might be looked upon as a “counter-ontological-region.”58 Yet there is no denying that the descriptions of the ethical relationship in Otherwise than Being and Levinas’s other works seem to present for us essential features of what is involved in meeting another person ethically. And indeed this eidos of the ethical relationship is presented to each one of us, to me, for my consideration and for my endorsement if I ﬁnd it adequate, or fulﬁlling, to what I think the ethical relationship is. We are implicitly on the transcendental plane, considering an eidos (the ethical relationship) underlying a regional domain (the Otherwise than Being), and we who consider this eidos are implicitly the transcendental subject and we are implicitly in relation to other subjects on the plane of transcendental intersubjectivity. Indeed, the Levinas who articulates the eidos of the ethical relationship, the Saying as opposed to the Said, is himself anonymously (until he reﬂectively makes it explicit) transcendental subjectivity and, as proposing his account to me, implicitly a participant in transcendental intersubjectivity. I think that Levinas himself recognizes this point insofar as he admits that his very work

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brings “back into the bosom of being all signiﬁcation allegedly conceived beyond being.” And yet, at the same time, he has discovered an “ontological region” that isn’t really ontological and that, if one examines its contents, ﬁnds intentionality itself being inverted and structures proposed that are at odds with those typical of phenomenology and that are, nevertheless, in accord with what one ﬁnds within this strange region. It is an interesting and paradoxical fact that the intentional spectrum, reaching from the theoretical transcendental sphere to the pretheoretical level also encompasses domains in which intentionality itself is subverted. Indeed Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and Invisible through an eidetic account of our knowledge of the world does something similar to what Levinas does in ethics, insofar as he reaches back to a point where the neat distinction between subject and object is dissolved and where the body belongs to the order of things and the world itself is made ﬂesh in its entwinement with the body. It is no wonder that Levinas at various moments takes Merleau-Ponty’s work as a model for his own.59 John Drummond objects to Levinas’s idea that the self is without context in apprehending the other as summoning one to responsibility, since the other can only appear to a subject who is prereﬂectively aware of itself and thematically aware of the other as not itself. The other is neither prior to the self, since it could not be grasped without it, nor is the self prior to otherness, for it is self-aware only in its intentional experiences of the other. Drummond is certainly correct in seeing the two-sidedness of apprehension of another: awareness of self and awareness of the object as not myself, and the lack of priority between the subjective and objective sides of intentional experience. Though Levinas sometimes speaks as though the other is given prior to consciousness, consciousness for Levinas in those passages refers to theorizing and thematic exposition; what he means in those cases, then, is that we encounter the other ethically before we theorize about the encounter.60 However, as we have seen, he also seems to allow that there is a cognitive, intentional moment of taking in the other’s phenomenality, recognizing her as a human being (and not a table), just as that phenomenality defects into a face and one ﬁnds oneself summoned to responsibility. That moment of phenomenality allows for just the epistemic duality that is Drummond’s focus; however, Drummond does not quite recognize the distinctive moment of defection in which one’s being summoned into obligation and responsibility so predominates that whatever experiencing is noticed functions only to reveal the urgency of the summons, and, consequently, he tends to assimilate the ethical relationship to the other to a cognitive one. This assimilation

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appears when in describing the self who undergoes ethical refashioning, he affirms that that self “apprehends the Other precisely as a radically different Other who disrupts the contexts established by the self’s own stream of experiences.”61 Though one must apprehend the Other for defection to occur, could I not suddenly come around a corner and be surprised by ﬁnding an unexpected human being there and experience my self-established contexts disrupted, but only in a cognitive sense? Moreover, the description of the Other as “different” employs an ontological category without capturing the shift from knowing to being obliged to be responsible by the other. Even when Drummond later articulates what he, in contrast to Levinas, takes to be the point of the ethical relationship, namely, that Other disrupts contexts of the self that would lead to failures in respect or that the Other calls one to reshape convictions, Levinas’s radical inversion of cognition in defection seems attenuated to point that ethics consists of a distant respect or revision of one’s beliefs, though Drummond admits that limits of space prevent him from describing all the details of our experience of Others. Drummond, then, verges on falling into just the trap that Levinas warns against, namely, that instead of being summoned to responsibility, we might reduce the being summoned to the experience of being summoned and thereby overlook the distinctiveness of the ethical encounter. Finally, although epistemically there is no temporal priority of subject over object, as Drummond observes, Levinas frequently describes the ethical relationship as if proximity were antecedent to subjectivity or as if responsibility preceded the subject rather than being an accident of it. This priority of the other in the ethical relationship ought not to be taken, though, in a temporal, historical, or genetic sense, as if the other were the psychological, ontological, or epistemic origin of my self or my activity. Rather, Levinas is speaking in the ethical sense that my responsibility for the other does not begin in some action (or inaction) on my part. It does not originate in some wrong I have done to the other that requires restitution (and if I have done no wrong I owe nothing) or in some commitment I have vouchsafed to make to the other (as the contract theorists might have it). The priority of the other over the self in Levinas has to do with where responsibility originates, rather than with the psychological genesis of the self.62

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3.2. Transcendental Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Pragmatics To show the compatibility between transcendental intersubjectivity à la Husserl and transcendental pragmatics à la Apel, who has engaged Husserl in ways that Habermas and Brandom have not and whose philosophical standpoint closely resembles theirs, it is necessary to examine Apel’s critique of Husserlian phenomenology. His critique widens the gap between the two positions insofar as he takes Husserlian phenomenology to espouse a methodical solipsism. Apel deﬁnes such solipsism as “the insinuation, that a conscious subject (whether empirically grasped, as by John Locke, or transcendentally grasped as an identical ‘consciousness generally’ in all empirical subjects) would be capable of achieving valid thinking, that is, knowledge, without in principle having to share with others linguistic conditions.”63 In contrast to such solipsism, Apel insists that the most isolated and radical reﬂection, insofar as it includes thinking and validity claims, must presuppose speech and a community of communication. Though it is legitimate and unavoidable that any possible meaning must be a correlate of an intentional act, the meanings in terms of which one understands oneself are mediated by the public meanings of language, and such shared meanings are the conditions of the possibility of intersubjective, valid knowledge, which depends on linguistically interpreted evidence about which consensus can be achieved. Truth claims cannot be immediately and deﬁnitively redeemed by intuitional evidence, since such evidence is always language-impregnated. However, for Apel, language-analytical philosophy in an antipsychologistic fervor went too far in rejecting intuitive evidence—as Husserl in his own opposition to psychologism did not—but what is needed now is to appreciate the interwovenness of language use and experiential evidence. Hence, while transcendental consciousness is necessary for ascertaining evidence, Apel rejects the solipsism and “mentalism”64 it seems to imply. Husserl mistakenly believed that the mentalistic transcendental ego-consciousness could constitute all timeless meanings by its intentionality, in much the way that Plato believed it possible to intuit an array of ideas, essentialities, and pure meanings, independently of historical languages.65 While Apel repeatedly complains about the solipsism of transcendental phenomenology, he rarely discusses the purpose it serves, namely, to aid the resolve, which we have claimed that Brandom’s scorekeeper also shares, not to accept unquestioningly any pregiven opinion or tradition to inquire about what is true in itself. Ironically, he claims that this purpose ought to characterize his transcendental pragmatics:

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The difference of the transcendental-pragmatic strategy in comparison with the older transcendental philosophy of consciousness cannot consist, in my opinion, in the fact, that something is left out from the radicality of the transcendental question (and that means also of the methodical doubt with respect to the bracketing of everything contingently thinkable)—as if we favored a half-empirical and therefore weaker transcendental argument. The difference consists rather essentially in this that we can see that we ourselves in the most radical, reﬂective distantiation and placing in question of all contingent presuppositions of our existence—and that means in individual thinking—must go back not only to the transcendental consciousness. But rather, along with the a priori intersubjective meaning-validity and truth-claim of thought, we must also must go back to the presupposition of language and an in principle unlimited communication community. With this subjective-intersubjective presupposition, however, the starting point of transcendental reﬂection is changed.66 However, it does not seem that Apel is nearly as radical as Husserl when at one point he simply affirms that the precondition of mutual participation in a language game replaces the methodological solipsism of attaining understanding through empathy. Husserl’s account of empathy—namely, that there is an analogical apprehension in passive synthesis of the other as a living organism—does not take for granted, as Apel’s seems to do, that we both share a language game together. Rather, Husserl examines how it is at a bodily, prereﬂective level we recognize each other as the kind of living beings with whom we anticipate that we could speak or share a language game. In seeking to give an account of that recognition, Husserl resembles Brandom’s scorekeeper whose rigor extends to inquiring how it is that we attribute intentionality to others.67 Furthermore, Apel seems to envision the kind of reﬂection that phenomenological reduction sets in place according to the often mistaken understanding of it, namely, that one leaves behind the social world, as if one transmigrates to another world as opposed to placing oneself in the natural attitude as a transcendental situation reﬂectively seen through, as Alfred Schutz describes it.68 Moreover, Husserl clearly recognizes that all possible truth and science in their absolute and ﬁnal justiﬁcation depend not only on the evidence of the ego cogito, whose ultimacy rests on the responsibility

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to accept only those truths for which there is evidence in accord with the degree of that evidence, but also on mediately grounded, inescapably linguistic evidence of transcendental intersubjectivity. In accord with the phenomenological Rückfrage, Husserl also recognizes that this transcendental subjectivity and intersubjectivity extends all the way back to the thoroughly linguistic and social lifeworld in which it is already anonymously present. In addition, constitutive phenomenology, which begins with statements as clues from which one might inquire back into the intentional activity that such statements presuppose as sedimentations, seems to achieve just that interwovenness of language use and experiential evidence for which Apel calls. Indeed, at many points in this book, I have been attempting to integrate aspects of the “linguistic turn” within Husserlian phenomenology for instance, by recognizing the legitimacy of Brandom’s methodological stipulation that intentionality be linguistically explained in the ontological region of discourse and by accommodating, through Husserl’s notion of the holism of experience and constitutive phenomenology, McDowell’s insistence that conceptual capacities are actualized in receptivity. In addition, if Husserl conceives evidence as fulﬁlling an empty signitive, linguistic intending, it is difficult to conceive how such evidence could be as independent of language as Apel claims transcendental phenomenology thinks itself to be. Furthermore, accusing transcendental phenomenology of necessarily engaging in “mentalism” is to neglect that the spectrum of intentionality encompasses its bodily and affective modes that Husserl’s constitutive phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology have uncovered. It is also to equate transcendental reﬂection on consciousnesses and its intentionality with a version of empirical-introspective psychology that deals with the mental (as opposed to the physical) states of empirical individuals—a conﬂation that Husserl himself speciﬁcally denies, especially since such a dualistic distinction seems false to intentional experiences that seem to involve indistinguishably physical and mental dimensions (e.g., the turning of the head toward a sudden, loud sound).69 Finally, the correlates of eidetic intuition, the essences, such as the nature of perception in the McDowell/Brandom debate, the nature of transcendental subjectivity/intersubjectivity, or the structure of discourse (concerning which Brandom and Apel have made several eidetic claims) do seem to be described in claims that lack the contingency characterizing empirical claims and hence have a timeless character. The question, though, is not about Platonic metaphysics, as Apel seems to suggest, but whether reﬂection on these

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claims shows them to have this noncontingent character, that is, whether the admission of the distinctiveness of such eidetic claims is not, as Husserl put it, “compellingly demanded by the nature of the matter in question.”70 In sum, the many obstacles that Apel seems to place in the way of a rapprochement between transcendental phenomenology and transcendental pragmatics can be overcome.

3.3. Husserlian Ethics and Levinasian/Discourse Ethics In chapter 7, my criticism of McDowell and Brandom depended on an appeal to ethics on different levels, a pretheoretical ethical encounter and theoretical ethics, such as Habermas’s discourse ethics, but one can ask whether the viewpoint of ethics espoused by Husserl, whose epistemic positions I have made broad use of, would be compatible with such an ethics. Drummond, one of the foremost American commentators on Husserl’s thought, and in particular his ethics, thinks that Husserl’s own ethics converge much more with Aristotelian than Kantian-type ethics. The Husserliana volumes contain two major sets of lectures on ethics in which Husserl’s approaches reﬂect differing emphases. In his earlier Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre (1908–1914) he showed the unity of reason by drawing parallels between logic and ethics, especially developing a formal axiology (e.g., every good when it does not yet exist is a desirable value, nonexistent beauty is desirable, therefore the beautiful is good, etc.) and a formal practical system for the guidance of will (“That will is the best . . . which is directed insightfully to the best option among whatever is attainable”71), each of which, like logic, Husserl takes to resists to resist psychologistic reduction. Although the principle guiding the will is formal, it seeks to take account of as many material conditions as possible, for example, the best possible choice might not be realizable or perhaps one can foresee that a certain choice may have consequences that will interact with other consequences that may make that choice less than the best one. The formal axiology also takes into consideration nonformal factors such as feelings conceived as intentional, and in this earlier work (and in the later one, too) Husserl continually seeks to balance the empiricist feeling-morality with the rationalist morality of reason, recognizing, for instance, the necessity to include feeling as well as moral principles in any satisfactory account of ethics. He continues his holistic approach to ethics in his later Einleitung in die Ethik: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924 by showing how ethical acts involve levels of knowing, valuing,

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and willing. These later lectures show a decided turn, though, away from an axiology and toward an ethics based on the value of persons, not just as individuals but as members of a whole society, to the point where Husserl entertains the possibility that realm of love for one’s neighbor might hold ﬁrst rank among our absolute obligations. In emphasizing the inseparability of individual from social ethics, Husserl traces his own work back to Plato, whose philosophy provided a rational foundation for the principal condition of the possibility of a truly rational society. Philosophical activity in this context becomes a branch of ethical activity!72 In his article “Aristotelianism and Phenomenology,” which aligns Husserl’s ethics with Aristotle’s, Drummond begins by describing valuing as a different kind of intentionality, but one founded in the cognitive grasp of the bearers of values and one susceptible of proper training—and from the outset we ought to admit, as we did with McDowell, that Levinas does not address sufficiently ways of developing the kinds of virtuous sensitivities requisite to recognize and respond appropriately to situational demands. Drummond then proceeds to distinguish the moral categoriality of values from that of their “usefulness” insofar as morality pertains to what will promote ﬂourishing in accord with the vocations that specify how we will rank our values and insofar as moral categoriality considers the good for persons in general and therefore overrides mere use-interests. Before considering how Husserl establishes the objectivity of moral values, Drummond notes how phenomenological axiologists reject Kantian formalism that takes the form of practical reason to be the source of moral worth, and he rejects Dietrich von Hildebrand’s idea of identifying goods or values that are good with “categorical force,” that is, independent of subjective interests, feelings, emotions, needs, and desires. The end result, in Drummond’s view, is that Hildebrand loses an adequate sense of the experienced moral obligation on the side of the agent, and obedience to the moral imperative “depersonalizes the action—as it does in Kant—insofar as the action is divorced from the agent’s will to be happy in her own moral commitments.” Drummond raises the same charge of depersonalization against Levinas. Furthermore, to the extent that obedience to the imperative is detached from the agent’s inclinations, then the accompanying theory of moral psychology and moral motivation is inadequate. Hildebrand, in sum, seems to fear that if the valuable in itself becomes too relative to human feeling it will be only subjectively important and lose its objectivity. Husserl’s “value realism,” by contrast establishes the objectivity of values through four means: corrigibility about the founding, cognitively

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apprehended object; value judgings that can be assessed for correctness; conceptualization of values grounded through identiﬁcation of like-with-like that allows us to detect appropriately the moral saliencies in particular situations; intersubjective (communal) understandings forged in our discussions of the correctness of our value judgments. At this point, though, Drummond recognizes that a theory of values and goods does not yet establish an ethics of obligation, which must provide a basis for criticizing vocational choices and for arriving at universal obligations. In line with autonomy characteristic of transcendental subjectivity, Drummond presents the standard grounding universal obligations when he comments, “We are called, in other words, to the fullness of the life of free, insightful agency in which reason, feeling, the emotions, desires, and actions are ordered together not only in the pursuit of manifest [i.e., material, contentful, nonformal] vocational goods, but in pursuit also and at the same time of this non-manifest ideal of free, insightful agency. Such a life is the chief, but not the only, good for humans as free, rational beings.”73 As opposed to the purely formal Kantian imperative, this transcendental good, which Husserl describes as the good of authenticity and Drummond acknowledges is in a sense formal and without substantive content, informs our pursuit of nonformal, manifest goods. Recognizing that transcendental subjectivity is necessarily transcendental intersubjectivity and that others are insightful agency deserving respect like myself, I am obliged not to interfere with others’ efforts to realize nonmanifest goods and to promote their realization in a way that might override manifest goods that belong to my individual life, even my vocational choices. The phenomenologist, in sum, “can identify what is essential to all rational life in a manner that is not purely formal and that can override merely empirical and worldly interests or inclinations.”74 Drummond’s objection that Hildebrand and Levinas identify a good independently of subjective feelings in such a way that one loses sight of the “experienced” obligation might be construed in two different ways. One might be that the good is taken to be experienced independently of intentional processes, but, for Levinas, as we have seen, the passivity of the ethical is not reducible to experience insofar as it so dominates what happens that I notice my experiencing only as conveying and revealing the other’s summons to be for the other—which, of course, does not imply that no experiencing is going on. But a second meaning, and perhaps more nearly the one Drummond employs, of the depersonalization objection may have to do with whether the moral imperative is divorced from the agent’s inclinations and

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will to be happy. In the ﬁrst place, though, it does seem phenomenologically accurate to say that the everyday ethical experience often does involve situations in which one ﬁnds oneself drawn into responsibility to and for another without regard for one’s own happiness. For example, I can imagine coming across an injured person who intrudes upon my activities, requiring me to set aside everything I was just doing, or I can bump into an alms-seeker to whom I feel required to respond politely, despite whatever project I may just have been pursuing, even if I decide not to give alms. Or one can envision oneself uttering the “After you, sir” upon arriving at the doorway simultaneously with someone else, or, to use Barbara Herman’s example, one can ﬁnd oneself not allowing one’s desires to own a car or computer even to range over another’s car or computer. Moreover, in everyday life experience, the prospect that the pursuit of my own goals, including the pursuit of my own good will, might impact another hurtfully immediately calls for deliberation, as if the good of the other were not just one value among others, but as if it exercises a constraining force on the pursuit of every other value in calling for deliberation. It is interesting, in this regard, that in his article’s ﬁnal section, in which he provides theoretical grounding for universal obligations, Drummond affirms that I ought not interfere with others’ efforts to achieve nonmanifest good (e.g., autonomy, etc.) and that I ought to promote the realization of such goods, even at a cost to my own pursuit of goods, to my empirical and worldly interests or inclinations, and even to my vocational choices. If one is able, rightly in my view, to justify at a theoretical level a demand for circumscribing one’s own desires for happiness, why not also take account of the frequent everyday experiences prior to theoretical justiﬁcation in which one ﬁnds oneself constrained in a correlative way? Furthermore, the detachment of obligation from inclination, which Drummond claims leads to an inadequate theoretical treatment of motivation, can instead reﬂect the fact that two different theoretical tasks are at stake here, with the result that an ethician conceivably could provide a perfectly good theory of what ought to be done and could provide a perfectly good justiﬁcation for why an action should be done, independently of a theory of motivation. Indeed Husserl himself in his Einleitung in die Ethik distinguishes a double meaning to the question “Why do you will what you do?” in terms of the justiﬁcation that explains either the act’s rightness or the motivations leading one to do it. Similarly, Apel objects that difficulties with Kant’s psychology do not necessarily undermine his derivation of universal principles, and, to show further this distinction between motivation and justiﬁcation

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questions, he argues that even if one is unable to motivate any change in the recalcitrant skeptic’s will, it is still possible to show that the skeptic’s position is rationally unjustiﬁable. Furthermore, Kant himself separates the task of establishing a supreme principle of morality (a metaphysics of morals) for determining the rightness or wrongness of actions from a study of the conditions of human volition, an anthropology. It is also signiﬁcant that Drummond himself after presenting his discussion of valuing admits that he has not yet provided the grounds for the universal obligation that are ﬁnally based in respect for insightful agency in oneself and others that sounds quite similar to Kant’s categorical imperative. Drummond’s own account of moral psychology, then, seems independent of his ultimate justiﬁcation for moral action. While it might be desirable to develop an adequate account of motivation to accompany one’s justiﬁcation of universal obligations, the latter is not necessarily jeopardized just because one lacks the former. Indeed, it is not clear to me that one could not conceive a Kantian justiﬁcation of obligations and then embrace Husserl’s psychological insights into the need for an integrated functioning of knowing, valuing, and willing intentionalities. Nor is it clear that Kant’s ideal of obedience to the categorical imperative is completely detached from the agent’s inclinations insofar as he does recognize the duty to promote human happiness, without which one’s ethical living can be imperiled. Finally, the higher level theoretical distinction between a discipline establishing what is right to do and another developing the motivations needed to do what is right could be seen in relationship to common everyday ethical experience in which one frequently encounters the summons to responsibility bearing in on one, regardless of one’s motivations to comply with it.75 In addition, there is a sense in which Drummond’s and Levinas’s approaches to ethics mutually imply each other. If one begins with the question of the objectivity of values, which Drummond discusses in connection with Husserl’s moral realism, one must say that Levinas’s phenomenological-eidetic explanation of the ethical experience of the other, as any other eidetic account, depends for its validity on the same kind of phenomenological insight utilized by Husserlian realism. One must ask oneself if Levinas’s description of how the other is encountered is adequate or fulﬁlling. Of course, any such account based on phenomenological insight is always proposed within a theoretical context that invites the criticism of others. Consequently, Drummond is correct, when he shows in his discussion of Husserl’s view regarding the objectivity of value how Husserl goes beyond the individual’s personal

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phenomenological insight and evidential having to include various other means aiding in the attainment of objectivity, including intersubjective discussions. But for Levinas, this intersubjective dimension is to be found not only in the course of one’s effort to determine objectivity but also in the ethical experience of the other’s ethical summons that precedes the discourse that seeks to establish objectivity; the face of the other is the discourse that, as Levinas says, “obliges the entering into discourse.”76 Even to ask at all whether one’s viewpoint is objective already manifests an unwillingness to push ahead with what one thinks is right without regard for what another may think; it is already to show a kind of respect for the other that would allow the other to play a role in forming one’s own thought. Theorizing, as Levinas observes, involves not abandoning oneself to one’s drives and learning to mistrust oneself. One wonders, then, whether the attempt to establish the objectivity of valuing doesn’t already presuppose at least one valuing, the valuing of the other person, who prompts one to worry about whether one’s valuing is objective in the ﬁrst place.77 Drummond’s grounding of universal obligation in the respect due insightful agency, one’s own and others’, as we have said, resembles Kant’s categorical imperative. It is not clear to me why the ﬁrst principles governing Kantian/ discourse ethics—which, as I have contended, focus on our characters as ends in ourselves, which can be show to be compatible with the ethical relationship to the Other described by Levinas, and which are implicit, as ultimately presupposed, in our very practice of discourse—could not also “inform” our decisions in concrete situations. These principles could inform every action just as Husserl’s admittedly formal and substantively contentless good of authenticity can inform our pursuit of manifest goods. In other words, it is not clear why the Kantian/Habermasian ultimate principle is any less formal in a good sense than Husserl’s. Finally, the ultimate universal principles to be found in the differing perspectives of Drummond and discourse ethics seem mutually to imply each other in much the way that Drummond’s and Levinas’s ethical approaches did. Drummond’s articulation of a universal principle grounding moral obligation in respect for insightful agency seems the kind of thing that any responsible subjectivity from a ﬁrst-person perspective would ﬁnd convincing. Drummond’s argument in the ﬁeld of ethics takes place, however, within the ultimate horizon of transcendental intersubjectivity, since the arguments in his paper are proposed to an interlocutor, whom he respects as an instantiation of insightful agency, like himself, even by the fact that he resorts to

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offering arguments instead of coercing with force. The very discursive practice Drummond presupposes also presupposes the respect for insightful agency in oneself and another that mandates dialogue and that can inform decisions about how to treat others in more concrete situations. By moving to this ultimate horizon, one makes explicit the dialogical presuppositions of one’s arguing, beyond the monologically seeming articulation of a ﬁrst principle that one can ﬁnd convincing for oneself. As mentioned above, transcendental intersubjectivity is something we always already are, even when we make it or anything else the theme we are talking about. While Drummond’s justiﬁcation of Husserlian ethics unfolds within the discursive conditions Apel and Habermas point to, it also lies within the horizon of transcendental intersubjectivity that Husserl himself spells out, and consequently, there need be no incompatibility between the Husserlian and discourse versions of ethics, especially since respect for insight agency seems to represent the ultimate principle for each. In the end, though, even such a dialogical defense of the same ultimate principle, which Drummond articulates from within the ﬁrstperson perspective of responsible subjectivity, has to be ﬁnally embraced, as Drummond sees, from within the ﬁrst-person perspective of my own or the reader’s responsible subjectivity, always anonymously transcendental and always anonymously transcendentally intersubjective.78

N O T E S

preface 1. Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Science, Perception and Reality (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1991), 168–70. 2. Ibid., 168. 3. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 58–66. A translation of Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister, vol. 2 of Sämtliche Werke, 79–89 (Leipzig: Meiner, 1937). 4. Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 124. Actually, Rorty in this passage claims that this is the title they claim for themselves; see also Rorty, “Introduction,” in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, by Wilfrid Sellars, with a Study Guide by Robert Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 8–9, on Brandom’s ushering analytic philosophy into a Hegelian phase. 5. Robert Brandom, “Perception and Rational Constraint: McDowell’s Mind and World,” in Perception, ed. Enrique Villanueva (Philosophical Issues 7; Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1996), 258–59. 6. Brandom, “Perception and Rational Constraint,” 241–59; John McDowell, “Reply to Gibson, Byrne, and Brandom,” in Perception, ed. Enrique Villanueva (Philosophical Issues 7; Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1996), 290–300. 7. Brandom, “Perception and Rational Constraint,” 241–59. 8. McDowell, “Reply to Gibson,” 290–300. 9. McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal,” PPR 55 (1995): 877–93. 10. Brandom, “Knowledge and the Social Articulation of the Space of Reasons,” PPR 55 (1995): 895–908. 11. McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” PPR 64 (2002): 97–105. 12. Ibid., 98–99. 13. A. D. Smith, The Problem of Perception (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 14. McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” 105. 15. Jeremy Wanderer, Robert Brandom (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008); Maximilian de Gaynesford, John McDowell (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004), xiv, 186n8–187, 188n14; Richard Gaskin, Experience and the World’s Own

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Language: A Critique of John McDowell’s Empiricism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 124, 128, 216–17; Tim Thornton, John McDowell (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 3, 220–23. 16. A. D. Smith, “Husserl and Externalism,” Synthese (2008): 314–16; A. D. Smith, The Problem of Perception, 106–7, 303–311; Walter Hopp, “Husserl, Dummett, and the Linguistic Turn,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 78 (2009): 30n13; Walter Hopp, “Husserl and the Linguistic Turn” (paper presented at the 37th annual meeting of the Husserl Circle, Prague, The Czech Republic, April 26, 2007). Thorsten Gubatz, “Ein Philosoph namens Brandegger: Ontologische Differenzen zwischen Heidegger und Heidegger in Robert Brandoms Interpretation,” Deutsche Zeitshrift für Philosophie 3 (2002): 377–91; Dallas Willard, “How Concepts Relate the Mind to Its Objects: The ‘God’s Eye View’ Vindicated” (paper presented at the Department of Philosophy, Biola University, La Mirada, February 1998); Steven G. Crowell, “Transcendental Logic and Minimal Empiricism: Lask and McDowell on the Unboundedness of the Conceptual” (paper presented at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, March 31, 2009); Steven G. Crowell, “Heidegger on Deliberation and Practical Reasoning” (paper presented at the World Conference on Phenomenology: Nature, Culture, and Existence, Hong Kong, China, December 17, 2008); Steven G. Crowell, “Phenomenological Immanence, Normativity, and Semantic Externalism,” Synthese 160 (2008): 335–54; Jakob Lindgaard, “Erfahrung und Natur,” interview with John McDowell, Deutsche Zeitscrift für Philosophie 53 (2005): 783–805 (questions for the interview are asked from a phenomenological perspective); Frode Kjosavik, Kjosavik, Frode. “Perceptual Intimacy and Conceptual Inadequacy: A Husserlian Critique of McDowell’s Internalism,” in Metaphysics, Facticity, and Interpretation: Phenomenology in the Nordic Countries, ed. Dan Zahavi, Sara Heinämaa, and Hans Ruin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003), 49–71. 17. Jürgen Habermas, “From Kant to Hegel: On Robert Brandom’s Pragmatic Philosophy of Language,” European Journal of Philosophy 8 (2000): 322–55; Cristina Lafont, “Is Objectivity Perspectival? Reﬂections on Brandom’s and Habermas’s Pragmatist Conceptions of Objectivity,” in Habermas and Pragmatism, ed. Mitchell Aboulaﬁa, Myra Orbach Bookman, and Cathy Kemp (London: Routledge, 2002), 185–209; James Swindal, “Equality and Democratic Societies,” Philosophy Today 45 (2001): 180–90; Barbara Fultner, “Inferentialism and Communicative Action: Robust Conceptions of Intersubjectivity,” Philosophical Studies 108 (2002): 121–31; Kevin Scharp, “Communication and Content: Circumstances and Consequences of the Habermas-Brandom Debate,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 11 (2003): 43–61.

chapter 1 1. John McDowell, “Brandom on Representation and Inference,” PPR 57 (1997): 159. 2. Robert Brandom, MIE (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 462–63. 3. McDowell, “Brandom on Representation and Inference,” 158; for the footnote, see Brandom, MIE, 669n90, in which Brandom suggests possibly one might explain

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inferentialism and representationalism in terms of some third notion or eschew reductive explanations entirely and rest content with describing a family of mutually related concepts. 4. McDowell, “Brandom on Representation and Inference,” 159. 5. Ibid. 6. Brandom, “Replies,” PPR 57 (1997): 190. Brandom insists that his accounts of “is true” and “refer” are not explanatory but expressive in nature, that is, he is not giving a theory of what truth is but showing the linguistic signiﬁcance and what is expressed by these terms. He anticipates that McDowell might oppose details of his explanation of these terms. 7. Ibid., 189–90. 8. Brandom, “Perception and Rational Constraint: McDowell’s Mind and World,” in Perception, ed. Enrique Villanueva (Philosophical Issues 7; Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1996), 247–48. 9. McDowell, “Reply to Gibson, Byrne, and Brandom,” in Perception, ed. Enrique Villanueva (Philosophical Issues 7; Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1996), 290–92; see John McDowell, “Reply to Commentators,” PPR58 (1998): 407. 10. McDowell, “Brandom on Representation and Inference,” 160. 11. Ibid. 12. McDowell, M&W (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 40. 13. Ibid. McDowell equates a kind of conceptual idealism with the coherentism represented by Davidson’s view that rejects the “friction” provided for our concepts that the myth of the given sought (though misunderstood as a “bare given”). See McDowell, M&W, especially 11, 18, 26, and in general, 3–45. Indeed, it is somewhat ironic in this regard that Brandom in “Perception and Rational Constraint” readily associates himself with Davidson in claiming to provide the very rational constraint by the world that McDowell seeks, as we will see below; see Brandom, “Perception and Rational Constraint,” 252–55. 14. McDowell, “Brandom on Representation and Inference,” 161n3. 15. Brandom, “Replies,” 190–91. 16. In MIE, Brandom integrated his idea of empirical concepts involved in observational reports that are noninferentially elicited with the two crucial features of linguistic expressions according to Michael Dummett, namely, the circumstances of their appropriate application and the consequences that follow from such an application. Regarding the latter, if one applies the concept “red” to some object, one cannot then apply the concept “blue” to it at the same time and in the same respect; see Brandom, MIE, 119–21. Veriﬁcationist theories of meaning stress the circumstances of application and the classical pragmatists identify propositional contents exclusively with the consequences of a claim, according to Brandom, see 121–23. 17. Brandom, MIE, 69; see also 496. 18. Ibid., 71, 83, 86–93, 496. While seemingly allying himself with Hegel’s Romantic rejection of representationalism, Brandom thinks that he can ﬁnd in the inferential connections of content a way of escaping Romantic hostility to rationality. Later, however, Brandom in Making It Explicit softens his seeming opposition to representationalism by affirming that his inferentialism is not antipathetic to representational locutions per se, but only denies them the basic role in semantic explanation and seeks to understand what is said by them. 19. Ibid., 194; see also 7, 141, 152, 156, 158.

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20. Ibid., 196. 21. Ibid., 7, 141, 152, 156, 158. 22. Ibid., 117,119, 131–32, 335–36; Brandom, “Replies,” 191. 23. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 601; see also 216–17, 220–21, 226–27, 496–97. 24. Ibid., 331. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 331, 496–97, 517, 594, 598–99. Brandom deﬁnes semantic externalism as “the way in which what we mean depends on how things actually are, whether we know how they are or not” (MIE, 647). Brandom’s endorsement of Sellars’s view that “looks-talk” is but a retreat from original “is-talk,” and his consequent rejection of “subjective phenomenalism,” is a further indicator that his position cannot easily be classiﬁed as a kind of linguistic idealism. See MIE, 294–96. In the Conclusion of MIE, Brandom attempts to show how his book does not concur with Kant’s idealism detached from the real world that ends up as nothing more than an unknowable thing in itself. He rejects outright, as does McDowell, the idea that concepts are epistemological intermediaries between us and the world, denying us access to the world in itself. Moreover, he rejects Kant’s understanding of concepts as set up over against some nonconceptual counterpart, for example, intuition—the very distinction, by the way, of which we have seen McDowell making such fruitful use—since Kant’s view results in a series of dualisms that Brandom’s view of concepts escapes, namely, between form and matter, generality and particularity, and spontaneity and receptivity. In opposition to the ﬁrst dualistic way of understanding concepts and intuitions, Brandom denies that his inferential notion of concepts involves forms structuring some underlying material. Moreover, insofar as the singular terms referring to particularities belong to an inferential network they are themselves already “general” in the sense that they are repeatable and understandable only in relation to other concepts (e.g., in anaphoric chains), and thereby the dualistic opposition Kant sets up between generalized concepts and some underlying particularity collapses. Here Brandom converges with Hegel’s analysis of sense certainty in the Phenomenology of Spirit, namely, that one cannot get at particularities except through terms like “now” and “here” that are already universals. Regarding the third way of distinguishing concepts, that they pertain to spontaneity whereas intuitions pertain to receptivity, Brandom points out that his notion of a stimulus eliciting as a propositional response (including deixis or the initiation of anaphoric chain) synthesizes receptivity and spontaneity insofar as one can focus either on the causal stimuli eliciting the utterance or on the spontaneity of the inferential network into which any empirical utterance is introduced. McDowell at the end of “Having the World in View” faults Brandom for precisely omitting Kant’s notion of intuitions; see “Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality,” [The Woodbridge Lectures, 1997], Journal of Philosophy 95 (1998): 491. McDowell thinks that Brandom accounts for the representational character of thought and language via a scorekeeper’s speciﬁcation of the de re content of another’s thought. I think that Brandom substitutes for Kantian intentional intuitions a causal account of stimuli eliciting conceptual-propositional responses. Like McDowell, who insists that conceptual capacities are deployed from the start in receptivity to avoid any nonconceptual given, Brandom strives to avoid any idea that there is something beyond conceptualizing processes by opposing Kant’s dualisms and by suggesting that it is impossible to get at facts except through linguistic claims that express them and make them explicit.

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Here it is as if the critical scorekeeping methodology that forbids one to talk about what is given without being explicit about the language through which it is talked about actually rules out any Kantian Ding an sich, just as the notion of “expression” builds a continuum from what is expressed to its expression and blocks any gap between them from opening up. Consequently, it is wrong to conceive discursive practice with a world of things and facts outside of it, as if objects constrained linguistic practice from outside of it, rather discursive practice consists of a “to-ing and fro-ing” with environing objects. Brandom, MIE, 331; see also 332, 614–23. 28. The previous footnote also illustrates how the deontic scorekeeping model of discursive practice further rules out the possibility of a Kantian Ding an sich from which our linguistic claims could become unmoored. 29. Brandom, “Replies,” 191–92. 30. McDowell, “Brandom on Representation and Inference,” 161n3. 31. Ibid., 160. 32. McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” 105. 33. Brandom, “Replies,”191. 34. McDowell, “Brandom on Representation and Inference,” 161; see also McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” 101. 35. McDowell, “Brandom on Representation and Inference,” 161. 36. Ibid., 294. 37. McDowell, “Reply to Brandom,” 293. 38. Ibid., 294–95. 39. Ibid., 295. 40. Ibid., 296; see also 293. 41. McDowell, “Brandom on Representation and Inference,” 161. 42. Ibid. 43. Brandom, “Replies,” 192. 44. McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” 104. 45. Brandom, MIE, 88–89, 214. Brandom is explicit that our noninferential acknowledgement of propositionally contentful doxastic commitments is our response to sensory stimulation, 276. 46. McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” 104. 47. Ibid. 48. McDowell, M&W, 34. 49. Ibid., 14, 35; see also McDowell, “Having the World in View,” 490–91, especially note 491n22, where McDowell questions Brandom’s denial of a transcendental role to sensibility and a neglect of Kantian intuitions. In his précis of M&W in stage two of the debate, McDowell conceives himself as addressing the question of how the empirical content is possible since without it experience cannot serve as a tribunal that is needed if there is to be a minimal empiricism. John McDowell, “Précis of Mind and World,” in Perception, ed. Enrique Villanueva (Philosophical Issues 7; Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1996), 231–32. 50. William Rehg, “Perceptual Intentionality and Brandom’s Pragmatics: Comments on Michael D. Barber,” Interpersonal Perspectives and Knowledge: The Seventh Henle Conference in the History of Philosophy, ed. Michael D. Barber, The Modern Schoolman 84 (2007): 268–69. 51. McDowell, “The Content of Perceptual Experience,” Philosophical Quarterly 44 (1994): 201–2.

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52. McDowell, “Reply to Brandom,” 296–98. The observer of a chicken or a chicken laying an egg would not have the kinds of doubts about claims made about such simple observations that a chicken sexer would have when trying to decide the sex of a chick prior to the maturing of it physical sexual characteristics. These simpler claims are intelligible as observation reports, responding to the reported facts as the rational constraints even though—of course, as McDowell admits elsewhere—there are subpersonal and physiological conditions of which one might not be consciously aware that play an enabling and explanatory rather than constitutive role in regard to such simple perceptual experiences, see John McDowell, “The Content of Perceptual Experience,” 203. 53. Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 104. 54. Brandom, MIE, 226. 55. Ibid., 601. 56. In chapter 6, we will discuss this problem more thoroughly in connection with Lafont’s essay, “Is Objectivity Perspectival?” 57. Brandom, “Replies,” 192. 58. Ibid. 59. McDowell, M&W, 35n10. In “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth,” Rorty suggests a way of thinking about our beliefs that would not construe them as attempts to represent the world accurately. He recommends that we look upon them from the outside as a ﬁeld linguist coming to understand natives who has no prior knowledge of their meanings but who must resort to coordinating their linguistic responses with the world, see Rorty, “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth,” in Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 339–55. 60. McDowell, M&W, 35; see also McDowell, “Having the World in View,” 445, 490. 61. McDowell, M&W, 35.

chapter 2 1. Donald Davidson, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” rep. in Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives in the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 310. 2. Robert Brandom, “Perception and Rational Constraint: McDowell’s Mind and World,” in Perception, ed. Enrique Villanueva (Philosophical Issues 7; Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1996), 245. 3. Ibid., 255. 4. Ibid., 253. 5. Ibid., 257. 6. Ibid., 242–49, 253–55. 7. Robert Brandom, “Knowledge and the Social Articulation of the Space of Reasons,” PPR 55 (1995): 897. 8. Such attributions of knowledge, then, are hybrid in nature, with the commitment and entitlement being attributed by the scorekeeper to the reporter, but the truth component of knowledge is supplied by the scorekeeper.

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9. The fully worked out inferential connections for attributing knowledge would go something like this: Insofar as the commitment (“This shard is Toltec”) is justiﬁed (wins entitlement) by the reliability of the shard identiﬁer, and insofar as I, as a scorekeeper, have no evidence leading me to believe that shard is not Toltec (e.g., that someone may have drugged the shard identiﬁer), I could affirm that belief to be true. The result is that the belief would be justiﬁed and true, and, consequently, knowledge could be attributed to the shard identiﬁer. 10. Brandom, “Perception and Rational Constraint,” 252. 11. Ibid., 254. 12. Ibid., 256. 13. Ibid., 258. 14. McDowell, “Reply to Gibson, Byrne, and Brandom,” In Perception, edited by Enrique Villanueva (Philosophical Issues 7; Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1996), 291. 15. Ibid., 293. 16. Ibid., 291n.9, 292, 294–95. 17. Ibid. 298. 18. Ibid., 297–98. 19. Ibid., 296. 20. Brandom, “Perception and Rational Constraint,” 257. 21. McDowell, M&W (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 168. 22. Ibid. 23. McDowell, “Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality,” [The Woodbridge Lectures, 1997]. Journal of Philosophy 95 (1998): 440; Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Science, Perception and Reality (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1963), 144. 24. John McDowell, “Experiencing the World,” in Reason and Nature: Lecture and Colloquium in Munster 1999, ed. Marcus Willaschek (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2000), 9, 12, 13; McDowell, “Having the World in View,” 439–40, 472; McDowell, Mind and World, 9, 25–26. 25. Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Science, Perception and Reality (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1963), 173. 26. McDowell, “Having the World in View,” 489. 27. Ibid., 468. 28. Ibid., 433, 437, 447, 451, 457, 460, 466–70, 473, 488, 491. The reference to intuition involving understanding and sensibility (457) seems to blur the distinction Kant makes between sense and understanding, but perhaps it simply refers to McDowell’s idea that conceptual capacities are actualized in receptivity. D. W. Hamlyn, “Perception, Sensation, and Nonconceptual Content,” in Essays on Nonconceptual Content, ed. York H. Gunther (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003), 254, notes that concepts are applied to objects, not informational data. 29. See the ﬁrst section of this chapter. 30. McDowell, M&W, 67–72, 76, 82, 97, 111. 31. Ibid., 5. 32. Ibid., 62. 33. McDowell, “Experiencing the World,” 11; see also M&W, xi–xii, 5, 51–53, 62; McDowell, “Having the World in View,” 440, 462. 34. McDowell, “Experiencing the World,” 15.

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35. Ibid., 14–17. 36. Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 41; a translation of Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Hamburg: Classen & Goverts, 1954), 38. Henceforth German version numbers will be given in parentheses after the English version numbers. 37. Ibid., 49 (47–48). 38. Ibid., 48 (46–47). 39. Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock, Collected Works, vol. 9 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2001), 269; a translation of Analysen zur passiven Synthesis: Aus Vorlesungs und Forschungsmanuskripten 1918–1926, ed. Margo Fleischer (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 11; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 216–17. Henceforth the German text numbers will follow in parentheses after English translation page. See also Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Husserliana: Collected Works, vol. 9; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2001), 31. This passage is a translation of Husserl, Formale und Transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, ed. Paul Jannsen (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 17; The Hague: Martinus Nihoff, 1974), 372–73. The English translation of this latter work is Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969). However pp. 372–73 in the German text pertained to “Ergänzender Text IV,” and it did not appear in the Cairns translation. Henceforth German original of Formale und Transzendentale Logik appearing in Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis will be speciﬁcally noted as originating in that text. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 41 (38), 48 (46–47), 49 (47–48). 40. Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, 312–13; a translation of Aktive Synthesen: Aus der Vorlesung “Transzendentale Logik” 1920/21, ed. Roland Breeur (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 31; Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), 40–41. Translations of Aktive Synthesen appearing in Analyses concerning Passive and Active Synthesis will be speciﬁcally noted after the page references in the latter. See also Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 79 (82–83). See Dan Zahavi, “Self Awareness and Affection,” in Alterity and Facticity: New Perspectives on Husserl, ed. Natalie Depraz and Dan Zahavi (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1998), 209–10. 41. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 59 (60), 60 (61), 73–76 (74–80), 84 (90); Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, 210 (162); Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, 275–77 (Husserl, Aktiven Syntheses, 3–5); Edmund Husserl, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934): Die C-Manuskripte, ed. Dieter Lohmar (Husserliana: Materialen, vol. 7; Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 189, 195, 202–3. On the late Husserl’s tendency not to separate very clearly activity and passivity, see Klaus Held, “Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Life-World,” trans. Lanei Rodemeyer, in The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, ed. Donn Welton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 52. Held’s text originally appeared as “Einleitung” in Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologie der Lebenswelt, Ausgewählte Texte (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1969), but this text is not available through standard United States interlibrary loan arrangements. Dieter Lohmar describes passive syntheses as elements in sensibility that, in a sense, come together by themselves, but this still involves the

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subject performing a unifying synthesis guided by the material of sensibility itself, see Lohmar, “Husserl’s Type and Kant’s Schemata: Systematic Reasons for their Correlation or Identity,” trans. Julia Jansen and Gina Zavota, in The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, ed. Donn Welton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 95. Original German text not cited, and, according to Professor Zavota, Lohmar may have had a previously unpublished paper translated speciﬁcally for this volume. 42. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 203–4 (239–40). 43. Ibid., 204 (240–41). 44. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 79 (83–84), 203–4 (239–41); Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, 312 (Husserl, Aktive Synthesen, 40); McDowell, M&W, 4. 45. Husserl, Analyses of Passive and Active Synthesis, 417–18 (283–84); see Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000), 69. 46. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 93, 96; a translation of Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 95–96, 99–100. Henceforth the German page numbers will follow in parentheses after English translation page. 47. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution; Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, vol. 3, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989), 231; see also 227, 229, 242; a translation of Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. M. Biemal (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 219– 20; see also 215–16, 217–18, 230–31. Henceforth the German page numbers will follow in parentheses after English translation page number. 48. Husserl, Experience and Judgment 53–54 (52–54); Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, ed. Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2001), 2:25; a translation of Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 2, part 1, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. Ursula Panzer (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 19/1; The Hague: Nijhoff, 1984), 267–68. Henceforth page numbers in parentheses are those of the German edition. Rehg, “Perceptual Intentionality and Brandom’s Pragmatics,” 272. Rehg argues that it is the intentional grasp of an objective world calls for explanation and suggests that any bare assertion of such contact results from a return to pre-critical philosophy, Ibid., 275. Intentional grasp of an objective world isn’t a matter of simply a “bare assertion” since it can only be established by one’s consulting one’s experience to see whether descriptive, eidetic claim that we relate to the world through intentionality is true or not. It certainly seems to me to be the case as I reﬂect upon it, and furthermore, all higher level “explanations” of intentionality would presuppose a life-world intentional engagement with the world. McDowell, too, argues that our embodied coping skills are conceptual insofar as they are “permeated with mindedness,” see John McDowell, The Engaged Intellect: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2009), 309. 49. Brandom, “Perception and Rational Constraint,” 254.

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50. Rehg, “Perceptual Intentionality and Brandom’s Pragmatics,” 273–74. The italics here are mine. See also Brandom, “Replies,” 198. 51. McDowell, M&W, 5. 52. Brandom, “Perception and Rational Constraint,” 254. 53. McDowell, M&W, 42. 54. See Brandom, “Perception and Rational Constraint,” 258–59, where Brandom extols McDowell’s conceptualism and sees it as uniting them both as “Pittsburgh neo-Hegelians.” 55. John McDowell, “Précis of Mind and World,” PPR 58 (1998): 365. 56. John McDowell, “Reply to Commentators,” PPR 58 (1998): 403–5, 407, 423; Richard Rorty, “McDowell, Davidson, and Spontaneity,” PPR 58 (1998): 393–94. 57. Edmund Husserl, “The Vienna Lecture,” trans. David Carr, in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 286; a translation of “Die Krisis des europäischen Menchentums und die Philosophie,” “Abhandlungen,” in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 333. Henceforth all page numbers in parenthesis refer to the German page numbers. In this lecture, the refusal to accept unexamined opinions is intended as a criticism of positivism that leaves out of consideration the free, subjective, conscious attitudes of natural scientists who explain consciousness away, see 289–99; see Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 1–6; a translation of Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. Stephan Strasser (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), 43–48. Henceforth German version pages will appear in parentheses after the English translation’s page number. 58. McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” 104–5. 59. Brandom, MIE, 553; see also 289. 60. John McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal,” PPR 65 (1995): 889. 61. Robert Brandom, “Knowledge and the Social Articulation of the Space of Reasons,” 908. 62. John McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” PPR 64 (2002): 98. 63. Ibid., 99. 64. Ibid., 101–3. 65. Ibid., 101. 66. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: J & J Harper Editions, 1969), 16e, 105; see also 18e, 115.

chapter 3 1. John McDowell, M&W (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 39. 2. Ibid., 39–40. 3. John McDowell, “Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space,” Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 228–59.

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4. Bertrand Russell, “On Denoting,” Essays in Analysis, ed. Douglas Lackey (New York: George Braziller, 1973), 107–9; Bertrand Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,” in Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1919), 225. 5. Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance,” 228, 232. 6. Russell, “On Denoting,” 104–7. The existentially quantiﬁed, nonsingular proposition would be formulated as follows: Ǝx (Cx • Uy(Cy→x = y) • Bx). This whole statement would mean the following in nonsymbolic terms: There exists an x such that x is C [x is the King of France] and for all individuals who are y if y is C [if that individual is the King of France] then that individual is the same as the individual (x) who is King of France (in other words there is only one entity that is the King of France), and that individual is bald. I am grateful to Joshua Anderson for this explanation. 7. McDowell, “Singular Thought,” 231. 8. Ibid., 232. 9. Ibid., 232–36. 10. Ibid., 232. McDowell’s comment here is not clear as to whether there is no object at all, and hence one would be having a hallucination whether one perceives an object but misperceives some aspect, and hence having an illusion. A. D. Smith, from a phenomenological perspective, rightly emphasizes the difference between these two possibilities, as we shall see later. See A. D. Smith, The Problem of Perception (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 8–9, 209, 235, 243. 11. Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference, ed. John McDowell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 45. 12. McDowell, “Singular Thought,” 232–37. When McDowell suggests that this mistakenness about the contents about one’s mind would consist in thinking that there was a singular thought in one’s mind when there is really “nothing precisely there,” he sounds a bit like Russell who denies that there is any singular proposition at all when the singular sentence begins with deﬁnite descriptions referring to an object that is not there to be referred to. However, McDowell qualiﬁes this view by suggesting in the footnote (236n17) that he does not think that the mind is simply void when a seemingly singular thought lacks an object. In his response to R. M. Sainsbury, McDowell admits that genuine names either have a referent-dependent sense or have a kind of sense their possession of which consists of their purporting to have a reference-dependent sense. The statement “Vulcan is at least 1,000 miles in diameter” is an instance of the latter. See “Response to R. M. Sainsbury,” in McDowell and His Critics, ed. Cynthia Macdonald and Graham Macdonald (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 16, 18. This discussion of names could be applied to this discussion of singular senses: it is not as if there is no sense at all when there is no referent. 13. John McDowell, “Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality,” [The Woodbridge Lectures, 1997], Journal of Philosophy 95 (1998): 482–83. 14. McDowell, “Singular Thought,” 236–37; on Brandom’s dismay, see chapter 2. 15. John McDowell, “Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge,” in Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 385–86; see also 376–84, 389; see John McDowell, “Response to Simon Blackburn,” in McDowell and His Critics, ed. Cynthia Macdonald and Graham Macdonald (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 220–21. 16. McDowell, “Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge,” 386.

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17. Ibid., 386–87. The italics here are McDowell’s bringing out the disjunctive possibilities. See McDowell, “Response to Simon Blackburn,” 220–22. 18. McDowell, “Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge,” 385, 388, 391–92, 393; “Singular Thought,” 241–43. 19. McDowell, “Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge,” 384. 20. Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 23; a translation of Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 31. Henceforth, page numbers in parenthesis refer to the German edition; Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (London: Archon Books, 1970), 260; a translation of Wesen und formen der Sympathie, ed. Manfred Frings (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7; Bern and Munich: Francke Verlag), 253–54. 21. McDowell, “Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge,” 370, 392. 22. McDowell, “Singular Thought,” 242. 23. McDowell, “Singular Thought,” 255, 259; Mc Dowell, “Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge,” 370, 383, 384–85, 389, 392–93; McDowell, M&W, 93, 111–13; Robert Brandom, “Replies,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (1997): 189; Richard Gaskin, Experience and the World’s Own Language: A Critique of John McDowell’s Empiricism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 120. 24. McDowell, “Singular Thought,” 239. 25. McDowell, M&W, 113. 26. A. D. Smith, Problem of Perception, 4–5, 241, 259. 27. Ibid., 25; see also 5–6, 8–9, 21, 26, 28–29, 40, 44, 45–47, 53–54, 235. 28. Ibid., 168, 186. 29. Ibid., 54, 58, 61–64, 133–35, 142, 153, 158–60, 164, 168–69, 172–73, 177–78, 185. 30. Ibid., 165. 31. Ibid., 187; see also 165–69, 186. 32. Ibid., 222–23. 33. McDowell, “Singular Thought,” 236. 34. Smith, Problem of Perception, 194–95, 206, 209–10, 214, 222–24, 234, 240–45, 248, 256–57, 260–62. 35. A. D. Smith, “Husserl and Externalism,” Synthese 160: 315–16, 331. 36. Smith, Problem of Perception, 133. 37. On this indistinguishability, see John McDowell, “Response to Simon Blackburn,” 220–21, and McDowell, “Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge,” 389 (e.g., on the phenomenological argument, which is not conclusive). 38. Smith, “Husserl and Externalism,” 319. Husserl’s allowance that external objects ﬁgure in the veridical perceptual experience makes him something of an externalist, Smith argues, despite other interpretations of the phenomenological reduction as conﬁning us within the realm of our own experiences. 39. Ibid. 40. Smith, Problem of Perception, 187. 41. Ibid., 158. 42. Ibid., 125; see also 92–93. 43. Ibid., 73, 95, 113, 185–86. 44. Ibid., 95.

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45. An earlier version of this section of the chapter appeared in print as Michael Barber, “Holism and Horizon: Husserl and McDowell on Non-conceptual Content,” Husserl Studies 24 (2008): 79–97. 46. McDowell, M&W, 9; see also 3–4, 9–10. 47. Ibid., 4–7, 11, 14–18, 31, 34, 35. 48. Ibid., 7–9, 46–49, 50–55. 49. Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Science, Perception and Reality (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1963), 168–70, 195. 50. McDowell, M&W, 9; see also 51. 51. Ibid., 12; see also 9. 52. Ibid., 4, 9, 29–30, 46, 56–57, 59, 62; McDowell, “Having the World in View,” 439–40, 453, 459–60, 474, 476, 488–89, 491. 53. See McDowell, M&W, 63–65; see also 114–24, where he also addresses the questions of the relationship between human beings and animals. Since this topic is brought up again and discussed at length in chapter 6, it is clear that much more attention is given to it than to the other objections against McDowell’s rejection of nonconceptual content. 54. Walter Hopp, “Husserl and the Linguistic Turn,” “Husserl and the Linguistic Turn.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Husserl Circle, 37th Annual Meeting, Prague, The Czech Republic, April 26, 2007. Hopp reiterates this charge in his essay, “Husserl, Dummett, and the Linguistic Turn,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 78 (2009): 27, stating that for McDowell, “the content of perception is exclusively ‘conceptual.’” 55. Christopher Peacocke, “Does Perception Have a Nonconceptual Content?” Journal of Philosophy 98 (2001): 245–50; William Alston, “Sellars and the ‘Myth of the Given,’” PPR 65 (2002): 73. 56. McDowell, M&W, 40, 111. 57. John McDowell, “Experiencing the World,” in Reason and Nature: Lecture and Colloquium in Munster 1999, ed. Marcus Willaschek (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2000), 11; see also McDowell’s correction of Crispin Wright on just this point, McDowell, “Reply to Commentators,” PPR 58 (1998): 426–27. 58. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay and ed. Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2001), 2:119–25; a translation of Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Vol. 2, Pt. 1, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis: Text der ersten und zweiten Auﬂage. (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, 19, no. 1; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1984), 425–35. Henceforth, the corresponding German pages will be given in parenthesis after the English pagination. 59. Ibid., 2: 206/Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Vol. 2, Pt. 2, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis: Text der ersten und zweitern Auﬂage, ed. Ursula Panzer (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 19, no. 2; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1984), 566–67. Henceforth, the corresponding German pages will be given in parenthesis after the English pagination. 60. Walter Hopp, “Husserl, Dummett, and the Linguistic Turn,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 78 (2009): 37. 61. Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2: 295 (Vol. 2, Pt. 2: 694–95); see also Robert Sokolowski, “Husserl’s Sixth Logical Investigation,” in Husserl’s Logical Investigations, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003), 109–22. See the

272

notes to pages 68–73

clear presentation of the syntheses involved in fulﬁllment by Rudolf Bernet, “Desiring to Know through Intuition,” trans. Basil Vassilicos, Husserl Studies 19 (2003): 159. 62. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 10; a translation of Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (1929), ed. Stephan Strasser (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), 50–51. Henceforth, the corresponding German pages will be given in parenthesis after the English pagination. 63. Ibid. 64. McDowell, “Having the World in View,” 468. Husserl speaks of horizons upsetting us and objects calling to us, see Edmund Husserl, Transzendentaler Idealismus: Texte aus dem Nachlass 1908–1921, ed. Robert Rollinger, with Rochus Sowa (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 36; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003), 86, 99. 65. Hopp, “Husserl, Dummett, and the Linguistic Turn,” 19–20, 30, 32–33, 34–36, 38; Hopp, “Husserl and the Linguistic Turn,” 90–91, 93–94; see John Drummond, Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism: Noema and Object (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1990), 97, 256–58. Robert Brandom in his recent Locke lectures describes in Sellarsian terms how the language of modalities can be transposed into the language of norms. That is, one can adopt a pragmatic meta-vocabulary to say what it is one must do in order thereby to be taking or treating two claims as incompatible. Whereas on the objective side one can discuss what states of affairs or properties are incompatible with others, these incompatibilities can be transposed into normative language on the side of knowing and acting subjects who would be normatively entitled to some commitments and not others. One wonders if the same kind of thing isn’t going on in regard to this discussion of veriﬁcation in McDowell and Husserl. In a sense, the intuitive contents in fulﬁlling perceptions in contrast to empty signitive intendings are, as it were, the objective precipitates out of the different attitudes undertaken by a subject who merely thinks a proposition, who puts herself perceptually before the object about which she had previously been only thinking, and who compares the difference. See Robert Brandom, Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1, 11, 23, 25–26, 121–22, 176–77, 180–81, 190–92. 66. Jocelyn Benoist speaks of the excess of the object in perception and the surprise involved in it, see Benoist, Les Limites de l’Intentionalité: Recherches Phénoménologiques et Analytiques (Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2005), 278, 280. Steven Crowell draws parallels between Brandom’s notion of normative and the normativity expected in the course of future experience (which can of course be exploded), see Steven G. Crowell, “Phenomenological Immanence, Normativity, and Semantic Externalism,” Synthese 160 (2008): 346. 67. McDowell, M&W, 56–57. 68. See chapter 2. 69. Husserl, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 203–4; a translation of Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Hamburg: Classen, 1954), 239–40. Henceforth, the corresponding German pages will be given in parenthesis after the English pagination. 70. Ibid., 60 (61).

notes to pages 73

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71. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 50 (86). 72. Ibid., 79 (112). 73. See Anthony Steinbock, “Generativity and the Scope of Generative Phenomenology,” in The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, ed. Donn Welton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 289–325. Steinbock explains that static phenomenology can be taken in an “ontological” direction (studying formal and material essences, structures like intentionality; 290) or in a “constitutive” direction (examining the way an object is given, intentionality and fulﬁllment, modalization; 290). In Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, volume 3: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences, trans. Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl (Husserliana: Collected Works, vol. 1; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980); a translation of Husserl, Ideen zur einer reiner Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie, vol. 3: Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, ed. Marly Biemel (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5: The Hague: Martinus, Nijhoff, 1952), Steinbock takes genetic analysis to describe relations of foundation (e.g., how categorical affair complexes presuppose objects of perception; 291), but this account of genetic analysis sounds more like static, constitutive phenomenology in which one examines layers of intentional activity sedimented within a present intentional act. Only in 1917 did Husserl distinguish genetic phenomenology in its proper sense (e.g., about the becoming of the concrete ego whose present experiences point back to previous ones that have become sedimented habitualities; 291). Particularly helpful in this regard is the work of Nam-In Lee. For instance, Lee affirms that a static, constitutive phenomenology would be interested in clarifying the layers of subjectivity contained in a knowing process without implying that one could ever ﬁnd concretely these layers existing separately from each other. One example he gives is that of the primordial sphere in the Fifth Meditation, which is not to be found independently of the higher levels of empathy and objectivity that he describes after the primordial sphere. By contrast, a genetic approach implies that certain stages could be found temporally earlier than later stages and so separate from them (e.g., certain stages through which a child might pass in its psychological development in which later developments are not to be found at earlier stages that prepare for their eventual attainment). Lee argues that Husserl himself came to clarity regarding the distinction between static and genetic phenomenology after the Cartesian Meditations—indeed the speciﬁc evidence Lee gives for Husserl’s clear recognition of the distinction is dated 1933. Lee opines that critics of Husserl like Schutz were taken in by Husserl’s unclarity and so mistakenly though that Husserl was positing genetically distinct temporal phases (e.g., the primordial sphere and empathy), though these critics were convinced that one could never ﬁnd the primordial sphere in isolation from empathetic relationships and objectivity—a point with which Husserl’s approach, understood as static, constitutive phenomenology would have agreed! See Nam-In Lee, “Static-Phenomenological and Genetic-Phenomenological Concept of Primordiality in Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation,” Husserl Studies 18 (2002): 169, 172–73, 180–81; see also Nam-In Lee, Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie der Instinkte (Phaenomenologica 128; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1993), 22. Donn Welton discusses the move from constitutive phenomenology of time to a deepened genetic account, with constitutive phenomenology serving as the hinge between static and genetic phenomenologies, in “The Systematicity of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy: From Static to Genetic Method,” The New Husserl: A Critical Reader,

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notes to pages 73–77

edited by Donn Welton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 264–65. For Klaus Held, static phenomenology is more descriptive whereas genetic phenomenology is explanatory, explaining the stages through which we arrive at capabilities in their mature form, see Klaus Held, “Das Problem der Intersubjektivität und die Idee einer phänomenologischen Transzendentalphilosophie,” in Perspektiven transzendental-phänomenologischer Forschung: Für Ludwig Landgrege zum 70 Gebürtstag von seinen Kölner Schülern, ed. Ulrich Claesges und Klaus Held (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), 24–25. 74. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 48 (47). 75. Ibid. Recognition of faces or chairs, for instance, depends not on conscious inference but synthesis taking place beneath conscious recognition, see Christopher Peacocke, A Study of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 149; see also Adrian Cussins, “Content, Conceptual Content, and Nonconceptual Content (1990),” in Essays on Nonconceptual Content, ed. York H. Gunther (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003), 147. 76. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 49 (48). 77. Ibid. Zahavi claims that reﬂection doesn’t relive experience but removes the anonymity of the naiveté of prereﬂective experience in Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 188. 78. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 60 (61). Husserl puts scare quotes around “stimulus” no doubt to distinguish the conscious experience of something standing out from its background from mechanistic causal account of stimulus-response that need not involve any conscious activity at all. He admits that in the ego’s very reception of what is pre-given to it through affecting stimuli there is to be found the lowest level of the ego’s activity, its consent to what is coming and its taking it in, see Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 79 (83). 79. Ibid., 60 (61). 80. John McDowell, “Reply to Commentators,” PPR 58 (1998): 418–19; McDowell, M&W, 59–60; see my earlier discussion in chapter 2 of this book. 81. See chapter 2 of this book. 82. McDowell modiﬁes this treatment of the perceptual demonstrative in M&W in the face of criticisms by Christopher Peacocke. He speaks instead of concepts being able to distinguish ways ordinary visible things can be and be seen as being, that is, ways of being colored or ways of being shaped, rather than dealing with colors and shapes, which are derived from the ways things are colored and shaped. Thus, one can identify an object as shaped thus or colored thus, see McDowell, “Reply to Commentators,” 414–16. On the richness of the perceptual experience connected with conceptual experience, see J. N. Mohanty, Husserl and Frege (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 75, 89, 114. 83. This is a classical deﬁnition of a “founding” relationship, see Logical Investigations, 2: 25 (Vol. 2, Pt. 1, 267–68). 84. John McDowell, “The Content of Perceptual Experience,” Philosophical Quarterly 44 (1994): 199–203. Husserl, too, in Logical Investigations, 2: 114 (Vol. 2, Pt. 1, 415–16), allows that the objective reference of an act built up out partial constituent acts subsumed within it is the judged state of affairs. 85. McDowell, M&W, 72. 86. Ibid., 77–86.

notes to pages 77–78

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87. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 39 (77). 88. Dan Zahavi agrees that for the later Husserl a noematic interpretation of hyle became possible, see Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity, 118. 89. Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2001), 19; this section was originally published in German in Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuche einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, ed. Paul Jannsen (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 17; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 364–65. Regularly, though, the crorresponding German text of the Analyses can be found in Analysen zur passiven Synthesis: Aus Vorlesungs–und Forschungsmanuskripten 1918–1926, edited by Margot Fleischer (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 11; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966). Henceforth the corresponding German text will be given in parentheses after the English version. See Analysis Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, 54–55 (17–19), 643 (40–41); Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 38–39 (77–78); Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. Fred Kersten (Husserliana: Collected Works, vol. 2; The Hague: Kluwer Academic, 1982), 75, 203, 236–38; a translation of Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950); rev. edition by Karl Schuhmann (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, no. 1; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 75, 191–92, 225–27. Henceforth the corresponding German text of the revised edition will be given in parentheses after the English version. Edmund Husserl, Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893–1912), ed. Thomas Vongehr and Regula Giulani (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 38; Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), 24, 27, 42, 86 137, 155, 220–21, 337. Smith, who is hesitant about characterizing sensation as itself necessarily intentional, argues that sense qualities characterize intentional perceptual-experience, but not brute matter; the world does not contain these qualities; otherwise, we end up with sense data, which can stand between us and the world. The end result is that to uphold realism, Smith thinks that the distinction between primary and secondary qualities must also be upheld (see Smith, Problem of Perception, 57–58, 63–64, 91–92). Husserl’s own comments cited above in Cartesian Meditations do not clearly portray sensations as themselves intentional, though they are certainly not intermediaries and are certainly ingredients in perceptual experience. On a commonsense level, it does appear that objects have sense features correlative to cogitations and the experience of these features could be understood without positing them as intermediaries but as correlative to intentional activity; Smith’s analysis proceeds on a more philosophical plane, asking whether direct realism is compatible with such commonsense experience. See also Edmund Husserl, Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Husserliana: Collected Works, vol. 7; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1980), 87n3; a translation of Ding und Raum: Vorlesungen, ed. Ulrich Claesges (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 16; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 103n1, where Husserl observes that even the slightest oscillation of the eye brings into play intuition and fulﬁllment. See also Nicholas de Warren, “The Rediscovery of Immanence: Remarks on the Appendix to Logical Investigations,” in Husserl’s Logical Investigations, ed. Daniel Dahlstrom (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003), 161.

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90. McDowell, M&W, 119; see also 63–64, 70, 114, 116. 91. McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” 104. 92. McDowell, M&W, 64, 84–85, 114–17, 119, 122. 93. Ibid., 60–63; Evans, Varieties of Reference, 123–24. 94. Charles Taylor, “Foundationalism and the Inner-Outer Distinction,” in Reading McDowell on Mind and World, ed. Nicholas H. Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 111. 95. McDowell, M&W, 62, see also: McDowell, “Having the World in View,” 477. 96. McDowell, M&W, 10. 97. Ibid., 11. 98. John McDowell, “Experiencing the World,” 11. The italics are mine. 99. McDowell, “Response to Charles Taylor,” in Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, edited by Nicholas H. Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 283. 100. McDowell, “Response to J. M. Bernstein,” in Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, edited by Nicholas H. Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 299–300. 101. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 76–77 (79–81). 102. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, 1: 107 (101–2). 103. Husserl, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934): Die C-Manuskripte, ed. Dieter Lohmar (Husserliana: Materialen, vol. 7; Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 250. “Horizont als universaler Bewussteinsmodus ist ein Gegentitel zu thematischen Bewussthaben, zur intentio, auf etwas als etwas gerichtet sein, in irgendeinem Geltungsmodus gerichtet sein. “Hier bedarf es aber näherer Überlegung. Horizont besagt einen Modus des Bewussthabens, aber gegenüber der Intention im Richtungssinn einen Gegenmodus von ‘Intentionalität’; was nicht eigentliche Intention ist, führt in eine solche über, vermöglich. Ich kann ‘jedes Horizonhafte befragen’ nach seinem unthematischen Sinn.” 104. Edmund Husserl, Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18), ed. Rudolf Bernet and Dieter Lohmar (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 33; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2001), 208; see also, 128, 131, 134, 164–65, 172, 179–80, 187, 190–91, 287. Dan Zahavi, commenting on these manuscripts, describes inner time-consciousness as the name for pre-reﬂective self-awareness of our experiences that are not reﬂectively thematized in Dan Zahavi, “Time and Consciousness in the Bernau Manuscripts,” Husserl Studies 20 (2004): 106. 105. Husserl, Die Bernauer Manuskripte, 125, 208. 106. Ibid., 154; see also 155, 182–83. 107. Ibid., 134–35, 190; Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Husserliana: Collected Works, vol. 4; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1990), 26, 69–71, 371; a translation of Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917), ed. Rudolf Boehm (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 24–25, 67–69, 67–69, 360–61. Henceforth the corresponding German text will be given in parentheses after the English version. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 106–7 (116–17). 108. Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, 50 (13). 109. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 85 (90–91). 110. Ibid., 76 (79–80), 87 (93), 149–50 (171–72); Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 44 (82), 46/(84); Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, 40–41 (4–5). 111. Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, 51 (14).

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112. McDowell, M&W, 106–7. 113. Evans, Varieties of Reference, 150, 155, 156, 164, 169; see McDowell, M&W, 106–7. The body functions, as Michael Polanyi would put it, as the tacit proximal term from which the distal is given, see Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1983), 11. 114. Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, 18 (Formale und transzendentale Logik, 363). All this ﬂows from Husserl’s attempt to begin with ready-made propositions and proceed back “to thinking consciousness and to the broader nexus of conscious life in which these formations are constituted,” Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, 31 (Formale und transzendentale Logik, 373), to the “experiencing consciousness and its essential characteristics which make the experiencing accomplishment intelligible.” See Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, 1: 51–53 (56–58); Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, 633–34 (344–45); Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, “Translator’s Introduction,” xxviii–xxix; Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 49–56 (47–57), 60 (61), 203 (239–40). 115. There are those, such as Michael Martin, who argue that after one acquires a concept, one can go back in memory to a time when one lacked the concept and apply the concept (e.g., Mary who subsequently learns the concept of a “dodecahedron”). This would indicate that experience involves nonconceptual content that is left in memory, but I suspect that McDowell could respond with a “thing shaped thus” argument. Otherwise it is difficult to decide whether our experiences prior to memory were nonconceptual in character since their being remembered employs concepts. I am not sure that I have to answer this issue since my next paragraph argues for a surplus kind of content that works with memory in a different way than Martin does. See Michael Martin, “Perception, Concepts, and Memory,” in Essays on Nonconceptual Content, ed. York H. Gunther (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 244. 116. Husserl, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, 14, 57, 175, 189, 202–3. 117. Ibid., 312–13. 118. Ibid., 313, 376; see Lanei Rodemeyer, Intersubjective Temporality: It’s About Time (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 100–104, on “far retention.”

chapter 4 1. John McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” PPR 64 (2002): 105. 2. John McDowell, “Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism,” in Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of H.-G. Gadamer, ed. Jeff E. Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 188. 3. Robert Brandom, “Perception and Rational Constraint: McDowell’s Mind and World,” in Perception, edited by Enrique Villanueva (Philosophical Issues 7; Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1996), 256. 4. Robert Brandom, “Replies,” PPR 57 (1997): 192; Brandom, “Perception and Rational Constraint,” 245–56; John McDowell, “Reply to Gibson, Byrne, and Brandom,” in Perception, ed. Enrique Villanueva (Philosophical Issues 7; Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1996), 295–96. 5. See chapter 2, section 4.

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6. Robert Brandom, “Knowledge and the Social Articulation of the Space of Reasons,” PPR 55 (1995): 899–901, 902–8; See section 1.2 of chapter 1. 7. McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” 101. 8. Ibid., 104–5; see also 98–99, 101. 9. Husserl, “The Vienna Lecture,” trans. David Carr, in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 286; a translation of “Die Krisis des europäischen Menchentums und die Philosophie,” “Abhandlungen,” in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 333. 10. Robert Brandom, “Insights and Blindspots of Reliabilism,” in Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 99. Brandom makes it clear that the colleagues of a reliable Toltec shard identiﬁer, acting as common-sense scorekeepers, are reasonable in saying that their reliable colleague “already knew” that a shard was Toltec even before microscopic and chemical conﬁrmatory evidence. The knowledge seems to belong to the knower before it is attributed. See also 101, 103, 105–6. 11. The author is indebted for this objection to one of Ohio University Press’s anonymous reviewers of this book in its manuscript form. 12. McDowell, M&W (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), xxiv. 13. McDowell, “Gadamer and Davidson,” 188. 14. Ibid., 193n57. 15. Ibid., 190; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), 460; a translation of Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hemeneutik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]), 1960, 456. Henceforth, the references to the German text will be given in parentheses after the pages in the English translation. 16. John McDowell, “Self-Determining Subjectivity and External Constraint,” Internationales Jahrbuch des deutschen Idealismus/International Yearbook of German Idealism 3 (2005): 21–33. 17. Ibid., 36. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 33–36. McDowell upholds Davidson’s “constitutive ideal of rationality” against any attempt to reduce them to what can be explained exhaustively by the natural sciences against Rorty in McDowell, “The Constitutive Ideal of Rationality: Davidson and Sellars,” Crítica, Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía 30 (1998): 29–48. In the course of the argument, McDowell shows that there can be a wordworld intentional relationship contrary to Sellars and that this intentionality is constitutive of a kind of subjectivity that need not be explainable only in Cartesian terms, see 38–48 in particular. 20. Again I am indebted for this question to the Ohio University Press’s anonymous reader of this book in its manuscript form. 21. Jürgen Habermas, “From Kant to Hegel: On Robert Brandom’s Pragmatic Philosophy of Language,” European Journal of Philosophy 8 (2000): 345. For a further discussion of how the I-Thou in Brandom involves a ﬁrst-second and ﬁrst-third person relationship, see Barbara Fultner, “Review Essay: Intersubjectivity in the Space of Reasons,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 27 (2001): 111–12.

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22. Robert Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts: A Reply to Habermas,” European Journal of Philosophy 8 (2000): 362. 23. Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 177; a translation of Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 246. Henceforth, passages of the corresponding German text will appear in parentheses after the page of the English translation. 24. Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 364. 25. Brandom, MIE: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 62. 26. Ibid., 25–27, 52; Robert Brandom, “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism: Negotiation and Administration in Hegel’s Account of the Structure and Content of Conceptual Norms,” European Journal of Philosophy 7, no. 2 (1999): 180. By the way, in that essay, Brandom, the methodological individualist, attempts to determine what Absolute Spirit is and concludes that it embraces the realm “of conceptually articulated norms, of authority and responsibility, commitment and entitlement. Spirit as a whole is the recognitive community of all those who have such normative statuses, and all their normatively signiﬁcant activities. It is, in other words, the topic of the pragmatist’s enquiry: the whole system of social practices of the most inclusive possible community.” See especially p. 177 in his essay. Robert Brandom, “Hermeneutic Practice and Theories of Meaning,” Nordic Journal of Philosophy 5 (2004): 22–25. 27. McDowell, “Gadamer and Davidson,” 189. 28. McDowell, “Self-Determining Subjectivity,” 34–35. 29. Brandom, MIE, 35–36; Brandom, “Some Pragmatist Themes,” 172. 30. McDowell, “Self-Determining Subjectivity,” 33; see Brandom, MIE, 38–40, 53–54, 594, 599. 31. McDowell, “Self-Determining Subjectivity,” 35. 32. Ibid., 36; see also 34–36; McDowell, “Gadamer and Davidson,” 190; Brandom, MIE, 52, 127; Brandom, “Some Pragmatist Themes,”178–79. In MIE, Brandom recognizes that his own view about testing inferential commitments and conceptual contents, certainly a requirement of rationality, can be traced to Sellars and Socrates; see 127. 33. McDowell, “Gadamer and Davidson,” 188. 34. Brandom, MIE, 57–58, 119, 162–66, 194, 196, 201–13, 226. 35. Ibid., 141. 36. Ibid., 158. 37. Husserl, “The Vienna Lecture,” 286 (333); Brandom, MIE, 141, 142, 147, 153, 155, 156, 158, 171–73, 195, 202, 288–89, 496, 553, 596–97. See Robert Brandom, “Responses,” The Pragmatics of Making It Explicit, ed. Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, A Special Edition of Pragmatics and Cognition 13 (2005): 241–42. Henceforth, this edition will be referred to as Pragmatics and Cognition 13. 38. Brandom, MIE, 641; see also 116, 169, 241, 474–75. For example, anaphoric chains can be intrasubjective, as when I make connections with my earlier initiators, for example, “The pig to which I referred to yesterday as ‘that pig,’—it has broken free.” But they can also be intersubjective, when someone else taps into my anaphoric chain, when he or she says, “The pig to which that man (me) referred yesterday as ‘that pig,’—it has broken free.” Argument chains work the same way, insofar as their can

280

notes to pages 105–113

be a communicative inheritance of deontic statuses in which commitments accepted from others (e.g., via testimony) can serve as premises in my own inferences. 39. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 90 (–/122). 40. Ibid., 92 (124). The italics here are Husserl’s. 41. Brandom, MIE, 61, 639–45. David Carr offers a thorough discussion of Husserl’s constitution of intersubjectivity, which has to do not with the problem of other minds, but rather to make phenomenological sense of other egos, to describe how they appear within the constraints of an overall phenomenological investigation beginning with reduction; see his article, “The ‘Fifth Meditation’ and Husserl’s Cartesianism,” PPR 34 (1972): 19. 42. Jürgen Habermas, “From Kant to Hegel,” 345. 43. Ibid., 346. 44. Robert Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” European Journal of Philosophy 8 (2000): 362–64. 45. McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” 105. 46. Brandom, MIE, 597; see also 184–85, 596, 598, 627. 47. Robert Brandom, “Some Pragmatist Themes,” 179–81. 48. Brandom, MIE, 599; McDowell, M&W, 40. 49. Brandom, MIE, 590, see also 488. 50. Ibid., 197, 510, 590; see McDowell, “Brandom on Representation and Inference,” PPR 67 (1997): 160; Brandom, “Replies,” 191. 51. Brandom, MIE, 545–46; see also 584. 52. Ibid., 513–14, 545–46, 584. 53. McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” 105. McDowell’s criticism here seems to suggest also that Brandom’s view fails to understand true individualism, since it weakens individuals, whereas McDowell’s approach informed by tradition does not, as if the “individualism” that Brandom criticizes McDowell for is actually something good. I have chosen to stress, though, that McDowell is claiming himself to be more community-minded than Brandom, which would be a more appropriate rebuttal of Brandom’s charge that McDowell is excessively individualistic. 54. Brandom, MIE, 177, 222; see below, the last page of this chapter. 55. Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 371. 56. A much earlier rendition of this section, which has been completely revised here, appeared as “Epistemic and Ethical Intersubjectivity in Brandom and Levinas,” in Levinas Studies, An Annual Review, ed. Jeffrey Blochl (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2008), 3:35–60. 57. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1997), 83, a translation of Autrement qu’être ou au-delá de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 105. Henceforth the pages numbers in parenthesis indicate the pages in the French version. 58. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Inﬁnity: An Essay in Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 28; a translation of Totalité et Inﬁni: Essai sur l’exteriorité (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1990), 14. Henceforth the pages numbers in parenthesis indicate the pages in the French version. 59. In later lectures, Levinas is concerned not to call responsibility a matter of “experience” or Erlebnis, because it would assimilate what happens in the ethical encounter with the other to cognition (or ontology). Instead, he speaks of the ethical relationship as an “intrigue.” See Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans.

notes to pages 113–117

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Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 186, 192, 198, 200, 202, 207, 211, 213–15; a translation of Dieu, la Mort et le Temps (Paris: Bernard Grasset & Fasquelle, 1993), 214, 220, 227, 229, 231, 236, 240–41, 242–44. Henceforth the pages numbers in parenthesis indicate the pages in the French version. I will refer to ethical “experience” to distinguish what goes on in encountering the other ethically to contrast with theorizing the relationship, but I should not be taken to mean that what goes on in the relationship is a cognitive matter. 60. Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 371. 61. Husserl conceives this immediate recognition of the other underlies the possibility of us having a common work or further human interactions, see Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, Part 1 (1905–1920), ed. Iso Kern (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 13; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 376; Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, Part 2 (1921–1928), ed. Iso Kern (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 13; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 133, 211. 62. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 23–59 (29–76), 64 (80–81), 67 (84–85), 74 (93– 94), 76 (94–95), 80 (101), 153–62 (195–207). Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Inﬁnity, 28 (14), 213 (234), 251–85 (281–318); Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 89–157 (121– 83). There are several phenomenological interpretations of intersubjectivity and one can ﬁnd a comprehensive presentation of several of them in Dan Zahavi, “Beyond Empathy: Phenomenological Approaches to Intersubjectivity,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (2001): 151–67. 63. Levinas conceives the recognition of the other and the being obligated by the other as inseparable, see Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking of the Other, trans. by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshaw (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 6–7; published in French as Entre Nous: Essais sur le Penser-a-l’Autre (Paris: Bernard Grasset & Fasquelle, 1991), 17–18. The French version’s pages appear in parenthesis after English translation page numbers. 64. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 90 (115) (the translation by Lingis is corrected). 65. Ibid., 87 (109–10). 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 74 (94–95); see also 67 (84–85). 69. Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 364. 70. Ibid. See also, Brandom, MIE, 158. 71. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Inﬁnity, 201 (220); Levinas, Entre Nous, 17 (27). For a similar argument about how transcendental philosophy depends upon responsibility to the Other, see Steven G. Crowell, “The Project of Ultimate Grounding and the Appeal to Intersubjectivity in Recent Transcendental Philosophy,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 7 (1999): 49. 72. Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Levinas’s Logic,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 125, 134. See Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 67 (84–85), 103 (130–31), 114 (144–45), 116 (148–49), 122 (156–57), 150 (191). 73. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 166 (211), see also 161 (205), 154 (196). The material contained in the bracket is my own clariﬁcation. 74. Levinas, Totality and Inﬁnity, 28 (14). 75. Ibid., 201 (220).

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76. Ibid., 28 (14), 201 (220); Brandom, MIE, 162, 172–73. 77. Levinas, Totality and Inﬁnity, 35–36 (24–25). 78. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 159 (202–3). 79. Ibid., 128 (164–65), 157–62 (200–207). 80. Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 371. 81. Brandom, MIE, 553. 82. Levinas, Totality and Inﬁnity, 245 (274–75); see 240–47 (268–77). 83. Ibid., 36 (24–25). 84. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 157 (199–200); see also 159 (202–3). 85. Husserl, “The Vienna Lecture,” 286 (333). 86. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 25 (31–32), 117 (149–50); Brandom, MIE, 598. 87. Levinas, Totality and Inﬁnity, 195 (212). 88. Ibid., 76 (74). 89. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 159 (202–3). 90. Ibid., 156 (198–99), 162 (206–7). 91. McDowell, “Having the World in View,” 468. 92. Levinas, Totality and Inﬁnity, 26 (11–12). 93. John McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” in John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 51. 94. Chapter 7, section 2; John McDowell, “Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality,” [The Woodbridge Lectures, 1997], Journal of Philosophy 95 (1998): 438–40, 444, 458, 468, 470, 474–75; McDowell, “Self-Determining Subjectivity,” 24–25. 95. Levinas, Totality and Inﬁnity, 244–46 (273–76); Brandom, “Freedom and Constraint by Norms,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 195.

chapter 5 1. A version of this chapter will appear in Advancing Phenomenology: Essays and Documents in honor of Lester Embree, ed. Thomas Nenon and Philip Blosser (Dordrecht: Springer, forthcoming). What is published here is published with kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media. 2. John McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” PPR 64 (2002): 101. 3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe, and ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (New York: J & J Harper Editions, 1969), 16e. 4. Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities,” The Problem of Social Reality, Collected Papers, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 1:229. 5. It is not the case that this perceiver would be entitled to her claim but not recognize it herself and that McDowell would be the one to attribute that entitlement to her. The entire context here, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” 98–99, is precisely intended to deny such externalism. The perceiver here is entitled herself because of the embedded fact’s availability to her, and yet, as we shall see below, McDowell is taking up a philosophical stance toward the claims of the commonsense perceiver that skeptical philosophers have placed in question. 6. Robert Sokolowski concurs that everyday life has its reﬂective moments, see Sokolowski, “Book Review of Sebastian Luft, Phänomenologie der Phänomenologie,” Husserl Studies 21 (2005): 259.

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7. Edmund Husserl, “The Vienna Lecture,” The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 286; a translation of “Die Krisis des europäischen Menchentums und die Philosophie,” “Abhandlungen,” Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 333. Henceforth, German page numbers will follow in parenthesis the page numbers of the English translation. 8. See chapter 4, section 1. 9. Though it may be the case that McDowell takes it for granted that the commonsense perceiver has knowledge and sets out to oppose philosophical positions that place it in question, in “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” it is deﬁnitely the case that he offers philosophical justiﬁcations (e.g., this appeal to Wittgenstein) for his taking commonsense perceptual knowledge for granted. 10. See above, chapter 4, section 1. 11. Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 43–44; a translation of Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 55–56. Henceforth, German page numbers will follow in parenthesis the page numbers of the English translation. 12. John McDowell, M&W (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), xxii–xxiii; John McDowell, “Reply to Commentators,” PPR 58 (1998): 421. 13. McDowell, M&W, 67, 72, 85, 108, 147, 151, 154; McDowell, “Reply to Commentators,” 420–21. 14. McDowell, M&W, xxiv; see also xiii, xxi, xxiii, 77–78. 15. Jakob Lindgaard, “Erfahrung und Natur,” interview with John McDowell, Deutsche Zeitscrift für Philosophie 53 (2005): 803. My translation. 16. John McDowell, “Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge,” in Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 384. 17. Ibid., 384. 18. Ibid., 370–73, 383, 384, 393. 19. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. Fred Kersten (Husserliana: Collected Works, vol. 2; The Hague: Kluwer Academic, 1982), 35; a translation of Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950); rev. edition by Karl Schuhmann (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, no. 1; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 41. Henceforth, German page numbers of the revised edition will follow in parenthesis the page numbers of the English translation. 20. McDowell, “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” 98. 21. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, 1:38–39 (44–45); Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 48–50, 54, 56, 116, 214, 229; a translation of Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel

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notes to pages 140–143

(Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 48–50, 54, 56–57, 118–19, 217–18, 232; Husserl, “The Vienna Lecture,” 295 (343); Alfred Schutz, “Concept and Theory-Formation in the Social Sciences,” in The Problem of Social Reality, Collected Papers, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 1:55–56. 22. McDowell, M&W, 95. 23. Ibid., xxiv. 24. Ibid., 178. 25. John McDowell, “Self-Determining Subjectivity and External Constraint,” Internationales Jahrbuch des deutschen Idealismus/International Yearbook of German Idealism 3 (2005): 33; see also 35–36. 26. Husserl, “The Vienna Lecture,” 286 (333). 27. Maurice Natanson, “Existential Categories in Contemporary Literature,” in Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences: Essays in Existentialism and Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 120; for more on common sense see Maurice Natanson, “Phenomenology and the Theory of Literature,” in Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences: Essays in Existentialism and Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 94, 96; Maurice Natanson, “Existentialism and the Theory of Literature,” Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences: Essays in Existentialism and Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 104. On causation, see Maurice Natanson, “Causation as a Structure of the Lebenswelt,” Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences: Essays in Existentialism and Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 198–200, 207, 210; also Maurice Natanson, The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 128–29. 28. Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 7; a translation of “Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos,” in Späte Schriften Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Manfred Frings (Munich: Francke Verlag, 1976), 9:11–12. Henceforth, German page numbers will follow in parenthesis the page numbers of the English translation. 29. Ibid. 30. McDowell, M&W, 82, 84, 85, 112–13, 115–19; see for example Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 33, 34, 57; a translation of Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (1929), ed. Stephan Strasser (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), 71–72, 72–73, 92–93, on how we reﬂectively experience our experiencing of the world and how such intentional acts’ being self-exhibited or self-giving constitutes the evidential having of them, and each philosopher must affirm for himself or herself whether there are such evidential havings. Henceforth, German page numbers will follow in parenthesis the page numbers of the English translation. See also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), 443–45; originally published as Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1960), 419–21. Henceforth, German page numbers will follow in parenthesis the page numbers of the English translation. See Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, 35–40 (31–34), 51–55 (41–45).

notes to pages 144–151

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31. Karl-Otto Apel, Transformation der Philosophie, Band 1: Sprachanalytik, Semiotik, Hermeneutik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 347, 356–57, 371; Karl-Otto Apel, Selected Essays: Toward a Transcendental Semiotics, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994), 245; Crispin Wright, “Critical Notice of Colin McGinn: Wittgenstein on Meaning,” Mind 98 (1989): 305. 32. McDowell, M&W, 69; see also 70–72. 33. Ibid. 34. McDowell, Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 287. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 285, 287, 290. A similar example of an a priori scientiﬁc-theoretic ruling out of experiential data that contradicts what theory tells us has to do with Simon Blackburn’s projectivist view that the world itself is devoid of value and that any one who claims to ﬁnd objectively comic situations is involved in projecting subjective feeling onto it. McDowell writes: “But how good are the credentials of a ‘metaphysical understanding’ that blankly excludes values and instances of the comic from the world in advance of any philosophical enquiry into truth? Surely if the history of philosophical reﬂection on the correspondence theory of truth has taught us anything, it is that there is ground for suspicion of the idea that we have some way of telling what can count as a fact, prior to and independent of asking what forms of words might count as expressing truths, so that a conception of facts could exert some leverage in the investigation of truth” (Ibid., 164). 37. John McDowell, “Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World,” Mind, Value, and Reality, 123. 38. John McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” Mind, Value, and Reality, 136. 39. McDowell, “Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World,” 123–24; McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” 133, 135–36, 140–42, 146. 40. McDowell, M&W, 71, 109; John McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 181–82. 41. McDowell, “Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 129; see also 119, 122–28. 42. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, 1: 39 (45). 43. John McDowell, “Projection and Truth in Ethics,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 163. 44. John McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 51, 65, 70–71; McDowell, “Projection and Truth in Ethics,” 163; McDowell, M&W, 80–82; Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 62–64/97–99. Husserl describes philosophy as the ultimately grounded science (letztbegründete Wissenschaft) in Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937), ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 27; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989), 57. 45. James Dodd describes such an “attitude” in terms of a description of the world from the perspective of a complex of relations operative in a context where things appear to a subject, the one directed toward them and engaged with them, in “Attitude-Facticity-Philosophy,” in Alterity and Facticity: New Perspectives on Husserl, ed. Natalie Depraz and Dan Zahavi (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1998), 61. See also Gail Soffer, “Phenomenological and Scientiﬁc Reality: Husserl’s Critique of Galileo,”

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notes to pages 151–161

Review of Metaphysics 44 (1990): 90; and Gary Gutting, “Husserl and Scientiﬁc Realism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 39 (1978): 56. 46. “Constitutes” does not imply an idealistic creating of the world, but rather it is a matter of the world being built up in relationship to certain acts of transcendental conscious life. 47. Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 175 (178–79). 48. James Mensch documents Husserl’s increasing focus on subjectivity in Ideas 1—a focus that had begun in the Logical Investigations, see Mensch, The Question of Being in Husserl’s Logical Investigations. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 168–73. 49. McDowell, M&W, 70.

chapter 6 1. Robert Brandom, “Reason, Expression, and the Philosophic Enterprise,” in What is Philosophy? ed. C. P. Ragland and Sarah Heidt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 91. Note that this essay represents Brandom’s philosophy of philosophy and gives us explicitly a statement that we lacked in dealing with McDowell’s philosophy of philosophy. 2. Robert Brandom, MIE, 62, 64, 77, 116, 641, 663n89; Brandom, “Reason, Expression, and the Philosophic Enterprise,” 92; see chapter 4, section 3. 3. Brandom, “Reason, Expression, and the Philosophical Enterprise,” 91, 93. 4. Ibid., 84; Brandom, “Insights and Blindspots of Reliabilism,” in Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 101, 107. 5. Robert Brandom, “Freedom and Constraint by Norms,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 192. 6. Ibid., 190–92. 7. Brandom, “Heidegger’s Categories in Sein und Zeit,” in Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 301, 306; Thorsten Gubatz, “Ein Philosoph namens Brandegger: Ontologische Differenzen zwischen Heidegger und Heidegger in Robert Brandoms Interpretation,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 3 (2002): 378, 380, 383, 385–86. 8. Gubatz, “Ein Philosoph namens Brandegger,” 389; see also 386–89. 9. Habermas, “From Kant to Hegel: On Robert Brandom’s Pragmatic Philosophy of Language,” European Journal of Philosophy 8 (2000): 330; see also 323; Brandom, “Heidegger’s Categories in Sein and Zeit,” 301–3, 312, 314, 315–20. 10. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper, 1962), 58; a translation of Sein und Zeit, 12th ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1972), 34. 11. Ibid., 60. 12. Brandom, “Heidegger’s Categories in Sein und Zeit,” 301–9, 323. 13. Ibid., 314–17, 320; Brandom, MIE, 26–30, 50–55, 86–87. 14. See chapter 4, section 2.

notes to pages 162–164

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15. Kevin Scharp, “Communication and Content: Circumstances and Consequences of the Habermas-Brandom Debate,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 11 (2003): 46, 56–57. Of course, Habermas abandoned his consensus theory of truth in his essay “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn” in 2000, three years before Scharp’s essay. See Jürgen Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 31–55. Albrecht Wellmer argues that truth cannot be a matter of consensus because we each have to recognize for ourselves because of reasons, see Wellmer, “Intersubjectivity and Reason,” Perspectives on Human Conduct, ed. Lars Hertzberg and Juhani Pietarinen (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), 157. 16. Scharp, “Communication and Content,” 58. 17. Brandom, Making It Explicit, xii; Scharp, “Communication and Content,” 57–58. 18. Karl-Otto Apel, “Normatively Grounding ‘Critical Theory’ through Recourse to the Lifeworld? A Transcendental-Pragmatic Attempt to think with Habermas against Habermas,” trans. William Rehg, Philosophical Interventions in the Unﬁnished Project of Englightenment, ed. Axel Honneth et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 142; a translation of “Normative Begründung der ‘kritische Theorie’ durch Rekurs auf lebensweltlische Sittlichkeit? Ein transzendentalpragmatisch orientierter Versuch, mit Habermas gegen Habermas zu denken,” in Zwischenbetrachtungen im Prozess der Aufklärung, Festschrift für Jürgen Habermas, ed. Honneth (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 38. 19. Karl-Otto Apel, Selected Essays: Toward a Transcendental Semiotics, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994), 245. 20. Brandom, M, 634–35; Robert Brandom, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2009). In Reason in Philosophy, 43–49, Brandom in effect distinguishes what essentially constitutes the difference between objects, in which the relations of inclusion and exclusion are alethic-modal (e.g., it is impossible for an object to be both a fox and a dog), and subjects, in which the relations of inclusion and exclusion are deontic-normative, that is, one ought not claim that the same object is a fox and a dog. These empirical examples here illustrate what are actually eidetic intuitions on Brandom’s part. In “Autonomy, Community, and Freedom,” chap. 2, Brandom again distinguishes the empirical and conceptual levels, since to utilize empirical terms like “cat” and “mat,” one must know how to do what one needs to know how to do to deploy the concepts of possibility and necessary, see 54–55. In “History, Reason, and Reality,” chap. 3, he observes how objective states of affairs, though concrete and empirical, also necessitate and rule out other states of affairs, 97–98. For more contrasts between the empirical, contingent, and conceptual, necessary levels, see Robert Brandom, Between Saying and Doing: Toward an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 52–53, in which he points out that anyone who can talk at all, employ a basic vocabulary in an everyday language, can already do everything one needs to do in order to be able to say what logical vocabulary lets one say. The capacity to deploy necessary, logical vocabulary is always implicit in one’s ability to deploy any vocabulary at all. Brandom comments on how the capacity to ignore details in order to be able to update mistaken views pertains to linguistic but not nonlinguistic creatures; it is one of their deﬁning, eidetic features, 73, 81–83, 85. Modal vocabulary is shown to make explicit aspects of practices that are implicit in the use of any empirical vocabulary, 101–2, 109–10.

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notes to pages 165–171

For instance, the ability to use ordinary empirical descriptive terms such as “green,” “rigid,” or “mass” already presupposes a grasp of the kind of properties and relations made explicit my modal vocabulary, 96–97. In “Incompatibility, Modal Semantics, and Intrinsic Logic,” chap. 5, he shows how material incompatibilities make possible the emergence of the language of modalities (e.g., negation and conjunction), 127–28. In “Intentionality as Pragmatically Mediated Semantic Realism,” chap. 6, he points out how normative and modal vocabularies have been elaborated from and explicating of various features essential to every autonomous, discursive practice, 180–81. Moreover, he provides deﬁnitions of objects and subjects, which are bound by alethic modalities and deontic norms, respectively, and transcend their empirical instantiations, as he had pointed out in his Woodbridge Lectures (see Between Saying and Doing, 190–93, 196–97). All these places in his recent lectures show a distinction between conceptually and empirically based claims. 21. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 15–16, 69–72; a translation of Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. Stephan Strasser (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), 55–57, 103–7. Nicholas de Warren makes the quite strong case for the idea that Husserl’s striving to ﬁnd essence should be considered one of the “deﬁning features of phenomenological philosophy,” ﬁrst discoverable within a self-reﬂective transcendental phenomenology, see de Warren, “On Husserl’s Essentialism: Critical Notice on Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 14 (2006): 158, 267. 22. Brandom, MIE, 141. 23. Brandom, “Responses,” 246. The italicization of “essential” is my own. 24. Heidegger, Being and Time, 58/34. 25. Alfred Schutz, “Some Leading Concepts of Phenomenology,” The Problem of Social Reality, 114; see n20 on the distinction between empirical and conceptual statements in Brandom’s recent lectures. 26. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: The Humanities Press, 1962), 62, 242; published in French as Phénoménologie de la Perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 75–76, 279–80. 27. Brandom, M, 87–88. 28. Ibid., 87–89, 157–59. 29. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead, 331. 30. Ibid., 75–79, 303, 305, 307, 308, 309, 313, 314–20, 324, 331, 334. 31. Ibid., 78, 80–82, 328–30, 332, 333, 335–36, 340, 344. 32. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 1–6 (43–48); Husserl, “The Vienna Lecture,” 286 (333); Schutz, “On Multiple Realities,” in The Problem of Social Reality, Collected Papers, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 1:208–9; Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 90, 132, 144–45, 152, 201, 205; published in German as Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 92–93, 135, 146–48, 155, 204–5, 209. Brandom, MIE, 289, 553.

notes to pages 171–180

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33. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 20–21 (60–62), 34–37 (72–76); Steven G. Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 111, 138–40, 201–2. Klaus Held has also shown the interconnection between Husserl and Heidegger, despite their seeming differences, see Klaus Held, “Die Endlichkeit der Welt: Phänomenologie im Übergang von Husserl zu Heidegger,” in Philosophie der Endlichkeit: Festschrift für Christian Schröder zum 65 Gebürtstag, ed. Beate Niemeyer and Dirk Schütze (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1992), 130–31. Sebastian Luft points out the dangers of any facile reconciliation of Husserl and Heidegger in, “The Condition of Possibility of Transcendental Philosophy,” review of Steven G. Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning, Husserl Studies 22 (2006): 62–64. 34. Brandom, “Responses,” 220–23. 35. Ruth Garrett Millikan, “The Father, the Son, and the Daughter: Sellars, Brandom, and Millikan,” in The Pragmatics of Making It Explicit, ed. Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, a Special Edition of Pragmatics and Cognition 13 (2005): 68, 70; Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 30, 37, 38, 73–74, 92, 97, 123, 134–37, 139, 141, 146; a translation of Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 50–51, 59, 60, 103–5, 125–26, 132–33, 164, 177–80, 183, 185–86, 191–92. Henceforth, numbers after the slash refer to the French version. 36. Brandom, “Responses,” 241. 37. John McDowell, “Comments on Making It Explicit,” in The Pragmatics of Making It Explicit, ed. Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, a Special Edition of Pragmatics and Cognition 13 (2005): 129, 133–35; Brandom, Making It Explicit, 499; Daniel Laurier, “Pragmatics, Pittsburgh Style,” in The Pragmatics of Making It Explicit, ed. Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, a Special Edition of Pragmatics and Cognition 13 (2005): 151; Brandom, “Responses,” 241–43, 243–46. 38. Cristina Lafont, “Is Objectivity Perspectival? Reﬂections on Brandom’s and Habermas’s Pragmatist Conceptions of Objectivity,” in Habermas and Pragmatism, ed. Mitchell Aboulaﬁa, Myra Orbach Bookman, and Cathy Kemp (London: Routledge, 2002), 196–201. 39. See chapter 2, section 2. 40. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead, 80. 41. Brandom, MIE, 592. 42. Ibid., 155. 43. Ibid., 142–43, 147, 152–53, 276, 592. 44. Ibid., 142; see also 504–8, 513–17, 542–47; Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. Fred Kersten (Husserliana: Collected Works, vol. 2; The Hague: Kluwer Academic, 1982), 80; a translation of Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950); rev. edition by Karl Schuhmann (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, no. 1; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 78–79. Laurier puzzles over the prospect that attitudes might be conceptually contentful, since attitudes seem focused on conceptually contentful statuses. It would seem circular that they themselves could become conceptually contentful, but they must be so at the point at which we can attribute them to others. Brandom

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admits that it possible to be attributing propositionally contentful commitments to another even though one is unable to explicitly state that one is so attributing—in other words there can be a kind of intentional structure at play, which only later, when it becomes the target of a process of making it explicit (when one has acquired ascriptional locutions), would itself become conceptually contentful. See Laurier, “Pragmatics, Pittsburgh Style,” 148–49; Brandom, “Responses,” 243–45. To see the emphasis on intentionality in Brandom’s recent lectures, see Brandom, Reason in Philosophy, 27–51. The basic distinction between subject and object, described in terms of being constrained by normative, deontic incompatibilities on the one hand, and alethic modalities, on the other, puts at the heart of Brandom’s outlook the basic framework that all intentionality presupposes. See also 64, where Brandom emphasizes the intentionality involved in Frege’s distinction between force and content. See also Brandom, Between Saying and Doing, 176–200. 45. Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts: A Reply to Habermas,” European Journal of Philosophy 8 (2000): 364; see chapter 4, section 4. 46. Brandom, MIE, 440–49.

chapter 7 1. An earlier version of sections 1 and 2 of this chapter appeared as “Ethical Experience and the Motives for Practical Rationality: A Kantian/Levinasian Criticism of McDowell’s Ethics,” International Philosophical Quarterly 47 (2007): 425–41. 2. John McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 51. 3. Ibid., 50–53, 65–71; John McDowell, “Deliberation and Moral Development in Aristotle’s Ethics,” in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty, ed. Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 32. 4. John McDowell, “Value and Secondary Qualities,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 144 (this citation is from Blackburn, quoted by McDowell). 5. John McDowell, “Projection and Truth in Ethics,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 157, 158, 160–65; McDowell, “Value and Secondary Qualities,” 133, 146. 6. McDowell, “Projection and Truth in Ethics,” 166. 7. McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” 60. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 57–65; John McDowell, “Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 203–12; McDowell, “Deliberation and Moral Development,” 21, 23, 24. 10. McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” 63. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 73. 13. Ibid., 65. 14. John McDowell, “Response to Axel Honneth,” in Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, ed. Nicholas H. Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 302; McDowell,

notes to pages 190–195

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“Virtue and Reason,” 65, 73; John McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 172, 189; John McDowell, “Some Issues in Aristotle’s Moral Psychology,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 37; McDowell, “Might There Be External Reasons?” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 101, 106–7; McDowell, “Deliberation and Moral Development,” 23–24, 25–26, 31–32. 15. McDowell, “Might There Be External Reasons?” 96–101, 104–7. 16. Ibid., 111. 17. McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” 63. 18. McDowell, “Might There Be External Reasons?” 99. 19. McDowell, “Might There Be External Reasons?” 100, 103; 109; McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” 71; McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” 176–77, 196–97. 20. McDowell, “Might There Be External Reasons?” 103. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 106, 107, 109. 23. McDowell, “Some Issues in Aristotle’s Moral Psychology,” 37. 24. McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” 174. 25. McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” 174, 189, 194–95; McDowell, “Some Issues in Aristotle’s Moral Psychology,” 37; McDowell, “Might There Be External Reasons?” 101. 26. McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” 195. 27. Ibid., 173–74, 194–95. 28. Talbot Brewer, The Bounds of Choice: Unchosen Virtues, Unchosen Commitments (New York: Garland, 2000), 27. 29. Barbara Hermann, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 83, see also 95. 30. Nancy Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 20, 32–33, 37, 57, 59, 69, 73–74, 77, 78–83, 123–25, 145, 162, 180, 196, 247, 257, 271, 288–89, 310, 317, 357–58; Herman, Practice of Moral Judgment, 77–78, 82, 83, 85, 93, 132–34, 151; Barbara Herman, “Making Room for Character,” in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty, ed. Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 43, 46, 49, 50, 53; Brewer, The Bounds of Choice, 63, 65, 81, 106; Rosalind Hursthouse argues that a Kantian could incorporate ideas of emotion open to reason-formation in On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 111, 120. 31. The reader needs to bear in mind what is said in chapter 4, endnote #58, since Levinas resists speaking of ethical experience insofar as experience (Erlebnis) is predominantly cognitive in nature. I use the term “experience” as over against ethical theory. 32. Adriann Theodoor Peperzak, Philosophy between Faith and Theology: Addresses to Catholic Intellectuals (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 97, 100. 33. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Inﬁnity: An Essay in Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 28, 36, 39–40, 80–81; published in French as Totalité et Inﬁni: Essai sur L’Extériorité (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1990), 14, 24–25, 28–30, 78–79; Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,

292

notes to pages 195–198

1997), 25, 32–33, 48, 62, 66, 70, 87, 90, 156, 157–61, 162; published in French as Autrement qu’Être ou Au-delà de l’Essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 31–32, 40–42, 61–62, 78, 82–83, 88, 109–10, 114–15, 198–99, 199–205; Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Levinas’s Logic,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 123–30. 34. Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue, 20, 21, 135–25, 357–58; Herman, Practice of Moral Judgment, viii, ix, 38, 74, 85, 134, 147, 237–38; McDowell, “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 91–94. It should be mentioned that these Kantian interpreters rightly ﬁnd Kant already cognizant of these experiential dimensions of ethics in his Metaphysical Principles of Virtue and Anthropology, for instance. Christine Korsgaard in an illuminating essay, “From Duty and for the Sake of the Noble: Kant and Aristotle on Morally Good Action,” points out that Aristotle, who recognized that pains and pleasures can serve as indications of what is good and bad and what we have reason to do, may be superior to Kant when it comes to recognizing how receptivity works in fully realized virtue. For Kant, pleasures and pains cannot tell us anything about anything. Korsgaard, however, does not think that this indicates any basic difference in their ethical outlooks which both insist that we choose our actions and do not merely react to the world. See “From Duty and for the Sake of the Noble: Kant and Aristotle on Morally Good Action,” in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty, ed. Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 225–27. 35. McDowell, “Are Moral Requirements, Hypothetical Imperatives?” 81, 84, 91–92; McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” 191–92; McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” 52–53, 55–56. 36. McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” 51. 37. Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue, 310. 38. Ibid., 327. 39. Ibid., 129, 134, 139, 140, 186, 196, 305; Herman, Practice of Moral Judgment, 31, 40, 77, 124, 193–95, 209, 237–38; Levinas, Totality and Inﬁnity, 199 (217), 201 (219–20), 233 (259); Otherwise than Being, 74 (93–94), 117 (149–50); Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, trans. James Ellington (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1964), 77–141; a translation of Metaphysik der Sitten, part 2: Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Tugendlehre, ed. Karl Vorländer (Hamburg: Meiner, 1966), 261– 337. If one, for instance, interprets the other experienced in metaphysical terms, as if the other appeared ﬁrst as a rational agent, the terms themselves would require a theoretical elaboration (e.g., in what does rationality consist, as a precondition of recognizing the other). But such explanations remove one from the immediacy of experiencing another summoning one ethically. For descriptions of the force of the experience of the other’s force, see Søren Overgaard, Wittgenstein and Other Minds: Rethinking Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity with Wittgenstein, Levinas, and Husserl (New York: Routledge, 2007), 149. 40. Immanuel Kant, Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 38; a translation of Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, ed. Theodor Valentiner (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1970), 82–83. Henceforth, German pages will be given in parentheses after the English translation correlates.

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41. Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue, 218–20, 283; McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” 169, 191–92; McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” 52–53, 55–56; McDowell, “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” 81, 84, 92; John McDowell, “The Role of Eudaimonia in Aristotle’s Ethics,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 17; McDowell, “Some Issues in Aristotle’s Moral Psychology,” 38–40. 42. Axel Honneth, “Between Hermeneutics and Hegelianism: John McDowell and the Challenge of Moral Realism,” in Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, ed. Nicholas H. Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 262; McDowell, “Response to Axel Honneth,” 302–3; Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 158/201. 43. Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue, 185–86. 44. Levinas, Totality and Inﬁnity, 39, 201/28–29, 79–80; chapter 4, section 4. 45. Honneth, “Between Hermeneutics and Hegelianism: John McDowell and the Challenge of Moral Realism,” 259–63. 46. McDowell, “Might There Be External Reasons?” 102. 47. McDowell, “Deliberation and Moral Development,” 29; Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, 180, 190, 194, defends the view that reasons can be given for a virtuous life and that those reasons need not be motivating, but rather they offer a rational basis for such a life and show how the virtues taken for virtues would survive rational scrutiny. 48. The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 285–87; a translation of “Die Krisis des europäischen Menchentums und die Philosophie,” “Abhandlungen,” Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 331–34; McDowell, “Self-Determining Subjectivity and External Constraint,” Internationales Jahrbuch des deutschen Idealismus/International Yearbook of German Idealism 3 (2005): 33–36; Hursthouse rightly points out that sometimes commonsense actors believe something is the right thing to do without being able to give the kinds of reasons an ethician might advance, see Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, 235. This supports a distinction between lifeworld action and the philosophical justification of such action: these take place on very different planes. 49. McDowell, “Projection and Truth in Ethics,” 163. 50. McDowell, “Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 129. 51. McDowell, M&W (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 86; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), #133, 51e; McDowell, “Self-Determining Subjectivity and External Constraint,” 35. 52. Robert Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts: A Reply to Habermas,” European Journal of Philosophy 8 (2000): 371–73; Kevin Scharp, “Communication and Content: Circumstances and Consequences of the Habermas-Brandom Debate,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 11 (2003): 57. 53. Honneth, “Between Hermeneutics and Hegelianism,” 256. 54. Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 372.

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55. Honneth, “Between Hermeneutics and Hegelianism,” 256–57; McDowell, “Reply to Axel Honneth,” 301–2; Brandom, “Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts,” 371–72. 56. Scharp, “Communication and Content,” 57; Jürgen Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 47–50. 57. Scharp, “Communication and Content,” 46, 56–57. See chapter 6. 58. Jürgen Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justiﬁcation,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 67; a translation of “Diskursethik—Notizen zu einem Begründungsprogramm,” Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 77. Correlative German pages will follow in parenthesis the pages of the English translation. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 65 (74–75). 61. Ibid., 67 (77). 62. Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 41 (88–89). 63. Habermas, “Discourse Ethics,” 93 (103–4). 64. Ibid., 89–93 (99–104); Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 38 (82–83). 65. Lyotard, “Levinas’s Logic,” 131–43.

chapter 8 1. Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie, Vorlesungen 1922/23, ed. Berndt Goosens (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 25; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2002), 58. 2. Ibid., 64. 3. Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1913/24), Part Two: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion, ed. Rudolf Boehm (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8, pt. 2; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), 6, 11, 13; Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie, 49–51; Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 2–6; published in German as Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (1929), edited by Stephan Strasser (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), 43–48. Henceforth the correlative pages of the German translation will follow in parenthesis the pages of the English translation. Husserl); The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans, David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 72, 112, 135–37; published in German as Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 73–74, 114, 138–40. Henceforth the correlative pages of the German translation will follow in parenthesis the pages of the English translation. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin

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Smith (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1962), xiv, xxi; published in French as Phénoménologie de la Perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), viii–ix, xvi. 4. See Donn Welton, The Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 148. 5. Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie, 288. 6. Ibid., see also 62; Husserl, Erste Philosophie, 2:32–33; Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 115 (116–17), 192 (194–95). 7. Husserl, Crisis of the European Sciences, 112 (114). See also Edmund Husserl, Natur und Geist: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1927, ed. Michael Weiler (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 32; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 102. 8. Husserl, Crisis of the European Sciences, 69 (70). 9. Ibid., 49 (49), 69 (70), 71 (72–73), 98 (101), 103–5 (105–7), 112–16 (114–18), 121 (123–24), 123–24 (126–27), 132–33 (135–36), 138–39 (141–42), 255 (258–59); Husserl, Erste Philosophie, 2:97, 109. Husserl adds that, even though the lifeworld is relative to its knower in a way that the objective sciences, which aim at objectivity, are not (though they too are always relative to the subjectivity of the scientiﬁc knower), it would be possible to engage in a science of the lifeworld by describing its structures, Husserl, Crisis of the European Sciences, 72 (73), 139 (142); Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, 19–21 (59–61). On the Rückfrage, see Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 152. 10. Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 130 (133), see also, 112–13 (114–15), 121 (123–24), 123 (125–26), 128 (131–32), 130 (133), 135 (138–39), 138–39 (141–42), 146–47 (149–50). It should be stressed that it is no small thing to recognize that science itself is an accomplishment of consciousness, see ibid., 90 (92–93), 118 (120–21). 11. Ibid., 172 (175); Edmund Husserl in Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, in a concluding section “On Phenomenological Method,” 634, 644 (344, 345), describes static phenomenology as discussing the constitution of leading types of object, the nexus of apperceptions in which objects are constituted eidetically. Such an account of objects furnishes us with leading clues for a genetic phenomenology, which would study the separate historical moments through which someone such as a child comes to acquire knowledge of an object. Nam-In Lee is particularly clear on the static constitutive approach and the genetic phenomenological approach. The latter sees a genetically prior state as temporally earlier than a later one and able to exist independently of that later state, whereas the former involves an abstraction of a stratum that cannot be observed as a concrete in the actual connection of transcendental genesis. Lee takes the primordial sphere in Husserl’s ﬁfth meditation as distinguished abstractively by a static constitutive phenomenology; it does not exist separately as a stage temporally prior to the level of objectivity, as something that can be observed phenomenologically. Critics of Husserl, such as Schutz, rejected the notion of a primordial sphere since they thought that it could not be observed phenomenologically and so were mistaking it for a genetic concept. See Nam-In Lee, “Static-Phenomenological Concept of Primordiality in Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation,” Husserl Studies 18 (2002): 166, 172, 180; Nam-In Lee, Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie der Instinkte (Phaenomenologica 128; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1993), 22. The potential of static constitution is not easily recognizable, see Kenneth Knies, “Review Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity: From Static to Genetic Phenomenology by Jane Donahoe,” Husserl Studies (2006): 252.

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12. Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 149 (152); see also 135 (138), 141 (144), 147–52 (150–55), 216 (219–20). 13. Ibid., 52 (51–52), 121 (123–24), 124–25 (126–28), 127–28 (130–31); see Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 25–26, 41; published in German as Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Hamburg: Classen, 1954), 18–20, 38. Henceforth the correlative pages of the German translation will follow in parenthesis the pages of the English translation. These passage explain how via a constitutive investigation, one can discover how a judgment, for instance, depends on the substrate, the object about which it is made, or how there are levels of evidence, sedimentations of earlier acts of judgment, subsumed within higher level judgments. These constitutively distinguished lower strata are sedimented within the higher level subjective activities. 14. Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 120 (122–23). 15. Intersubjective understanding becomes a problem, according to McDowell, if we think that the other is given ﬁrst as a body from which one must infer mental states, Husserl, in Crisis of European Sciences observes how the natural sciences of the modern era want to see in the lifeworld only corporeity, 60 (60–61), 227 (230). 16. Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 76 (79–80). 17. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution; Edmund Husserl, Collected Works, vol. 3, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989), 231; a translation of Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. M. Biemal (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 219–20.Henceforth the correlative pages of the German translation will follow in parenthesis the pages of the English translation. 18. Ibid., 245 (233). Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 88, 222; Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 71–77 (73–80). 19. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 83–84 (116–17). In Crisis of European Sciences, 113 (115–16), Husserl comments on the pervasiveness of conscious accomplishments (again meaning that the world is given in relation to those accomplishments, not that they produce them arbitrarily out of nothing): “This applies ﬁrst of all to all the mental accomplishments which we human beings carry out in the world, as individual, personal, or cultural accomplishments. Before all such accomplishments there has always already have been a universal accomplishment, presupposed by all human praxis and all prescientiﬁc and scientiﬁc life. The latter have the spiritual acquisitions of this universal as their constant substratum.” See also Crisis of European Sciences, 204 (207–8), 243 (246), 245 (248). Husserl observes in his Einleitung in die Philosophie (my translation), 13: “The [everyday life] natural attitude, which is that of outer experience, does not reﬂect about meaning [Sinn], but it still carries it within itself. The natural attitude was directed [instead] straightaway to the conscious objective thingworld that lies within itself and leaves the knowing subjectivity with its knowing acts wholly out of consideration. To the content of outer experience belongs above all the ruling order of causality.”

notes to pages 227–229

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20. Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities,” in The Problem of Social Reality, Collected Papers, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 1:208–9; Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 52–53 (51–53); Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, and ed. Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2001), 2:114; published in German as Logische Untersuchungen. Band 1, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik: Text der ersten und der zweiten Auﬂage (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 18; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975); Band 2, Pt. 1, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis: Text der ersten und zweiten Auﬂage (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 19, no. 1. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1984); Band 2, Pt. 2, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis: Text der ersten und zweitern Auﬂage, ed. Ursula Panzer (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 19, no. 2; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1984), 415–16; chapter 5, section 2. Michael Dummett, it seems overlooks the role of the lifeworld origins of thought in Husserl when he insists against Husserl, as he thinks, that we start with the practice of language ﬁrst before philosophizing, see Michael Dummett, The Origins of Analytic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 50, 66, 143. On the gradual ascent of reﬂection from taken-for-granted human life, see also Maurice Natanson, The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 64. On the broader conception of subjectivity beyond the mere cognitive concern for truth see Welton, The Other Husserl, 107. 21. Husserl, Erste Philosophie, 2:36. 22. Ibid., 23, 36; Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie, 43–44, 289–90; Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 57 (92–93); Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. Fred Kersten (Husserliana: Collected Works, vol. 2; The Hague: Kluwer Academic, 1982), 44; a translation of Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, no. 1; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950); rev. edition by Karl Schuhmann (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, no. 1; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 51. Henceforth the correlative pages of the German translation will follow in parenthesis the pages of the English translation. Not all experience is intentional and the boundaries between the intentional and non-intentional experience are not always clear, see Nam-In Lee, “Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Mood” in Alterity and Facticity: New Perspectives on Husserl, ed. Natalie Depraz and Dan Zahavi (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1998), 116. 23. John McDowell, M&W (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 112–13; Husserl, Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit: Text aus dem Nachlass (1893– 1912), ed. Thomas Vongehr and Regula Giulani (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 38; Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), 19–20, 40–42, 138–39; Edmund Husserl, Transzendentaler Idealismus: Texte Aus dem Nachlass (1908–1921), ed. Robin D. Rollinger with Rochus Sowa, vol. 36 of Husserliana (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 40, 92; Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 38–39 (76–78). Drummond, Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism: Noema and Object (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1990), 86 and see also 27, 35–36, 39, 40–42, 67, 106, 125, 146–47, 149, 159, 258. Drummond shows how in the Logical Investigations Husserl, in an attempt to avoid Brentano’s reduction of the real object to an object in intentionality, separated the phenomenological content of an act, on the subject side, from the intentional

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content, the independent real object, on the object side. He allowed for intentional matter in an intentional (but still non-phenomenological) act to specify the direction to that intentional, real object. Later, after his discovery of the phenomenological reduction, both the intentional act and its object both came to be seen to belong to the phenomenological realm, as noesis and noema. Drummond argues that David W. Smith and Ronald McIntyre assimilate the noema with the earlier intentional matter, with the result that the noema belongs on the act side, the noesis, with the intentional object over against them, whereas for Drummond, intentional matter is assimilated to the object as intended, the noema, on the object side. As opposed to the idea that the conscious (reell) contents of the perceptual act include the hyletic data presenting the sensible determinations of the material world, Drummond concurs with Aron Gurwitsch in his opposition to a distinction within the subject side between hyletic data and a perceptual apprehension. Whereas Husserl argues that the possibility of the object remaining the same while sensuous appearances vary leads one to posit a dualism on the act side between the data and the apprehension, Drummond notes that the kinds of variations Husserl discusses here come from changing objective conditions (e.g., changed illumination, change in the medium from air to mist, etc.), and he concludes that the object appears as identical (as opposed to Gurwitsch who sees the object as a part of the whole noematic object rather as the identity appearing in a manifold of noematic appearances) through varying psycho-physical conditions on the noematic side. Drummond’s argument here then ensures an epistemological realism for Husserl, like that of McDowell’s, insofar as the intentional objects are irreducible to an inherent component of the subjective experience itself. While David Smith, as we have seen, requires that objects themselves do not possess secondary qualities since that would begin to posit sensations as objects rather than as constituents of perceptual acts and thus reintroduce the possibility that sensations could be intermediaries, thereby undermining direct realism, I have suggested that Smith’s discussion proceeds on a philosophical plane beyond the level at which we experience objects in which sense-properties seem to belong to objects. See chapter 3, n86. See also Christina Schües, “Conﬂicting Apprehensions and the Question of Sensations,” in Alterity and Facticity: New Perspectives on Husserl, ed. Natalie Depraz and Dan Zahavi (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1998), 150; Dan Zahavi, “Self-Awareness and Affection,” in Alterity and Facticity: New Perspectives on Husserl, ed. Natalie Depraz and Dan Zahavi (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1998), 217; Dan Zahavi, “Husserl’s Noema and the Internalism-Externalism Debate,” Inquiry 47 (2004): 47–50. 24. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy, 1: 9–10 (14–15); Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2:282 (674–75), but see also 271–94 (657–93). In Einleitung in die Philosophie, 238, Husserl comments that in grasping such essential laws “This seeing is no sensible seeing.” 25. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 69–73 (103–7). 26. Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie, 257; the italics are mine. See also Husserl, Erste Philosophie 2:257. See also Husserl, Natur und Geist, 125. 27. Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2: 273 (660), 274 (661), 278–81 (667–73); See Harry Frankfurt, “Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility” Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 829–39. See also Günther Patzig, “Husserl on Truth and Evidence,” in Readings on Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, ed. J. N. Mohanty (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1997), 192, where Patzig argues that the kind of evidence with which things are given makes possible the establishment of ideal objects like pure meanings.

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28. Husserl, “Prolegomena,” Logical Investigations 1:41, 43, 49, 54, 73, 79–81, 89, 99, 117, 119, 121, 128, 151, 159–60; a translation of “Prolegomena zur reinen Logik” in Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 1: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, ed. Elmar Holenstein (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 18; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 64–65, 67–68, 76–77, 85, 114–15, 124–29, 141, 156–57, 186–87, 190. 193–94, 204–5, 241–42, 255–56. Henceforth the correlative pages of the German translation will follow in parenthesis the pages of the English translation. Husserl, Erste Philosophie 2:171–72. 29. Husserl, Einleitung in die Phenomenologie, 24–26, 294–95, 300–301; Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 50–55 (87–91), 153–55 (179–81); Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 175 (178–79). In the Einleitung in die Philosophie, 25, Husserl explains why one must ascend to a higher level science: “The exactness of the modern natural science is certainly a great and beautiful thing. But when this natural science owes its world and its method to a consistently but unconsciously deployed set of blinders, which for it, to be sure, is the method of all its methods, and when it wins its idea of nature through the fact that its screens off from all objects of experience all spiritual relationship and meaning—at that point, all its truth, as also its nature itself, ends up being an artiﬁcial, a one-sided abstraction and not the full, concrete truth and world. This conjecture takes nothing from the worth of natural science, but if it is on target, it takes from natural science the absolute signiﬁcance, the ultimate validity which it ascribes to itself. If this philosophical viewpoint is conﬁrmed, then natural science would be a lower-level of a higher science, whose task it would be to take from the achievement its blinders and to investigate this achievement. This gives also to you the representations of a higher, supra-disciplinary, supra-exact investigation, which obviously presupposes a higher standpoint, a standpoint beyond everything that is naïve and obvious.” 30. Husserl, Einleitung in die Phenomenologie, 269–70. 31. Ibid., 300. 32. James Dodd observes that this subjectivity is ultimate not only in that all other realms of activity are relative to it, but that it accomplishes itself, see Dodd, Crisis and Reﬂection: An Essay on Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2004), 202. There is a paradox here in that subjectivity presenting that in which subjectivity consists remains anonymous—a paradox central in Eugen Fink’s emphasis on the “unclosure” of questioning, see Ronald Bruzina, Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928–1938 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 397–98. 33. Husserl, Einleitung in die Phenomenologie, 300. 34. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 37 (75); Husserl, Einleitung in die Phenomenologie, 300–301; chapter 2, section 3; Husserl, Erste Philosophie, 2:165–67. See Maurice Natanson, “Introduction,” Essays in Phenomenology, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 11, on phenomenology’s capacity for self-inspection. 35. Robert Brandom, Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 131–32 36. Ibid., 119–23, 125–26, 131–32. 37. Brandom, MIE, 227.

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38. Schutz, “Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World,” in Studies in Social Theory, Collected Papers, ed. Arvid Brodersen (The Hague: Martinus Nijoff, 1964), 2:232. 39. McDowell, M&W, 93. McDowell here battles off a threat to absorb within communitarian or social pragmatist norms what he calls our ﬁdelity to the way things are. 40. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass, Part 3 (1929–1935), ed. Iso Kern (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 15; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 403. 41. Edmund Husserl, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934): Die C-Manuskripte, ed. Dieter Lohmar (Husserliana: Materialen, vol. 7; Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 437, see also pages 1, 6, 407; see Lanei M. Rodemeyer, Intersubjective Temporality: It’s About Time (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 113, 187, 193. 42. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 92 (124). 43. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 105–8 (135–38); Husserl, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, 14–15, 22, 34, 56–57, 317, 381, 425–26; Rodemeyer, Intersubjective Temporality, 70, 118; Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Part 3, 17; Rodemeyer argues for an Urempathy—an original empathy—in which the other is present in me much in the way that the Urtemporality—an original temporality— includes retentions and protentions, see Intersubjective Temporality, 118. Alfred Schutz objects that Husserl’s view of empathy contradicts itself insofar as analogical apprehension of another’s living body cannot take place since my living body stands out in my primordial ﬁeld in a way different from the way the other’s body appears (since I do not experience the other’s body originarily as I do my own), see Alfred Schutz, “The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl,” Collected Papers 3: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, ed. I. Schutz (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 63–64. However, the connections between my body and the other’s are multiple and sufficiently similar for a passive synthesis, a pairing association, which Husserl admits involves no deliberate derivation of the other. He is clear that we do not deliberately think through such an analogy, rather he is talking about an apperceptive transfer of sense from my animate organism to the other’s, which “must have derived this sense” from such a transfer. In other words, the transfer happens in an immediate association of similarity that happens passively, without me intellectually concluding to it (see Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 110 (140), 112 (142). On the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, see also Fred Kersten, Phenomenological Method: Theory and Practice (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989), 262, and Janet Donahue, Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity: From Static to Genetic Phenomenology (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004), 79. 44. Husserl, Erste Philosophie 2:166. Notice that this citation comes from 1923–24 manuscripts, showing that the role of intersubjective Husserl develops in his Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934) was already anticipated earlier in his career. Intersubjectivity was a constant concern of Husserl’s. 45. Edmund Husserl, “The Amsterdam Lectures,” in Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931), ed. and trans. Thomas Sheehan and Richard Palmer. Husserl, Collected Works, vol. 6 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1980), 249; a translation of “Amsterdamer Vorträge,” in Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed. Walter Biemel (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 344. 46. Husserl, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, 262 (my translation).

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47. Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 254–55 (257–59), which bears a great resemblance to many of the comments in the Späte Texte. See also Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie, 280–84; Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 128–31 (156–58); Husserl, Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution, 188, 262–63, 431 (this latter text refers again to transcendental intersubjectivity); Husserl, Erste Philosophie 2:129. Dan Zahavi, for instance, points out that Husserl described his own project as a sociological transcendental philosophy and that he effected an intersubjective transformation of such philosophy, Zahavi, “Internalism, Externalism, and Transcendental Idealism,” Synthese 160 (2008): 363. 48. Theodore de Boer, “An Ethical Transcendental Philosophy,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 83. 49. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 163 (207–8). 50. Ibid., 120 (154); see also 46–47 (58–60), 83 (104–5), 135 (172). 51. Ibid., 125 (161). 52. Ibid., 155 (–/197–98). 53. Ibid., 3–9 (3–10), 18–19 (22–23), 45 (57–58), 94 (119–20), 136 (173–74), 152–56 (194–99), 162 (206–7), 181 (228). 54. Ibid., 139 (177–78). 55. Ibid., 47 (60–61). 56. Ibid., 84 (106). 57. Ibid., 47–49 (60–63), 54 (69–70), 69 (87), 75 (94–95), 80 (101), 87–90 (111–14), 92 (117), 96 (122–23), 101 (127–28), 135 (172); John Drummond, “Personal Perspectives,” The First-Person Perspective in Philosophical Inquiry, Spindel Conference, September 28–30, 2006, ed. Tom Nenon, Supplement, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 45 (2007): 41. 58. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 26 (33), 34 (43–44), 38 (49), 45 (57–58), 50 (64– 65), 61 (77), 63 (79–80), 68 (86), 85–88 (109–12), 102 (132), 103 (132), 105 (133–34), 111 (141), 116 (147–48), 141 (179–80), 167 (205–6). 59. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 137; published in French as Le Visible et l’Invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 180; Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 76/95–96. Just as Drummond assimilates the ethical relationship to an epistemic one, Paul Ricoeur in Oneself as Another assimilates it to an ontological relationship, see Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 331, 335, 336, 338, 339; a translation of Soi-même comme Un Autre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990), 382–83, 385–86, 387–88, 390, 391. Similarly, Rudi Visker, comments regularly on the epistemic limits involved in recognizing the ethical summons or the practical limits in acting on it (which Levinas too recognizes at the level of the Third), but I do not see that he has undermined the summons itself, as clariﬁed by a phenomenological examination of the ethical sphere. In fact, the poignancy with which Visker portrays our incapabilities of responding to Other’s summons, incapabilities often constitutive of who we are ontologically, psychologically, and epistemologically, would presuppose at least that the reader and he recognize that summons. Visker, “In Praise of Visibility,” a paper presented at a conference entitled “Despite Oneself: Subjectivity and Its Secrete in Kierkegaard and Levinas,” 3–7. Visker tempers, I think, some of Levinas’s claims about what will in fact happen in the ethical relationship, but the “being summoned” that the reader recognizes even if the one summoned does not, makes possible the lack of recognition on the part of

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the subject summoned, examples of which Visker repeatedly and convincingly offers. My interpretation here converges with several comments by Nam-In Lee, “Experience and Evidence,” Husserl Studies (2007): 234, 236, 237, 243, 245. 60. In pages 207–12 (236–41) of God, Death, and Time, Levinas distinguishes between the consciousness and “awakening,” which is an opening “prior to intentionality” [208 (237)], and a matter of “ex-posure to the other” [211 (240)], a “wakefulness or keeping watch [la veille], which does not consist in keep watch over [veiller-a] (something)” [208 (237–38)]. This exposure is a more “ancient modality” [208 (237)] than consciousness. I do not think that the temporal vocabulary of “prior” or “more ancient” need imply that somehow encounter the other ﬁrst without any cognitional moment (how else explain the defection of phenomenality into the face), but rather, as mentioned in discussions of how ethical intersubjectivity is older than epistemic intersubjectivity in chapter 4, it refers to how knowing emerges from responsibility and how responsibility does not take its beginning in some decision of my own. 61. Drummond, “Personal Perspectives,” 42. 62. Ibid., 42. 63. Karl-Otto Apel, Diskurs und Verantwortung: Das Problem des Übergangs zur postkonventionellen Moral (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 98. 64. Karl-Otto Apel, Selected Essays, Vol. 1: Toward a Transcendental Semiotics, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Atlantic Hills, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994), 141, 156. 65. Ibid., 65, 76–77, 78, 141, 156, 187, 188–89, 234, 242, 243; Apel, Diskurs und Verantwortung, 200. 66. Apel, Diskurs und Verantwortung, 112–13. 67. Karl-Otto Apel, “Wittgenstein und das Problem hermeneutischen Verstehens,” Transformation der Philosophie, Vol. 1: Sprachanalytik, Semiotik, Hermeneutik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 371; translated as “Wittgentstein the Problem of Hermeneutic Understanding,” Towards a Transformation of Philosophy, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (Norfolk, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 33. 68. Schutz’s account of reﬂection, if used in Husserl’s transcendental sphere, would not involve reducing the being of what is considered to its being given, as James Mensch seems to argue, see James Richard Mensch, Intersubjectivity and Transcendental Idealism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 23–24. 69. Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities,” 257–58; Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 3 (45); Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie, 72 (distinguishing the contents of transcendental subjectivity from the empirically introspectively grasped Seele); Husserl, Erste Philosophie 2:166–67. Husserl writes there: “Perhaps all possible truth and science in absolute justiﬁcation and in the sought ultimate philosophical sense lies in this unpretentious evidence of the ego cogito—and in the mediately to be grounded evidence of transcendental intersubjectivity.” 70. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy, 1:9 (14). 71. Edmund Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908–1914, ed. Ullrich Melle (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 28; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1988), 241. 72. Ibid., 36–37, 48–49, 66, 68, 143, 153, 207, 209, 240–41, 245–48, 252–53, 267, 354–55, 394, 412, 416, 418; Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924, ed. Henning Peuker (Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 37; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), xv, 11, 183, 214; Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–37), 20, 26, 36, 50, 89; Husserl, Einleitung in die

notes to pages 253–257

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Philosophie, 54–55. See for example Thomas Nenon, “Feelings and Reason in Husserl’s Ethics,” Phenomenology 2008: Selected Essays from North America, ed. Michael Barber, Lester Embree, and Thomas Nenon (Budapest: Zeta Books, forthcoming). 73. John J. Drummond, “Aristotelianism and Phenomenology,” in Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy: A Handbook, ed. John J. Drummond and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2002), 40–41. 74. Ibid., 44, see also the entire article which has been summarized here, 15–45; see also John J. Drummond, “Introduction: The Phenomenological Tradition and Moral Philosophy” in Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy, 12–13; see chapter 7, section 1. 75. Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik, 82; Apel, Diskurs und Verantwortung, 166, 348; Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysical Principles of Morals, 2–5 (20–27), 12 (36). 76. Levinas, Totality and Inﬁnity, 201. 77. Ibid., 82. 78. On the inescapable intertwinement of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, see Dan Zahavi, Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity: A Response to the Linguistic-Pragmatic Critique, trans. Elizabeth A. Behnke (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), 84, 203, 205; a translation of Husserl und die transzendentale Intesubjektivität: Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1996), 67–68, 162–63, 164.

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INDEX

Absolute Spirit: Brandom’s discussion of, 279n26 accountability: epistemic intersubjectivity and, 121–27; ethics and, 197 acquaintance: Russell’s concept of, 47 Alston, William, 64–65, 68 “Amsterdam Lectures, The” (Husserl), 240–41 Anstoss: argument from illusion and, 55–57, 59–61 Apel, Karl-Otto, xiv–xv, 144–45, 163–64, 166–67, 217, 235, 238–41; Husserlian ethics and, 254–57; transcendental pragmatics of, 248–51 Archimedian point, 148–49, 193–94, 207 argument from illusion: McDowell’s discussion of, 49–50, 57–61; Smith’s phenomenological approach to, 53–57 “Aristotelianism and Phenomenology” (Drummond), 252–57 Aristotle, 27, 143; ethics of, 186–87, 191–98, 201; Husserlian ethics and, 251–57; Kant and, 201–02; natural science and work of, 146–48 Augustine, Saint, 2–3 bald naturalism: nonconstructivism and, 135–45; rational constraint and, 19–25, 38–39 beliefs: interiorization of, 39–40; rational constraint and, 21–25 Bernstein, J. M., 80 Blackburn, Simon, 150, 285n36 Brandom, Robert: discursive ethics of principles and, 209–15; eidetic-theoretic reﬂective pole and, 234–38; ethics of intersubjectivity and, 95–102, 200–201; on intelligibility of empirical content, 10–18; on interiorization, 39–44; interiorization and metaphilosophy debate and, 130–34;

intersubjectivity debate and, 87–127; on language of modalities and norms, 272n65; language theory of, 5–9; levels of ethics debate and, 185–215; Levinas’s epstemic intersubjectivity and, 113–27; on McDowell’s experientialism, 28–34; metaphilosophy of, 153–84; nonconstructivism of McDowell and, 137–45; on perception and intersubjectivity, 88–94; perception debate and, ix–xvi, 13–18; phenomenology and, 217–57; philosophy of language and consciousness and, 180–84; on pretheoretical, 169–80; on rational constraint, 19–34; on representationalism vs. inferentialism, 1–4; self-reﬂective methodology and I-Thou relationship and, 103–13; on semantic externalism, 262n27 “Brandom on Representation and Inference” (McDowell), 9–10 Brewer, Talcott, 193–94 Carr, David, 280n41 Cartesian Meditations (Husserl), 77–78, 105, 113–14, 220, 230, 273n73, 275n89 categorical imperative: ethics and, 193–95 causal mechanisms of perception, 14–18, 29–34 Cavell, Stanley, 189 classiﬁcation schemes: self-reﬂectivity and dependence on, 157 coherentism: conceptuality of empirical experience and, 62–64; intersubjectivity and, 89–94; natural science and, 145–52; nonconstructivism and, 135–45; rational constraint and, 19–25, 27, 36–39 common sense: interiorization and metaphilosophy concerning, 131–34; intersubjectivity and, 94; McDowell’s discussion of, xiii–xiv, 217, 282n5, 283n9; natural science and, 150–52; virtue ethics and, 293n48

320

community: ethics and norms of, 189 conceptual capacity: ethics and practical rationality and, 187–93; levels of ethics and, 185–86; natural science and, 146–52; Peacocke’s discussion of, 25–26; quietism and, 143–45 conceptual content: language and, 4–9; rational constraint and, 22–25 conscious accomplishments: Husserl’s discussion of, 296n19 consciousness: Brandom’s metaphilosophy and, 153–54, 180–84; Levinas’s discussion of, 302n60; phenomenology and, 227–28 constitutive methodology: nonconceptual content and, 72–79 Crisis (Husserl), 151, 220, 223 “Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge” (McDowell), 49, 137–38 “criterialism”: nonconstructivism and, 138–45 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant), 215 Crowell, Stephen, 174 Dasein: eidetic-theoretic reﬂective pole and, 236–38; Heidegger’s concept of, 153–54, 158–62, 166–67, 169–74; philosophy of language and consciousness and, 182–84 Davidson, Donald, xi, 12, 16–17, 261n13; coherentism of, 20, 23, 62–63, 135–36; “constitutive ideal of rationality” and, 278n19; empirical intelligibility and, 93–94; McDowell’s nonconstructivist philosophy and, 139; rational constraint and, 34–39 de dicto analysis: phenomenology and, 235–38 Dennett, Daniel, 103 de re analysis: intersubjectivity and, 99, 106, 109–10; phenomenology and, 235–38; philosophy of language and consciousness and, 180–84 Descartes, René, 12, 218; on realism, 48, 52–53 direct realism: Smith’s phenomenological approach to, 53–57 “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justiﬁcation” (Habermas), 211–12 discursive practice: eidetic-theoretic reﬂective pole and, 235–38; Habermas’s discussion of, 115–16; Husserlian and Levinasian ethics and, 251–57; intersubjectivity and, 106–13, 117–18; language model of, 6–9, 167–69; pretheoretical concepts and, 170– 80; ultimacy of, 163–69

index

discursive practices: ethics of principles, 209–15 disjunctivism: defense of realism and, 46–53 Dodd, James, 285n45 doubt: epoché concept and, 131; limits of, 112–13 Drummond, John, 228–29, 244, 246–47, 251–57, 297n23 Dummett, Michael, 261n16 eidetic-theoretic reﬂective pole: phenomenology and, 226–38 Einleitung in die Ethik: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924 (Husserl), 251–52, 254–57 Einleitung in die Philosophie (Husserl), 230–32 “Ein Philosoph namens Brandegger: Ontologische Differenzen zwischen Heidegger und Heidegger in Robert Brandoms Interpretation” (A philosopher by the name of Brandom: Ontological differences between Heidegger and Heidegger in Robert Brandom’s interpretation) (Gubatz), 157–58 empirical content: conceptuality of, 62–64; epistemic intersubjectivity and, 114–27; epistemic intersubjectivity and intelligibility of, 121–27; intelligibility of, x, 9–18, 60–61 empirical knowledge: Sellars’s observations on, ix Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Sellars), 26 “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (Sellars), 64 empty perception: nonconceptual content and, 64–71 environment: metaphilosophical concepts of, 143–45 epistemic intersubjectivity: ethical intersubjectivity and, 113–27, 214–15 epoché: natural science and, 151–52; phenomenology and, 221–26; Schutz’s concept of, 131 essentiality: self-reﬂectivity and, 155–69 ethics: discursive ethics of principles, 209–15; epistemic intersubjectivity and, 113–27; epistemic knowledge and, xiv; Husserlian vs. Levinasian/discourse ethics, 251–57; of intersubjectivity, 95–102; intersubjectivity and, 238–57; Kantian morality and, 193– 209; levels of, McDowell-Brandom debate on, 185–215; natural science and, 150–52; practical rationality and, 186–93

index

Evans, Gareth, xi, 47–48, 56, 63–64, 70–71, 79, 83, 136, 139 everyday experience: interiorization and, 131–34 existential commitments: philosophy of language and consciousness and, 183–84 experience: conceptuality of, 62–64; ethics and practical rationality, 193–209, 292n39; McDowell’s phenomenological elaboration of, 25–34; natural sciences and philosophy of, 147–52; nonceptual content and, 64–71; phenomenology and, 224–26 Experience and Judgment (Husserl), 72–79 “Experiencing the World” (McDowell), 28–29 externalism: rational constraint and, 20 fallibilism: discursive practice and, 166–67 falsiﬁcation principle: discursive practices and, 163–64 ﬁrst-person perspective: epistemic intersubjectivity and, 121–27 Frankfurt, Harry, 230 freedom: normativity and, 127 “Freedom and Constraint by Norms” (Brandom), 127 Frege, 46–47, 69 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 87, 95–102, 143 “Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism” (McDowell), 95–102 Gaskin, Richard, xv Gaynesford, Maximilian de, xv Geisteswissenschaften: Husserl’s discussion of, 232 Gerede (idle talk): Heidegger’s concept of, 172–73 German idealism: McDowell’s incorporation of, 87–88, 112–13 “gonzo” externalism, 21 Gubatz, Thorsten, 153, 157–61, 174 Gurwitsch, Aron, 229, 298n23 Habermas, Jürgen, xiv–xv, 97, 105–06, 112– 16, 161–63, 181–84, 186; discursive ethics of principles and, 209–15; Husserlian ethics and, 257; transcendental pragmatics and, 217 hallucination: direct realism and, 55–58, 269n10 “Having the World in View” (McDowell), 26, 263n49 Hegel, G. W. F.: Brandom’s discussion of, 107–08; Kant and, 96–97, 99–100;

321

McDowell and, 28; representationalism of, 261n18; Sellars’s discussion of, 26; “sensecertainty” concept of, ix Heidegger, Martin, 79; Brandom’s appropriation of, 153–54, 157–74, 179–80; eidetictheoretic reﬂective pole and, 236–38; pretheoretical concepts and, 170–80 Held, Klaus, 273n73 Herman, Barbara, 193–94, 254 “highest common factor”: defense of realism and, 50–52, 58–61 Hildebrand, Dietrich von, 252–57 history: self-reﬂective methodology and, 107–08 Honneth, Axel, 200–202, 210 Hopp, Walter, 61–62; on nonconceptual content, 65–71, 81 Hume, David, 32, 191, 207 Husserl, Edmund, xi–xii, xiv–xv; Apel’s critique of, 248–51; constitutive methodology of, 72–79, 273n73, 274n78, 275n89; eidetic-theoretic reﬂective pole and, 226–38; ethics discussions and work of, 185, 206, 251–57; genealogy of logic and, 30–34; on horizontal contents, 81–85; intersubjectivity and work of, 91–92, 104– 05, 280n41, 281n61; Levinas and, 113–14, 241–47; McDowell’s nonconstructivist philosophy and, 139–45; natural sciences and philosophy of, 142–43, 147–49, 151–52; nonceptual content and, 65–71; on perception, 61–62; phenomenology and work of, 218–26; rational constraint and, 38–39; Smith and, 53, 57, 270n38; on static phenomenology, 295n11; theoretical domain concept of, 172–74, 180; transcendental intersubjectivity and, 153–54, 166–67, 217, 238–57, 288n21 hyperinferentialism: interiorization and, 130–31; linguistic practice and, 4–9 I-acts: phenomenology and, 227–28 Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book (Husserl), 229 impartiality: discursive ethics of principles and, 212–15; ethics and, 196–97 individualism: rational constraint and, 35–39 inferentialism: Brandom’s discussion of, 279n32; linguistic idealism and, 4–9; pretheoretical concepts and, 170–80; rational constraint and, 23–25; representationalism vs., 1–9

322

intelligibility of empirical content, x, 9–18, 60–61; intersubjectivity and, 88; Levinasian ethics and, 245–47; philosophy of language and consciousness and, 181–84 intentionality: eidetic-theoretic reﬂective pole and, 226–38; Husserl’s discussion of, 143; Levinasian ethics and, 243–47; phenomenology and, 218–26; subjectivity and, 278n19; truth and, 158–59 interiorization: metaphilosophy and, 130–34; of perception, McDowell-Brandom debate and, ix, 39–44; phenomenology and, 223–26 intersubjectivity: Brandom-McDowell debate on, 87–127; epistemic intersubjectivity and, 113–27; ethical dimensions, I-We and I-Thou relationships, 95–102; ethics and, 238–57; Husserlian vs. Levinasian ethics and, 252–57; knowledge and, xi, xiii; levels of ethics and, 185–86; perception and, 87–94; phenomenology and, 217–57 intrasubjectivity: epistemic intersubjectivity and, 121–27, 279n38 intuition: experience and, 27–28 I-Thou relationships: community norms and, 162; discursive ethics of principles and, 211–15; ethical dimensions of I-We intersubjectivity and, 95–102; intersubjectivity and, xiii; Kantian ethics and, 200–201; McDowell’s discussion of, 87–88; selfreﬂective methodology and, 103–13 I-We sociality, xiii; discursive ethics of principles and, 210–15; ethical dimensions, 95–102; Levinas’s epistemic intersubjectivity and, 125–27; McDowell’s discussion of, 87–88; self-reﬂective methodology and, 111–13 justiﬁcation: belief and truth and, 40–41; discursive practice and, 164–65; phenomenology and, 218–26; rational constraint and, 20–25 Kant, Immanuel, xiv, 262n27; bald naturalism and work of, 136, 143; B deduction of, 96–97, 99–100; discursive ethics of principles and, 210–15; ethics and morality of, 193–209; Husserlian ethics and, 252–57; on intuition, 27, 62, 219, 265n28; nonconceptual content and, 75; noumenal supersensible concept of, 37; second critique of, 116; Sellars’s discussion of, 26; transcendental intersubjectivity and, 219–26

index

knowledge: Brandom’s pretheorism and role of, 177–78; interiorization and metaphilosophy concerning, 130–34; intersubjectivity and production of, 90–94; McDowell’s nonconstructivist philosophy and, 139–45; rational constraint and, 21–25, 264n8, 265n9 “Knowledge and the Internal” (McDowell), x, 39–40; interiorization discussed in, 130 “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited” (McDowell), x, 11–12, 39–40, 90–94, 111–13, 133–34, 283n9 “Knowledge and the Social Articulation of the Space of Reasons” (Brandom), x, 40–41, 89–94 Korsgaard, Christine, 292n34 Lafont, Cristina, 154, 177–79, 223, 238 language: Brandom’s philosophy of, 180–84; conceptual content and, 4–9; Dasein and, 171–72; ethical dimensions of intersubjectivity and, 95–102; quietism and game of, 144; sociality of, 101–02; transcendental phenomenology and, 248–51 Laurier, Daniel, 168, 175–76, 289n44 Lee, Nam-In, 273n73, 295n11 Levinas, Emmanuel, xii–xiii, xv; on consciousness, 302n60; epistemic intersubjectivity discussion and, 113–27, 280n59; ethics discussions and, 185, 194–202, 209, 214–15; Husserlian ethics and, 251–57; transcendental intersubjectivity and, 217, 238, 241–47 Lewis, C. I., 89 Lindgaard, Jakob, 137 linguistic practice: Habermas’s discussion of, 115–16; idealism of, 4–9 Locke, John, 227–28, 248 logic: inferentialism and, 175 Logical Investigations (Husserl), 33–34, 66–67, 229, 231, 297n23 logocentrism: Brandom’s comments on, 156 Lohmar, Dieter, 266n40 Lyotard, Jean-François, 116–17, 195, 214–15 Mackie, J. L., 56, 147, 183–84, 187 Making It Explicit (Brandom), ix; discursive ethics of principles and, 210–15; eidetictheoretic reﬂective pole in, 234–38; ethics of intersubjectivity and, 98–102; everyday experience and knowledge in, 132–34; intelligibility of empirical content and, 12, 261n16; intersubjectivity and perception in,

index

91–94; I-Thou relationship in, 103–13; language discussed in, 6–9, 114–15; perception discussed in, 12; phenomenology discussed in, 219–26; philosophy of language and consciousness and, 181–84; pretheoretical discussed in, 169–80; rational constraint in, 39; representationalism vs. inferentialism in, 1–4, 261n18; self-reﬂective methodology in, 103–13, 153, 155–69; semantic externalism in, 262n27 Martin, Michael, 277n115 McDowell, John: on conceptual capacities, 79–85; on conceptuality of empirical experience, 62–64; discursive ethics of principles and, 210–15; disjunctivist defense of perception by, 46–53; eidetic-theoretic reﬂective pole and, 226–38; ethics and practical rationality of, 186–93; ethics of intersubjectivity and, 95–102; on individualism, 280n53; on intelligibility of empirical content, 10–18; on interiorization, 39–44; interiorization and metaphilosophy debate and, 130–34; intersubjectivity debate and, 87–127; Kantian morality and ethics and, 193–209; on language and conceptual content, 4–9; levels of ethics debate and, 185–215; Levinas’s epstemic intersubjectivity and, 113–27; metaphilosophy of, 130–52; natural science and, 145–52; on nonconceptual content, 61–85, 64–85; nonconstructivism of, 135–45; on perception and intersubjectivity, 88–94; perception debate and, ix–xvi; on perceptual discrimination, 71–79; phenomenological elaboration of experience, 25–34; phenomenology and, 217–57; philosophy of philosophy of, 129–30; pretheorism of Brandom and, 175–80, 184; on rational constraint, 19–34; on representationalism vs. inferentialism, 1–4; self-reﬂective methodology and I-Thou relationship and, 103–13; Smith and, 53–57; Wittgensteinian quietism and work of, 129–30 McIntyre, Ronald, 297n23 meaning: Brandom’s discussion of, 161–62 Meinong, 46, 56 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 79, 154, 184; Levinasian ethics and, 246–47; on pretheoretical, 169–71, 174–80; on radical reﬂection, 238; transcendental phenomenlology and, 250–51 metaphilosophy: of Brandom, 153–84; interiorization and, 130–34; levels of ethics and,

323

185–86; of McDowell, 130–52; natural science and, 145–52 Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, The (Kant), 197, 292n34 metaphysics: natural science and, 285n36 Mill, John Stuart, 193 Millikan, Ruth, 174–75, 184 Mind and the World Order (Lewis), 89 Mind and World (McDowell), x; conceptuality of empirical experience in, 63–64; ethics and practical rationality in, 188; inferentialism and rationalism in, 4; intersubjectivity in, 93–94; natural science discussed in, 145–52; nonconceptual content in, 64–85; nonconstructivism in, 135–45; perceptual demonstrative in, 274n82; rational experience in, 27, 59–60 minimal empiricism: intelligibility of, 28 modal vocabulary: Brandom’s discussion of, 287n20 moral epistemology: ethics and, 193 myth of the given: ethics of intersubjectivity and, 95–96; experience and, 27; intersubjectivity and, 93–94; natural science and, 145–52; nonconceptual content and, 70–71; nonconstructivism and, 135–45; rational constraint and, 19–25, 38–39; Sellars’s rejection of, ix Nagel, Thomas, 193 Natanson, Maurice, 142–43, 148, 227 naturalism: nonconstructivism and, 135–45; rational constraint and, 19–25, 38–39; selfreﬂectivity and, 157–69 natural science: philosophy’s critique of, 149–52. See also scientism nature: Husserl’s discussion of, 239–40 Naturwissenschaften: Husserl’s discussion of, 232 Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 143 nonconceptual content: individual conceptual focus and, 79–85; McDowell on, 61–85; objections to, 64–85; perceptual discrimination and, 71–79 nonconstructivism: McDowell’s discussion of, 135–45 normativity: of community, 161–62; discursive ethics of principles and, 210–15; eidetic-theoretic reﬂective pole and, 236– 38; epistemic intersubjectivity and, 121–22, 127; ethics and, 189; ethics of intersubjectivity and, 96–102; modal vocabulary and, 287n20

324

objective knowledge: Brandom’s discussion of, 154; ethics and, 187–93 objective truth-conditions: self-reﬂective methodology and, 108–13 objects: Brandom’s discussion of, 287n20; intentionality and, 187–88 obligation: Husserlian ethics and detachment from, 253–57 On Certainty (Wittgenstein), 43–44, 90, 92–94, 130–31, 233 organism: ethics of rationality and, 190–92; Kantian ethics and role of, 203–09 Other: Levinasian ethics and role of, 246–47 Otherwise than Being (Levinas), 113–14, 124–27, 195, 241–47 Peacocke, Christopher, 25–27, 64, 68, 74–75, 274n82 Peirce, Charles, 148 perception: discrimination in, 71–79; of environmental stimuli, 12–13; interiorization and, 39–44; interiorization of, 39–44; intersubjectivity and, 87–94; linguistic response to, 7–9; McDowell’s disjunctivist defense of, 46–53; nonconceptual content and, 61–85, 64–71; phenomenological debate concerning, ix–xvi; phenomenological vs. disjunctiviist views of, 57–61; phenomenology and, 221–26; rational constraint and, 20–39; representationalism vs. inferentialism and, 1–9; Smith’s phenomenological approach to, 53–57 Perception (journal), x, 19–20 “Perception and Rational Constraint: McDowell’s Mind and World” (Brandom), 4, 10, 19–20, 37–39, 89–94 personal responsibility: social relationships and role of, 173–80 phenomenology: discursive ethics of principles and, 211–12; eidetic-theoretic reﬂective pole and, 226–38; Heidegger’s discussion of, 160–61; intentional spectrum and, 218–26; intersubjectivity and, 217–57; perception and, xi–xvi Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), ix, 262n27 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 2, 144 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (journal), ix–x, 37–38 “Pittsburgh School of Neo-Hegelians,” ix Platonism: ethics and, 203–04, 206; Husserlian ethics and, 252; McDowell’s nonconstructivist philosophy and, 140–41

index

Popper, Karl, 2–3 practical rationality: ethics and, 186–93; Kantian morality and, 193–209; theoretical ethics and, 202–09 pragmatics: transcendental intersubjectivity and, 248–51 “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth” (Rorty), 264n59 prescriptive: Lyotard’s discussion of, 116 pretheoretical: Brandom’s discussion of, 169–80 principles: discursive ethics of, 209–15 Problem of Perception, The (Smith), 45 propositional contents: self-reﬂective methodology and, 109–13 proximity: epistemic intersubjectivity and, 117–27 Putnam, Hilary, 146–47 quietism: ethics and, 189–93, 202–03, 207–09; of McDowell, 129–30, 233–34; Wittgenstein’s theory of, 140–45 radical reﬂection: Brandom’s metaphilosophy and, 153–84 rational constraint, x–xi; Brandom-McDowell debate on, 19–44; critique of, 34–39; intersubjectivity and, 89–94 rationality: Brandom’s discussion of, 91–92; discursive ethics of principles and, 212–15; ethics and, 186–93; Kantian morality and ethics and, 193–209; self-reﬂectivity and, 156–69 realism: McDowell’s disjunctivist defense of, 46–53; Smith’s phenomenological approach to, 53–57 “Reason, Expression and the Philosophic Enterprise” (Brandom), 153 receptivity: conceptualism of, 28; Husserl’s discussion of, 31–34; natural science and, 145–52; nonconceptual content and, 75–76 “recognitional” scorekeeping: self-reﬂective methodology and, 112–13 Rede (discourse): Heidegger’s concept of, 174–75 reﬂection: intersubjectivity and asymmetry of, 122–27 Rehg, William, 13–14, 18, 33–34, 36, 267n48 reliabilism: Brandom’s discussion of, 278n10; intersubjectivity and, 89–94; rational constraint and, 21–25, 34–39; self-reﬂectivity and, 156 “Reply to Brandom” (McDowell), 10–11, 264n52

index

representationalism: inferentialims vs., x; inferentialism vs., 1–9 Republic (Plato), 117 responsibility: Levinas’s discussion of, 114–15 Ricoeur, Paul, 301n59 Rodemeyer, Lanei, 240–41 Rorty, Richard, ix, 12, 17, 264n59; answerability to objects discussion of, 96; bald naturalism and work of, 136; rational constraint and, 38 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 99–100 Rückfrage (questioning back), 114–27, 222– 22, 233, 250–51 Russell, Bertrand, 46–49, 56–57, 269n12 Said and Saying relationships: Levinasian ethics and, 241–47 Sainsbury, R. M., 269n12 Scharp, Kevin, 161–67, 186, 210–13 Scheler, Max, 143 Schutz, Alfred, xii, 273n73; on Husserlian ethics, 300n43, 302n68; phenomenology of, 131–32; on social role, 237–38; “TheyRelationships” of, 97–98; transcendental intersubjectivity and, 200n11, 249–50 science: ethics and, 207–09; Husserl’s discussion of, 232–33, 299n29; phenomenology and, 221–26 Science and Metaphysics (Sellars), 26 scientism: classiﬁcation schemes in, 157; ethics and, 207–09; McDowell and, 145–52. See also natural science scorekeeper framework: epistemic intersubjectivity and, 121–27; Husserl’s sociality concept and, 173; intelligibility of empirical content and, 10–18, 263n28; interiorization and metaphilosophy and, 131–34; intersubjectivity and perception debate and, 88–94; I-Thou relationship and, 103–13; perception debate and, 13–18; philosophy of philosophy and, 129–30; rational constraint and, 21–25, 264n8; reliabilism and, 35–39; self-reﬂectivity and, 103–13, 155–69 secondary qualities: natural science and, 147 Sein und Zeit, 174 “Self-Determining Subjectivity and External Constraint” (McDowell), 95–96 self-reﬂective methodology: I-Thou relationships and, 103–13; metaphilosophy and, 153–84; natural science and, 148–52; phenomenology and, 222–26; ultimacy and essentiality and, 155–69

325

Sellars, Wilfrid: coherentism of, 20; on empirical experience, 64; on inferentialism, 4–5, 7–9, 130; internalism of, 10; on language of modality, 236–37; opposition to myth of the given and, 95–96; on perception, 26–27, 43, 48, 90; philosophical legacy of, ix, xi; “wringing” response concept of, 126 semantic externalism, 262n27 sensibility: Levinas’s discussion of, 114–15; nonconceptual content and, 75–76 sensory qualities: argument from illusion and, 54–57 Sherman, Nancy, 193–94, 198–99, 201, 292n34 “sideways-on” perspective: epistemic intersubjectivity and, 119–20; McDowell’s theory of perception and, 12, 16–17 signitive intending: nonconceptual content and, 66–71 “Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space” (McDowell), 46–53 skepticism: defense of realism and, 49–50 Smith, A. D., xii–xiii, 45; kinesthetic intentionalities of, 78; McDowell compared with, 58–61; phenomenological approach to perception, direct realism and argument from illusion, 53–61, 270n38 Smith, David W., 297n23 sociality: discursive ethics of principles and, 210–15; ethics of intersubjectivity and, 97–102, 200–209; Husserl’s discussion of, 173 Socrates, 186 “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism” (Brandom), 107–08, 279n26 space of reasons: intersubjectivity and, 89–94 Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (Husserl), 239–41 static phenomenology, 295n11 Steinbock, Anthony, 273n73 Stroud, Barry, 52 surplus horizons: nonconceptual content and, 80–85 Tales of the Mighty Dead (Brandom), 170 Taylor, Charles, 79 temporality: epistemic intersubjectivity and, 117–27 theorizing: Levinas’s discussion of, 113–14, 120–27; Lyotard’s discussion of, 116–17; of pretheoretical, 169–80 Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas), 163–64

326

theory of descriptions, 46 “They-Relationships,” 97–98 third person: epistemic intersubjectivity and introduction of, 120–27; Levinas’s ethics and, 200–201 Thornton, Tim, xv Totality and Inﬁnity (Levinas), 124 Tractatus (Wittgenstein), 144 tradition-formed autonomous individual: McDowell’s concept of, 87–88, 111–13 transcendental ego: Brandom’s discussion of, 165–66 transcendental intersubjectivity: Levinasian ethics and, 241–47; pragmatics and, 248–51 transcendental phenomenology: discursive ethics of principles and, 210–15; ethics and, 239–57; Heidegger and, 169–74; Husserl’s concept of, xv; interiorization and metaphilosophy and, 134; natural science and, 151–52 truth: discursive ethics of principles and, 211–15; intentionality and, 158–59 Truth and Method (Gadamer), 143 ultimacy: self-reﬂectivity and, 155–69 universalization: discursive ethics of principles and, 213–15 Urempathy: Husserlian ethics and, 300n43 utilitarianism: ethics and, 193

index

valuing: Husserlian ethics and, 252–57 Verstehen: German tradition of, 109–13 “Vienna Lecture, The” (Husserl), 91, 104, 206 Villanueva, Enrique, x virtue: ethics and, 186–98 Visible and Invisible, The (Merleau-Ponty), 246–47 Visker, Rudi, 301n59 vorhanden (present-at-hand), 159, 172 Vorhandsein, 159–61, 170–74, 179–80, 236–38 Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre (Husserl), 251–57 Wanderer, Jeremy, xv “willed immunity”: ethics and, 192–93 Williams, Bernard, 21, 147–49, 183–84, 190–93, 204–09, 214 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2, 43, 51–52, 90, 92–93; McDowell’s discussion of, 130–31, 138–45, 295n9; moral rules concept of, 189, 209; nonconstructivism of, 129–30; phenomenology and work of, 233; quietism of, 129–30, 140–45 Wright, Crispin, 100–101, 144 Zahavi, Dan, 274n77, 301n47 Zuhandensein: eidetic-theoretic reﬂective pole and framework of, 236–38; Heidegger’s concept of, 153–54, 159–61, 170–74, 179–80

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