Unbounded naturalism

Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Jan, 2008 by Andrew Taggart

DISENCHANTMENT

Frederick Beiser frames the phenomenological predicament of German idealists writing in the Kantian aftermath in dialectical terms. (8) For the subject to get any purchase on reality, there must be a point of contact between subject and object such that they became identical. But in order to reject subjectivism, the doctrine that there is nothing beyond the circle of consciousness, idealists needed also to establish a fundamental disidentity between subject and object. Thus they asked, 'How is it possible to explain the possibility of knowledge according to idealist principles and yet to account for the reality of the external world?' (9) Beiser notes that Hegel's speculative formula, 'the identity of nonidentity and identity', captures both horns of the dilemma, both sides of the dialectic. (10) In Mind and World, John McDowell follows this idealist line of inquiry but with one notable difference. He not only sets as his main objective that of answering this thorny question that idealists most explicitly raised and thought through, but he also seeks to make perspicuous why this synthesis has so infrequently been achieved. Indeed, he goes even one step further, arguing that the 'diagnosis' is a necessary precondition for 'curing' this ailment.

McDowell's gambit is to aver, with the 'experiential' Kant, that while understanding and sensibility are distinct faculties they both work in tandem in empirical judgment: more precisely, our conceptual capacities are passively summoned forth during actualizations of receptivity. (11) For McDowell, what makes this view of experience especially appealing is that the space of reasons is coeval with the space of concepts; hence, we have no problem justifying the content of our empirical judgments since these fall within the space of reasons. Yet once the space of reasons is disjoined from the space of concepts, we arrive at two unpalatable options--a coherentism which relinquishes any prospect of our empirical thinking bearing on independent reality and a bald empiricism which declares that it has put us in contact with empirical reality but cannot justify the unmediated phenomenon that is given to us. Whereas the former, which holds fast to the idea of spontaneity yet not without sacrificing the possibility of there being external constraint upon our thought, gives us up to 'spinning in a void', the latter, which gives us the 'friction' we need, can offer only exculpation (the world's impingement on us exonerates us from wrongdoing in cases of involuntary action) when what we are after is justification. in response to these positions, McDowell does not merely point out that coherentism cannot satisfy our desire for some purchase on empirical phenomena while the myth of the Given, on view in bald empiricism, cannot defeat the skeptic; nor does he merely suggest that his unbounded naturalism is a logical possibility, a tertium datur, that simply has yet to be pursued. Since the difficulty lies in the fact that relaxed naturalism can never present itself as an even remote logical possibility to Donald Davidson, a defendant of coherentism, or to Gareth Evans, a representative of a sophisticated version of the myth of the Given in McDowell's story, McDowell thinks it necessary to treat the matter therapeutically. In the spirit of diagnosis, McDowell first acknowledges that coherentism and empiricism are 'capable of gripping us' (MW, p. xi) but then goes on to identify the root cause of their unthinkable blind spot, a historical cause that will reveal that the same 'topography of mind and world' underlies both positions. (12)