Unbounded naturalism

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

EXPERIENCE

The similarities between McDowell's and Kant's stance on perceptual experience go well beyond Kant's fundamental insight into the operations involved in synthetic judgment. Kant's opponents--rationalism with its affirmation of intellectual intuition, empiricism with its affirmation of the passive, unmediated reception of sense impressions, and scientism with its denial of sui generis spontaneity in the face of natural law--are not entirely unlike McDowell's. But McDowell wishes to avoid the 'transcendental' Kant's fate spelled out in his affirmation of a purely formal-logical subject, the unity of apperception, which stands behind all of our empirical judgments; his answer to the question of how pure reason, raised above empirical life and bound by an unconditional moral law, can be practical; and his postulate of a noumenal reality whose aim is to provide an external constraint on cognition. (20)

With respect to the last point, there is no such 'really real' in McDowell's account of experience; nor, for that matter, is there a nonconceptual moment which typically serves as an external constraint. The problem with the nonconceptual, as we have already seen, is that we have trouble making sense of how understanding gets hooked up to sensibility. At some length, McDowell demonstrates that the idea of Givenness makes it unintelligible how sensing that things are thus and so gets mediated by judging that things are thus and so. From McDowell's standpoint, the apologist for nonconceptuality thus gets mired in endless talk of our being disposed to pronounce on appearances or our being inclined to do so.

This 'blindness' can be avoided, McDowell thinks, if we grant that conceptuality goes all the way out. For only in this way does the linkage between sensibility and understanding remain rational. Whence the double character of understanding which is passive in the deliverance of its concepts in the passive synthesis of experience but active in judging, i.e., active in our making up our mind that such and such is the case. Because the transition between experience and judging is immanent, McDowell thinks that it is in no way mysterious how experience can be a 'reason for' (MW, p. 62) judging.

What is mysterious, however, is how McDowell can demonstrate the utter passivity of the understanding so as to ensure that an independent reality, via sensibility, is providing him with the 'friction' he needs to make good on his promise that empirical thinking bears on reality. McDowell's refutation of the charge that his unbounded naturalism amounts to subjectivism rests firstly on his distancing himself from anything remotely resembling a two worlds theory. For McDowell, the appearance of the thing is the reality of that thing; it immediately follows that there is only one empirical reality. But it would appear that his negation of transcendental idealism, which in the traditional reading has upheld the noumenon/phenomenon distinction, only brings him closer to subjectivism. How, then, is it possible for there to be any 'friction', any check on the projection of the mind's categories, once empirical reality becomes that which is fully open to view?