Unbounded naturalism

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

In his critique of McDowell's premise that conceptuality goes all the way out, Friedman maintains that McDowell lacks the resources to distinguish between inner and outer sense. Without such a criterion, McDowell's purported common sense realism backslides into coherentism. (22) In his later lectures, 'Having a World in View: Kant, Sellars and Intentionality', McDowell no doubt has become aware of his privileging the understanding over sensibility in providing for the necessary friction. Whence his playing up object dependency more in order to put more weight on sensibility's role in making a 'claim' on the passive exercise of our conceptual capacities. (23) In the end, the question concerning whether McDowell has the resources at his disposal to maintain a direct realism is undeniably relevant to any conception of experience of a non-coherentist sort, yet it is not, to my mind, the ultimate test of McDowellian naturalism. In the section on Bildung below, I find McDowell's account of experience wanting not because it cannot reasonably justify how we can become aware of a reality independent of our awareness but because it cannot do justice to the role that reflection plays in a subject's conceptual sensitivity to the world.

BILDUNG

McDowell's naturalism is shaped by his desire to return us to a kind of nature that is other than that governed by physical law. He is keen to take as literally as possible the thought that we are rational animals, animals whose theoretical engagements involve using the conceptual capacities that we happen to have. The idea that we are animals of a rational kind differs appreciably from rampant platonism which is led to conceive of rationality as dirempted from nature thanks to its tacit endorsement of a disenchanted nature. In order to stave off rampant platonism, McDowell points to Bildung, a thin account of our normal upbringing. Indeed, McDowell needs some story of human evolution, however short and underdeveloped, in order to illustrate how it is possible for rational beings to inhabit a 'partially re-enchanted' (MW, p. 85) nature. (24) it is a story animated by three fundamental questions. Firstly, how can the kind of animals we are be rational? secondly, how can the rational persons we are be animalistic? thirdly and more broadly, how do we explain the fact of our having these conceptual capacities and not others?

There is a tension between the first and second questions that is expressed in an antinomy between rampant platonism and bald naturalism. If the former, steadfastly holding to the idea that rationality is sui generis, is negated in order to return us to nature, the latter fancies itself the only other option. It is for this reason that McDowell describes his relaxed naturalism as 'partially re-enchanted'. We have already seen that the source of this antinomy is a disenchanted picture of the natural world; hence the problem can be removed only after we change our conception of the latter. With this new view of nature comes a new image of humans 'as animals whose natural being is permeated with rationality, even though rationality is appropriated conceived in Kantian terms' (MW, p. 85). But it remains to be seen how our nature can be 'permeated with rationality', with a sui generis rationality no less, without compelling us to fall back into some version of rampant platonism.