Comment on Richard Schantz, "The Given Regained"

John McDowell

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 62, No. 1. (Jan., 2001), pp. 181-184.

Stable URL:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8205%28200101%2962%3A1%3C181%3ACORS%22G%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research is currently published by International Phenomenological Society.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/ips.html.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

http://www.jstor.orgSat Oct 6 18:48:28 2007

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8205%28200101%2962%3A1%3C181%3ACORS%22G%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Shttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.htmlhttp://www.jstor.org/journals/ips.html

Plzilosophy ancl Phet~onzenological Research Vol. LXII, No. 1, January 2001

Comment on Richard Schantz, "The Given Regained"

IOHN MCDOWELL

U n i v e ~ r i t ) ~Pittsburghof

Richard Schantz gives a concise and effective rehearsal of the background against which I find it liberating to see our experience as structured by our conceptual capacities, at least insofar as experience figures in the transcenden- tal Garnework within which alone we can make sense of our having the world in view. Given how attractive that background makes the idea, I cannot see that Schantz makes the opposed conception he undertakes to defend even comparably compelling, let alone more compelling.

Schantz undertakes to do two things: first, to defend the claim that there is a nonconceptual element in the content of experience; and, second, to vindi- cate the capacity of experience, conceived as having nonconceptual content, to serve as evidence for beliefs about the world.

Under the first head, Schantz says at one point that his aim is to "save appearances." He may mean to irnply that the conception I recommend flies in the face of appearances, so that "saving appearances" encapsulates a moti- vation for attributing nonconceptual content to experience. Perhaps his approving citation of C. I. Lewis belongs with this implication. Lewis said: "There is in all experience that element which we are aware we do not create by thinking and cannot, in general, displace or alter." Of course Lewis thought this rernark was both an expression of sheer comrnon sense and an affirmation of a nonconceptual given. But the unquestionable character of what Lewis says is not threatened by taking experience to be conceptually structured. In seeing experience as actualization of conceptual capacities in sensory receptivity, I accornmodate the palpable fact Lewis insists on, that the shape of our experience is not up to us (once we have decided such things as whether to open our eyes and what direction to look in). I myself exploit the fact -which Schantz appeals to in a different context - that the Miiller- Lyer illusion persists, at the level of how things look, even in subjects who know it is an illusion.

The question how many color concepts we have belongs in the context of the question I am raising, whether the aspiration to "save appearances" consti-

COMMENT ON RICHARD SCHANTZ, "THE GIVEN REGAINEI)" 181

tutes a motivation for attributing nonconceptual content to our experience. Gareth Evans and, in some places, Christopher Peacocke allege that to sup- pose our experience is conceptual through and through would commit us to a phenornenological falsification. They claim that our conceptual repertoire is too sparse to capture the rich specificity of, for instance, color experience. Schantz does not dispute what, as he notes, I point out in response to this argument: the clairn of sparseness ignores demonstratively expressible conceptual capacities made available to us by experience itself. My aim here is not, as Schantz says, to "show . . . that the content of experience is concep- tual through and through." My aim is to reject the premise of a phenorneno- logical objection to that conception of experience. The point is to undermine a supposed obstacle in the way of accepting a conception whose positive credentials lie elsewhere, in its potential for freeing us from philosophical cramps.

There is indeed a sense in which, on the view of experience I recommend, experience depends on conceptual capacities. Schantz seizes on this. He says triumphantly, in connection with my invocation of demonstratively express-ible conceptual capacities, "The dependency is, rather obviously, the other way around." But it is quite unobvious why there should not be dependencies in both directions. Why should the idea of experience as an actualization of conceptual capacities be threatened by the thought that some of the concep- tual capacities in question are initiated in and by the very experiences in which they are actualized'? Schantz says my "reply to the phenornenological case for nonconceptual content is significantly flawed." But this depends partly on misstating what the reply aims to do, and partly on assuming with- out argument that we have to choose just one direction of dependency. In fact Schantz gives me everything I need in this area, when he concedes that there are those demonstratively expressible conceptual capacities.

Of course, as Schantz says, a subject who does not have the concept of a crocodile can see a crocodile. I am puzzled as to why he thinks the point is a problem for me. As he says, "seeing a crocodile is constituted by certain visual experiences, certain ways the crocodile looks to us." Everything turns on whether having something look a certain way to one can be understood otherwise than as an actualization of a concept of something's being that way. Here, as far as I can see, Schantz offers only the unargued assertion that it can. I agree, of course, that the concept of a crocodile need not be involved in sorneone's seeing a crocodile. But this has no bearing on the question Schantz would have tf address: whether the experience of seeing a crocodile, on the part of a subjekt who has the capacity to take charge of her cognitive life, can be understood independently of capacities to ernbrace in thought the ways the crocodile looks.

The questions that arise here cannot be cleanly separated from the second issue Schantz airns to deal with: whether experience needs to be understood as

182 JOHN MCDOWELL

conceptually structured if it is to be intelligible that experiences constitute reasons for beliefs about the world.

Granting me, for the moment, a connection between the relevant idea of reasons and articulability, Schantz urges that the conceptual character that attaches to a minimal articulation of a reason for a visually grounded belief - "Because it looks that way" - should be seen as belonging only to the act of giving a reason, not to the reason given. Earlier he remarks that he would prefer to say linguistic exercises of conceptual capacities refer to, rather than express, the content of experience. It is clear why he has this preference; it would be natural to suppose that conceptual character belongs to what is expressed just as much as to the expressing of it, and Schantz does not want to accept that the content of experience is conceptual. But on these principles he seems committed to denying that "Because it looks that way" can express a subject's reason for believing that something is a certain way, and perhaps to maintaining that, if the reason for a belief lies in the character of the subject's experience, the reason itself is inexpressible. This is not obviously a comfortable position.

However that may be, Schantz anyway thinks the requirement of articula- bility should be rejected. He suggests that in imposing such a requirement, I conflate having reasons with actually giving them. But this is gratuitous; the proposed connection is between having reasons and an ability to give them, which of course need not be exercised whenever a subject has reasons. (And when the ability is exercised in an explicit appeal to experience, the exercise need not take the form of describing the way something, for instance, looks; so it is beside the point for Schantz to insist, rightly enough, that a subject who has reason to believe an animal is a crocodile need not be able to describe the way the animal appears to her. This is accommodated by the point, which, as I have noted, Schantz does not dispute, that there are concep- tual capacities that are expressible only with the aid of demonstratives.) There is no question of representing all empirical knowledge as somehow including knowledge about reasons, thus conceiving "all empirical knowledge as higher level in character," as Schantz suggests I do -any more than Kant, when he says that the "I think" of apperception must be uble to "accompany all my representations" (Critique of Pure Reason, B 13l) , thereby implies that all awareness of the relevant sort is explicitly self-referential.

This Kantian thought is not just a parallel. Schantz does not acknowledge the attractions of a proposal to this effect: we should make sense of the idea of believing for reasons, like the idea of acting for reasons, in the context of the idea of a subject who can take charge of her beliefs and actions -hence, a subject who can step back from candidate reasons and acknowledge or refuse to acknowledge their cogency, which requires just the potential for self- consciousness that Kant alludes to. Schantz thinks he can tell, as it were without looking, that such a placement of the very idea of reasons cannot be

COMMllNT ON RICHARD SCHANTZ. "THE GIVEN REGAINED" 183

acceptable, because he endorses, as I do, the ernpiricist thought that experi- ences can as such constitute reasons for belief, and he is confident that in such an expression of the empiricist thought, "experiences" must collect episodes in a kind that plainly has instances in the lives of non-human animals and prelinguistic infants, not just in the lives of subjects who can take responsibility for reworking their views of the world. If the reason- constituting status of experiences is already in view outside the context of an ability to take charge of one's beliefs, it cannot depend on the potential presence of the "I think" of apperception.

But why should we suppose "experiences" must effect its classification like that? Schantz appeals to "the strong intuition that animals and prelin- guistic infants can enjoy sensory episodes of the very same kinds as users of language." Of course non-human animals and prelinguistic infants enjoy episodes of sensory awareness of features of their environment. Are we to suppose they thereby acquire reasons for forming beliefs'? (Even though f o m - ing beliefs -reshaping a world view - is not something they can do.) The "strong intuition" requires no such thing. I have no difficulty securing conformity to it, by specifying kinds in which non-human and prelinguistic sensory episodes belong together with adult human sensory episodes: for instance, the kind I have just alluded to, episodes of sensory awareness of features of the environment.

The question is not whether there are such kinds; obviously there are. The question is whether we can make sense of a sensory episode's constituting a reason for believing something without needing to appeal to anything more than its belonging to such a kind. By definition, episodes can belong to such kinds independently of whether or not the episodes are available to a unifying apperception - a condition that would require, as I see things, that the episodes are actualizations of conceptual capacities. Schantz undertakes to vindicate a position that implies an affirmative answer to this question. But he does no more, in this area, than point out that the episodes that, as he and I agree, constitute reasons for belief belong in kinds of which non-human and prelinguistic sensory episodes are members. That does nothing to show what he would need to show: that their n~en~bership in such kinds suffices to make their constituting reasons intelligible. He offers no argument against the thought that when a sensory episode constitutes a reason for belief, that needs to be understood in terms of its being a member, also, of a different kind: actualizations of conceptual capacities in sensory receptivity, which are as such capable of being accompanied by the "I think" of apperception. This way, we can combine the "strong intuition" with the roughly Kantian under- standing of reasons that Schantz thinks, wrongly as far as I can see, he has given grounds for rejecting.

184 JOHN MCI)OWELL