John McDowell
John Henry McDowell (born
1942) is a contemporary
philosopher, formerly a
fellow of
University College,
Oxford and now University Professor at the
University of Pittsburgh.Although he has written extensively on
metaphysics,
epistemology,
ancient philosophy, and
meta-ethics, McDowell's most influential work has been in the
philosophy of
mind and
language.
McDowell's early work was in ancient philosophy, most notably including a translation of and commentary on
Plato's
Theaetetus. In the
1970s he was active in the
Davidsonian project of providing a semantic theory for
natural language, co-editing (with
Gareth Evans) a volume of essays entitled
Truth and Meaning. McDowell edited and published Evans's influential posthumous book
The Varieties of Reference (1982).
McDowell is both one of the most insightful interpreters of the later philosophy of Wittgenstein and one of the few philosophers to have developed Wittgensteinian themes in an original way. McDowell has, throughout his career, understood philosophy to be "therapeutic" and thereby to "leave everything as it is", which McDowell understands to be a form of philosophical quietism. The philosophical quietist believes that philosophy cannot make any explanatory comment about how, for example, thought and talk relate to the world but can, by offering re-descriptions of philosophically problematic cases, return the confused philosopher to a state of intellectual quietude. However, in defending this quietistic perspective McDowell has engaged with the work of leading contemporaries in such a way as to both therapeutically dissolve what he takes to be philosophical error, while developing original and distinctive theses about language, mind and value. In his early work, McDowell was very much involved both with the development of the Davidsonian semantic programme and with the internecine dispute between those who take the core of a theory that can play the role of a theory of meaning to involve the grasp of truth conditions, and those, such as Professor Michael Dummett, who argued that linguistic understanding must, at its core, involve the grasp of assertion conditions. If, Dummett argued, the core of a theory that is going to do duty for a theory of a meaning is supposed to represent a speaker's understanding, then that understanding must be something of which a speaker can manifest a grasp. McDowell successfully argued, against this Dummettian view and its development by such contemporaries as Crispin Wright, both that this claim did not, as Dummett supposed, represent a Wittgensteinian requirement on a theory of meaning and that is rested on a suspect asymmetry between the evidence for the expressions of mind in the speech of others and the thoughts so expresssed. In these early exchanges and in the parallel debate over the proper understanding of Wittgenstein's remarks on rule following, some of McDowell's characteristic intellectual stances were formed: to borrow a Wittgensteinian expression, the defence of a realism without empiricism, an emphasis on the human limits of our aspiration to objectivity, the idea that meaning and mind can be directly manifested in the action, particularly linguistic action, of other people, and a distinctive disjunctive theory of perceptual experience. The latter is an account of perceptual experience, developed at the service of McDowell's realism, in which it is denied that the argument from illusion supports an indirect or representative theory of perception as that argument presuspposes that there is "highest common factor" shared by veridical and illusory (or, more accurately, delusive) experiences. In this claim that a successful perceptual encounter with the world and a failed encounter share no highest common factor, a theme is visible that runs throughout McDowell's work, namely, a commitment to seeing thoughts as essentially indviduable only in their social and physical environment, so called externalism about the mental. McDowell defends, in addition to a general externalism about the mental, a specific thesis about the understanding of demonstrative expressions as involving so-called "singular" or "Russellian" thoughts about particular objects that reflects the influence on his views of Gareth Evans. According to this view, if the putative object picked out by the demonstrative does not exist, then such an object dependent thought cannot exist - it is, in the most literal sense, not available to be thought.
The later development of McDowell's work came more strongly to reflect the influence on him of Rorty and Sellars and, in particular, both
Mind and World and McDowell's later Woodbridge lectures focus on a broadly Kantian understanding of intentionality, of the mind's capacity to represent. Mind and World sets itself the task of understanding the sense in which we are active even in our perceptual experience of the world. Influenced by Sellars's famous diagnosis of the "myth of the given" in traditional empiricism, in which Sellars argued that the blankly causal impingement of the external world on judgement failed to supply justification, as only something with a belief like conceptual structure could engage with rational justification, McDowell tries to explain how one can accept that we are passive in our perceptual experience of the world while active in how we conceptualise it. McDowell subtly develops an account of that which Kant called the "spontaneity" of our judgement in perceptual experience while avoiding the suggestion that the resulting account has any connection with idealism. Mind and World rejects, in the course of its argument, the position that McDowell takes to be the working ideology of most of his philosophical contemporaries, namely, a reductively naturalistic account that McDowell labels "bald naturalism". He contrasts with his own, broadly naturalistic perspective in which the distinctive capacities of mind are a cultural achievement of our "second nature". The book concludes with a successful critique of Quine's narrow conception of empirical experience and a much less successful critique of Donald Davidson's views on belief as inherently veridical, in which Davidson plays the role of the pure coherentist. While, overall, MInd and World remains one of the most insightful developments of a Kantian approach to contemporary philosophy of mind and metaphysics written by a contemporary philosopher, one or two of the uncharitable interpretations of Kant's work in that book receive important revisions in McDowell's later Woodbridge Lectures, published in the Journal of Philosophy, xcv, 1998, pp. 431-491. McDowell has, since the publication of
Mind and World, largely continued to re-iterate his distinctive positions that go against the grain of much contemporary work on language, mind and value, particularly in North America where the influence of Wittgenstein has significantly waned. McDowell remains one of the most admired, if not most frequently imitated, of contemporary philosophers, who has consistently produced work of the highest originality and importance.
McDowell has advocated what has been called an
externalist theory of mind, and contends that a due respect for scientific
naturalism should not preclude our treating mentalistic vocabulary as real — as actually referring to and describing the world.
Many of McDowell's papers are collected in
Mind, Value, and Reality (
Cambridge,
Mass.:
Harvard University Press,
1998) and
Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). In
1991 he gave the
John Locke Lectures at Oxford. A revised version of these lectures was published as
Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1994; reissued with a new introduction,
1996). It is an influential but difficult work that provides a controversial account of empirical justification for beliefs, covering some of the same ground as
Hegel's critique of
Kant but informed by a deep sensitivity to contemporary modes of scientific naturalism.
His work has been also heavily influenced by, among others,
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
P. F. Strawson,
David Wiggins, and, especially,
Wilfrid Sellars. Many of the central themes in McDowell's work have also been pursued in similar ways by his
Pittsburgh colleague
Robert Brandom (though McDowell has stated strong disagreement with some of Brandom's readings and appropriations of his work). Both have been strongly influenced by
Richard Rorty, in particular Rorty's "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (1979). In the preface to
Mind and World (pp. ix-x) McDowell states that "it will be obvious that Rorty's work is [...] central for the way I define my stance here".
McDowell is rumoured to be a huge fan of the
Pittsburgh Pirates.
*
McDowell's home page. Includes a CV and a list of representative publications.
