Mind, Body, and World: Todes and McDowell on Bodies and Language

Dreyfus presents Todes’s (2001) republished Body and World as an anticipatory response to McDowell (1994) which shows how preconceptual perception can ground conceptual thought. I argue that Dreyfus is mistaken on this point: Todes’s claim that perceptual experience is preconceptual presupposes an untenable account of conceptual thought. I then show that Todes nevertheless makes two important contributions to McDowell’s project. First, he develops an account of perception as bodily second nature, and as a practical-perceptual openness to the world, which constructively develops McDowell’s view. Second, and more important, this account highlights the practical and perceptual dimension of linguistic competence. The result is that perception is conceptual ‘‘all the way down’’ only because discursive conceptualization is perceptual and practical ‘‘all the way up’’. This conjunction of McDowell and Todes on the bodily dimensions of discursive practice also vindicates Davidson’s and Brandom’s criticisms of McDowell’s version of empiricism. The recent republication of Samuel Todes’s 1963 PhD dissertation under the new title Body and World (2001) is provocative. The title suggests that Todes’s dissertation should be understood as a response to John McDowell’s Mind and World thirty-one years before its publication. In introducing the new edition, Hubert Dreyfus offers this summary of Todes’s implicit response to McDowell: By calling attention to the structure of nonconceptual, practical perception and showing how its judgments can be transformed into the judgments of detached thought, Todes is able to provide a framework in which to explain how the content of perception, while Correspondence Address: Joseph Rouse, Department of Philosophy, Wesleyan University, 350 High Street, Middletown, CT 06459, USA. Email: [email protected] Inquiry, Vol. 48, No. 1, 38–61, February 2005 0020-174X Print/1502–3923 Online/05/010038–24 # 2005 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/00201740510015329 not itself conceptual, can provide the basis for conception. (Todes, 2001, p. xvi) On Dreyfus’s reading, Todes provides reasons to reject McDowell’s claim that perceptual experience is already conceptually articulated, and that it must be conceptual to play its indispensable role in constraining the spontaneity of reason so as to produce empirical knowledge. I argue that Dreyfus is mistaken in his assessment of how Todes’s account of perception and human embodiment affects McDowell’s position: Todes does not succeed in resurrecting a role for ‘‘preconceptual experience’’. I nevertheless show that Todes’s book can advance McDowell’s concerns in two significant ways. First, Todes’s account of embodied perceptual practice advances McDowell’s account of empirical knowledge even in the latter’s own terms. Second, once this account has been freed from attachment to Todes’s own treatment of conceptual thought, it suggests a novel way to fulfill McDowell’s desideratum of reconnecting perceptual openness to the world to conceptual spontaneity, by assimilating the conceptual domain within perceptual practice rather than incorporating perceptual receptivity within an unbounded conceptual domain. My discussion has four parts. First I briefly recapitulate McDowell’s widely discussed criticism of neo-pragmatist accounts of empirical knowledge. I then introduce Todes’s account of embodied perceptual practice and show how it constructively contributes to McDowell’s project. Todes articulates the conception of bodily second nature and practical-perceptual openness to the world that McDowell calls for. My third section takes up the differences between Todes and McDowell that prompted Dreyfus to juxtapose the two accounts. Todes developed his account of perceptual praxis as part of an explicitly dualistic theory contrasting preconceptual perception with the conceptual domain of imagination and thought. His position might thus seem directly opposed to McDowell’s claim that ‘‘experiences themselves are already equipped with conceptual content’’ (McDowell, 1994, p. 25). We cannot simply take this direct opposition at face value, however, because Todes and McDowell work with fundamentally different accounts of conceptual understanding. Moreover, I will show that we have compelling reasons to prefer McDowell’s version of the conceptual domain: Todes’s accounts of language and theoretical imagination cannot capture the open-ended character of thought and language (expressed by its compositionality and inferential articulation), and they explicate listeners’ linguistic competence at the expense of failing to understand what speakers can do. The result is that McDowell can accept the core of Todes’s account of perceptual practice while denying Todes’s claim that perception is preconceptual. In the final section of the paper, I show how conjoining Todes’s account of perceptual practice with McDowell’s understanding of the conceptual domain suggests a novel Mind, Body, and World: Todes and McDowell 39