Critical Notice of : Mind and World

The general topic of Mind and World, the written version of John McDowell's 1991 John Locke Lectures, is how`concepts mediate the relation between minds and the world'. And one of the main aims is`to suggest that Kant should still have a central place in our discussion of the way thought bears on reality' (1). 1 In particular, McDowell urges us to adopt a thesis that he finds in Kant, or perhaps in Strawson's Kant: the content of experience is conceptualized; what we experience is always the kind of thing that we could also believe. When an agent has a veridical experience, shètakes in, for instance sees, that things are thus and so' (9). McDowell's argument for this thesis is indirect, but potentially powerful. He discusses a tension concerning the roles of experience and conceptual capacities in thought, and he claims that the only adequate resolution involves granting that experiences have conceptualized content. The tension, elaborated below, can be expressed roughly as follows: judgments must be somehow constrained by features of the external environment, else judgments would be utterly divorced from the world they purport to be about; yet our judgments must be somehow free of external control, else we could give no sense to the idea that we are responsible for our judgments. McDowell explicitly relates this puzzle to the Kantian slogan, `thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind'; and he often speaks in terms of`receptivity' and`spontaneity'. But despite the terminology and occasional references to Hegel or Gadamer, Mind and World – henceforth `M&W' – is written primarily for those schooled in the analytic tradition; although interest in M&W will not be limited to philosophers working in this tradition. McDowell makes heavy use of Davidson (on justification) and Evans (on content). Strawson's influence pervades the book. Sellars' notion of a `space of reasons' figures prominently. Wittgenstein is a recurring character. This makes for a rich, stimulating text. But some readers will (like me) not begin M&W with all this background firmly in mind; and 2 McDowell's great strength is not that of presenting complex issues in clear simple language for the uninitiated. Coupled with the intrinsic difficulty of its subject matter, this makes M&W a hard read. Effort is, however, repaid. McDowell locates an important tension in our thinking about thought, suggests an attractive way of easing the tension, and offers a plausible diagnosis of why the …