[MD] continental and analytic philosophy

[david buchanan]

Matt said to Ron:
My reticence to use the pre-conceptual/conceptual distinction myself, or suggest it as a good idea, is not because people occasionally use Platonic techniques of argument  ("that's just the way things are," as if there were a method of demonstration lying around) as you did not, but because after we distinguish purposes, the only ones I see left are ones created by taking on the Platonic problematic (like the unrepresentability of pure experience). These we might call "metaphysical purposes," and the only way to fix them are with "metaphysical splits."  I don't see the need for taking on the problematic, see those purposes as "false needs" (in Marcuse's sense), and so don't see the utility of the distinction. 
I certainly wouldn't claim that there aren't people out there making strong claims to the contrary (John McDowell in Mind and World is one), but as largely a spectator to the sport, I still can't see the point that's being made.  The issue that Dave has with me, I think, largely surrounds this--he perceives me as evacuating philosophical space.


dmb says:

It's not very clear to me what you're saying here. I thought it might help if I looked into McDowell's "Mind and World", although I can't tell what his claim is contrary to. When I try to simplify your sentence by taking out the parenthetical statements and qualifiers, I get something like:My reticence to use the pre-conceptual/conceptual distinction is because after we distinguish purposes, the only ones I see left are ones created by taking on the Platonic problematic, like the unrepresentability of pure experience." I don't know what that means but it seems that your reticence about this distinction stems from issues that have nothing to do with the distinction. I'd say your reticence comes from the influence of philosophers who tend to understand things in terms of analytic philosophy and not pragmatism. It's a source of confusion, I think, because you take their criticisms of traditional empiricism and inappropriately apply it to radical empiricism, which has a completely different "metaphysical" starting point and a completely different theory of truth. I know it's an unpleasant thought, but I'd like you to entertain the possibility that your reticence is the result of conceptual errors with respect to the meaning of the preconceptual/conceptual distinction. 

As I understand it, the analytic philosophers deny that there is any such thing as the preconceptual. Apparently, McDowell's Mind and World is all about about denying exactly that. He's an analytic philosopher who is influenced by Rorty and your other favorites from the analytic school. I know it's only Wiki, but it's also totally relevant to this dispute....

Mind and World (1994)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 develops an account of that which Kant called the "spontaneity" of our judgement in perceptual experience, while trying to avoid 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 this view with what he deems to be his own "naturalistic" perspective in which the distinctive capacities of mind are a cultural achievement of our "second nature", an idea that he adapts from Gadamer. The book concludes with a critique of Quine's narrow conception of empirical experience and also a critique of Donald Davidson's views on belief as inherently veridical, in which Davidson plays the role of the pure coherentist.One of the hallmarks of McDowell's later work is his denial that there is any philosophical use for an idea that our experience contains representations that are not conceptually structured, so-called "non-conceptual content". Given that other philosophers claim that scientific accounts of our mental lives, particularly in the cognitive sciences, need this idea, this claim of McDowell's has provoked a great deal of discussion. McDowell develops a stringent reading of Sellars' diagnosis of a "myth of the given" in perceptual experience to argue that we need always to separate out the exercise of concepts in experience from a causal account of the pre-conditions of experience and that the idea of "non-conceptual content" straddles this boundary in a philosophically unacceptable way.
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".

dmb continues:
It's funny that Strawson, the one who thinks SOM is a straw man, is listed here. Seems to me that all these guys are rejecting the notion of objectivity without dropping the basic premise of SOM. The don't deny that it's all a matter of the subjective mind's capacity to represent the world, the debate is just about the ways in which our representations are structured. To say that there is "no blankly causal impingement of the external world upon judgement", for example, is to say we can't subjectively have the Kantian thing-in-itself, the objective reality as it really is. As I see it, you are understanding the non-conceptual in these terms, in terms of the analytic critique of traditional empiricism, both of which are understood and handled from within the assumptions of SOM.

As a result, you have a misconception about what the non-conceptual ("pure experience" and "Quality") means. It certainly doesn't involve a claim that the subject has direct access to objective reality or a claim that we've gone beyond mere appearances to obtain reality as it really is because radical empiricism begins by rejecting those categories and distinctions. The idea of pure experience is predicated on the notion that subjects and objects are not the "pre-conditions of experience" but rather the secondary conceptual effects of experience. At the risk of sounding like an anti-analytic snob, I really don't think these guys are ever going to help you with radical empiricism. That's just not what they're talking about. I can see how it might look like they are, but they aren't. The myth of the given that they're criticizing is the myth of the positivists in particular and the SOMers in general. Their position as inheritors of that tradition and the influence of Kant, as alluded to in the wiki article above, is a dead give away. 
   

Matt said:
...How do we suggest to other philosophers that while we don't have a systematically articulated response to their arguments, we also don't "feel," on the inside, that the argument was successful--the sense in which we've "been successfully persuaded to change our opinions"?  It would be lying, wouldn't it, to say because you can't think of anything cogent to say, that you've been persuaded by their arguments?  Or, because of your quasi-inarticulacy, to begin to repeat their positions because you can't articulate your own up to high enough standards? This may seem like pure evasion, but to me it is a description of the first-person difficulty of negotiating the argumentative process--how it _feels_ to argue and be persuaded.  If you don't _feel_ persuaded, what do you do?  What is the proper response?  What is the best rhetorical presentation to give each side their due?



dmb says:

I remember a friend of mine once explained to me how he had thoroughly and utterly defeated his opponent in a debate but also told me that the victory would be much more satisfying if only his opponent could see it that way. I laughed out loud.

But it seems that in our case, you remain unpersuaded as to the value of the preconceptual/conceptual distinction because you're listening to the analytic critiques of traditional empiricism and mistaking that for a critique of radical empiricism. But if you just stop for a moment and remember that radical empiricism is itself a critique of and replacement for traditional empiricism, you can see what a big problem it might be to confuse or conflate the two. Are you, at least, persuaded of that much yet? 

Please don't get upset about my efforts to correct you. I realize you're not going like the idea that there is something about this that you don't understand but my aim is not to insult your intelligence or find fault just for the fun of it. If I'm right, then you and I have been talking about two completely different things for a long time and it would explain a lot as to why there has been so much progress. Give it some thought, will you. Ultimately, you are the only one who can change your mind. I can put a few suggestions out there but you have to put it together in your own thoughts and then see what it does. 


 		 	   		  
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