Abstract
A large part of Hilary Putnam’s latest work is spent on disagreeing with John McDowell’s conceptualist view of perception which has been expressed in Mind and World and the McDowellian disjunctivism. Nevertheless, Putnam does not articulate which specific aspects of McDowell’s view he disagrees with. This paper endeavours to: first, clarify what Putnam’s disagreement with McDowell precisely is based on an investigation of the views held by each of the two philosophers regarding the problem of the mind and perception, as well as their attitudes toward the relevant sciences; and second, examine Putnam’s argument against McDowell, then reconstruct it in its most plausible form. Before diving into Putnam’s exact disagreement with McDowell in §3, I consider it important to first clarify the common stance that the two philosophers share, namely the stance which opposes reductionism and eliminativism about the mind. Following that, I will explicate the views held by each of the two philosophers as well as point out where they diverge or disagree on. We will see that Putnam has appreciated the virtue in McDowell’s conceptualist view of doxastic perception. Nevertheless, Putnam argues that perceptual experience is not exhausted by what must be put under the actualisation of the perceiving subject’s conceptual capacities, and there is the dimension of ‘sense impression’, together with the possibility for science’s intervention to our discussion on perception, that has been neglected by McDowell. Finally, in §4, I will discuss some problems I have found in Putnam’s argument and give my own solutions in the hope of contributing to today’s current debates. I argue that ‘sense impression’, though it exceeds the perceiver’s acquired conceptual capacities, must in principle be conceptual insofar as it can be intelligible to us. Putnam’s criticism of McDowell only stands if McDowell’s conceptualist view is understood as a static first-order metaphysical picture of human perception. Meanwhile, Putnam’s proposal for science’s intervention should be taken not as aiming at a better substitutive picture to McDowell’s, but as advocating a certain attitude towards our enterprise of studying human perception which is always open to possible collaborations between different disciplines as well as to possible critiques from future reflections.
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Notes
Putnam, Words and Life, 10.
Ibid,11.
Intensionality is a feature of sentences and is a linguistic expression of intentionality. When we want to characterize a mental state in terms of its intentional content, we must do so with intensional sentences. Non-intensional sentences about the mental, then, are (believed to be) descriptions that do not appeal to intentionality but only to what the mental denotes in the material world.
Putnam, “Reductionism and the Nature of Psychology”, 131.
Ibid, 131.
Notice that the word “large” used by Putnam have suggested some degree of reduction, for example, to the level of physical size. However, this does not render a challenge to Putnam’s argument, as I will discuss later.
“Reductionism and the Nature of Psychology”, 132.
Ibid, 134.
Arguably, this conception is still widely accepted by psychologists in this century.
This point will be pick up again in the discussion of Putnam’s disagreement with McDowell. See Putnam’s “Reply to John McDowell”, 666–7.
Though some philosophers hold that the association between pain and the C-fibre firing is a myth. See Roland Puccetti’s “The Great C-Fiber Myth: A Critical Note”.
“Reductionism and the Nature of Psychology”, 141–145. Putnam spends a section in the article on arguing that the attempt to study human intelligence by designing the so-called IQ tests, as executed by social scientists, has assumed a technical concept of “intelligence” while fully neglected the ordinary language use of “intelligence”. The IQ tests “do not measure any kind of absolute cognitive capacity for anyone” (144) but have been treated as an absolute measure of human intelligence.
Ibid, 135.
Ibid, 135.
The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, 666–7.
“Reductionism and the Nature of Psychology”, 141.
Words and Life, preface vi.
Ibid, 441.
This is usually taken to be what W. V. Quine’s view is. Quine, in his famous “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, argues that there is no synthetic/analytic distinction so the scientific reduction cannot be achieved. However, Quine does not conclude by defending the autonomy of different sciences. Instead, he argues that all sciences should be put under the scope of our best physical theory. In “Epistemology Naturalized”, Quine asks for settling epistemology in a chapter of behaviourist psychology, and this move is taken by philosophers such as Kim Jaegwon and Putnam (at least at a time) to be an elimination of normativity in reason, which would be unacceptable.
Putnam, “Why Reason Can't Be Naturalized”, 20.
Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’”, 136.
Ibid, 136.
Ibid, 137.
Ibid, 144.
McDowell, “Putnam on Mind and Meaning”, 36.
Ibid, 35.
Ibid, 36.
Ibid, 37. Here McDowell brings ideas from Colin McGinn.
Words and Life, 283. Though this article was written after McDowell’s Critique, the socio-functionalist view had already been abandoned by Putnam before McDowell’s critique.
“Putnam on Mind and Meaning”, 38–9.
Ibid, 39.
Ibid, 40.
As we will see, this line of thought will appear again in McDowell’s rejection to the conjunctivist view of perception.
“Putnam on Mind and Meaning”, 43.
Ibid, 44.
The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, 659. This question is characterised by James Conant as the worry about “Kantian Skepticism”.
McDowell, Mind and World, Introduction xi.
Ibid, 11.
Ibid, 48.
Ibid, 4.
Ibid, 9.
Ibid, 69.
Ibid, 125.
Ibid, 84.
Such an example arguably originates from Wilfrid Sellars’ Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, 37–8.
McDowell, “Tyler Burge on Disjunctivism”, 245.
Putnam agrees with this point and calls the disappearance of mental representation, the denial of an interface between mind and world, a state of “second naivete”.
Words and Life, 292–3. In a footnote of the article, Putnam writes: “The idea that the mind is neither a material nor an immaterial organ but a system of capacities is strongly urged by John McDowell in an article titled ‘Putnam on Mind and Meaning’… Although I do not wish to hold McDowell responsible for my formulations here, I want to acknowledge the pervasive influence of his work, which has reinforced a standing interest of mine in natural realism in the theory of perception.”.
Putnam, Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity, 144.
Reading McDowell, 182.
Ibid, 182.
See Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, B131, “The I think must be capable of accompanying all my presentations; otherwise something would be presented to me which could not be thought at all, which means no less than: the presentation would be either impossible, or at least nothing to me... Consequently every manifold of perception has a necessary relation to the I think, in the same subject in which the manifold is found.”.
Reading McDowell, 183.
McDowell, Having the World in View, 256–72.
Ibid, 260.
Conant, “Resolute Disjunctivism”.
Jacobson and Putnam, “Against Perceptual Conceptualism”, 16.
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity, 145.
As I will say later, it seems to me that Putnam and McDowell really focus on different questions: McDowell has been discussing about perception, but Putnam is concerned with not only perception but also the wider process of sense experience.
See Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity, 149.
With that said, Putnam does not commit to claiming that sense impression on any level is the same for both humans and animals. This would be illustrated later.
This might make “attending to pain” sound like the “highest common factor” between animals’ feeling and human feeling, but I will soon clarify that Putnam really means something different.
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity, 148.
Ibid, 188.
Noë, Action in Perception, 76–9.
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity, 151. Another distinction that Putnam stresses (arguably inspired by Ned Block) is that sense impression, being phenomenal, varies from person to person, thereby not to be identified with apperception which is subject to existing public languages. See Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity, 189–191; and Philosophy in an Age of Science, 624–40.
“Against Perceptual Conceptualism”, 10–13. Jacobson and Putnam draw evidence from V. A. F. Lamme’s example that whenever a face-like construction is presented to one, there would be firing of neurons which encodes the presence of a face.
A change blindness case, in general, is a case where a change occurs in what is visually presented to the experiencing subject but the subject fails to observe the change. A controlled experiment on change blindness is discussed in “Against Perceptual Conceptualism”, 5–6.
Ibid, 20.
Ibid, 23–7.
Ibid, 26.
In “Sensation and Apperception”, Putnam, I think falsely, identifies the shift of focusing discussed here with the “attending to” mentioned earlier. I think his mistake lies in a confusion between the change of phenomenal content due to one’s focus in having a sense impression and simply having a sense impression. See Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity, 148–9.
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity, 150.
Putnam, The Threefold Cord, 5.
Ibid, 6.
Putnam, Philosophy in an Age of Science, 636.
Note that environment used here should be taken in a wide sense, including not only physical environment but also cultural and other types of non-physical environment.
The Threefold Cord, 9.
See Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity 169–175, and also Philosophy in an Age of Science 632–3, 635.
In Philosophy in an Age of Science, Putnam argues for an identity of “functional characterisation” in these two cases but rejects the idea that the identity is of brain states (637). However, in “‘Naïve’ Realism” and Qualia”, Putnam is convinced by Block on that it is harmless to propose an identity of brain states with “qualia”, i.e., sense impression (Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity, 174–5).
By positing this “ideal observer”, one need not be committed to assuming this observer’s view to be infallible like a God’s point of view. All that is required is that this “ideal observer” have the access to what is phenomenally presented to the perceiving subject but not under the actualisation of the subject’s acquired conceptual capacities.
Here, I share agreement with McDowell on “the unboundedness of the conceptual”: “[t]here is no guarantee that the world is completely within the reach of a system of concepts and conceptions as it stands at some particular moment in its historical development” (Mind and World, 40.), on condition that the “unboundedness” is not read as claiming a first-order metaphysical structure of the world (namely that everything is covered by the conceptual), but rather read as, like how Hegel’s idealism should be read according to Markus Gabriel’s suggestion, making a meta-metaphysical claim “that there is no barrier internal to the conditions of objective purport separating thought from what there is” (Gabriel, “Hegel’s Idealism”, 186.). However, as said earlier, McDowell seems to leave the question how the development of a subject’s conceptual capacities is affected by the environment unanswered.
Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, 29.
Ibid, 30.
Mind and World, 125.
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity, 146.
Ibid, 165.
Philosophy in an Age of Science, 83 & 88 & 615.
Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity, 167.
Note that acquiring a conceptual capacity is not necessarily an “amodal” practise. Rational capacities that have to do with bodily movements—such as intentionally doing a handstand—involve conceptual elements, while the acquisition and the actualisation of them require physical interactions between the subject’s body and the surroundings. We may also think of cases where a subject is equipped with artificial limbs. The subject’s learning how to control those limbs which do not grow from her own body surely needs the cultivation of certain conceptual capacities. Moreover, there are quite a few cases provided by the empirical studies—e.g., the rubber hand illusion (Tsakiris and Haggard, “The Rubber Hand Illusion Revisited: Visuotactile Integration and Self-Attribution”), Ian Waterman’s story of losing his body schema and regaining control of his body through visual contact (McNeill, Quaeghebeur & Duncan, “IW—‘the man who lost his body’”)—that suggest various kinds of modal capacities are likely to depend upon conceptual acquisition.
I also believe that the whole debate between these two philosophers should be rightly read as a dialectical process around what I put at the beginning of the first section, namely “there exists a picture of perception which correctly depicts the ‘real’ relation between mind and world, and philosophers’ job would be to discover that relation.” I regard both McDowell’s conceptualism (if understood as similar to what I proposed above) and Putnam’s liberal functionalism as therapeutic attempts toward the very idea that there is an essential final picture of human perception to be discovered. The rejection of reductionism/eliminativism, McDowell’s critique of earlier Putnam’s isolationist conception of mind, and Putnam’s critique of the metaphysical picture that he interprets from McDowell’s conceptualism, are all different phases in this dialectical process.
For example, there are functions shaped by evolution, and the empirical investigation of such functions (of course, in a non-scientistic way) does not run against McDowell, but even helps explain how McDowell’s claim that mature humans have second nature can be potentially backed up.
Philosophy in an Age of Science, 88.
Gallagher and Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 220. (Note: This is a well-written and extremely illuminating book introduced to me by Li Yizhi during my first revision).
Gallagher, regarding himself as following Merleau-Ponty, proposes the notion of mutual enlightenment between phenomenology and cognitive science.
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Xu, Y. The Putnam-McDowell Controversy on Perception and the Relevant Sciences. Philosophia 50, 787–814 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00412-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00412-9