Abstract
John McDowell has defended a position called minimal empiricism, that aims to avoid the oscillation between traditional empiricism’s commitment to a set of contents working as external justifiers for our system of beliefs and a coherentist position where our thought receives no constraint from the world. We share McDowell’s dissatisfaction with both options, but find his minimal empiricism committed to the idea of a tribunal of experience where isolated contents are infused into our network of inferences. This commitment is prone to sceptical attacks and waters down McDowell’s holism. We propose to retain McDowell’s partial re-enchantment of nature—without appealing to McDowell’s Kantian conception of experience—, and argue that it is sufficient to avoid the oscillation and to make sense of the objectivity of thought.
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Notes
In 2000, McDowell suggests a rewriting of Kant’s slogan that intuitions without concepts are blind. They are, he argues, rather mute (McDowell 2000).
Brandom (2002: 92) diagnoses McDowell’s position to hold all of these three theses: without perceptual experience we have no knowledge of matters of fact, conceptual content requires experience and experience is a tribunal to our thinking. He then claims that McDowell is an empiricist in epistemology, in semantics and in the philosophy of mind.
In “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism” Brandom (1999a) draws a comparison between Quine’s criticism of the first dogma as adopted by Carnap on the one hand and Hegel’s critique of Kant’s pre-existing structures needed for experience. Brandom presents the issue in terms of a refusal to accept an arbitrary distinction between the moment where rules are instituted and the moment where they are applied. He suspects that any such distinction can only be drawn arbitrarily.
Something along this lines seems to be suggested by Hegel. For example, in Hegel 1807: §200 he comments on stoicism and sketches a way to overcome its limitations.
Rorty (1999: 375) points out that we can get right something that does not exist—we can know more about Zeus now than in the Renaissance. What we take as part of reality is no less regulated by the soft facts intertwined with our thinking practices than anything else.
One could take the identity between true thinkables and soft facts as a foundational belief. We would then feel inclined to reply that a challenge to the belief that soft facts are true thinkables cannot come from anywhere but a reason to challenge all of our soft facts at once and there are no self-standing reason to support this challenge.
It would be of independent interest to argue that, against the reading of Hegel favoured by Brandom 1999a, where the whole of reason is ultimately modelled on the free and spontaneous operation of Kant’s understanding (endangering the desideratum of keeping in touch with a world that preexists free thinking practices), it would do more justice to Hegel’s undertaking (an to the fact that “phenomenology” is part of the title of his most important work) to think of reason as experiential through and through.
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Bensusan, H., Pinedo-Garcia, M. Minimal Empiricism Without Dogmas. Philosophia 35, 197–206 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-007-9061-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-007-9061-0