Abstract
McDowell motivates a disjunctive conception of experience in the context of other-minds skepticism, but his conception of other minds has been less frequently discussed. In this paper, I focus on McDowell’s perceptual account of others that emphasizes the primitivity of others’ bodily expressivity and his defense of a common-sense understanding of others. And I suggest that Husserl’s subtle analysis of bodily expressivity not only bears fundamental similarities with McDowell’s but also helps to demonstrate the sense in which McDowell’s emphasis on bodily expressivity can remove some of the grounds for other minds skepticism. I argue that the other’s behavioral manifestation is first and foremost perceived in a salient Gestalt and social perception is inherently infused with a constitutive propensity with which we normally take the other as human person in the first place. In this light, I show that Husserl’s account can better elucidate human expressivity and its intrinsic features, thereby helping to remove some of the props of other-minds skepticism. As a result, I believe it proves fruitful to juxtapose McDowell’s and Husserl’s account of bodily expressivity, so as to alternate the Cartesian picture of other-minds that engenders skeptic anxiety and to secure a common-sense understanding of other people.
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Notes
To be sure, many authors hold that McDowell’s disjunctivism lacks any anti-skeptical implications, for instance, Pritchard and Ranalli (2018), Conee (2007), Wright (2008) and Echeverri (2011), whereas others such as Millar (2008) and Overgaard (2011) argue that McDowell’s disjunctivism, and in particular his account of perceptual experience, can adequately respond to at least one kind of skepticism, namely Humean skepticism.
According to Williams (2008), (2009), we can distinguish between several forms of skepticism (in Hume) according to different parameters, ranging from, for instance, epistemological and conceptual skepticism, to methodological and practical skepticism. Williams however does not address Hume’s skepticism of other minds in particular; for the latter, see, e.g., Waldow (2009). In this paper, I mainly focus on two sorts of skepticism discussed in the literature on (McDowell’s) disjunctivism, namely, Humean and Cartesian skepticism.
Martin (2006) further thinks that the first line of skepticism is Humean and the second Cartesian, and he suggests that they are two independent lines of argument. While Humean skepticism challenges the possibility of knowledge by appealing to the nature of perceptual experience, Cartesian skepticism appeals to the possibility that things merely appear to be the case. While I do not discuss the differences between Humean and Cartesian skepticism, I would emphasize that, from McDowell’s perspective, both Humean and Cartesian skepticism regarding other minds have a common root in that they hold that perceptual experience is unable to present us with other minds and thus has no role to play in justifying knowledge of other minds.
We need to make a distinction at this point: it is one thing to ask whether McDowell’s disjunctivism succeeds in pacifying skeptical concerns, but it is quite another thing to ask how McDowell diagnoses the problematic assumptions that generate other minds skepticism. While most of the literature has focused on the first question, little attention has been paid to the second. As I show in this paper, it is in light of the second question that we can see how and to what extent McDowell’s diagnosis succeeds in countering other minds skepticism.
In Mind and World, McDowell says, “the aim here is not to answer the skeptical questions, but to begin to see how it might be intellectually respectable to ignore them, to treat them as unreal, in the way that common sense has always wanted to” (McDowell 1996: 113, see 1998c: 410). I will come back to this statement and evaluate the degree to which McDowell’s account accords with our common-sense understanding of other people.
I will come back to this point in “Behavioral Expressivity and Its Normative Character” section.
Elsewhere, Wittgenstein writes: “‘We see emotion’.—As opposed to what?—We do not see facial contortions and make the inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features. Grief, one would like to say, is personified in the face” (Wittgenstein 1980: §570).
The issue of “experiential constituent” in McDowell, to be sure, is open to debate. On an epistemological reading (Haddock and Macpherson 2008; Millar 2008), to say that behavioral expression is embraced as a “constituent” in social perception amounts to saying that someone else’s behavioral expression, in favorable circumstances, contributes to the experiencer’s “epistemic warrant”. That is, behavioral expression provides experientially acquired support for justifying the claim that the person is experiencing some particular inner state. When subject S sees that someone else is in mental state p, then S is in a position to know that p; that is, the fact that p is experientially available to the subject S. Crispin Wright, on the other hand, suggests that the “constituent” as such can be interpreted as a sort of “representational state” that the perceiver allots to the targeted object (see Wright 2008: 392f.). I believe that, in order to have a tangible grip of the concept of “constituent” here, we had better resort to our de facto social experience so as to determine more precisely the phenomenal feature of having someone’s expressivity as a perceptual constituent.
In a recent paper, Pacherie (2005) demonstrates with empirical findings that intentional behaviors have intrinsic observable properties that non-intentional behaviors do not have.
This is particularly Hume’s view of the sources of our knowledge of other minds, see Waldow (2009: 63).
Overgaard (2011) suggests that McDowell’s response to skepticism would have been more persuasive if he restricted his target to the Humean skepticism instead of not teasing apart Humean and Cartesian skepticism. This is because, for Cartesian skeptics, subjective indiscriminability between the veridical and the hallucinatory case is sufficient to raise the challenge of demonstrating that we are indeed veridically perceiving a genuine expression, rather than undergoing a hallucination or perceiving a pretense expression (see Overgaard 2011: 10). But as I show in this sub-section, I think McDowell’s emphasis on bodily expressivity can at least secure a naïve conception of other people by demonstrating that the possible case of deception that motivates Cartesian skepticism already presupposes an experiential belief that the other is in a certain mental state.
Waldow (2009: 81, 99ff.) argues that, on the basis of bodily similarity between others and ourselves, a “natural propensity of association” automatically represents other people as minded human beings. And Waldow concedes a normative constraint in the other’s behavior, because the resemblance between the other’s behavior and our own suffices to “trigger” the association in question. Due to this natural propensity, Waldow further argues, perhaps to the surprise of Humean readers, that we perceive the other’s behavior as expressive right from the beginning, so much so that we can obtain a correct picture of other minds, a picture which is substantially different from the Cartesian one.
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Acknowledgements
This paper was presented at the “Mind and World” Workshop in Shanghai, the “Brown lunch bag” workshop in Zhuhai, and the Conference of “What is phenomenology? Ideas from east Asia” in Sapporo. I’m indebted to the discussants and audience for critical and helpful discussions. I’m particularly grateful to Shun Sato, Hao Tang, Wenjing Cai, Luis Rodrigues for reading earlier versions of the paper and for their helpful suggestions, and in particular to James Jardine for his in-depth comments and careful proofreading, as well as two anonymous reviewers at Human Studies for their helpful suggestions. This paper is supported by Guangdong Provincial Fund of Social Sciences and Humanities (No. GD18YZX01) and by Sun Yat-sen University (No. 17wkpy74)
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Luo, Z. Seeing the Other’s Mind: McDowell and Husserl on Bodily Expressivity and the Problem of Other Minds. Hum Stud 42, 371–389 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-019-09505-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-019-09505-7