Table Of ContentMcDOWELL
AND HIS CRITICS
PHILOSOPHERS AND THEIR CRITICS
General Editor: Ernest Lepore
Philosophy is an interactive enterprise. Much of it is carried out in dialogue as theories and ideas
are presented and subsequently refi ned in the crucible of close scrutiny. The purpose of this series
is to reconstruct this vital interplay among thinkers. Each book consists of a temporary assessment
of an important living philosopher’s work. A collection of essays written by an interdisciplinary
group of critics addressing the substantial theses of the philosopher’s corpus opens each volume.
In the last section, the philosopher responds to his or her critics, clarifi es crucial points of the
discussion, or updates his or her doctrines.
1 Dretske and His Critics
Edited by Brian McLaughlin
2 John Searle and His Critics
Edited by Ernest Lepore and Robert van Gulick
3 Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His Critics
Edited by Barry Loewer and Georges Rey
4 Dennett and His Critics
Edited by Bo Dahlbom
5 Danto and His Critics
Edited by Mark Rollins
6 Perspectives on Quine
Edited by Robert B. Barrett and Roger F. Gibson
7 The Churchlands and Their Critics
Edited by Robert N. McCauley
8 Singer and His Critics
Edited by Dale Jamieson
9 Rorty and His Critics
Edited by Robert B. Brandom
10 Chomsky and His Critics
Edited by Louise M. Antony and Norbert Hornstein
11 Dworkin and His Critics
Edited by Justine Burley
12 Ernest Sosa and His Critics
Edited by John Greco
13 McDowell and His Critics
Edited by Cynthia Macdonald and Graham Macdonald
McDOWELL
AND HIS CRITICS
Edited by
Cynthia Macdonald and Graham Macdonald
© 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
except for editorial material and organization © 2006 by Cynthia Macdonald and Graham Macdonald; Chapter 2
“Reason and Language” © 2006 by Richard Heck; Chapter 6 “Acting in the Light of the Appearances” © 2006 by
Jonathan Dancy.
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1 2006
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McDowell and his critics / edited by Cynthia Macdonald and Graham Macdonald.
p. cm. — (Philosophers and their critics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-0623-8 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-0623-9 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-0624-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-0624-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. McDowell, John Henry. 2. Philosophy, British—20th century.
I. Macdonald, Cynthia, 1951– II. Macdonald, Graham. III. Series.
B1647.M144M33 2006
192—dc22
2006001712
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Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Introduction ix
1 Austerity and Openness 1
. .
Response to Sainsbury 14
c
2 Reason and Language 22
. , .
Response to Heck 45
c
3 Some Philosophical Integrations 50
Response to Bilgrami 66
c
4 Self-Knowledge and Inner Space 73
ac
Response to Macdonald 89
c
5 Personal Identity, Ethical not Metaphysical 95
Response to Rovane 114
c
6 Acting in the Light of the Appearances 121
Response to Dancy 134
c
vi
7 External Reasons 142
Response to Pettit and Smith 170
c
8 Aristotle’s Use of Prudential Concepts 180
. .
Response to Irwin 198
c
9 Julius Caesar and George Berkeley Play Leapfrog 203
Response to Blackburn 217
c
10 The Two Natures: Another Dogma? 222
ac
Response to Macdonald 235
c
Index 240
Notes on Contributors
AKEEL BILGRAMI is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and is the
author of Belief and Meaning (Blackwell, 1992) and Self-Knowledge and Resentment (2006).
SIMON BLACKBURN is currently the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was Fellow and Lecturer in Philosophy at Pembroke
College, Oxford, from 1970 until 1990, and from 1990 to 2001 the Edna J. Koury Distinguished
Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. From 1984 to 1990 he
edited the journal Mind. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2001. His books are
Reason and Prediction (1973), Spreading the Word (1984), Essays in Quasi-Realism (1993),
The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (1994), Ruling Passions (1998), Think (1999), Truth, edited
with Keith Simmons (2001), Being Good (2001), Lust (2004), and Truth: A Guide for the
Perplexed (2005).
JONATHAN DANCY is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, United Kingdom, and
the University of Texas at Austin. His key publications are An Introduction to Contemporary Epis-
temology (Blackwell, 1985), Moral Reasons (Blackwell, 1993), Practical Reality (2000), and Ethics
without Principles (2004).
RICHARD G. HECK, JR. is Professor of Philosophy at Brown University and an Associate Fellow
of Arché, the AHRC Research Center for the Philosophy of Logic, Language, Mathematics
and Mind. His recent publications include “Truth and Disquotation,” Synthèse (2004), “Do
Demonstratives Have Senses?,” Philosophers’ Imprint 2 (2002), “Cardinality, Counting, and
Equinumerosity,” Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 41 (2000), and “Non-Conceptual Content
and the ‘Space of Reasons’,” Philosophical Review 109 (2000).
T. H. IRWIN is Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters, Cornell University.
He is the author of Plato’s Gorgias (translation and notes) (1979), Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
(translation and notes) (2nd edn, 1999), Aristotle’s First Principles (1988), Classical Thought (1989),
and Plato’s Ethics (1995).
CYNTHIA MACDONALD is Professor of Philosophy, Queen’s University Belfast, and Adjunct Pro-
fessor of Philosophy, University of Canterbury, New Zealand. She is author of Mind–Body Identity
Theories (1989) and Varieties of Things: Foundations of Contemporary Metaphysics (Blackwell,
2005), editor of Philosophy of Psychology and Connectionism, with Graham Macdonald (both
Blackwell, 1995), editor of Knowing Our Own Minds, with Crispin Wright and Barry C. Smith
viii
(1998), and editor of Contemporary Readings in the Foundations of Metaphysics, with Stephen
Laurence (Blackwell, 1998).
GRAHAM MACDONALD is Professor of Philosophy, University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and
Distinguished International Fellow, Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen’s University Belfast.
He co-authored Semantics and Social Science, with Philip Pettit (1980), edited Perception and
Identity: Essays Presented to A. J. Ayer, With His Replies to Them (1979), and co-edited Fact,
Science, and Morality, with Crispin Wright (Blackwell, 1986), Philosophy of Psychology and Con-
nectionism, with Cynthia Macdonald (Blackwell, 1995) and Karl Popper: Critical Appraisals, with
Philip Catton (2004).
PHILIP PETTIT is L. S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton Univer-
sity, where he teaches in political theory and philosophy. His recent books include Republicanism
(1997), A Theory of Freedom (2001), The Economy of Esteem, with Geoffrey Brennan (2004),
as well as a collection of his own papers, Rules, Reasons, and Norms (2002), and a collection of
co-authored papers involving Frank Jackson and Michael Smith, Mind, Morality and Explana-
tion (2004).
CAROL ROVANE is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Her key publications include
The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics, and articles on various topics,
including the fi rst person, personal identity, rational agency, group agency, consciousness, moral
psychology, and ethical relativism.
R. M. SAINSBURY is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and Susan
Stebbing Professor at King’s College London. His most recent books are Departing From Frege
(2002) and Reference Without Referents (2005).
MICHAEL SMITH is Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He is the author of The Moral
Problem (Blackwell, 1994), Ethics and the A Priori: Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and
Meta-Ethics (2004), and Mind, Morality and Explanation: Selected Collaborations, with Frank
Jackson and Philip Pettit (2004).
Introduction
John McDowell’s philosophical work is both seminal and remarkable in a number of ways. The
spread of his writing is surely unique; it ranges over interpretative issues in Greek philosophy to
contemporary debates in the theory of meaning. His views are highly infl uential in ethics, episte-
mology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language; his writing on Aristotle, Kant,
Wittgenstein, and, more recently, Wilfrid Sellars, presents a remarkable engagement with, and
sometimes reworking of, the thought of key fi gures in the history of philosophy. In this intro-
duction we will attempt to summarize his many contributions to philosophy, emphasizing the
consistency and unity of McDowell’s approach to such diverse issues.
The extraordinary unity in McDowell’s thought has its origin in a view of philosophy
that McDowell fi nds in Wittgenstein, one that is opposed to philosophical theorizing, or what
McDowell sometimes calls “constructive philosophy.” This approach embraces Wittgenstein’s
dictum that philosophy “leaves everything as it is” (Wittgenstein 1953: 124). The work of philosophy,
on this account, is not to supply us with novel explanations of puzzling phenomena, but to release
us from the thought that there really is a philosophical problem to be solved here. The general idea
is that we are under the illusion that some constructive philosophical work needs to be done because
we are tempted to accept some underlying assumptions that generate a tension, a tension provoking
philosophical anxiety. We then, erroneously, think that the only way of relieving this anxiety is by
producing a philosophical explanation or theory, one that we hope will dispel the anxiety whilst
leaving the assumptions in place. The therapeutic method McDowell prefers is to expose and ques-
tion the assumptions generating the tension: once we clearly see that we are not driven to theorize
our way out of the problem, anxiety will subside, and everything will be left “open to view.” The
option that has been obscured by the intrusive assumptions is made readily visible.
This meta-philosophical view is best appreciated when seen in action. In what follows we begin
by looking at a topic that might be thought to least fi t the therapeutic approach, the theory of
meaning. We start with this not only because it was, chronologically, one of the starting points for
McDowell’s philosophical work, but also because it is here that we fi nd him resolutely refusing to
be drawn into giving a philosophical explanation of meaning, an explanation that would provide
an account of that relation between meaning symbols and the world that gives symbols their
meaning.
McDowell’s position on meaning arises out of Davidson’s suggestion that a “theory of meaning”
for a natural language such as English can be given by a theory of truth for that language. The
axioms of the theory would specify the extensions of the semantic primitives in the language
(denotations for the case of singular terms, satisfaction conditions for the case of predicates) and
combinatorial rules would show how the truth-conditions of complex expressions depend on just
such an assignment of extensions to the semantic primitives. The result of doing this for all the
x
semantic primitives and all the possibilities of combination would be an extensional theory of truth
for the language, one that would be able to specify for each sentence the truth-condition for that
sentence. Davidson relied on the formal apparatus provided by Tarski, taking from Tarski the
criterion of adequacy for such a theory: the axioms and rules should deliver as theorems true
instances of the biconditional “ ‘p’ is true if and only if p” (known as T-sentences). That is, the
denotation assigned to “John” and the extensions assigned to “six,” “feet,” and “tall” should yield
as a theorem: “John is six feet tall” is true if and only if John is six feet tall. Davidson also used
the phrase “true-in-L” to relativize the truth-theory to a specifi c language, avoiding the threat
posed by orthographically similar items having a different signifi cance in different languages.
This theory is extensional, so one might wonder how such a theory could be relevant to someone
wishing to use it to illuminate the meaning of the sentences of a language, meaning being tradi-
tionally construed as intensional. This extensionality may be thought to be a particular problem
for one who wishes to respect Frege’s intuitions about the difference in meaning, or sense, of
coreferring expressions. A Tarski-style theory of truth could be adequate if it delivered theorems
such as: “Lewis Carroll is a dead author” is true-in-English if and only if Charles Dodgson is a
dead author, given that the mentioned sentence is true if and only if the used sentence is true.
Now McDowell does think that Frege’s approach to sameness and difference of meaning is fun-
damentally correct. In particular, he thinks that the Fregean constraint, which states that if a
rational thinker can take different attitudes to propositions then that fact should be explicable by
the assignment of different meanings to sentences expressing those propositions, must be accepted.
So if a thinker can rationally believe that “Lewis Carroll is a dead author” is true whilst not believ-
ing that “Charles Dodgson is a dead author” is true, then that difference in attitude must be
explicable by the different meanings attaching to “Lewis Carroll” and “Charles Dodgson.” How
can an extensional theory of truth for a language deliver such differences in sense for coreferring
expressions?
To deal with this problem both Davidson and McDowell embed the theory of truth for a natural
language in a wider context, that of making sense of the linguistic and other actions of agents who
use that language. Making sense of the utterances of speakers becomes part of a wider interpreta-
tive task, that of making sense of all of their actions.1 In this wider context the role played by the
adequacy condition for a Tarski-style theory of truth for the language (that it delivers true T-
sentences) is that of a necessary condition on the acceptability of a theory of meaning for the lan-
guage. The additional conditions are supplied by whatever is necessary for the correct interpretation
and rational explanation of all of the speaker’s actions. In the example cited above, it will become
obvious from other actions of John’s that the expressions “Lewis Carroll” and “Charles Dodgson”
are associated with different meanings. That is, an assignment of different meanings to the expres-
sions will make more rational sense of John’s actions than will an assignment of the same meanings.
The axioms of the appropriate truth-theory will respect this difference by having as an axiom:
“ ‘Lewis Carroll’ denotes Lewis Carroll,” and not allowing as an axiom: “ ‘Lewis Carroll’ denotes
Charles Dodgson.”
Earlier we said that the theory of meaning is an area where McDowell’s “non-constructive”
approach to philosophical method is most under strain, and it should be obvious from the above
brief sketch of the project why this should be so. Providing a theory of truth for a natural language
adequate to underpin the theory of meaning for that language is a large undertaking, one that has,
on the face of it, spawned a great deal of constructive philosophizing. Davidson’s own early work
in this area is a case in point, especially his work on action sentences. Here his semantic analysis
of a sentence like “John cut the bread in the kitchen at midnight” required the semanticist to
