The Given: Your Myth, My Idol

My post the other day on horrible philosophical prose was brilliantly and energetically discussed, but more or less inevitably slipped into the deep-thought vs simply-bad-writing death spiral. My fellow blogger, Mark Lance, and I got into a disagreement about John McDowell in particular. I promised more discussion in another thread. Here, dedicated to Mark, is a brief account of why the Given is no Myth.

You are standing in a large room. Above you, there looms a large red sphere suspended from the ceiling. When you look at the sphere, you are subject to a certain visual experience: call this experience E. For the sake of simplicity, think of E as an event in the Cartesian soul. E has certain phenomenal properties: it is an instance of phenomenal RED, of phenomenal LARGE, and so on.  To be clear, these phenomenal properties are characteristics of E. Traditionally, empiricists take experiences such as E to be the ultimate source of empirical knowledge. This is the infamous Myth of the Given.

When a human subject has an experience like E, s/he tends to arrive at the belief that there is a large red sphere above. What explains this? A legitimate question, surely. There are two mental events here: an experience E, followed by the onset O of a belief. Moreover, there is a pattern: experiences of the same phenomenal type lead to beliefs with the same type of content. Why?

According to Donald Davidson, E causes O. And that is all that there is to it. In Mind and World, McDowell demurs. Human beings have reasons for arriving at beliefs. All that Davidson has provided is a cause. It is as if somebody, asked why she went to Kalamazoo, responds that a tornado deposited her there. This is not a reason for going to Kalamazoo; our respondent had no reason—she had, as McDowell says, merely an exculpation. “Her arriving there is completely removed from the domain of what she is responsible for.” The relationship of E to O is based on reason: it ought not to turn out to be forced. “The space of reasons is the realm of freedom.”

Davidson thought that E merely causes O because he thought that experiences are just concrete events. That E has this or that property doesn’t suffice to explain why the subject forms a belief for the reason that E. For her to do so, the subject must herself relate E to the belief. And this is where McDowell thought his old friend, Gareth Evans, had gone wrong. Evans thought E was a reason for a belief, though it is “non-conceptual”. Thus, says McDowell, “the space of reasons is made out to be more extensive than the space of concepts.” McDowell thought that in order to maintain the reason-giving relation between experience and belief, experience has to be conceptually articulated, since belief is. So far, I completely agree with him.

The question now arises: from where do the concepts embedded in experience come? McDowell’s answer is: from the rational mind of the subject, from “spontaneity,” to use the Kantian term.  The concepts involved in perceptual belief arise freely and rationally, and cannot be exculpated.

This is where I take a different path.

1. While I agree that experience is conceptually articulated, my view is that automatic perceptual processing in the brain is responsible for these concepts. The perceptual process is not merely “reception,” in my view. It includes the creation, or rather application, of concepts. However, we do not make the concepts by free rational choice. Thus, we humans are indeed exculpable for “sensory” concepts such as RED, ROUND, and LARGE.

2. This does not mean that perceptual belief is merely caused. It is just that I favour a different account of where “spontaneity,” or rational autonomy, comes in. For I think that the passage from exculpated experience to belief is reason-guided and free. I may experience the world as containing a large red sphere above and in front of me, but I am not forced to believe that the world is actually this way. My experience gives me reason to believe so, but I must evaluate this experience before I form a belief. Moreover, I am not forced to operate with the repertoire of concepts that experience provides: I may modify these or construct new ones.

I believe (and argued at length in Seeing, Doing, and Knowing 2005, Part I) that cognitive neuroscience supports the view I have just sketched. Neuroscience is not the source of these views; philosophy is. But philosophy can be more or less convergent with scientific insights. More about this on another occasion.