II. Perception and the Role of Reason: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate
2.5. Lowering the Bar
One proposal we might call “the lowering the bar-strategy” is that conceptuality need not solely be tied to our ability to articulate in language what it is that we experience (and give reasons for our actions etc.) but that conceptuality can be understood as a form of understanding. One thing is that we as humans and language using creatures, have the ability to bring aspects under
concepts, categorize, describe what we see (perceive) and articulate what we feel (emotions).
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Another thing is whether these conceptuo-lingual capacities always play directly into our daily lives, as one can interpret McDowell to mean.
I have urged that our perceptual relation to the world is conceptual all the way out to the world’s impacts on our receptive capacities. The idea of the conceptual that I mean to be invoking is to be understood in close connection with the idea of rationality, in the sense that is in play in the traditional separation of mature human beings, as rational animals, from the rest of the animal kingdom. Conceptual capacities are capacities that belong to their subject’s rationality. So another way of putting my claim is to say that our perceptual experience is permeated with rationality.82
It seems that it is easy for philosophers to focus on one particularly unique ability and then render the rest of the abilities, activities and skills that can be described as belonging to the animal understandable only through the, in this case, skills of linguistic description. So
“understanding” can be understood as a substitute for “conceptuality” and can happen both with and without direct concept-use.
When we know our way about in our daily environments, skillfully deal and cope with things and non-verbally communicate with other people; there seems to be a whole lot we do intelligently without language needing to play a direct (or even indirect) role. To illustrate this point, there is a whole field in social psychology dedicated to the study of non-verbal
communication. And can this form of communication not be seen as rational in the sense that I understand that another person is angry when he clenches his fist, or know that another is happy when I see her smiling face? Indeed, this seems to be one way of viewing conceptuality that Dreyfus is open to as he in a footnote claim that “what I have been calling skillful coping, Heidegger calls ‘understanding’. And this understanding, importantly, is a form of ’know-how.’”83 The problem is that Dreyfus seems very resistant to the idea that conceptuality is anything else than an ability to distance yourself from the situation, and bring in thought to grasp it (the situation/the activity) objectively. Thought, concepts, language and the deliberations we perform with them are, for Dreyfus mental in nature, and thus belong to the operations of the mind and the space of reasons. So, arriving at a dynamic account of the role of reason in our perceptual lives seems to be difficult for Dreyfus, since on one interpretation, conceptuality for him has nothing to do with perception. At best, conceptuality transforms what is already given in perception. For McDowell, on the other hand, conceptuality appears to have everything to do
82 McDowell, (2007) pp. 338-339.
83 Dreyfus, H. in Schear (2013) p.37.
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with perception, since, as I have stated multiple times, perception for him is pervaded with conceptuality. But then McDowell will face the problem, as mentioned, of how human infants perform the majestic and miraculous leap from the space of causes to the space of reasons, sometime during the maturation process.
This problem is succinctly presented by Gallagher and Zahavi who discusses the very conclusion of Mind & World and presents this quote from the book
The feature of language that really matters is rather this: that natural language, the sort of language into which human beings are first initiated, serves as a repository of tradition, a store of historically accumulated wisdom about what is a reason for what. The tradition is subject to reflective modification by each generation that inherits it. Indeed, a standing obligation to engage in critical reflection is itself part of the inheritance. … But if an individual human being is to realize her potential of taking her place in that succession, which is the same thing as acquiring a mind, the capacity to think and act intentionally, at all, the first thing that needs to happen is for her to be initiated into a tradition as it stands.84
Now we see how important language acquisition is for McDowell. It is not just about acquiring certain abilities that you can use to act in the world; no it is rather coming to inhabit the world differently, a radically different mode of being.
Becoming open to the world, not just able to cope with an environment, transforms the character of the disclosing that perception does for us, including the disclosing of affordances that, if we had not achieved openness to the world, would have belonged to a merely animal competence at inhabiting an
environment.85
Acquiring language (and thus conceptual capacities tied to rationality I have discussed) is nothing less than becoming a minded being. The problem with this is of course that it forces us to ask “how McDowell can explain the very process of language acquisition, given that he takes infants to be mindless.”86 My worry is of course also that it leads us to not only refer to other animals as not truly experiencing creatures, but as mindless.
There is a possible evolutionary problem here as well, for we homo sapiens have to have evolved into the space of reasons sometime during our evolutionary history. The space of reasons seems to be tightly sealed from within, and the creatures outside have no means of unsealing it, given that they would need the linguistic capacities necessary to enter, the very capacities that is explained as residing within the space itself. Not just individual children, but an entire species, us, have to have achieved this leap. Second nature has to have evolved from first
84 McDowell (1996) as quoted in Gallagher & Zahavi (2012) p.113.
85 McDowell (2007) p.345.
86 McDowell (1996) as quoted in Gallagher & Zahavi (2012) p.113.
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nature. If reason is tied to our bodily nature and senses, then it would be interesting to discuss in a more detailed way than both Dreyfus and McDowell do, how it is tied to our specific bodily structure; face, hands, feet etc. What would reason look like in creatures radically different from us in bodily structure? The rest of the members of the animal kingdom seem then to be either
“mere animals” not open to a world the way we are, only in possession of senses and sensibilities (they feel pain and respond to their environment etc.) or worse, mere automata, fully describable in physical-mechanical terms. That would surely be a Cartesian tragedy. Right away I think we should conclude that McDowell would not relegate the rest of the animal kingdom to the space of causes, as he is clearly of the opinion that they are not automata, as several commentators point out.87 I will get back to this point, as there are some finer details pertaining to our talk of senses (and sensibilities) perception and experience. The point is that by using these other words—like senses in lieu of perception, response instead of action, and environment instead of world—McDowell can hold that (at least many higher animals) are clearly not automata, and thus not condemned to serve the remainder of their very much sentient lives in the barren prison of the space of causes. But if his strict take on conceptuality in perception entitles him to
disallow other animals’ entry into the space of reasons, the question of where on earth we should put them is raised.
The lowering-the-bar strategy can be seen as leading to two options.
Option A: Many animals can be said to be rational in the sense hinted at above and thus perceive the way we perceive, i.e. that at least in some cases, the content of our perception is similar. An example of how this rationality might manifest itself in animal understanding is presented by Alva Noë when he discusses whether vervet monkeys understand the concept of “kinship”.
Do vervets have the concept of kinship? Do they understand what kinship is? […] How could anyone be said to know what kinship (or matrilineal kin group) is if he or she or it lacked knowledge or understanding of sexual reproduction and the biology of families? In the absence of an understanding of biology, the monkey could be said, at best to be able to pick out the matrilineal group, but that would not show that it understands, in any interesting sense of the word, what such a matrilineal group is. […]
But this skepticism about monkey minds misses the point. To describe the world of the monkey, you must describe a world in which relationships are structured, as we would say, along dimensions of dominance
87For instance the aforementioned Gallagher & Zahavi (2012) p.116.
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and kinship; and clearly, the monkey is right at home in this world. Granted, we may be uncertain whether we should say that the monkey has any grasp of what we call kinship or that it has a confident grasp on a notion more primitive than kinship. But this indeterminacy notwithstanding, we must appreciate that the monkey’s very mode of being is one in which kinship relations matter, and this mode of monkey being amounts to a form of substantial cognitive achievement.88
Option B: Humans are more “animal” in our perception and understanding than many
philosophers originally have thought, and that even language (concept) use and abstract activity (imagining, doing mathematics and thinking) is akin to responding to affordances in a field of forces. This does not necessarily mean that our perceptions are identical or overlapping with other animals, since, after all, we perceive different things in virtue of engaging in different activities. The (important) upshot is simply that the way in which we perceive, is similar.
A version of how this option of “heightening the animal” is by viewing perception as “smart.”
This is a strategy Shaun Gallagher has recently been known for employing in his phenomenological research.
The world [can be seen as] laid out in perception, not in terms of a conceptual or proto-conceptual meaning, but first of all, in terms of differentiations that concern my action possibilities—the object is something I can reach, or not; something I can move or not. Our ability for making sense of the world comes, in part from an active and pragmatic engagement with the world. If we can then turn around and discover that our world or our experience has an inherent rational or proto-intentional structure, that’s because that structure has already been put there by our pre-predicative embodied engagements. I take this to be consistent with some things Dreyfus says even if he rejects the idea that this is a form of rationality.89
Option B seems to correspond to Dreyfus’ claim that we share the basic perceptual capacities (bodily and skillful as they are) with prelinguistic infants and higher animals. But Dreyfus’ acceptance of this will be dependent on whether he would agree with the notion of conceptuality thus presented, and as we have seen, that might be difficult for him given his view on conceptuality and reason as distance-standing. A point Gallagher also makes in the above quote. It might just be that McDowell can be viewed as more open to A than initially anticipated.
So, which one of A or B is most suited for understanding the perceptual continuity I am interested in investigating; or perhaps there is more to the account of perceptual capacities and
88 Noë, A. (2009) pp.44-45.
89 Gallagher, S. (2017) section 10.3.
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rationality than I have hinted to as of yet? And what about the problem I have already brought up for Dreyfus, that when discussing skillful coping as an essentially shared phenomenon between species, he fails to focus on the animal side, as he presents his account of the phenomenology of skill-acquisition in a fundamentally human world.
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