Three Problems with McDowellian Disjunctivism

Three Problems with McDowellian Disjunctivism In his 2010 reply to Tyler Burge, John McDowell asks Burge to clarify the sketch he has given of McDowellian disjunctivism: “[w]ho holds this position?... for my part, I do not recognize the doctrine Burge labels ‘disjunctivism’ as a view I hold” (McDowell, 2010: 243). McDowell accuses Burge of misrepresenting his version of disjunctivism, but does he really? In working through McDowell’s replies to Burge, I find that Burge has had a difficult time characterizing McDowell’s views in part because they are ambiguous to begin with. As an example of the kind of ambiguity I am referencing, I will begin by telling how McDowell defends his position on common factors against Burge’s charge that his (McDowell’s) disjunctivism does not allow for common factors, and I will show how McDowell’s reply to Burge does not hold much water in view of Burge’s more robust concerns. In order to get to the bottom of the common factors discussion, three larger problems come up between McDowell and Burge: (1) the requirements of defeasibility and infallibility, (2) the role of modern perceptual psychology as a science in analytical philosophy, and (3), dovetailing with (2), the place of the Proximality Principle in analytical theories of perception. I will treat problem one in the first section, and problems two and three together in section two. If Burge’s arguments from the point of view of science are correct, it follows that McDowell has not met basic requirements of defeasibility, or responded to the problem presented to his disjunctivist theory by the Proximality Principle. Alapin/Perception Final/Fall 2014 !1 Initial Accusations: McDowell Refuses a Common Factor McDowell offers this passage as an initial summary of Burge’s main objections to (McDowellian) disjunctivism: ...[disjunctivism] claims that there is never an explanatorily relevant mental state type in common between (and specific to) a veridical perception and a referential perceptual illusion. And it claims that there is never a mental state in common between (and specific to) perception of an object and perception of a would-be duplicate substitute for the object that would be, in the context, perceptually indiscernible to the perceiver. The same claims are made with respect to corresponding perceptual beliefs (Burge, 2005: 25). Of this quoted position, McDowell claims simply: “the fact is that the position [above] is not there in my work” (McDowell: 243). What does McDowell think has been mis-represented by Burge? To begin with, McDowell accuses Burge of mis-characterizing his position on common factors of mental states. Burge says that McDowell does not accept a common factor,1 but McDowell’s first 2010 response to Burge claims the contrary. McDowell responds that there are cases where “appearance is either a case of things being thus and so in a way that is manifest to the subject or a case of its merely seeming to the subject that that is how things are” (McDowell, 2010: 244). The former, veridical case occurs when the first state “conforms” to the to the “subject’s inner world” (McDowell, 2010). The latter is a case of mere appearance, some kind of illusion, mistake, or hallucination. What can be identical for McDowell is a state type, an appearance. The cases in the disjunction above can appear the same to a McDowellian subject, but be distinct in terms of veridicality. So, McDowell re-asserts that “according to me 1 Here is the original passage from McDowell: “...it is part of the point of my disjunctive conception of experience that having an aspect of objective reality perceptually present to one entails having it appear to one that things are a certain way. But that is not to say that having an aspect of objective reality perceptually present to one can be factored into some non-mental conditions and an appearance conceived as being the mental state it is independently of the non-mental conditions. The factoring fails; the state is the appearance it is only because it is a state of having something perceptually present to one” (McDowell, 2010: 251, my italics). Alapin/Perception Final/Fall 2014 !2 the is a state type in common between those disjuncts” (McDowell, 2010: 244). Can McDowell have it both ways? Problem: Defining Infallibility This section attempts to show why it matters if McDowell concedes a common state type or not, and connects this claim with the larger claims at stake for Burge, namely defeasibility and fallibility. For a realist like McDowell, there exists a possibility that in a good, veridical case, objective reality is immediately, directly, manifestly there for the a subject, “perceptually present to her” (McDowell, 2010: 245). On this view, if an object is perceptually present, there is no chance that the perceiver might be incorrect about the experience being as it is. The veridicality cannot be factored into non-mental conditions; the mental state of being in veridicality is independent. As such, for McDowell, veridical perceptions do not draw truth value from anything external. They contain within them an indefeasible warrant, which is in a sense verified by object-dependence. Since there are no possible defeaters to such claims (as for example, how do you know that you were not on drugs?) for McDowell, they are not only propositional and indefeasible, but wholly infallible. Given such premises, McDowell considers any requirement of a warrant for a perceptual claim as superfluous, a “failure all his [Burge’s]” (McDowell, 2010: 245). What you know, you know because you saw it and knew you were in your right mind. There are no ‘further reasons’ you could give. Essentially, McDowell asks Burge: why should there be a burden of proof on regular day-to-day acts of perception? You know what you know because you saw it, and you know that you saw it. And, you know that when you saw it, you were in your right mind. Alapin/Perception Final/Fall 2014 !3 Another way of saying it is that perceptual knowledge is propositional. When the external world contacts with the mind, the mind automatically knows whether it is in a veridical state or not. The mind contains within it a kind of puzzle piece which fits to the outside world, and a light goes off. The subject is in a veridical case and knows it without having to check any facts. So, McDowell argues that Burge’s demands of perception are overly, hyper-intellectualized. There is no need for an account to accompany a veridical perception because of its implied propositional nature. Here we begin to see the crack in McDowell’s case: to claim that knowledge is indefeasible is to skip the step of dealing with defeaters and go straight to fallibility. So, for McDowell, indefeasible and infallible become synonymous. But, as we will see in the following example, this is not helping solve the age-old perception problem of how to know if we are hallucinating, dreaming, on drugs, etc. Basketball Example It is natural to wonder at this juncture: what about usual defeaters of perceptual claims? For example, when the light is such that something green looks brown? Isn’t is fair to say: how did you know it was brown? I saw it (Propositional Claim). What about how the light was coming in? (Defeater). I accounted for that (Warranted Claim, Defeater un-defeated).2 2 Burge offers a number of kinds of warrants on p.58 and passim, including factive (veridical, could not fail to be veridical metaphysically-speaking), warrant-factive (being warranted in having the belief implies by apriority or necessity that the belief is true in the world), indefeasibly warranted in the traditional sense (if and only if it is warranted and there is no metaphysically possible situation in which a counter-warrant could undermine the warrant). Another paper would be needed to discuss all the kinds of warrants with their corresponding examples, but the main point is that warranted claims have various factive statuses both in the world and metaphysically, creating a complex matrix of truth claims. Alapin/Perception Final/Fall 2014 !4 McDowell does not think any such warrant (‘I accounted for the light’/ ‘I know I am not drunk because I didn’t drink anything today’) are necessary at all. He offers the following example to clarify his view of indefeasible warrant: some people can throw a basketball from the free-throw line. He says, “one might as well think that there cannot be a capacity--of course not guaranteed success on all occasions--in whose non-defective exercises one actually makes free-throws” (McDowell, 2010: 246). In other words, why does Burge not believe in a realm of free-throws which are all non-defective? There is a way, for McDowell, for the outright, unimpeded, unquestionable practice of only a non-defective set of exercises (free-throws), and there is no reason to worry about if this is possible. Usually, you just get all the free throws in. On the analogy with perception, getting the free throw in means being in a veridical experience and knowing it. So, in the basketball analogy, you would know that the ball will make it into the basket before the shot. Like the veridical experience, the basketball player has access to an ‘always-in’ mentality, which she would have to know before even making the shot for the analogy to hold. This seems to require a kind of psychic power, an ability to defeat defeaters before they even arise. It is as though Burge and McDowell are conjoining the issues of defeasibility and and veridicality in different ways. For Burge, the question is precisely whether or not a basketball shot (or any perception) is successful (that is to say, veridical) or unsuccessful (a case of making a mistake, perceiving a hallucination/illusion, turning out to be a brain in a vat/on LSD etc). A question for McDowell might be: when you are standing at the free-throw line with your fallible capacity for free-throws, could you possibly know if you are going to get the shot before you make it? For McDowell, the capacity is not about shot-making (yes or no). It is about shot- Alapin/Perception Final/Fall 2014 !5 making (yes), as opposed to shot-making (never). The shots that are made are made by a shotmaking capacity that never falters, and there exists a kind of separate other fallible shot-making capacity that never interferes with the successful one. Much of the disagreement between the two thinkers rests in this example. For Burge, the burden of proof--the question of indefeasibility--lies in the player’s capacity to miss. If a defeater could exists (like an earthquake makes you miss, even more metaphysically-speaking, you are not sure if you are awake or asleep), a warranted claim is needed. For McDowell, the capacity to succeed is the very premise of the example. Hyper-Intellectualization Thus far McDowell has re-asserted that the ability to get into a a mistaken situation is possible, but that the capacity to know veridicality when it is happening is never fallible. Burge’s accusation that McDowell hyper-intellectualizes rests on the fact that for McDowell, the very act of perception “belong to their posessor’s rationality” (McDowell, 2010: 247). It is not clear to Burge how McDowellian perception happens in a way ‘simultaneously’; the external object is both gathered by the mind, and also understood to be perceived veridically. It is as though a ‘veridicality checklist’ were completed at the very moment of any perception, adding a level of intellectualization to perception. But McDowell claims that this process occurs without the employment of reasoning since it is a function of one’s being a rational being at all. Against Burge, McDowell replies: “sophisticated concepts like that of defeating conditions” (McDowell, 2010: 247) do not have to be attached or overlayed onto initial, immediate perception. This is hyper-intellectualization on McDowell’s view! So, as I noted above, McDowell thinks that the charge of hyper- Alapin/Perception Final/Fall 2014 !6 intellectualization should be turned back on Burge who wants to be able to defeat defeaters with more than a simple claim of propositional knowledge. Problem: The Proximality Principle and the Role of Perceptual Psychology How then, without providing any warrants under McDowell’s theory, will we really know if we are in an open, immediate veridical case, free of misperceptions, misleading lighting, LSD, hallucination, illusion, etc.? And how will we know in Burge’s case that we have no overcomplicated perception unnecessarily, a la accusation from McDowell? We have to turn to the largest question between Burge and McDowell to settle this question, namely the role of science in matters of analytical epistemology. Burge’s larger-scale reply to McDowell’s thesis rests on the view that McDowell does not understand how perceptual states work from a scientific point of view, and that this affects his ability to defend disjunctivism. The problem is as follows: the findings of perceptual psychology “explain individuals’ perceivings in [different cases] as involving the same specific kind of perceptual state” (Burge, 2011: 43). This is the so-called Proximality Principle. In full, it states that “if proximal causes are indiscriminable and one holds antecedent states and formation principles constant, and if one varies distal causes, one get the four cases [a) veridical case, b) an identical veridical case to case 1 but with a different identical object, c) an illusion/mistake, d) a hallucination]” (Burge: 2011, 48). If the Proximality Principle is true as a matter of scientific fact, then it follows that a common factor exists among the four cases. You could easily slip from a veridical to a hallucinated state and not know it, because distal causes are altered while you basic condition stays the same. Accepting “an ability-general kind as a common factor is necessary to an account’s being compatible with the science of perceptual psychology” (Burge, 2011: 52). The Alapin/Perception Final/Fall 2014 !7 fact is that perceivers cannot and do not register all the differences in perception. Science tells us that we are fallible with respect to the very assessment of veridicality. So, there is no significant, relevant common factor that provides information about perceptual states. McDowell can say that there is an ‘appearance’ in common between them, but that is not only obvious, but also begs the question: how do we tell the appearances apart from one another? He has obfuscated the main issue of telling veridical and non-veridical states apart. To clarify further, Burge replies directly to the text quoted on page one above: ...no disjunctivist discussed the explanatory or classificatory level at which he denied a “common factor”. As noted, some absurdly denied a common factor at any level. So I thought that I had to supply some precision that was missing in the disjunctivists’ own work. I thought that they were committed by the “logic” of individuation of perceptual states at relevantly specific, explanatory levels to denying a common factor in the context specific to the four cases (Burge, 2011: 46). Isn’t it the case, Burge asks McDowell, that there is something special about McDowell’s veridical cases? When something is immanently present to one under McDowell’s epistemology, how does it share a common factor with a representational mode that is non-veridical? It seems that by McDowell’s own admission, there is something different about the veridical case that is obvious and incontrovertible. “So, I took it that disjunctivists were committed to denying a common explanatory kind” (Burge, 2011: 47). In his own defense, Burge here concedes to McDowell’s accusation of having misconstrued his disjunctivism that he his sketch has been “rough” (Burge, 2011: 47). This is mostly because, he says, the disjunctivists have precisely not specified what kind of common factor they accept or deny. Burge’s apparently ambiguous accusation of McDowell therefore appears to be precipitated by McDowell’s lack of a clear stance. Alapin/Perception Final/Fall 2014 !8 The argument cannot progress without this basic clarification, because as Burge has noticed, disjunctivists sneakily concede some kind of common features between veridical and non-veridical cases. McDowell says that the problem is not that we cannot be confused (we can, which implies a common factor), but that when we are not confused, we also simultaneously and instantly know that we are not. Burge’s attempt to disambiguate this disjunctivist view has brought to light that the kind of common factor that is needed for distinguishing between perceptual states is a fundamentally relevant one. The science of perceptual psychology produces “fundamental explanatory classifications that attribute a common kind or factor in the four cases”3 (Burge, 2011: 48). This is precisely why it is possible to keep proximal causes the same, vary distal causes, and produce various states of perception, from veridical to fully hallucinatory. So, there is some significant factor in common between the veridical and the hallucinated state, if the subject cannot tell the difference. As such, it is the denial of this common factoring that marks disjunctivism. Burge has decisively shown why being explicit about common factors is central to sorting out what disjunctivism stands for, and why McDowell has to respond directly to the strong claim about common factors in the Proximality Principle. System vs. Perceiver Before leaving the Proximality Principle and the way in which the findings of perceptual psychology have influenced Burge’s opinion of McDowell’s position, there remains a final point to clarify: McDowell’s reply to Burge on the grounds that the way that systems operate does not 3 The four cases being a veridical case, another veridical case that is exactly the same in appearance but different from the first case, an illusion/error, a hallucination. Alapin/Perception Final/Fall 2014 !9 necessarily reflect the functioning of its perceiving members: “a state of a perceptual system cannot have the epistemic significance of a perceptual experience that consists in having an aspect of objective reality perceptually present to one” (McDowell, 2010: 250). Burge’s argument from science simply replies that anyone familiar with it knows that perceivers are in perceptual systems; they cannot be understood apart from one another : “the whole system at any given time is a state of the perceiver” (Burge, 2011: 69, my italics). The system cannot be separated from the perceiver; there is no science of the way perception works without reference to the subject perceiving. Again, it seems that Burge’s lack of intimacy with Burge’s claims from science interfere with the intelligibility of his position. Conclusion So, is Burge guilty of having mischaracterized McDowell’s disjunctivism? I don’t think so. As Burge has shown, there is no way to understand disjunctivism without the denial of factoring in the sense of the denial of the Proximality Principle. So, whether or not McDowell concedes factors of lesser relevance is beside the point; the factoring that Burge addresses is the factoring that sets disjunctivism aside from other theories of perception. McDowell can choose not to meet this criticism head on, but he has not offered an alternative account of common factors with any explanatory value. Burge notes in his concluding remarks that the commitment to infallibility at the heart of disjunctivism “does not have a good track record” (Burge, 2011: 55). This is because we all want to answer definitely: are we dreaming or not? Are we on drugs or not? McDowell’s indefeasibility claim does not meet the metaphysical skeptic’s worry. It pats us on the back and reassures us that we will know when the times comes. The ordinary woman knows that this is not Alapin/Perception Final/Fall 2014 !10 true: sometimes there is legitimate confusion and cause to wonder. Sometimes there is legitimate confusion and cause to worry and we do not even know it until after the fact. All the more reason to follow and accept Burge’s more robust requirements for defeasibility. Central to this discussion has been Burge’s disgust with McDowell’s lack to interest in the actual functioning of the human nervous system. Burge has strongly argued against McDowell that science has a voice in the philosophical discussion today, and that ignoring it does not improve the fate of philosophy: One can no longer pronounce from the armchair on the form and nature of human perception. Such issues are not to be determined by empirical investigation, not by armchair pronouncements uninformed by understanding the relevant science. Human perception is the subject matter of a science. Philosophy of perception must incorporate informed philosophy of science (Burge, 2011: 71). Rejecting the Proximality Principle appears to be a position taken from ignorance. Claiming infallibility while refuting Proximality is not a credible position. The discussion between McDowell and Burge has shown that key distinctions must be made in order to advance the discussion: mere appearance must be distinguished from relevant factor, and indefeasibility must be distinguished from infallibility. Bibliography Burge, T. (2005). “Disjunctivism and Perceptual Psychology”. Philosophical Topics, Vol. 33, No. 1. Spring 2005. (2011). “Disjunctivism Again”. Philosophical Explorations. Vol. 14, No. 1, March 2011, pp. 43-80 Alapin/Perception Final/Fall 2014 !11 McDowell, J. (1986). “Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space”. in Subject, Thought and Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press). (1994). Mind and World. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). (2009). “Selections from ‘Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge’ in Disjunctivism: Contemporary Readings (MIT Press). (2010). “Tyler Burge on Disjunctivism” Philosophical Explorations. Vol. 13, No. 3, Sept 2010, pp. 243-255 Alapin/Perception Final/Fall 2014 !12