I. Sideways-on inquiry and skepticism

McDowell’s account of skepticism depends on the idea that skepticism makes two claims that are, at best, intellectually optional. One of these is the thesis that the position the subject inhabits relative to some object is something that is common between cases when the subject has false beliefs or perceptions and true beliefs and perceptions. McDowell calls this the “highest common factor conception” of our subjective position (McDowell 1996, 113). On this view the subject relates to the object through some intermediary that, to the subject, is indistinguishable whether or not it is true to the object that it claims to represent. When this thesis is adopted, the question, “How do you know that what you are enjoying is a genuine glimpse of the world?” (McDowell 1996, 113) becomes a question that one takes seriously and that raises the skeptical problem. In sideways-on inquiry, on my reconstruction, there are three positions or moments. One is the view taken by the subject. Another is the object viewed by the subject. The third, which characterizes a sideways-on inquiry as sideways-on, is what I will call a metaview that affords, or claims to afford, a perspective on the view, the object viewed and their relation that is completely independent of them.

            The skeptical problem, as I mean to speak of it here, is the problem of sorting out from among our representations the ones that are true, i.e., that represent reality in whatever way they do that (resemblance, functional mapping, etc.) from the ones that are false without ever supposing that we get any access to what those representations are true or false of independent of the representations about which, one and all, we already have doubts. McDowell would like to persuade us that we can, with justification, ignore this problem. Certain problems arise for us when we take up the framework of the highest common factor and sideways-on inquiry; the problems themselves are features of the framework itself. If we can learn to ignore (respectably) the framework—say, by substituting another framework—then we have earned the right to ignore the problems that framework instantiates. According to McDowell, the highest common factor conception of experience and the sideways-on style of thinking about the knower and the known generates the problem of skepticism.

            The sideways-on view that is so characteristic, McDowell thinks, of modern epistemology, and hence so bound up with its preoccupation with skepticism and its frustrating oscillations, is best characterized, I think, with reference to Descartes. (1) To simplify, for Descartes, the subjective view is characterized by an order of ideas, of which we can have infallible knowledge (McDowell 1998, 240-1), representations that are inspected by the subject. These ideas are either clear and distinct or confused. Those that are clear and distinct are materially true and if there is an object, existing independently of the idea that caused that idea and that the idea resembles, then that idea is true of that object. However, the clarity and distinctness of an idea does not guarantee, of itself, that the idea grasps an object or a state of affairs (McDowell 1998, 241-2). The object itself Descartes thinks of as an independent substance or thing—independent that is of the mind and its ideas. The inner realm of ideas and the outer realm of objects or states of affairs do not interpenetrate—how things are in the inner realm is independent of how things are in the outer realm (McDowell 1998, 241). McDowell, in other contexts, characterizes this lack of interpenetration between inner and outer realms (as thought of in the sideways-on conception) by saying that facts (outer) are not “blankly external” to thinking (McDowell 1998, 389).

            Needless to say, when we forgoe availing ourselves of a benevolent God within the Cartesian, sideways-on framework, the problem of skepticism become acute. For, if the inner realm and the outer realm do not interpenetrate, not even in the best case of having knowledge, then how knowledge and ignorance can be distinguished become problematic. Ideas that represent facts and ideas that represent mere appearances are not distinguished from each other by any factor that involves a relation to the objective world, but rather are distinguished from the objective world by their “highest common factor” of subjective certainty.

Rather than try to show, from some sort of metaview in the context of a sideways-on investigation, that our conceptual capacities have a grip on the world, McDowell repudiates the sideways-on investigatory framework and the highest common factor conception of our subjective position in favor of what he calls openness to reality. I will next examine how McDowell takes this to be a response to skepticism.

II. Openness to reality and the avoidance of skepticism

Since McDowell thinks that it is our faculty of spontaneity that supplies the conceptual structure that our faculty of experience uses to grasp the world, he must add the thesis that world itself is conceptually articulated such that our experiences can comport to it and provide our spontaneous belief-formation faculty the possibility of attaining truth. This thesis is captured in the openness to reality:

[T]here is no ontological gap between the sort of thing one can mean, or generally the sort of thing one can think, and the sort of thing that can be the case. When one thinks truly, what one thinks is the case. So since the world is everything that is the case…, there is no gap between thought, as such, and the world. Of course thought can be distanced from the world by being false, but there is no distance from the world implicit in the very idea of thought (McDowell 1996, 27).

I should note two more features of this thesis. One is that the facts which make up the world and with which our true thoughts are ontologically homogenous are  thinkable: “When we put the point in the high-flown terms, by saying that the world is made up of the sort of thing one can think…” (McDowell 1996, 27-8).[1]

            Not only is the world thinkable, but McDowell wants to make the claim that through experience—understood as a mode of openness to reality, the world places rational constraints on judgment:

[T]hat things are thus and so is also, if one is not mislead, an aspect of the layout of the world: it is how things are…. Experience enables the layout of reality itself to exert a rational influence on what a subject thinks (McDowell 1996, 26, cf. 29).

Experience’s capacity to register the influence of the world in a conceptual manner is drawn from the active faculty of thought. When we experience the world passively, the conceptual content that we acquire is not independent of concepts that have their home in the understanding. McDowell’s example is color experience. There is a background understanding of concepts necessary for a subject to be ascribed an experience of color; she must have comprehension of the mind-independence of the world that she experiences—the concepts of visible surfaces and suitable conditions for determining the color of something (McDowell 1996, 12). The network of concepts that experience draws on, however, is one that can change under pressure of rational reflection (McDowell 1996, 12-3). Despite this central role of understanding in sensibility, McDowell nevertheless consistently maintains that experience is a passive registering of facts and that “the presence of conceptual capacities in [experience] does not imply ‘idealism’” (McDowell1998b, 470).

            McDowell understands experience as the way in which we check our standings in the space of reason with the layout of the world. In the sideways-on view, the subject can have perfectly adequate standing the the space of reasons internal to subjectivity while the objective world external to the space of reasons could just as well fail to comport to the subject’s thoughts. On the openness to reality model, “that the world does someone the necessary favour, on a given occasion of being the way it appears to be is not extra to the person’s standing in the space of reasons” (McDowell 1998, 406). Thus, when we assemble the right justifications for our beliefs there is no reason to suppose that our beliefs could be false by virtue of some gap between thought and the world. By virtue of openness to the world, when we assemble the right justifications, we are justified in assuming that nothing stands between our thoughts and the facts our thoughts are about.

            The skeptic fears that we could justify our beliefs perfectly with reference to each other and experience, and that nevertheless such justification is merely internal to thought and may fail to grasp reality. McDowell thinks that if the openness to reality thesis is made intelligible, its sheer intelligibility should calm skeptical worries by showing that it is not a fact, as it might appear from the sideways-on perspective characteristic of Cartesianism “that however good a subject’s cognitive position is, it cannot constitute her having a state of affairs directly manifest to her” (McDowell 1996, 113). McDowell’s aim is not to refute the skeptic but to show how it can be “intellectually respectable” to ignore the skeptic’s questions—“to treat them as unreal, in the way that common sense has always wanted to” (McDowell 1996, 113). If we take seriously the openness to reality model we can ignore the skeptics’ worries with good conscience (McDowell 1996, 113).

III. Objections to McDowell

I do not think that McDowell’s openness to reality model can make sense of the notion of the world exerting a rational influence on thought in such a way as to allay the urgency of skeptical questions about knowledge. The burden of the rest of my paper is to advance a couple of criticisms of McDowell’s argument.

            To get at these objections, we must look more closely at some of McDowell’s claims about the nature of thought, facts, and judgment. What McDowell means by “thinkable” is clarified when he explains that he is using a Fregean conception[2] of thought. “[T]houghts are senses of sentences…,” according to Frege, and a “’thought’ [is] something for which the question of truth can arise at all” (1991, 328). For McDowell, the realm of thought is the realm of Fregean sense (McDowell 1996, 107). We can note here that this conception of thought seems to be useful in articulating the notion of openness to reality. If thought is defined as something for which the question of truth can arise at all (though Frege does not think this a full definition), there is little in the way of a specific ontological claim that could support a highest common factor conception of the subject and a sideways-on conception of knowledge. Additionally, this minimalist notion of thought makes the openness to reality conception of knowledge plausible. In contrast to the highest common factor conception, McDowell commits the notion of openness to reality to a “disjunctive conception of appearences” in which an appearance that is thought is either a mere appearence that plays us false or an appearance that is a manifestation of a fact. By manifestation of facts, McDowell means that the fact itself is present to our thought (McDowell 1998, 389). On McDowell’s account, what distinguishes deceptive from non-deceptive cases that are experientially indistinguishable is the fact that non-deceptive appearences manifest facts and deceptive appearences do not. On the Cartesian view, the disjunctive conception of appearences would be nonsense, since experiential indistinguishability of deceptive and non-deceptive appearences is just a feature of the closed-off character that distinguishes the inner realm of thought from the outer realm of reality. What makes this Cartesian view appealing, from the perspective of conceptions of thought is the understanding of thought as an ontologically distinct realm constituted by ideas of which we can have certain knowledge by introspection. However, when thought is understood in a McDowellian-Fregean way, the distinction between thoughts and that which thoughts are of can be taken as implying no general gap between thoughts and states of affairs.

What are the facts that make themselves manifest? Frege tells us that “[a] fact is a thought that is true” (Frege 1991, 342). Presumably then, what McDowell characterizes as a mere appearance would be a thought that is false. So then, a false thought is a thought of what is not the case or is not a thought of what is the case. The first option is problematic, in as much as it would require a needless proliferation of mysterious “not-the-cases.” The second option would be made sense of by some notion of thought stopping short of the world. McDowell claims that mere appearances do intervene between us and the world (using an analogy that generally characterizes the role of experience in the highest common factor conception of Descartes.

Let me take an example. Suppose that you claim that the sun is the god Ra, and I claim that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas, or a gigantic nuclear furnace. The conceptual content of our perceptions is borrowed from thought; in your case, from ancient Egyptian mythological thinking and in my case from modern science. Arguably, both cannot be true. We can say, though, that at least with regard to this example McDowell has given us an understanding of cognition in which Cartesian, external-world skepticism has been avoided by abandoning the sideways-on conception of epistemological thinking and the highest common factor conception of our subjective position.

However, McDowell’s notion of openness to reality does not help us understand how the world can help us to decide between appearences that mislead and appearences that manifest facts. The most McDowell can show is how things are when we have true thoughts, but not how the world has played any role in having true thoughts.

Both mere appearances and facts are thinkable, and, as thinkables, if one can exert an influence on our thought so can the other. Both can influence our thought because neither is “blankly external” to thought, in the way that the external realm is blankly external to the internal realm in the Cartesian conception. McDowell’s claim that when we are in good standing in the space of reasons we are not separated from facts does not amount to the claim that being in touch with the facts is a way in which the world exerts a rational influence on thought.

            McDowell allows that mere appearances and facts are indistinguishable in experience just insofar as they are appearances that things are thus and so. All experiences claim to represent states of affairs, just as Descartes held that all ideas claim to represent objects independent of the mind. The parallel with Descartes continues. In Descartes, we assert the existence of an object corresponding to our ideas when in judgment we add an affirmation of the idea. For McDowell, “that things are thus and so is the content of experience, and it can also be the content of a judgment: it is becomes the content of a judgment if the subject decides to take the experience at face value” (McDowell 1996, 26). The mere experience of a fact’s manifestation could not count as knowledge; there must be an additional act of judgment that affirms that the experience is actually manifesting a fact, if the subject is to be said to have knowledge.   

When we claim to distinguish between facts and appearance, and take the experiences that attend the claim that the sun is a god at face value and treat the experience that attend the claim that the sun is a mass of incandscent gas as playing us false, we do not do so based on the character of the experiences themselves. If we could read off the veridicality of experiences from the experiences themselves, and from this decide whether or not to take them at face value, then the question of distinguishing between false and true appearances would not arise. Nor can the claim that we are in touch with some fact when we are in good standing in the space of reasons be construed as a way in which the world influences our thought. On McDowell’s scheme, the only other direction to turn is to the conceptual linkages that belong to understanding. This may allow us to properly distinguish between mere appearance and fact in experience, but if it does, it is not because the layout of reality has assisted us by influencing our thought, as McDowell claims.

There is room for an important kind of skepticism here, one that focuses on the fact that, given any particular belief, we can be deeply uncertain as to whether or not that belief is about a mere appearance or a fact. It is this form of skepticism that motivates Descartes in the first pages of Meditations (See Stroud 1984, 2). This skepticism takes seriously the notion that the possibility of error in such determinations, for instance, as in Descartes’ case, by reacting to this possibility by demanding absolute certainty in determining whether one is presented with a fact or a mere appearance. However, it is a species of skepticism to which McDowell’s theory is vulnerable. Simon Blackburn takes this form of skepticism to be independent of “parochial, historical outcome[s] of mistaken conceptions of mind or experience” such as the Cartesian framework of sideways-on inquiry and the highest common factor of our subjective position (Blackburn 1993, 51). It might also be said that this form of skepticism, even when not taken as seriously as it might be, is the core suspicion that motivates much inquiry into the nature of and possibility of knowledge.

Bibliography

Blackburn, S. 1993. “Knowledge, Truth, and Reliability” in Essays in Quasi-Realism. Cambridge UP. 

Frege, G. 1997. The Frege Reader. Ed. M. Beaney. Blackwell.

 McDowell, J. 1996. Mind and World. Harvard UP.

 ------. 1998. Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality. Harvard UP.

            Cited in this paper, from this volume: “Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space” ( 228-259); “Criteria, Defeasability, and Knowledge” (369-394); “Knowledge and the Internal” (395-413).

 ------. 1998b. “Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality” Journal of Philosophy XCV/9 (September 1998): 431-491.

 Stroud, B. 1984. The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism. Cl

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