McDowell's Kant VI

We have come to my final post in this series on McDowell's Kant. Earlier I argued that the two-tier approach reduces Kant’s picture to the Lockean view, according to which the understanding is not active in experience but only in the judgements we make based on experience. Once the understanding has been removed from experience, we are left simply with raw sense-impressions that are now presumed to serve as a basis for judgement. But this means that sense-impressions must rationally constrain one’s empirical beliefs, which just is the “Myth of the Given” as Sellars understood it.

The alternative approaches I considered, {STRATEGY1} and {STRATEGY2}, are the Kantian analogues to the coherentist and bald naturalist positions respectively. Both conceive of the relationship between sense-impressions and beliefs as being merely causal. However, there are important differences between the two. {STRATEGY1} still preserves the notion of the understanding as the domain for rational inferences. But on {STRATEGY1}, sense-impressions can only exert causal but no rational (or justificatory) influence on the activities of the understanding. As Davidson’s famously (or is that infamously?) puts it, “only beliefs can justify beliefs.” On this view, the content of any one of our beliefs is determined solely by its relation to other beliefs, since the sense-impression (striped of all rational currency) can no longer determine their content. McDowell sees this view as ultimately self-defeating since it prevents us from “so much as making sense of the notion of a belief at all."(McDowell [1994]. p. 9.) {STRATEGY2} dispenses with the understanding altogether, reducing the entire chain leading from sense-impressions to empirical beliefs and judgements to a set causal relations. The price of {STRATEGY2} is that we are forced to give up the idea that rational relations are sui generis. In brief, according to {STRATEGY2}, saying that A justifies B is on a par with saying that A causes B.

According to McDowell, the problems articulated in (Q1) and (Q2) never arise if we conceive of sense-impressions as themselves having conceptual content (McDowell [1994], pp. 9-10). Thus understood, it at once becomes clear how sense-impressions can stand in justificatory or evidential relation to beliefs and endow our beliefs with empirical content. McDowell sees Kant as pointing towards (if not actually arriving at) a solution along these very lines:

The way to stop oscillating [between the myth of the given and coherentism] is to conceive empirical knowledge as a co-operation of sensibility and understang, as Kant does. To avoid making it unintelligible how the deliverances of sensibility can stand in grounding relations to paradigmatic exercises of the understanding such as judgements and beliefs, we must conceive this co-operation in a quite particular way: we must insist that the understanding is already inextricably implicated in the deliverances of sensibility themselves. Experiences are impressions made by the world on our senses, products of receptivity; but those impressions themselves already have conceptual content.(Ibid, p. 46)

By McDowell’s lights, when Kant says that the understanding is required for experience, he is not only saying that it is required for empirical knowledge or judgement—i.e., W-experience—but for sense-impressions themselves, that is for experience in a sense continuous with Lockean experience. Thus, McDowell straightforwardly rejects the two-tier approach described earlier. McDowell, as I understand him, can therefore be described as holding to a version of the three-tier account. Like Longuenesse and others, McDowell sees the role of the understanding within experience as different from its role in empirical judgement. However, he parts ways from most advocates of the three-tier approach by insisting that there is no pre-conceptual manifold of intuition upon which synthesis must operate. McDowell puts the point as follows:

The relevant conceptual capacities are drawn on in receptivity….It is not that they are exercised on an extra-conceptual deliverance of receptivity. We should understand what Kant calls “intuition”—experiential intake—not as a bare getting of an extra-conceptual Given, but as a kind of occurrence or state that already has conceptual content. (McDowell [1996], p. 9)

By McDowell’s lights, the only sensible impressions are those that are already endowed with conceptual content and can therefore stand in grounding relations to beliefs. Moreover, these sensible impressions are not in turn to be seen as arising from the exercise of the understanding on some more basic type of sensible impression. There is, as McDowell puts it, no “sheer receptivity”. The understanding is “already inextricably implicated in the deliverances of sensibility themselves”.(McDowell[1996], p. 46) On this account, the problem of how “blind” intuitions can determine the rules by which they are to be synthesized does not arise.

McDowell therefore agrees with the Kantian slogan: “intuitions without concepts are blind.” [A51/B75] But he draws from it a very different conclusion to that underlying the views described earlier. Previously, this phrase was taken to highlight the fact that intuitions, conceived in terms of the pre-synthesised sensory manifold, are unable to play any guiding role in activities of the understanding when selecting which rule to apply to said manifold. This is supposed to emphasise the importance of bringing intuitions under concepts in order to make them understandable. McDowell grants the point, but then takes the Kantian suggestion to be, not that the synthesis of the imagination needs to act upon the manifold before it can serve in judgement (i.e., that what was blind must be made to see), but that sensory intuitions should never be seen as blind to begin with.

The questions, (Q1) and (Q2), with which I have been concerned may be put as follows: how can that which was blind (i.e., unconceptualised intuition) be made to see (i.e., intuition brought under a concept)? Admitting that sensory impressions are blind seems to suggest that they cannot guide the understanding in the application of the rules under which the manifold is synthesised. But this means that impressions can exert no rational influence on the understanding. But if impressions can exert no rational influence on the understanding, then it remains unclear how experience can justify our empirical judgements. The way to avoid this conclusion, McDowell suggests, is to deny that impressions are blind. Assuming that the Kantian dictum, “intuitions without concepts are blind”, holds, the only way to deny that impressions are blind is to say that they involve concepts. Once we picture impressions as conceptual, we are (to put the matter crudely) picturing them as speaking the same language as the understanding. Sense impressions are now able to play the guiding role necessary vis-à-vis the understanding’s rule application to the manifold.


References*:

Longuenesse, B. [1998], Kant and the Capacity to Judge.

McDowell, J. [1994], Mind and World.

McDowell, J. [1996], “Woodbridge Lectures”.

*Although not directly cited, my reading of McDowell's Kant is significantly influenced by the work of Hannah Ginsborg

McDowell's Kant (Part V)

We are only one post away from my summary of McDowell's own position (I'm sure the suspense has been just eating away at you by now!) But first, I want to consider two more alternative positions (for reasons that should become clear by the end of the post).

The first alternative response to (Q1) and (Q2), which I will henceforth refer to as {STRATEGY1}, would be to argue that unconceptualised intuition merely plays a causal, rather than normative, role in determining how the sensory manifold is synthesised. The difference between the causal and normative can be made vivid by contrasting the case in which A triggers B with the case in which A indicates B. On the present view, the intuition does not suggest or indicate which rule the imagination ought apply. Rather, it merely triggers the application of a certain rule. Take for example the case in which one’s vision is affected by a red cube. On the present account, the red cube causes one’s imagination to apply the red-rule and the cube-rule as opposed to the green-rule and sphere-rule. However, it does not indicate that the imagination ought to apply the red-rule and cube-rule.

One advantage of this view is that it allows us to preserve the Kantian doctrine that intuitions without concepts are blind. According to this picture, the intuitions do not tell the imagination to apply a particular rule, it merely causes the application of the rule. But its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. For once we conceive of the intuition as merely exerting causal influence on the imagination, then it becomes unclear how the intuitions can, as Kant says, provide the “matter” of the experience. One upshot of this fact is that the intuition plays no constitutive role in determining the content of experience. That is, intuition may determine whether the understanding applies the red-rule or cube-rule, but it plays not part in making up the rules themselves. Thus, the repertoire of rules available in the understanding for the imagination to apply is determined solely by the understanding itself.

Significantly, this view seems to be in opposition to the kind of approach Kant himself would endorse since it essentially collapses the distinction between pure and empirical concepts. Thus, insofar as we wish to remain true to Kant, we have good textual grounds for rejecting this picture. But even if we have no qualms with departing from Kant on this score there still seems to be non-textual grounds for being sceptical about this approach. Specifically, {STRATEGY1} makes unclear how experience could be about a mind-independent world. McDowell expresses the worry as follows:

But if our freedom in empirical thinking is total, in particular if it is not constrained from outside the conceptual sphere, that can seem to threaten the very possibility that judegments of experience might be grounded in a way that relates them to a reality external to thought. And surely there must be such ground if experience is to be a source of knowledge, and more generally, if the bearing of empirical judgments on reality is to be intelligibly in place in our picture at all.McDowell [1996], p. 5.

The problem with {STRATEGY1} is that by making empirical concepts (in addition to the pure concepts) solely the product of the activity of the understanding it eliminates any role the manifold may play in determining the content of our judgements.

A second strategy, henceforth {STRATEGY2}, would be to give up on the idea of normativity altogether in favour of a more thoroughgoing causal account. On this view, it is not simply the case that the unconceptualised intuition causes the imagination to apply the rule that it does, but the rule applying activities of the imagination, under the direction of the understanding, is itself to be understood in purely causal terms. Whereas on {STRATEGY1} normative rules guide the interaction between the understanding and the imagination, and causal laws guide the opposite direction from the unconceptualised intuitions to the imagination, on {STRATEGY2}, both directions are to understood in purely causal terms. On this picture, what are taken to guide all of the imagination’s activities are no longer rules, understood as concepts, but rather brute causal laws. This view has the advantage of eliminating any problem concerning how the unconceptualised intuition, understood as blind, could direct the imagination’s application of rules since the rules the imagination applies are themselves now seen as causal laws of exactly the same kind that govern the unconceptualised intuition.

However, this view suffers from the same defect as {STRATEGY1} since it fails to explain how experience can provide the “matter” of judgement. Moreover, {STRATEGY2} removes the activity of the understanding from experience altogether. It therefore entails the denial of (K3). Thus, whatever the merits of such a proposal, it is not a Kantian one. Rather than offering a solution to (Q1) and (Q2), it actually represents an abandonment of the philosophical approach that gave rise to the problem in the first place. In this regard, {STRATEGY2} can be seen as employing a type of quietism, albeit at great cost to the Kantian view of experience.

It should be clear to the observant reader that the three approaches to (Q1) and (Q2) considered in this and a previous blog posts parallel the three options McDowell considers and rejects in setting up the problematic of Mind and World; the Myth of the Given, on one hand, and the Coherentist and Bald Naturalist positions, on the other. In my next post, I will outline McDowell's alternative.

McDowell's Kant (Part IV)

In my previous post I adumbrated the three-tiered approach to (Q1):

(Q1): How are we to reconcile the Kantian claim that experience involves making judgements with the Lockean conception of experience as the means by which objects are given to us?

If we adopt the three-tiered account, the problem raised by (Q1) begins to take a slightly different form. Commentators such as Strawson and Sellars have suggested that by Kant’s lights, we come to see some object α as φ by forming an image of α in accordance with the rule or concept φ. On this view, when one comes to see something as red, one is forming an image of that thing in accordance with the rule or concept red. However, the question quickly arises as to what determines which rule the imagination applies in its synthesis of the sensory manifold and what role (if any) does the manifold itself play in its own synthesis?

In the case of the “pure concepts of the understanding”, or the categories, the answer is relatively straightforward. Since all human experience is subject to the categories, then it is the understanding, and the understanding alone, that determines which rules the imagination applies to the sensory manifold. However, the above question becomes most relevant, not with regards to the pure concepts, but with respect to what Kant calls “empirical concepts”, such as red cube or green sphere. For example, we may ask: when confronted by a red cube, what directs the imagination to synthesise the sensory manifold according to the red-rule and cube-rule as opposed to, say, the green-rule and sphere-rule? If our perceptual experiences are going to be of or about mind-independent objects, then it would seem that the sensory manifold must play some role in determining which empirical concepts the imagination employs in its synthesis.

Clearly, if we are preserve the receptivity of experience, then the sensory manifold must play some part in determining which rule the imagination applies in its synthesis. This means that the manifold must, in some sense, be able to “tell” the understanding which rule the understanding should apply in synthesising the manifold. But therein lays the problem. In the “Transcendental Logic” Kant notes that “intuitions without concepts are blind.”(A51/B75) The blindness of the unsynthesised intuitions (i.e., before they have been brought under a concept) seems to preclude them being able to play any guiding role in which rule the imagination applies in its synthesis. But if unconceptualised intuition is able to guide the understanding in its rule application, then it would seem that unconceptualised intuition is not really blind after all. The question that now faces the three-tier approach may be put as follows:

(Q2): How are we to reconcile the idea that sensible intuition determines the content of experience (such that it serves as its matter) with Kant’s insistence that unconceptualised intuitions are blind?

I believe (Q1) and (Q2) are the questions that serve as the backdrop for McDowell’s appropriation of Kant in Mind and World. There, McDowell frames the present questions in terms of “the idea that experience must constitute a tribunal, mediating the way our thinking is answerable to how things are"(Mind and World, p. xii). According to McDowell’s Kant, we can only make sense of the sensory manifold playing a role in determining which rule the understanding applies in its synthesis by conceiving of the manifold as in some sense “justifying” the application of one rule as opposed to another. I will have more to say on McDowell’s conception in my next post.

McDowell's Kant (Part III)

The Space of Reasons is Back! First off, a special word of thanks to all the commenters who kept The Space of Reasons active while I was away. They’re a number of great insights in your responses, many of which foreshadow much of what I was planning to say. To recap, we began looking at the following question:

(Q1): How are we to reconcile the Kantian claim that experience involves making judgements with the Lockean conception of experience as the means by which objects are given to us?

As promised, I will like to sketch a response to (Q1) based on some thoughts gleaned from the work of Béatrice Longuenesse who limns what may be described as a three-tier approach (for reasons that will eventually become clear). On Longuenesse’s reading of Kant, the understanding is active not only in W-experience, but in N-experience as well (though she of course does not put the matter in exactly those terms). However, she distinguishes between two “aspects” of the activity of the understanding—namely, the “sensible” and the “discursive”.

According to the sensible aspect, “the understanding is a rule giver for the synthesis of imagination…In this first aspect the activity of the understanding, or actualizing of its rules, is nothing else than the productive synthesis of imagination.” [Longuenesse 1998, p. 63] The discursive aspect of the activity of the understanding, by contrast, “reflects sensible synthesis under concepts, whether empirical or pure.” [Ibid]

The first step towards solving the problem posed by (Q1), is to recognise that the activity of the understanding, as it factors in W-experience, is different from that which factors in N-experience. In W-experience the understanding is responsible for the “combination of concepts” in empirical judgements, while in N-experience, the understanding is responsible for the “combination of the manifold of intuition” in sensation.

The second step towards responding to (Q1) is to recognise that N-experience itself may be further subdivided in terms of pre- and post-synthesis manifolds. The pre-synthesis manifold represents simply that which is given by the senses while the post-synthesis manifold represents the end result of the synthesis of imagination, now understood as the sensible aspect of the understanding. Thus emerges the three-tier structure of the Longuenesse reading of Kant. The first tier is that of the un-synthesised sensory manifold, the second tier is the synthesis of imagination carried out by the sensible aspect of the understanding, and the third tier refers to the synthesis of concepts carried out by the discursive aspect of the understanding.
The three-tier account avoids the trivialising consequences of the two-tier account by preserving some of the anti-Lockean oomph in the Kantian account of experience. On this approach, judgement is involved in N-experience, though it now serves an intuitive rather than discursive function. In its intuitive capacity, the understanding results in one’s experience of the objective world being a certain way, without itself committing one to the claim that it is that way. This brings us back to the two ways in which I suggested that experience contrasts with judgement on the Lockean account. First, experience is seen as passive while judgement is seen as active. Second, experience involves merely a registering that things are a certain way while judgement involves a commitment to them being that way. What the three-tier account effectively does is sacrifice the empiricist idea that N-experience is purely passive, while preserving the empiricist idea that N-experience itself involves no commitment to things being a certain way. Thus, it makes good on one empiricist intuition while sacrificing another. This allows us to preserve one of the central insights of Kant’s Copernican revolution—namely, that experience itself consists of judgements—without sacrificing the empiricist contrast between experience as registering the way things are and empirical judgement as commitment to things being that way.

However, one may well question whether the three-tier account represents a genuine alternative to the two-tier account. Recall, on the three-tier model, N-experience is itself subdivided into pre- and post-synthesis stages. Moreover, the pre-synthesis stage (i.e., the first tier of the three-tier account) is now identified with the raw deliverances of the senses, before the understanding has had a chance to operate on them. The question may therefore be asked, what prevents us from simply identifying the first tier with Lockean experience and the second tier with empirical judgement? If this question goes unanswered, then the trivialising objection simply re-emerges.

I do not believe the attempt to reduce the three-tier account to the two-tier account in this way is successful. Notice, the reduction only gets off the ground if the first tier is identified with Lockean experience. But this identification is not right. Recall, that on the Lockean view, experience provides us with data which can be used in empirical judgment. However, the unsynthesised manifold that characterises the first tier could not possibly fulfil this role. It is only after the synthesis of imagination, which characterises the second tier, that the subject is in a position to exercise empirical judgements in the manner the empiricist envisions. It is this fact that gives teeth to Longuenesse’s observation that “the psychological data empiricist assume depend themselves on operations empiricists cannot account for.” [Longuenesse 1998, p. 38]

By denying (K3), the empiricist is removing all right she may have for treating experience as structured enough to serve as a basis for perceptual judgement, or at least so the Kantian thought goes. Thus, by Kant’s lights, it is first and second tiers combined that is to be identified with Lockean experience.


Reference:

Longuenesse, B. [1998], Kant and the Capacity to Judge. Princton, NJ.: Princeton University Press.

McDowell's Kant (Part II)

In my previous post, I concluded that the question that motivates McDowell’s Kant may be put as follows:

(Q1): How are we to reconcile the Kantian claim that experience involves making judgements with the Lockean conception of experience as the means by which objects are given to us?

One straightforward response to (Q1) is to distinguish between two meanings of the word “experience” as used by Kant in the Critique. The first, which I will refer to as narrow experience (or N-experience), refers to raw “sensory impressions”. N-experience corresponds with the Lockean conception of experience. The second, which I will refer to as wide experience (or W-experience), refers to “empirical knowledge”.

On the present proposal, when Kant talks about experience involving the understanding, it is W-experience that he has in mind. Thus, on this picture, the categories only apply to experience understood in terms of empirical knowledge or W-experience. However, N-experience, which corresponds to the Lockean conception, does not involve the activity of the categories or the understanding. The upshot of this distinction is that it is only for W-experience that the understanding is required, thus avoiding the problem articulated in (Q1). I will refer to the reply to (Q1) that trades on the two meanings of experience adumbrated above as the two-tier approach.

However, many would consider two-tier approach problematic since it seems to undermine the efficacy of Kant’s argument in the Critique as a reply to Hume. Recall, according to Kant, the purpose of the Transcendental Deduction is to show that the categories are a priori conditions of the possibility of experience (See: A 84/B 116—A 95/B 129).[2] Now, according to Hume, we do not perceive objective, publicly observable states of affairs, but only subjective “impressions”. The only way to gain access to the objective world is via an inference to physical objects as the cause of our impressions. However, Hume impugns any such inference as unwarranted. Thus, we are left only with the flux of unconnected subjective experience.

Kant’s strategy in the Deduction is to argue that Hume’s view of experience is mistaken since it omits certain structural features without which we could not have the sorts of experience we unquestionable do have. Kant begins with an assumption which Hume himself accepts:

(K4): Experience is possible

He then sets out to show in the Deduction that:

(K5): If experience is possible, the categories have objective validity

If successful, Kant’s argument is supposed to establish the conclusion:

(K6): The categories have objective validity.

Given (K6), Hume is no longer entitled to his denial of the reality of causation and his sceptical argument is thwarted.

But suppose we interpret the word “experience” as it appears in the Deduction to mean “empirical knowledge”. Then we must build into (K4) everything Kant means by empirical knowledge as set forth in the Critique. Now empirical knowledge, for Kant, is knowledge of an objective world governed by causal laws. However, if we take experience as it appears in (K4) to include all of this, then Kant’s argument would beg the question against Hume. Thus, if we interpret “experience” as empirical knowledge, we would no longer be entitled to see the Deduction as a reply to Hume. The upshot of this is that if we wish to maintain that the relevant arguments in the Critique are effective vis-à-vis Hume, we must also renounce the two-tier account.

In my next post, I will look at a more sophisticated reply to (Q1) that avoids the above criticism, and which is loosely based on the reading of Kant advanced by Béatrice Longuenesse.

McDowell's Kant (Part I)

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged on McDowell. So for the next few posts I will be returning to this blog’s original inspiration with a series on McDowell’s Kant. In the next few posts I will be attempting to re-express the dialectic McDowell sets up in the introduction to Mind and World in Kantian terms, thereby displaying the deeply Kantian nature of McDowell’s project. I begin with Kant’s claim that “experience itself is a kind of cognition requiring the understanding” (Bxvii). Thus, we arrive at the first Kantian principle I wish to exploit in my discussion of McDowell’s Kant:

(K1): experience requires understanding

How are we to interpret the word “understanding” as used by Kant? Perhaps the closest thing to a definition can be found in A69/B94, where Kant writes: “We can reduce all acts of the understanding to judgements, so that the understanding in general can be represented as a capacity for judging.” Thus, we arrive at our second central Kantian principle:

(K2): understanding =^def a capacity for judging

We can combine (K1) and (K2) to arrive at our third Kantian principle:

(K3): experience requires a capacity for judging

I take (K3) to be one of the key insights of Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy. Broadly speaking, Kant’s Copernican revolution amounts to the claim that the formal features of the empirical world (i.e., space and time and the categories) are transcendental impositions of the subject’s mind. For example, when one takes one’s experience to be of a mind-independent object, one is essentially judging that that object is located somewhere in space. Kant makes this point explicitly in the first edition of the Critique, where he posits: “experience consists of judgements”.[Kant, 1998] p. 202. fn.]

Putatively, judgement involves commitment to something being the case. Thus, to say that experience involves judgment is to say that experience involves actively taking a stand on how things are. But this seems to run counter to the conception of experience as passively registering the way things are, prior to and independent of taking a stand on whether or not things are that way. This suggests at least two ways in which experience putatively contrasts with judgement. First, experience is passive while judgement is active. Second, experience simply registers that things are a certain way, while judgement involves being committed to things being a certain way.

The forgoing considerations are meant to register what I believe to be a set of pre-theoretical intuitions regarding the nature of experience. These pre-theoretical intuitions seem aptly captured in the Lockean empiricist idea that experience is the means by which objects are given to a subject. On this picture, one may proceed to make judgments based on experience, but experience itself consists in simply registering sensory impressions. Thus, on the Lockean empiricist picture, experience does not seem to require a capacity to judge. If this is right, then both (K1) and (K3) would be false on the Lockean empricist account. If we wish to preserve the idea that experience is the means by which objects are given, within a broadly Kantian framework, then we must find some way to reconcile these two sets of intuitions. I have suggested that this is what McDowell wishes to do. This brings us the first formulation of the question that motivates McDowell’s Kant:

(Q1): How are we to reconcile the Kantian claim that experience involves making judgements with the Lockean conception of experience as the means by which objects are given to us?

Shopping for Apples and Appendixes

This is the final installment of my ongoing series of posts on Reid's shop argument.

In my previous post, I noted that the sceptic’s attempt to refute step (1) of the Shop Argument fails. However, the sceptic can also attempt to undermine the Shop Argument by refuting step (2); that is, the sceptic may argue that the fact that two faculties come from the same shop does not imply that they are equally trustworthy. In fact, it is quite easy to construct a counterexample to step (2) of the Shop Argument. For instance, the Apple computer company manufactures both ipods and desktop computers.

Now I am a big fan of the Apple ipod and would gladly class it among the ten greatest 21st century inventions. However, I also believe that the Apple desktop operating system remains the most non-user friendly invention to curse the planet and that their production should be immediately discontinued. (Okay, so I don't really believe this, but let us just suppose that this is true for the sake of argument.) The fact that both Apple ipods and desktops are produced by the same manufacturer, and even constructed in the same factory in Thailand, does little to ameliorate my approval of the former and disapproval of the latter. In short, the fact that both come from the same shop hardly seems like sufficient reason to assume they are of equal quality.

The same point can be made using an example from the natural world. For instance, few naturalists would disagree with the claim that the human eye is a marvel of biological engineering and that it executes its function in a superbly exquisite fashion. However, the same could hardly be said for the vermiform appendix, which fails to perform the task it was originally designed for and may even become inflamed and rupture, resulting in the painful death of its human host. Admittedly, both the eye and the appendix were produced in the same factory of nature, but while one works wonderfully the other doesn’t seem to work at all.

(NB: There has been speculation among scientists that the appendix may play some yet unknown lymphatic, exocrine, endocrine function. However, most physicians and biologists agree that it is merely a vestigial organ (a leftover from our cellulose-digesting herbivorous ancestors) that presently serves no significant function in humans.)

Consequently, the fact that two things proceed from the same shop or manufacturer does not entail that they are equally effective. A further story must be provided if we are to assume that the efficacy of the one entails the efficacy of the other. The need for Reid to provide additional grounds in support of the Shop Argument is made even more acute in light of the sui generis nature of reason vis-à-vis the senses. What makes the Apple and appendix analogies particularly striking is that the respective manufacturers (namely, the Apple computer company and Nature) produce very different products. If Apple only produced desktops and laptops, then one wouldn’t expect much of a difference in the quality of their products since both are merely types of computers. However, ipods are sufficiently different from computers to allow for a significant disparity in quality between the two.

Likewise, the fact that our rational faculties are sui generis vis-à-vis our sensory faculty increases the likelihood that there may be a difference in the reliability between the two. In brief, the sui generis nature or reason vis-à-vis the senses places a greater burden on Reid to say why he assumes that the reliability of one entails that of the other. This is not to deny that both our rational and sensory faculties are products of Nature—i.e., come from the same shop. Rather, it is to recognise that the same shop may produce two very different products of radically different quality.

Shopping for the Sui Generis

In this post I will be further developing the reply to Reid adumbrated in my previous post; what I will refer to as the sui generis thesis. This thesis is not in tension with Reid’s observation that all the cognitive faculties are equally susceptible to “disorders of the body”. To wit, I am not claiming that reason is somehow less fallible than the faculty of sense. For example, we can imagine someone in the exact opposite position to Nash; someone whose schizophrenia utterly undermined the reliability of their rational faculty while leaving their sensory faculty perfectly intact. I do not wish to deny such a possibility.

My point is that if someone’s reason were so corrupted, there would be no way for them to use their sensory faculty to discover this fact. By contrast, in the case of someone whose sensory faculty is compromised by schizophrenia, it is nevertheless conceivable that they could discover this fact using their rational faculty (in fact, this is precisely what John Nash does).

Reid may object to my Nash counterexample by pointing out that John Nash could only use his reason to evaluate his sensory deliverances because he had prior veridical sensory experiences to use as a paradigm. But if we were to posit, let us say, a global scepticism in which the senses were always mistaken, reason would be powerless to discover this fact. The upshot of this objection is that reason could not effectively evaluate the senses independent of prior aid from the senses themselves.

However, the preceding objection merely points out that there are certain circumstances (i.e., in the case of pervasive sensory scepticism) in which reason would be unable to effectively evaluate the reliability of the senses. However, the sui generis thesis does not rely on the bold (and implausible) claim that reason is always able to effectively evaluate the reliability of the senses. Rather, it rests on the much more modest (and highly plausible) claim that it is possible, given the right circumstances, for reason to evaluate the senses. To wit, if we grant that it is never possible to use the senses to evaluate the reliability of reason, then it merely has to be the case that under some circumstances we may effectively use reason to evaluate the reliability of the senses in order to establish a unilateral relationship between the two faculties.

In sum, I am not claiming that reason is somehow free of the foibles that threaten the senses. Neither am I suggesting that reason can always be effectively used to evaluate the reliability of the senses (i.e., independent of prior aid from the senses themselves). Rather, I avow that there is a unilateral relationship between reason and the senses in that (under favourable circumstances) the former can be used to discover defects in the latter but not vice versa. I believe this unilateral relationship between reason and the senses is sufficient to establish, contra Reid, that there is something sui generis about reason vis-à-vis the senses.

In my next post on this topic, I will provide an account of what makes reason sui generis vis-à-vis the senses and outline how the sui generis thesis bears on Reid’s Shop Argument.

Reid's "Same Shop" Argument (Part 2)

The central contention of the Shop Argument is that our trust in our sensory faculty (along with the other cognitive faculties) is a first principle just like our trust in reason. The reliability of both faculties is derived from the same place—i.e., how we have been designed by Nature—and neither is therefore better than the other. In a slogan, all first principles are created equal.

However, pace what Reid has to say on the matter it seems to me that there is in fact something special about the rational faculty that sets it in sharp contradistinction to the sensory faculty. Specifically, there appears to be a unilateral relationship between the two faculties such that our rational deliberations can be employed to evaluate the reliability of our sensory deliverances, but our sensory deliverances cannot be used to evaluate our rational deliberations.

This claim is illustrated by the Ron Howard film, A Beautiful Mind, which is loosely based on the life of the mathematician and winner of the 1994 Noble Prize in Economics, John Forbes Nash. In the movie, Nash suffers from an extreme form of paranoid schizophrenia that gives rise to sensory experiences (both visual and auditory) of people, places and objects that do not exist. Nash’s hallucinations are phenomenally indistinguishable from actual objects. However, he learns to use his superior gifts of logical reasoning to figure out which phenomena are real and which are not. (For example, he is able to deduce that his supposed best friend Charlie was merely a hallucination by noticing small inconsistencies in his dress and in the way he aged.)

We have no problem imagining someone using their rational faculty to evaluate the veridicality of their sensory deliverances in the manner John Nash did. However, it only takes a moment’s reflection to realize that it would be absurd to talk about someone using their sensory faculties to determine whether or not their rational judgements are veridical. Thus, while we can imagine using reason to evaluate the reliability of the senses, we cannot imagine using our senses to evaluate the reliability of reason. I believe that this unilateral relationship between reason and the senses suggests that there is something unique about the rational faculty that sets it apart from the faculty of sense. I will refer to this thesis by saying that reason is sui generis vis-à-vis the senses. In my next post on this topic, I will develop my sui generis thesis further and respond to one possible objection to my proposal.

Reid's "Same Shop" Argument (Part 1)

External-world scepticism is the thesis that we cannot know that the external world exists or that it is as we perceive it to be. The canonical summary of Reid’s reply to external-world scepticism is that found in chapter 6 of the Inquiry:

The sceptic asks me, Why do you believe in the existence of the external object which you perceive? This belief, sir, is none of my manufacture; it came from the mint of Nature; it bears her image and superscription; and, if it is not right, the fault is not mine: I even took it upon trust, and without suspicion. Reason, says the sceptic, is the only judge of truth, and you ought to throw off every opinion and every belief that is not grounded on reason. Why, sir, should I believe the faculty of reason more than that of perception?—they came both out of the same shop, and were made by the same artist; and if he puts one piece of false ware into my hands, what should hinder him from putting another?[Inquiry, VI, 20: 168-9]

Reid notes that whether we believe that the objects we perceive exist independently of our perceptions is not up to us. To wit, when it comes to the external world, to believe or not to believe is never the question. This belief is something that arises from how we have been constituted by Nature and is therefore something over which we have little or no control. At first glance, Reid seems to be suggesting that we can’t be held responsible for the fact that we believe in the external world since we simply have no choice in the matter. This interpretation is further supported by Reid’s mot: “if it [belief in external objects] is not right, the fault is not mine”. However, to say we can’t help but believe in an external world would be to offer exculpations when what the sceptic demands are justifications. That is, the fact that we cannot help but believe in the external world does not imply that we should believe in the external world.

However, I believe Reid’s argument is much more subtle and sophisticated than it may first appear. Reid is not simply saying that we cannot offer a rational justification for our belief in the external world. He is making the further point that such a belief is not the kind of thing one should offer a rational justification for. In brief, our belief that our senses provide us with reliable knowledge of the external world is a first principle—that is, a belief that arises out of how we have been constituted by Nature:

All reasoning must be from first principles; and for first principles no other reason can be given but this, that, by the constitution of our nature, we are under a necessity of assenting to them. Such principles are parts of our constitution, no less that the power of thinking: reason can neither make nor destroy them; nor can it do any thing without them. [Inquiry, VI, 7: 71]

Among the first principles is included the belief that our faculty of sense is a reliable source of knowledge. Our trust in this faculty is independent of reason, which is itself merely one among the several cognitive faculties we take to be reliable because of how we have been designed by Nature.

Reid can therefore be described as offering a poly-foundationalism. Cartesian foundationalism (or what may just as easily be called traditional foundationalism) is the idea that there is some indubitable first principle upon which all our other beliefs can be built—it is where the epistemic buck stops. However, Reid represents a poly-foundationalism in that he offers not one, but several first principles. But the most distinctive feature of Reid’s foundationalism is that he sees reason as merely one among the many sources of knowledge. Within the Cartesian rationalist system, only beliefs that bore reason’s stamp of approval were deemed acceptable. However, the Reidian system forsakes the monopoly of reason found in Cartesianism and in its place establishes an epistemological oligarchy comprised of various first principles, each equally authoritative in their own right.

The mistake the sceptic makes, then, is seeking for rational justifications in places where she has no business looking. Our belief that our sensory faculty is, all things being equal, trustworthy is a first principle that stands on its own two feet and does not need to be vindicated by reason. This is not to deny that we may sometimes be mistaken about our perceptual beliefs. However, the fallibility of the sensory faculties is shared by all other faculties, including reason:

They are all limited and imperfect…We are liable to error and wrong judgment in the use of them all; but as little in the informations of sense as in the deductions of reasoning. And the errors we fall into with regard to objects of sense are not corrected by reason, but by more accurate attention to the informations we may receive by our senses themselves.[Essays, II. 22: 252]

Reid maintains that if we reject the faculty of sense we must reject the faculty of reason as well since they both share the same foibles. In sum, since no cognitive faculty is in anyway privileged above the others, they all stand or fall together:

Thus the faculties of consciousness, of memory, of external sense, and of reason, are all equally gifts of Nature. No good reason can be assigned for receiving the testimony of one of them, which is not of equal force with regard to the others.[Essays, VI. 4: 463]

Relevant Reading:
De Rose, Keith. (1989). ‘Reid's Anti-Sensationalism and His Realism’, Philosophical Review. 98, 313-348.

Greco, J. (2004). ‘Reid’s Reply to the Skeptic’, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid. T. Cuneo and R. Van Wouldenberg (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reid, T. (1969). Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, (ed.) Baruch A. Brody (ed.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Reid, T. (1990). Practical Ethics, (ed.) Knud Haakonssen, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Reid, T. (1997). An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, (ed.) Derek R. Brookes, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. (Inquiry)

Reid, T. (2002). Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, (ed.) Derek Brookes, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. (Essays) Yaffe, G. (2004). Manifest Activity: Thomas Reid’s Theory of Action. Oxford: Clarendon Press.