Workshop on Imperative Aspects of Perceptual Experience

Time and place:

Aug 28, 2013 09:00 AM - Aug 29, 2013 05:00 PM, 

University of Oslo

Are there imperatival aspects to perceptual experience? Do any experiences have intrinsic motivational powers? If so, is this at odds with their being correct or incorrect? If not, what are they correct or incorrect about? One way to approach them is by comparing perceptual experiences to speech acts. If perceptual experiences were modeled by speech acts, would the best models be assertions, imperatives, or neither? If in some ways, or on some occasions, experiences are more like imperatives than assertions are these imperatival aspects of experience reflected in any way in their accuracy conditions? Are they at odds with their having accuracy conditions at all? Are they at odds with representationalism? In this workshop we explore these and related questions.

Schedule

Wednesday August 28

9:30 Welcome and Introduction (Sebastian Watzl and Susanna Siegel)

10:00-11:30 John Bengson (University of Wisconsin-Madison): “Practical Perception”
Commentator: Avery Archer (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

11:45-13:15 Susanna Siegel (Harvard University, CSMN): “Affordances and the Contents of Perception”
​Commentator: Anna Bergqvist (Manchester Metropolitan University)

14:15-15:45 Sebastian Watzl (University of Oslo, CSMN): “Perceptual Guidance”
Commentator: Dagfinn Føllesdal (Stanford University, University of Oslo)

16:00-17:30 Gabriel Greenberg (UCLA): “The Representation of Space in Visual Sequences”
Commentator: Farid Masrour (Harvard University)

Thursday August 29

9:30-11:00 Hilla Jacobson (Ben-Gurion University): “Not only a Messenger: From a Purely Representational to a Hybrid Account of the Phenomenal Character of Pain”
Commentator: Maja Spener (University of Birmingham)

11:15-12:30 Ole Koksvik (University of Bergen): “Pushiness”

13:30-15:00 Manolo Martínez (University of Barcelona): “Imperativism about Perceptual Experience – The Case of Disgust”
Commentator: Michael Brady (University of Glasgow)

15:15-16:45 Tim Bayne (University of Manchester): “Phenomenal Attitudes”
Commentator: Anders Nes (University of Oslo, CSMN)

Dilworth's Functional Consonance

In his paper, “Perception, Introspection and Functional Consonance”, Dilworth attempts to provide a broadly functionalist account of first-person authority with respect to how things perceptually seem to an agent. The account is functionalist in the sense that it individuates cognitive states in terms of their role in the aetiology of a disposition to engage in a certain kind of classification behaviour. For example, if I perceive that X is red or I believe X is red, then my perceiving or believing are to be unpacked in terms of my disposition to sort X as red in the relevant classification task (i.e., to engage in red-classification behaviour). When my perceptual experience and belief match in terms of classification behaviour, they are said to be “consonant” with each other. Moreover, Dilworth holds that in any given situation, S, it is logically impossible for an agent to be disposed to behave in two mutually exclusive ways in response to S. It follows that if an agent has both a perceptual experience and belief in response to a given situation, the experience and belief must be consonant with each other. This leads Dilworth to postulate what he refers to as the “perceptual consonance principle”:

(PCP): If one is having at time t a perceptual experience concerning the F-ness of X, and if at that same time t one is also having a perceptually derived belief concerning the F-ness of X, then the experience and the belief must be consonant with each other.

Unfortunately, it is possible to construct a counterexample to (PCP). Consider a case in which an agent is given the task of classifying objects as straight or bent. Moreover, let us suppose that the agent is unfamiliar with the phenomenon of refraction. Looking at a partially submerged stick the agent has the visual experience of the stick being bent. Given Dilworth’s dispositional model, this entails that the agent is disposed to classify the stick as bent. Suppose further that the agent slides her fingers down the length of the stick, giving rise to the tactile experience of the stick being straight. By Dilworth’s lights, this entails that the agent is disposed to classify the stick as straight. Since it is possible for the agent to have the visual experience that the partially submerged stick as bent (at time t) and have the tactile experience of it being straight (at t), it follows that an agent may be simultaneously disposed to engage in conflicting classification behaviours. Furthermore, we can imagine that the agent forms the perceptually derived belief that the stick is straight (based on her tactile experience). In such a case, the agent would have a perceptual experience concerning the shape of the stick (a la sight) and a perceptually derived belief concerning the shape of stick (a la touch), without the experience and belief being consonant with each other.

UPSHOT: What must be added to (PCP) is a restriction to a single sensory modality, and not simply a restriction to a given time or situation. However, as far as the paper under consideration is concerned, Dilworth fails to provide us with the theoretical tools we need for such a restriction.

Dilworth appears to anticipate this objection in his discussion of the Muller-Lyer illusion; a case in which a pair of equal vertical lines (A and B below) appear to have different lengths.

According to Dilworth, one can be said to perceive the lines as being of different lengths because one is temporarily disposed to classify them as such. However, this perceptual disposition is quickly displaced by one’s prior belief that the lines are actually the same length. Moreover, Dilworth points out that this offers no counterexample to his claim that there cannot be conflicting perceptual dispositions since the “relevant knowledge that the lines are actually the same length is clearly not a belief that is perceptually acquired...” He summarises the point as follows:

[W]hat we have in such cases is not a conflict of perceptual dispositions—which has already been shown to be, strictly speaking, impossible—but instead a refusal by a perceiver to believe what she would otherwise believe on ‘the evidence of her own eyes’, so that the temporary or initial consonant belief that the lines are of different lengths is rejected in favour of a longer-term belief based on prior knowledge.[1] (Italics mine)

CAVEAT: Insofar as Dilworth’s functionalist analysis commits him to the thesis that being disposed to engage in classification behaviour is a necessary condition for perception, his claim that one is only “temporarily” disposed to engage in the relevant classification behaviour already concedes too much. If one perceives that X is F only if one is disposed to engage in F-classification behaviour with respect to X, then the point at which one ceases to be so disposed one also ceases to have the perceptual experience in question. However, in the case of a Muller-Lyer illusion, the agent continues to have the perceptual experience of the lines being different lengths even after she is no longer disposed to classify them as such.

Putting aside the above caveat, Dilworth’s treatment of the Muller-Lyer illusion case fails to generalise to that of the partially submerged stick. In the latter the conflict is not between a perceptual experience and a prior belief (as is plausibly the case in the Muller-Lyer illusion), but rather between two conflicting perceptual experiences. In fact, we can imagine a modified partially submerged stick example in which the agent fails to form a belief altogether. We may suppose that, confronted with conflicting perceptual experiences, the agent simply decides to remain agnostic as to whether the stick is straight or bent. (Recall, we have assumed that the agent is unfamiliar with, and therefore has no prior beliefs about, the phenomenon of refraction.) However, even if the agent were to decide to withhold belief altogether, she may still continue to enjoy both sets of conflicting perceptual experiences. Thus, unlike the Muller-Lyer case, the partially submerged stick example presupposes no competing beliefs or knowledge.

It is important to get clear on why this poses a problem for Dilworth’s account. The problem is not that the partially submerged stick case threatens to undermine Dilworth’s claim that any given perceptual experience may be accompanied by a corresponding consonant belief. Since Dilworth wishes to defend the claim that a belief about how things seem to one must be consonant with the corresponding perceptual experience (if one were to form such a belief at all), the mere fact that such a consonant belief is absent (as we may suppose it is in the partially submerged stick case) is no counterexample to the functional consonance thesis. (On at least this much, Dilworth and I agree.) Moreover, I hold that if the agent were to form beliefs about both her visual and tactile experiences, then each respective belief would be consonant with the corresponding perceptual experience. This is something I believe Dilworth would also wish to say; though I maintain that he is not entitled to do so until he has filled in the gap described by Upshot. However, this is not the worry I presently wish to press.

Instead, the present worry has to do with Dilworth’s claim that in any given situation, S, it is logically impossible for an agent to be disposed to engage in mutually exclusive classification behaviours in response to S. Insofar as he is also committed to the claim that an agent perceives that X is F only if that agent is disposed to engage in F-classification behaviour with respect to X, then the partially submerged stick example shows that an agent may be disposed to classify the same object as both bent and straight. Dilworth must therefore either give up the claim that it is logically impossible to have conflicting perceptual dispositions or the claim that being disposed towards classification behaviour (of the relevant kind) is a necessary condition for perception.

Another tempting (but ultimately unsuccessful) response available to Dilworth is to argue that the partially submerged stick example is an instance of a “mixed case”; one “in which several properties are simultaneously perceived, each of which would require its own separate experience versus belief consonance analysis.” The example that Dilworth provides is that of perceiving an object as being a certain colour (with one sensory modality) and perceiving it as having a certain shape (with another sensory modality). Regarding such mixed cases Dilworth maintains there cannot be any conflict:

Now arguably mixed cases of simultaneous perception of different properties would always be cases involving properties falling under different determinable, since one could not simultaneously perceive an object both to have determinate colour F1 and also to have a distinct determinate colour F2.

The above observations may be perfectly correct as far as they go, but they fail to address the issue at hand. Recall, the objection with which this post is concerned is not directed against the notion of experience/belief consonance per se (to which I am sympathetic), but against the conjunction of the claims that (a) it is logically impossible to have two conflicting dispositions and (b) that being disposed to engage in classification behaviour is a necessary condition for perceiving that X is F. Dilworth fails to consider cases in which different sensory modalities present an agent with conflicting information with respect to the same property. The partially submerged stick example is one such case; an instance in which both the visual and tactile sensory modalities provide information about an object’s shape. Thus, unlike the mixed cases that he considers, the partially submerged stick example appears to be a genuine instance in which Dilworth is forced to either (a) acknowledge that an agent may be simultaneously disposed to engage in conflicting classification behaviours or (b) give up on the idea that being disposed to engage in the classification behaviour is a necessary condition for perception.

Dilworth's Propositional Indexing

In his paper, “Semantics naturalised: Propositional indexing plus interactive perception”, John Dilworth advocates a propositional indexing view according to which cognitive states (understood as concrete causal occurrences) enjoy an isomorphic correspondence with propositions (understood as abstract truth-value bearing items). Maintaining such an isomorphism requires that we have some method for indexing a given proposition (such as the proposition “X is red”, with respect to some worldly object X) with a corresponding perceptual or cognitive state (such as an agent Z perceiving that X is red).

This method, whatever it may be, may be identified with the specific epistemic conditions under which we would accept that the isomorphism in question holds. Moreover, Dilworth maintains that the epistemic conditions must be ones that can be met by individuals without any technical or specialised scientific knowledge. After all, it is part of our folk psychological practice to describe the contents of perceptual and cognitive states in propositional terms. This imposes the constraint that the method for indexing propositions to cognitive states must be one which is available to everyone, including those lacking any specialised philosophical or technical expertise. Dilworth puts the point as follows:

Our understanding of propositional indexing is not intended to be restricted to specialised cognitive science procedure requiring technical expertise and detailed knowledge of such matters as the cognitive structures involved in perceptual functioning. Instead, the idea is that the everyday understanding by people in general, of when a particular proposition, such as “X is red” is true of a particular object X is to be correlated with a related understanding by such people of what kinds of behavioural evidence would justify a claim that the person had indeed correctly perceived the relevant fact. So the predominant epistemic issue is not the theoretical nature of propositional indexing as such, but rather the everyday conditions under which people in general would agree that it had successfully occurred.

Dilworth recommends that propositional indexing be unpacked in terms of classification behaviour:

For example, a paradigm kind of colour-related classification behaviour would be that of a person assigned a task of sorting some miscellaneous objects by their colour, and then putting object X into a box containing only red objects. This classification behaviour would provide evidence that the person P had perceived that object X was red. Consequently, if the person Q observing person P is considering the proposition that X is red, then Q would take person P’s classification as evidence that P had perceived that X is red, and hence that P’s relevant perceptual state S, whatever it may be, is indexed by the proposition ‘X is red’.

Significantly, Dilworth describes propositional indexing in third- rather than first-personal terms. This suggests a view according to which an agent’s cognitive state may be described as propositional just in case it is, in principle, possible for that cognitive state to be correlated with a proposition. However, the act of identifying the correlation need not be performed by the agent that is actually undergoing the cognitive state in order for the cognitive state to count as propositional. One upshot of this view is that the cognitive states of non-linguistic animals, which lack the ability to actually engage in propositional indexing, may nevertheless count as having propositional attitudes.

Dilworth’s observations about colour-related classification behaviour generalises to less overt types of classification behaviour. For example, a dog may be said to perceive a bone is edible just in case it is disposed to ingest the bone. Ingesting the bone, then, amounts to a type of classification behaviour (akin to the act of sorting bones into the set of edible items). Since the heuristic of classification behaviour is understood in dispositional terms, it is not necessary that the ingesting of the bone actually take place for the dog to count as perceiving that the bone is edible. Moreover, since a dog may engage in such classification behaviour without us having to attribute to the dog the concepts of “bone” or “edible”, the present account does not require concept possession as a prerequisite for having an agent’s perceptual state indexed by a proposition.

There is much that I find attractive in Dilworth’s framework. Specifically, I believe it provides the resources for an account of propositional attitudes that allows for such attitudes to be attributed to non-linguistic animals. (Admittedly, Dilworth may be reluctant to speak of propositional attitudes in this way, but that would only be because of his refusal to attribute semantic content to cognitive states in general and not because of any prejudice against such attributions in the case of non-linguistic animals. In short, both Dilworth and I agree in the even-handedness of our treatment of the cognitive states of linguistic and non-linguistic animals.) However, I want to conclude this post by highlighting a minor problem in Dilworth’s account of perceptual states.

Dilworth is committed to what he refers to as an "interactive theory of perception", the considered version of which he puts as follows:

IP2: An organism Z perceives an item X to have the property of being F just in case X causes some sense-organ zi of Z to cause Z to acquire an X-related disposition D, such that D is an F-classification disposition.

Dilworth defines an F-classification dispositions as “a disposition, the manifestation of which is some F-classification behaviour. For example, on this account, to perceive that an object X is red is to acquire a disposition to classify object X in some red-related way.”

However, it is not clear that IP2 can accommodate cases in which an agent perceives things to be a certain way and yet fails to believe that things are that way. For example, suppose that I am led to believe (erroneously) that a room is equipped with special lighting that makes all the white objects in the room appear red. (However, there is no special lighting and all objects in the room are actually the colour they appear to be.) Due to my misinformation, I am disposed to sort all objects that appear red into the white box. According to IP2, it follows from my having this disposition that I do not perceive that the objects are red. But this gets things wrong. The thing to say is that I perceive the object as red, but I believe it is white. Consequently, IP2 is unable to accommodate cases in which the two—perceiving X is F and believing X is F—come apart.

The Perceptual Model as Ideal in McDowell's Account of Virtuous Agency

Avery has written a number of interesting posts about McDowell’s conception of virtuous agency. Here, I would like to offer a reason why McDowell thinks that the virtuous agent has a correct perception of what has to be done, when a particular situation calls for a particular ethically salient action.

Let’s begin by making a distinction between two ways of understanding the aetiology of a particular morally correct action: (1) the Perceptual Model, and (2) the Ratiocinative Model. (I’m trying to follow Avery’s terminology here.) On the Perceptual Model of morally correct action, a virtuous agent is moved to act by his or her perception of what that particular situation demands. Here, the virtuous agent does not think about what he or she ought to do before or while performing the relevant action. The sense in which the virtuous agent does not “think about” what ought to be done can be given an intuitive gloss: the agent is moved to act by an inculcated habit, which is very much like a reflex. In contrast, on the Ratiocinative Model of morally correct action, a virtuous agent is moved to act by his or her entertaining a thought to the effect that “That such-and-such is to be done, here and now”. On this model, the virtuous agent must first entertain such a thought and then act accordingly.

Now, McDowell elevates the status of the Perceptual Model to that of an ideal. Why does he set aside the Ratiocinative Model as being unworthy of the ideal status? Why might he think that Ratiocination ought not to be attributed to the ideal virtuous agent’s motivational psychology? I believe that McDowell elevates this model of virtuous agency to the status of ideal because he wants us to think of the ideal virtuous agent as having a special kind of non-inferential knowledge of a particular ethically salient matter of fact. The notion of non-inferential knowledge allows no room for the kind of error in reasoning in which one’s thinking begins with a correct apprehension of some segment of reality, and ends with a non-apprehension of any segment of reality. Non-inferential knowledge is both immediately ascertained and constitutes an accurate apprehension of some segment of reality. Coupled with McDowell’s account of the fundamentally relational and exhaustively conceptual nature of perceptual experience, non-inferential knowledge of a particular ethically salient matter of fact is perfect, indefeasible knowledge of what must be done, here and now, in the perceptible world. In effect, I believe that McDowell’s notion of the ideal virtuous agent is the idea of an Omniscient Agent.

But this does not yet constitute an answer to the question: Why is ratiocination ruled out? The answer, I think, is this: McDowell is assuming that we non-ideal (non-omniscient) agents use ratiocination as a means of discovering particular matters of fact about the empirical world, and that this means of gaining knowledge is simply not required by the ideal (omniscient) virtuous agent. The ideal (omniscient) virtuous agent registers each and every ethically salient fact, in each and every particular occasion, by perception alone.

I think this is a very provocative and plausible way of understanding the notion of an ideal virtuous agent, but I'm curious to know (1) whether anyone thinks that I've correctly described McDowell's position here, and if so, (2) whether anyone finds the position thus described plausible?

McDowell's Theory of Virtue and the Multivocality Objection

One objection to McDowell’s account of virtue is that it seems to give rise to a multivocal account moral aspirations. This multivocality is viewed as problematic since it makes it unclear what the appropriate target of our moral aspirations should be.

Intuitively, one should strive to be like the ideal agent. This seems to be, in part, constitutive of what it means to be the ideal. If this is right, then it would seem that the thing to do would be to emulate the ideal (i.e., virtuous) agent. For McDowell, this means not only acting as the virtuous agent acts, but also employing the same methodology for arriving at one’s moral judgements—namely, moral perception. However, since I know that I am not the ideal, and that I am therefore unable to arrive at what I ought to do via moral perception, I should really aspire towards ratiocination (i.e., all-things-considered judgements). Admittedly, this would represent a step down from the ideal, but given my less-than-ideal status, it seems to be the best I could aspire towards.

The worry that this objection points to is that once we recognise that we are less-than-ideal agents, the ideal can on longer serve as the target of our moral aspirations. In stead of asking, what would Jesus do (i.e., the ideal agent), we seem obliged to ask what would the impetuous-but-well-meaning-apostle Peter do (i.e., the continent agent). Or, to put the matter in more McDowellian and less New-Testament-theological terms, the appropriate question for agents who recognise that they fall short of the ideal moral agent is not “what would the virtuous agent do?” but “what would the continent agent do?” This seems to follow from the fact that on McDowell’s picture the difference between the cognitive methodologies of the virtuous and non-virtuous agents (i.e., perception and ratiocination respectively) is one of kind rather than merely degree. This difference in the respective methodologies of the virtuous and non-virtuous agent opens up the lacuna that allows the multivocality worry to take hold.

This worry may further motivate the desire to have ratiocination figure as a perfectly legitimate part of the virtuous agent’s cognitive moral apparatus. If both the virtuous and continent agent, alike, are pictured as relying on ratiocination, the path appears cleared for the continent agent to become (or at least make some progress towards becoming) the virtuous agent. But so long as their methodologies remain distinct, then our awareness of our own imperfection seems to normatively confine us to emulate (i.e., employ the methodology of) the non-virtuous agent.

I believe the multivocality objection (at least in its present form) errs by construing McDowell’s account of the methodology of the continent agent (i.e., ratiocination) as prescriptive when, by McDowell’s lights, it is purely descriptive. To wit, one is never supposed to aspire towards ratiocination. Rather, moral ratiocination is simply the default position of an agent who suffers from clouded perception. Recall, the virtuous subject’s moral perception constitutes an overriding reason that silences all other reasons. By contrast, the moral perception of the non-virtuous agent is not able to silence all other reasons, which leave several competing reasons in play at once. This leads to a weighing of moral reasons, and this weighing of moral reasons just is what I have been calling moral ratiocination. The upshot of this is that ratiocination, on McDowell’s picture, always amounts to a fall back position (i.e., faute de mieux) and never to an ideal to be aspired towards.

McDowell, Akrasia and the Misguided View

In this post I wish to engage in a piece of philosophical exegesis in order to expose a certain misreading of McDowell. The passage I will be discussing reads as follows:

It would be a mistake to protest that one can fail to act on a reason, and even on a reason judged by oneself to be better than any reason one has for acting otherwise, without there needing to be any clouding or distortion in one’s appreciation of the reason one flouts. That is true; but to suppose it constitutes an objection to Aristotle is to fail to understand the special nature of the conception of virtue that generates Aristotle’s interest in incontinence. (Mind, Value, and Reality, p. 55)

Here, McDowell concedes that Akrasia, the phenomenon where an agent judges that some action A is the best course to pursue, but nevertheless freely chooses not to do A, is possible. On this point, McDowell agrees with Aristotle and Donald Davidson (and disagrees with Socrates who flatly denies such a possibility). More significant still, McDowell acknowledges that the best way of conceiving of Akrasia may not be in terms of “clouding or distortion in one’s appreciation of the reason one flouts.” In short, while McDowell conceives of the distinction between the virtuous agent, on the one hand, and the continent or incontinent agent, on the other, in terms of the latter having a clouded perception, he does not maintain that the possibility of Akrasia is also to be so explained.

This is an important point since some have mistakenly attributed to McDowell the claim that Akrasia can only be explained in terms of clouded moral perception. Let us refer to the thesis that it is possible for an agent to choose not to do A even if the agent’s judgement that A is the best course of action is unclouded as unclouded Akrasia. According to, what I will refer to as the misguided reading of McDowell, the above passage implicates a denial of unclouded Akrasia. The misguided reading rests on the false assumption that the “mistake” McDowell refers to in the passage in question is the idea that unclouded Akrasia is possible. However, the misguided reading overlooks the opening clause of the very next sentence in which McDowell grants “that [the possibility of unclouded Akrasia] is true”. What McDowell actually sees as the mistake is not the possibility of unclouded Akrasia per se but the idea that unclouded Akrasia poses a difficulty for his account. The upshot of the rejection of the misguided reading is that we do not need to see McDowell as attempting to account for the possibility of Akrasia in terms of “clouding or distortion” in an agent’s appreciation of her reasons. On the contrary, a careful reading of the relevant passages reveals that this is a question McDowell is altogether silent on—i.e., McDowell fails to provide any explicit positive account of how Akraisa in general (or unclouded Akrasia in particular) is possible, at least not in the essay presently under discussion.

That McDowell fails to provide a positive account of Akrasia is not surprising, nor should it be seen as a defect (i.e., a sin of omission) given his present purposes. This is because McDowell is only concerned with preserving the Aristotelian distinction between the continent and incontinent agent, and not with an account of Akrasia per se. Thus, the misguided reading errs first and foremost because it construes McDowell’s argument as attempting to establish a conclusion on a subject matter that falls outside the argument’s actual area of concern.

However, even if we reject the misguided reading, the possibility of unclouded Akrasia may still seem to pose a difficulty for McDowell’s account. Since (in the case of the virtuous agent) perceiving what one ought to do is sufficient for doing it, then the agent who manifests weakness of will must be displaying a clouded perception. While this is true by McDowell’s lights, this fact alone does not involve the denial of the possibility of unclouded Akrasia. To see this, we must distinguish between the following two types of cases: (1) ones in which an agent arrives at what she ought to do via the exercise of a perceptual sensitivity (alone) and (2) ones in which an agent arrives at what she ought to do via ratiocination. Strictly speaking, (1) and (2) are not mutually exclusive since in the case of the non-virtuous agent (i.e., the continent and incontinent) both ratiocination and a perceptual sensitivity are typically in play. However, in such a case, the deliverance of the agent’s perceptual sensitivity is itself reduced to just another reason in the agent’s all-things-considered judgement. This follows from the fact that (in the case of the non-virtuous agent) moral perception does not have the silencing power that it does in the case of the virtuous agent. In fact, the absence of this silencing power is just what it means for a moral perception to be clouded on McDowell’s picture. By contrast, the virtuous agent, who has an unclouded perception, is one whose perceptual sensitivity silences all competing reasons (with certain qualifications that I will ignore for the time being) and who can therefore be described as not resorting to ratiocination at all. With these subtleties in mind, I will (for brevity) continue to talk of moral perception versus moral ratiocination as if the two are mutually exclusive phenomenon.

With the distinction between moral perception and moral ratiocination firmly in place, we can now appreciate that McDowell sees unclouded Akrasia as only relevant to the latter but not to the former. By McDowell’s lights, an agent cannot have an unclouded perception of what she ought to do and yet fail to do it since (as noted earlier) having an unclouded perception is sufficient for virtuous action. However, McDowell’s account allows that an agent may have an unclouded appreciation of her reasons and yet fail to act upon them. The upshot of this is that Akraisa (i.e., unclouded Akrasia) only applies to moral ratiocination and not to moral perceptions.

The significance of the above conclusion should not be under-appreciated. Recall, on McDowell’s view, the virtuous agent is able to perceive and act upon what she ought to do in a given situation without need for ratiocination. (In fact, this is what distinguishes the virtuous agent from the merely continent agent on McDowell’s picture.) Hence, the non-virtuous agent (i.e., the continent and incontinent) is the agent who has to resort to ratiocination since her perceptions (being clouded) are not sufficient to get her to the point of acting as the virtuous agent acts. In a slogan, the non-virtuous agent shall not live (morally) by perception alone. The upshot of this is that Akrasia can only arise in the case of a non-virtuous agent for whom ratiocination remains relevant. The virtuous agent, by contrast, relies solely on perception and therefore cannot ever suffer from Akrasia. This strikes me as just the sort of result one would want. In conclusion, McDowell’s distinction between moral perceptions and moral ratiocination allows him to preserve the following pair of desiderata: (1) it allows him to grant the possibility of unclouded Akrasia (vis-à-vis moral ratiocination) while maintaining that unclouded perception (alone) is sufficient for virtuous action, and (2) it implies that only non-virtuous agents can suffer from unclouded Akrasia.

McDowell On Virtue

The meta-ethical approach limned in John McDowell’s essay, “Virtue and Reason”, combines the Socratic thesis that “virtue is knowledge” with the Aristotelian thesis that a virtuous agent is one who exhibits a “reliable sensitivity” to the requirements of virtue. McDowell describes this sensitivity as a perceptual capacity—the ability to see, for example, what kindness requires. Significantly, McDowell’s picture does not require that the virtuous agent have the conceptual sophistication to nominally identify the particular virtue (for example, “kindness”) the agent happens to be acting from in a given situation. All that is required is that the agent be able to identify the act that kindness requires as “the thing to do”, whenever acting kindly is what ought to be done. The exercise of this sensitivity amounts to a type of knowledge, according to McDowell, because it involves getting things right.

One preliminary objection McDowell considers to the virtue as knowledge thesis is the claim that a mere sensitivity is insufficient to capture virtue since one may apprehend what one ought to do without being motivated to do it. According to this objection, some added appetitive component is needed, so that virtue is best conceived as a composite of reason and desire. I will refer to this idea as the composite conception. McDowell diagnoses the plausibility of the composite conception as stemming from the putative possibility of a non-virtuous agent perceiving the very same thing as a virtuous agent in a given situation and yet not act as the virtuous agent acts.

McDowell’s response to the composite conception appears to give rise to a dilemma, rooted in (what I shall argue are) conflicting sets of claims. On the one hand, he seems to deny the possibility of a virtuous and non-virtuous agent enjoying matching perceptions vis-à-vis what ought to be done:

If we are to retain the identification of virtue with knowledge, then, by contraposition, we are committed to denying that a virtuous person’s perception of a situation can be precisely matched in someone who, in that situation, acts otherwise than virtuously. (p. 54*).

On the other hand, he rejects Socrates’ claim that the difference between the virtuous and non-virtuous agent is one of ignorance, since this has the unattractive upshot that the non-virtuous agent’s failure to act as the virtuous agent does is involuntary. However, it is not clear that both of these positions can be consistently maintained.

McDowell’s proposed solution is “to allow that someone who fails to act virtuously may, in a way, perceive what a virtuous person would…but to insist that his failure occurs only because his appreciation of what he perceives is clouded, or unfocused, by the impact of a desire to do otherwise.” (p. 54) This reply preserves the idea that virtue is nothing more than a sensitivity since, by McDowell’s lights, the non-virtuous agent’s failure to act is not due to the agent lacking something that the virtuous agent possesses. Thus, there is no need to posit something, like say a desire, to bridge the gap between the virtuous agent’s action and the non-virtuous agent’s inaction. In stead, the reverse seems true by McDowell’s lights. To wit, it is the non-virtuous agent who actually possesses something that the virtuous agent lacks—namely, a perception-clouding desire to do otherwise. However, McDowell points out that the fact that there is an appetitive element present in the case of the non-virtuous agent does not mean that there is an appetitive element present in the case of the virtuous agent as well.

McDowell’s reply to the composite conception seems to concede that the virtuous and non-virtuous agents have the same sensitivity after all, albeit the latter’s sensitivity is accompanied by something extra. Recall, McDowell means to deny that the inactivity of the non-virtuous agent is to be explained in terms of ignorance. As such, he appears to allow that the non-virtuous agent possesses the same knowledge (i.e., sensitivity) that the virtuous agent has. However, if virtue is knowledge, then this seems to entail that the non-virtuous agent also possesses virtue. Admittedly, the non-virtuous agent possesses more than just knowledge (i.e., the relevant sensitivity) since he also possesses a competing desire. But, if virtue just is knowledge, then possession of said knowledge should be a sufficient condition for the agent counting as virtuous. If so, then the fact that the non-virtuous agent also has a perception-clouding desire to do otherwise seems beside the point. (Consider: if possessing mammary glands is sufficient for being a mammal, then the fact one also has a tail in no way ameliorates one’s fulfilment of the sufficient condition.)

The above objection illustrates why the Socratic response to the composite conception—i.e., equating a lack of virtue with ignorance—is so attractive. If one posits a sufficient condition for virtue and one wants to deny that a particular agent is virtuous, then the thing to do would be to deny that the agent meets the sufficient condition, not to say that the agent meets it but has some additional property. Thus, to the extent that Socrates employs the first strategy and McDowell employs the second, the former is preferable to the latter. As already noted, McDowell rejects the Socratic strategy because it has the unattractive upshot that the non-virtuous agent’s failure to act as the virtuous agent does is involuntary. But he seems equally unable (or unwilling) to say that the non-virtuous agent has the relevant knowledge (i.e., sensitivity) since, given the equation of virtue and knowledge, this would imply that the non-virtuous agent is virtuous.

There is a tempting reply to the above dilemma which I believe should be resisted. It is almost impossible to read McDowell’s claim that the virtuous and non-virtuous agents fail to have matching perceptions without thinking of a thesis McDowell advocates elsewhere—namely, experiential disjunctivism. Roughly, experiential disjunctivism amounts to the thesis that perceptual experiences are essentially relational, so that a subject who undergoes a veridical perceptual experience and one who undergoes a phenomenologically indistinguishable illusory experience actually have different types of experiences. On this view, there is no “highest common factor” shared between verdical and illusory experiences which may be cited as an explanation for their phenomenological indistinguishability. Applying this idea to the case of virtue, McDowell may well argue that although the perceptual experience of the virtuous and non-virtuous agents may be in some sense indistinguishable, the fact that the latter’s experience is clouded by a competing desire entails that the non-virtuous agent is having a different type of experience. That McDowell may have had something along these lines in mind is suggested by his carefully placed qualification “in a way”, in his description of the shared perception of the virtuous and non-virtuous:

This is to allow that someone who fails to act virtuously may, in a way, perceive what a virtuous person would…but to insist that his failure occurs only because his appreciation of what he perceives is clouded, or unfocused, by the impact of a desire to do otherwise. (p. 54, Italics mine)

“In a way” is supposed to flag the fact that though similar, perhaps even indistinguishable in some sense, they are ultimately different perceptions and involve the use of different sensitivities. On this view, moral perceptions are to be individuated, in part, by the presence or absence of competing desires to do otherwise.

However, the disjunctive reading of moral perceptions seems powerless to free us from the aforementioned dilemma. First, even if we grant that the virtuous and non-virtuous undergo different types of perceptual experiences, it does not follow from this that they are exercising different types of sensitivities. Presumably, the same sensitivity can be exercised in different ways and can even give rise to different types of experiences. But since it is the exercise of a certain sensitivity, rather than the type of perceptual experience the sensitivity gives rise to, which is to be identified with virtue, then a disjunctive conception of perceptual experiences does little to ameliorate the present worry. Second, even if we allow that the sensitivities exercised by the virtuous and non-virtuous agents are in fact different, this only pushes us unto the second horn of the dilemma outlined earlier. If the virtuous agent has a different sensitivity to that of the non-virtuous agent, then (given that the sensitivity in question is to be equated with knowledge) the non-virtuous agent lacks the relevant piece of knowledge. But that is just to say that the non-virtuous agent suffers from a type of ignorance. Hence, if this is the correct diagnosis of the non-virtuous agent by McDowell’s lights, then McDowell’s position is no better than the Socratic solution.

In sum, McDowell seems confronted with the following dilemma. If he denies that a virtuous agent may have the same knowledge (i.e., moral sensitivity) that the virtuous agent has, then it seems to imply that the non-virtuous agent had no choice but to act non-virtuously. If, on the other hand, he affirms that the non-virtuous agent may have the same knowledge (i.e., moral sensitivity) that the virtuous person has in a particular situation, then given the equation of virtue with knowledge, McDowell’s position would imply that the non-virtuous agent is virtuous.

*All page numbers taken from the Mind, Value and Reality anthology.

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.