Some things that I’ve stumbled over, and have been trying to reconcile with one another, are my inchoate understandings of both McDowell and Heidegger. In particular, I’m trying to smash together McDowell’s remarks in ‘Mind and World’ about the passivity of conceptual experience, and Heidegger’s entire corpus. I imagine the collision course of these two powerful philosophers will take many a post to articulate.
But maybe you, mysterious internet folk, can help.
In this first instalment, I want to talk a little bit about concepts.
I think there is truth about McDowell’s arguments that our experience is, more or less, entirely conceptual. I also think that the analyses of the phenomenologists (at least as reconstructed in modern philosophical argot) seem to agree with his remarks. We can think of Husserl’s lifeworld as the horizon of all horizons, or the thrownness of Dasein (which I will be looking at later, I imagine), but at the moment I’m pondering on an essay by Sean Kelly, who in other places seems to want to argue the opposite of McDowell. The deeply contextual information available in seeing different ‘shades’ of colour on a surface – caused by shadows and differences in illumination – as the same colour, might seem to point towards some kind of non-conceptual experience. Or does it?
Kelly’s solution to this riddle is to draw upon Merleau-Ponty. Why the different shades of a surface all look like the same colour, is due to a kind of tension. This tension points towards an ideal illumination where the colour would simply appear as the colour it is. And this ideal illumination, this situation where the colour appears as the colour it is, is what our experience is of. Or more specifically, we experience the felt (whatever felt means in this context) deviation from that ideal. This is to say, we experience some orienting structure or space, within which our experience fits in. Sounds more or less conceptual to me.
Of course, our concepts will overlap. Something that is not only coloured, but reflective (say, like my glossy red mug) has several overlapping tensions, and depending on what I am attenuating to, or what the situation requires of me, I will be oriented to one or another idealized target, to which my experiences point. Our experiences at any moment are due to bundles of conceptual resources being drawn into play, and the tension within the concepts themselves.
This means that the concepts that are passively drawn into experience are subject for revision if the inferences and expectancies of which they are constituted fail to obtain, that is, if the ideal target to which our experiences point is erroneous. If we move our eyes across a surface, and find that the colour does not change in the way we expect, we may have to revise the idea that the surface is a monolithic colour, or perhaps come to more drastic conclusions. We can see this in more mundane circumstances: often when I’m walking around at night (sometimes more intoxicated than others), I mistake objects at a distance. In particular, I often mistake seated or stationary people for immobile objects – only to be surprised when they start moving around. This is an example of reappraising the conceptual bundle that is brought to bear on our experiences, but substituting a conceptual apparatus that better makes sense of the situation.
The question now becomes, is the reason behind that conceptual shift some kind of non-conceptual experience? Well, at no point in the story is there anything like non-conceptual experience, only something that seems to be poorly accounted for with a certain orientation or expectancy (our experience points towards the wrong ideal target), which then is better accounted for by a conceptual shuffle. Whether or not this shuffle happens consciously or not doesn’t seem to matter. The shuffle is simply drawn out by the tension, the vagaries of the situation itself.
Drew-
Thanks for putting your thoughts out there into the blogoshpere: the world will undoubtedly be a better place because of it!
For how detailed your explication is, my comments/question might seem rather crude. And, admittedly, I know very little of McDowell. Nonetheless, Rick Grush, in a recent interview, refused to comment on a question concerning the relation between concepts and emulators because he takes the category ‘concepts’ to be both extremely ill-defined and used with a multiplicity of meanings. Might the tension you describe come down to a category error and not one rooted in the phenomena? An eliminative materialist might say that the category of ‘concepts’ fall away like other folk notions with mature science.
Also- concepts might not be an issue in the same way for Heidegger, since what is understood as ‘explicit conceptualization’ only occurs in breakdown situations. So maybe a strict dichotomy of non-conceptual and conceptual experience wouldn’t map on to the phenomena as described by Heidegger.
Do you see possible connections between Heidegger and the conceptual/non-conceptual experience debate?
Cheers buddy.
Sup Will!
Great to see you presence here.
Stalnaker is also a rad dude who refuses to use the term ‘concept’. I have to say, like Grush and Stalnaker, I find the term incredibly slippery. But I think I have nailed it down to some extent. If I ever get around to McDowell and Heidegger pt. II, I’d defend some of the things I’d say here – though I’m still uncertain how context-switching takes place, or how interpretation shifts occur.
With ma’ boy Heidegger however, I think there is room for implicit conceptualization in our readiness-to-hand activities – after all, in everything we do, objects and situations show up in terms of our projects and goals! It seems like the context is fixed by teleology, understood in socially articulated concepts.
At least, that’s the story I want to tell. But you’ll read allllll about it when you get my thesis in the mail.