Dewey and McDowell on Naturalism, Values, and Second Nature

John Dewey and John McDowell agree in rejecting twentieth-century noncognitivist theories of value from a common discontent with the legacies of modern philosophical thought that underpin them. But they disagree about the best way to defend the status of values and of practical reason. Dewey champions a pragmatic, naturalistic account of values as characteristics of situations that meet our needs as biological and social beings, whereas McDowell rejects this on the grounds that it puts us on a slippery slope to reductive materialism and determinism. In what follows, I review their objections to noncognitivism and discuss the role that "second nature" plays in their respective reconstructions of value and its place in the world. I then take up McDowell's arguments against naturalizing second nature and values and conclude by offering one possible Deweyan response.

Background

Modern philosophy adopted a "disenchanted" view of nature, according to which nature is as the physical sciences depict it, containing only those properties and relations susceptible to the experimental methods those sciences employ. Values and secondary qualities were treated as projections of human subjectivity, spread upon a world where they have no real place. Both Dewey and McDowell reject this view, holding that the "disenchanted world" is better understood as a complex theoretical model that stands in for the real world in scientific inquiries—not to be identified with the actual world or its contents. Both see modern philosophy's misinterpretation of scientific models of the world as laying the groundwork for twentieth-century noncognitivisms. Once one accepts that view of reality, then human values can be "real" only to the extent that they can be explained in terms of the causal forces that the natural sciences recognize. Attitudes and desires are features of human nature that fall within the purview of the natural sciences, so values are reinterpreted accordingly. But when we do this, both men argue, we leave practical reason without any significant role to play in human action, for our so-called reasons for action are merely organic events having no inherent cognitive significance. Say, for example, I have a certain attitude A toward cats. This gives me no reason to behave one way or another toward cats. As Dewey remarks, "Cats have claws and teeth and fur. They do not have implications. No physical thing has implications" (MW 8:77).¹ Similarly if attitudes are organic events, they can have no implications for action unless or until they are interpreted in light of some conceptual scheme. Only if they have cognitive significance can they transfer that significance onto the world.

Now a conceptual scheme is not just an idea; it is instead a kind of interpretative practice in virtue of which things in the world and our acts, attitudes, and desires take on significance and become reason giving. Practices are rule governed, but their rules do not conform to natural laws. Thus when we engage in practices of interpretation we operate in a Sellarsian "space of reasons" to which natural scientific laws do not directly apply. Or as McDowell puts it, it is to take on, and act from, a second nature.²

We acquire second natures through initiation into cultural practices, into the shared conceptual strategies that our cultures employ for ordering and evaluating inner and outer experience. As we acquire facility with these practices, especially language, we gain entry into that "space of reasons" in which persons uniquely operate. Both McDowell and Dewey assign special importance to language because it is both a tool and a conduit of enculturation, whose possession is essential to see and to appreciate the world as a culture's members are able to do. As McDowell puts it: "Moulding ethical character . . . is a particular case of a general phenomenon: initiation into conceptual capacities, which include responsiveness to other rational demands besides those of ethics. Such initiation is a normal part of what it is for a human being to come to maturity. . . . If we generalize from the way Aristotle conceives the moulding of ethical character, we arrive at the notion of having one's eyes opened to reason...