Diminished Rationality and the Space of Reasons

Introduction

Some theories of language, thought, and experience require their adherents to say unpalatable things about human individuals whose capacities for rational activity are seriously diminished. Donald Davidson, for example, takes the interdependence of the concepts of thought and language to entail that thoughts may only be attributed to an individual who is an interpreter of others’ speech.¹ And John McDowell’s account of human experience as the involuntary exercise of conceptual capacities can be applied easily only to individuals who make some reasonable judgments, because conceptual capacities are paradigmatically exercised in judgments.² In both cases, we seem forced towards an error theory about any ordinary understanding of impaired human individuals as minded, or as undergoing human experience.³

Debates about making linguistic competence or conceptual capacities central to an account of experience often focus on the consequences for non-human animals or pre-linguistic infants. Defenses of the language-emphasizing views usually include statements about how much animals can still be allowed to have: for example, causal responses to their environment, or perceptual awareness of biologically relevant environmental features. These defenses may also include an acknowledgment that explaining how human infants get initiated into thinking, talking, and perceiving is a delicate task if no one of those activities is conceptually or developmentally prior to the others. But attention is rarely paid to human individuals who attain strictly biological maturity without achieving linguistic competence. Their situation requires separate treatment if these defenses are to be truly compelling.

I want to provide the beginning of such a treatment by focusing on McDowell’s accounts of perceptual experience. McDowell’s account depends heavily on the notion of social space, in the sense of distinctively human communal life. Because this notion of the social seems to include many of the interactions impaired and non-impaired humans share, it might look as if McDowell could grant human experience, or something close to it, to some impaired human individuals, even though he can’t grant it to animals. I argue that this appearance is deceptive, and explain how we ought to understand the connections between rationality and human sociality in McDowell’s work. In conclusion, I suggest which aspects of that understanding might generalize beyond McDowell’s case.

I

McDowell’s aim in Mind and World is to relieve us of a traditional anxiety about the relation between the world and what we take to be our knowledge of it. More generally, he seeks to relieve an anxiety about the very possibility of objective content, whether it amounts to knowledge or not. The anxieties are to be relieved by a mixture of diagnosis and prescription. The diagnosis emerges from an examination of why philosophy keeps thinking it must choose from a narrow set of unpalatable options. In epistemology, for example, we can’t seem to escape a forced choice between some form of the Myth of the Given, in which something utterly distinct from our rationality nevertheless provides a justificatory foundation for exercises of that rationality, and some type of coherentism, in which nothing constrains the activity of thinking except thinking’s effort not to contradict itself.

The prescription is an account of perceptual experience that standard responses to the anxieties miss, because — and I’m gliding over a great deal of diagnosis — of assumptions they share about how reason and nature must relate. McDowell undercuts the assumptions with a view of nature on which the natural is not identified with the realm of law, with phenomena whose intelligibility science appropriately reveals. If nature is understood to include phenomena whose intelligibility is that of reason or meaning, McDowell can then develop the missed option, and claim that operations of human sensory receptivity, impressions of the world on our senses, belong in the logical space of reasons.⁴ They are episodes (in our biographies) in which our conceptual capacities — and so our rationality — are brought into play (though involuntarily). And their content, what is delivered to us in them, is always already conceptual in structure. Human sensory episodes are operations of nature, and their descriptions place them in...