On the Explanatory Limits of Concepts and Causes: Intentionality, Biology, and the Space of Reasons

Abstract

In Mind and World John McDowell argues that our attempts to understand how it is that our thoughts are rationally answerable to the world are in vain. Whether one takes Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Psychology or Phenomenology to be capable of answering this question, such attempts are, he claims, merely a consequence of failing to see that they are already gripped by a picture of the world which precludes the possibility of such answers. In particular, he suggests that if we render Nature as that which is circumscribed by the intelligibility of the natural sciences, we leave no room for rationality conceived of in terms of the spontaneity and freedom that Kant associated with it. While McDowell claims to be a `quietist' who is not putting forward his own theory of mind, he is, at the very least, suggesting a theory of nature, one which he dubs `liberal' insofar as it suggests that we widen the scope of nature so that it can be hospitable to the normative features of thought.

This thesis will propose a theory of mind which attempts to show how the causal, normative, and phenomenological can be seen as continuous features of the natural world. It demonstrates that a careful appraisal of causal or scientific accounts of intentionality can be made compatible with McDowell's commitment to the normativity of thought. By revealing that a biological account of the mind, suitably expanded to include an account of history as a Dynamic Ecological Milieu, generates biological interrogatives for the human organism, we can show that the normative manifests as an emergent property of the nomological. This allows second nature to retain its sui generis status while being continuous with the causal descriptions of first nature. This thesis will also draw from the Phenomenological tradition, as a means of critiquing McDowell's account of “the Myth of the Given" and his rejection of pre-conceptual content. In particular, it will follow Charles Taylor and Hubert Dreyfus in affirming that we should view experience, not in terms of that which provides epistemic foundations, but as the domain of pre-reflective embodiment. This is essential to showing how the biological sciences can inform us about the causal background which makes embodied coping so unreflectively natural. Furthermore, phenomenology has provided a means of engaging with the biological sciences in a non-reductive way, as is evidenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The Structure of Behavior and the more recent neurophenomenological tradition which is largely inspired by his work. Finally, by drawing on these resources, the desideratum of this thesis is a scientifically informed understanding of what McDowell calls “second nature" and “the space of reasons" in terms of what I have called “biological interrogatives" and the “phenomenology of epistemic agency".