All Facts Great and Small

Abstract

John McDowell has recently argued that Donald Davidson’s view of the relationship between the mind and the world fails to account adequately for the ontogenesis of perceptual belief.¹ On Davidson’s view, perceptual beliefs are simply caused by events in the external world, and this causal relation determines the content of those beliefs, in that interpreters of the perceptual beliefs of others assign belief contents “according to ... the events and objects in the outside world that cause them to be held true”.² But in McDowell’s view, belief cannot be the upshot of a merely causal relation, since empirical thought in its essence expresses a commitment as to the way things are with the world, and the effect of a merely causal relation cannot itself contain or sustain such a commitment. We may see McDowell’s insight as a reflection and application of Hume’s point (though Hume famously did not draw the conclusion McDowell draws) that, at least where causation is a relation of regularity, the nature or character of a cause is not reflected in the nature of its effect. Effects are blind to their causes. So if we are merely affected by the world, we must be blind to it, in no position to take it as being any particular way at all. McDowell puts the point in Kantian terms:

Thoughts without intuitions are empty, and the point is not met by crediting intuitions with a causal impact on thoughts; we can have empirical content in our picture only if we can acknowledge that thoughts and intuitions are rationally connected.³

The problem McDowell presses against the causal account of the origin of perceptual belief is not that we will have no justification for our perceptual beliefs about causes, nor that we would, on such a view, have no access to what our perceptual beliefs are about. Rather, McDowell’s claim is that on such a conception, we can have no perceptual, hence no empirical, beliefs at all. As McDowell stresses, the emptiness here is emptiness of content, and ‘thoughts’ without content are no thoughts at all. In treating perceptual belief as the result of a causal world-mind relation, Davidson illicitly helps himself to the concept of a body of empirical beliefs, and his influential anti-skeptical arguments concerning the necessary structure of such bodies and the veridicality of their members come too late. They invoke and exploit the interpreter’s empirical grasp of causal relations between speakers and the world, taking as unproblematic some of just what McDowell calls into question.