6 The Confusion

regardless of any conceptual knowledge of body language. Yet, perception, in this form, can never give reason to act or judge. It can provide cause to act (see footnote 1 for an explanation of cause and reason).

For both, the experience is different, but the perception is the same. The confusion comes in how concepts relate to perception and then experience. For McDowell, concepts are as close to perception as possible. McDowell sees the concepts of letters as contributing to perception in an indistinguishable way that gives experience. Travis says if that is true, then concepts must shape perception so that experience is just in the mind and untied from the objects as they are in the world. It is here that Travis has misunderstood McDowell and McDowell has not been able to correct him. For McDowell, perception and the conceptual give experience, experience then allows for judgments that can be true or false. For Travis, there is the perception that is our experience and judgments that come when we add concepts to experience.

They both agree that perception gives things for which rational beings have the capacity to respond. Both philosophers seek to understand how rational beings have access to the world as the basis for judgments. Both seek to answer the questions about the relationship between subject and object. Travis says McDowell falls short in this for he falls into idealism—the world depends on and exists only in the mind. McDowell says Travis falls short for he falls into the Myth of the Given—he allows for something unquestionable and given to guide and constrain rational thought.

This debate starts with Travis’s response to Mind and World. Neither wants to fall into Idealism and only McDowell wants to avoid the Myth of the Given. McDowell thinks he avoids Idealism by saying that our awareness of reality is dependent on the conceptual, but reality is not dependent on our experience or perception of it.7 What avoids idealism is his passive use of the conceptual with perception and therefore in experience—the conceptual shapes nothing. Therefore, we can get at the world as it is, not just how we think of it. Travis has mistaken passive application as having a shaping role in experience; McDowell means it differently. Influenced by Gilbert Ryle of Oxford University, the passive application of concepts is a way of being in the world. Perception occurs with or without concepts, yet concepts tune experience. The world does not fit into our concepts—instead, our concepts must fit into the world. This is what McDowell means.

7. McDowell, “Mind and World,” 42.

35

Flipping how concepts fit into the world helps alleviate their issues. Tuning a radio to a specific channel puts the receiver in the position to pick up a specific frequency. Concepts guide the receiver of experience to the frequency of the understanding of the world. They do not shape the form of perception but angle (not physically) it in a specific direction—they alter without affecting. This is an extremely difficult conceptualization of McDowell’s to understand and is natural to fall into old thinking patterns of acting on, meaning shaping of. This is not the case.

The case of reading provides the perfect example of this phenomenon. Learning the concepts of letters and words and such does not alter how they are perceived in the sense of mechanics or intake. What it does alter is the immediate experience of those letters.

The root of the confusion is that concepts do not shape perception but give meaning to experience alongside perception in the same way a plant gives meaning to water. Concepts offer tuning to a view of an object with infinite representations— they do not alter a view such that it exists only in the mind but offer a window into the world. They open the floodgates to understand the world. They offer unencumbered access to the world via one route. They are answerable to the tribunal of experience through the interactions between the rational being and the world. They are passive in the way that they do not stand between the being and the world.

In The Silences of the Senses, Travis describes the idea of face value in experiences. This is the idea that the world presents something to the subject with a face value that the person can judge—it can be accepted or rejected.8 To have face value leads to the thing being judged to be there as thus and so. Travis says this is McDowell’s picture. We experience face value. Travis points out that if this were true, all that is constitutive of a being, to tell its existence, would be its face value.9 To reject a concept applied to the perception of face value says nothing about the object in itself. Travis then goes on to mention how this way of thinking does not work in cases of identical twins where the face value of one does not necessitate the other’s existence. My seeing Joe, who is identical to Jim, does not necessitate Jim’s existence— even if they have the same face value. Therefore, face value is not enough to tell Jim’s existence.

It is this claim that McDowell responds to by saying that the conceptual, as he laid out, must be present in proper and common sensibles10 but not incidental

8. Travis, 29. 9. Travis, 35. 10. These terms and concepts come from Aristotle’s, De Anima.

36