John Henry McDowell (born 7 March 1942) is a South African philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford, and now Distinguished University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, nature, and meta-ethics, McDowell's most influential work has been in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. McDowell was one of three recipients of the 2010 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award, and is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the British Academy.
McDowell has, throughout his career, understood philosophy to be "therapeutic" and thereby to "leave everything as it is" (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations), which he understands to be a form of philosophical quietism (although he does not consider himself to be a "quietist"). The philosophical quietist believes that philosophy cannot make any explanatory comment about how, for example, thought and talk relate to the world but can, by offering re-descriptions of philosophically problematic cases, return the confused philosopher to a state of intellectual perspicacity.
However, in defending this quietistic perspective McDowell has engaged with the work of leading contemporaries in such a way as to therapeutically dissolve what he takes to be philosophical error, while defending major positions and interpretations from major figures in philosophical history, and developing original and distinctive theses about language, mind and value. In each case, he has tried to resist the influence of what he regards as a scientistic, reductive form of philosophical naturalism that has become very commonplace in our historical moment, while nevertheless defending a form of "Aristotelian naturalism," bolstered by key insights from Hegel, Wittgenstein, and others.
Life and career
McDowell was born in Boksburg, South Africa and completed a B.A. at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. In 1963, he moved to New College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, where he earned another B.A. in 1965 and an M.A. in 1969. He taught at University College, Oxford, from 1966 until 1986, when he joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is now a university professor. He has also been a visiting professor at many universities, including Harvard University, University of Michigan, and University of California, Los Angeles.
McDowell was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1983Directory of Fellows , British Academy. Accessed 2 April 2011 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992.List of Fellows , American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Accessed 2 April 2011 In 2010 he received the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities. Distinguished Achievement Award , Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Accessed 2 April 2011
McDowell delivered the John Locke Lectures in Philosophy at Oxford University in 1991 (these became his book Mind and World.)Past Lecturers, John Locke Lectures , Department of Philosophy, Oxford University. Accessed 2 April 2011 He has also given the Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University in 1997Tim Thornton, Review: New books by John McDowell , The philosopher's magazine, no. 36, 2009. Accessed 2 April 2011 and the Howison Lectures in Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley in 2006.Howison Lectures in Philosophy, Graduate Council Lectures, University of California at Berkeley. Accessed 2 April 2011
He received an honorary degree from the University of Chicago in 2008.University to confer five honorary doctorates at Convocation, University of Chicago Chronicle, 12 June 2008, vol. 27, no. 18
Philosophical work
Early work
McDowell's earliest published work was in ancient philosophy, most notably including a translation of and commentary on Plato's Theaetetus. In the 1970s he was active in the Davidsonian project of providing a semantic theory for natural language, co-editing (with Gareth Evans) a volume of essays entitled Truth and Meaning. McDowell edited and published Evans's influential posthumous book The Varieties of Reference (1982).
In his early work, McDowell was very much involved both with the development of the Davidsonian semantic programme and with the internecine dispute between those who take the core of a theory that can play the role of a theory of meaning to involve the grasp of truth conditions, and those, such as Michael Dummett, who argued that linguistic understanding must, at its core, involve the grasp of assertion conditions. If, Dummett argued, the core of a theory that is going to do duty for a theory of a meaning is supposed to represent a speaker's understanding, then that understanding must be something of which a speaker can manifest a grasp. McDowell argued, against this Dummettian view and its development by such contemporaries as Crispin Wright, both that this claim did not, as Dummett supposed, represent a Wittgensteinian requirement on a theory of meaning and that it rested on a suspect asymmetry between the evidence for the expressions of mind in the speech of others and the thoughts so expressed. This particular argument reflects McDowell's wider commitment to the idea that, when we understand others, we do so from "inside" our own practices: Wright and Dummett are treated as pushing the claims of explanation too far and as continuing W. V. O. Quine's project of understanding linguistic behaviour from an "external" perspective.
In these early exchanges and in the parallel debate over the proper understanding of Wittgenstein's remarks on rule-following, some of McDowell's characteristic intellectual stances were formed: to borrow a Wittgensteinian expression, the defence of a realism without empiricism, an emphasis on the human limits of our aspiration to objectivity, the idea that meaning and mind can be directly manifested in the action, particularly linguistic action, of other people, and a distinctive disjunctive theory of perceptual experience.
The latter is an account of perceptual experience, developed at the service of McDowell's realism, in which it is denied that the argument from illusion supports an indirect or representative theory of perception as that argument presupposes that there is a "highest common factor" shared by veridical and illusory (or, more accurately, delusive) experiences. (There is clearly a distinction between perceiving and acquiring a belief: one can see an "apparently bent" stick in the water but not believe that it is bent as one knows that one's experience is illusory. In illusions, you need not believe that things are as the illusory experiences represent them as being; in delusions, a person believes what their experience represents to them. So the argument from illusion is better described as an argument from delusion if it is to make its central point.)
In the classic argument from illusion (delusion) you are asked to compare a case where you succeed in perceiving, say, a cat on a mat, to the case where a trick of light deceives you and form the belief that the cat is on the mat, when it is not. The proponent of the argument then says that the two states of mind in these contrasting cases share something important in common, and to characterise this we need to introduce an idea like that of "sense data." Acquaintance with such data is the "highest common factor" across the two cases. That seems to force us into a concession that our knowledge of the external world is indirect and mediated via such sense data. McDowell strongly resists this argument: he does not deny that there is something psychologically in common between the subject who really sees the cat and the one that fails to do so. But that psychological commonality has no bearing on the status of the judger's state of mind from the point of view of assessing whether she is in a position to acquire knowledge. In favourable conditions, experience can be such as to make manifest the presence of objects to observers – that is perceptual knowledge. When we succeed in knowing something by perceiving it, experience does not fall short of the fact known. But this just shows that a successful and a failed perceptual thought have nothing interesting in common from the point of view of appraising them as knowledge.
In this claim that a veridical perception and a non-veridical perception share no highest common factor, a theme is visible which runs throughout McDowell's work, namely, a commitment to seeing thoughts as essentially individuable only in their social and physical environment, so called externalism about the mental. McDowell defends, in addition to a general externalism about the mental, a specific thesis about the understanding of demonstrative expressions as involving so-called "singular" or "Russellian" thoughts about particular objects that reflects the influence on his views of Gareth Evans. According to this view, if the putative object picked out by the demonstrative does not exist, then such an object dependent thought cannot exist – it is, in the most literal sense, not available to be thought.
Value theory In parallel with the development of this work on mind and language, McDowell also made significant contributions to moral philosophy, specifically meta-ethical debates over the nature of moral reasons and moral objectivity. McDowell developed the view that has come to be known as secondary property realism, or sensibility or moral sense theory. The theory proceeds via the device of an ideally virtuous agent: such an agent has two connected capacities. She has the right concepts and the correct grasp of concepts to think about situations in which she finds herself by coming to moral beliefs. Secondly, for such a person such moral beliefs are automatically over-riding over other reasons she may have and in a particular way: they "silence" other reasons, as McDowell puts it. He believes that this is the best way to capture the traditional idea that moral reasons are specially authoritative.
McDowell rejects the Humean theory that every intentional action is the result of a combination of a belief and a desire, with the belief passively supplying a representation and the desire supplying the motivation. McDowell, following Thomas Nagel, holds that the virtuous agent's perception of the circumstances (i.e. her belief) justifies both the action and the desire. In order to understand the desire, we must understand the circumstances that the agent experienced and that compelled her to act. So, while the Humean thesis may be true about explanation, it is not true about the structure of justification— it should be replaced by Nagel's motivated desire theory.Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford University Press, 1970)
Implicit in this account is a theory of the metaphysical status of values: moral agents form beliefs about the moral facts, which can be straightforwardly true or false. However, the facts themselves, like facts about colour experience, combine anthropocentricity with realism. Values are not there in the world for any observer, for example, one without our human interest in morality. However, in that sense, colours are not in the world either, but one cannot deny that colours are both present in our experience and needed for good explanations in our common sense understanding of the world. The test for the reality of a property is whether it is used in judgements for which there are developed standards of rational argument and whether they are needed to explain aspects of our experience that are otherwise inexplicable. McDowell thinks that moral properties pass both of these tests. There are established standards of rational argument and moral properties fall into the general class of those properties that are both anthropocentric but real.