The “how is it pos si ble that thoughts have content?” question that pre-occupies McDowell is not a request for a reduction of intentionality (“content”) to something else. A long time ago, I myself was tempted by the desire for a reductive account when I wrote,
The brain’s “understanding” of its own “medium of computation and repre sen ta tion” consists in its possession of a verifi cationist se-mantics for the medium, i.e. of a computable predicate which can represent acceptability, or warranted assertibility or credibility.61
59. See Hilary Putnam, “Pragmatism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95, no. 3 (1995): 291–306; “When ‘Evidence Transcendence’ Is Not Malign” [a reply to Crispin Wright], Chapter 8 in this volume; and “On Not Writing Off Scientifi c Realism,” in Philos-ophy in an Age of Science, 91–108.
60. See Chapter 8 for a defense of this claim.
61. Hilary Putnam, “Computational Psy chol ogy and Interpretation Theory,” in Realism and Reason, vol. 3 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 130–155. The sentences quoted in the present essay are on p. 142.
McDowell’s work has been consistently free of all signs of such a temptation. What bothers him is something else. The obvious answer to the “how is it pos si ble?” question, if we prescind from the diffi cult question of reference to unobservables, is, “What’s your prob lem? Don’t we see (touch, handle, etc.) objects in our environment all the time?”
But the fact that our perception of such familiar objects as apples and chairs depends on “bits of sensory intake” leads, if we identify that sen-sory intake with “impressions,” and we identify impressions in turn with un-conceptualized “qualia,” straight to the conclusion that the basis for all our “knowledge of the external world” is our qualia; and it is hard to see how they can be a basis. Moreover, even if we don’t hope for a re-ductive account of reference and “content,” it is reasonable, especially after the rejection of Platonist and Rationalist accounts of the mind, to posit that what we can conceive and what we can refer to depends, at least in its initial stages,62 on what we have cognitive contact with.63 And if all we have cognitive contact with, in the initial stages of empir-ical knowledge, is qualia . . . ?
Surely this is a reasonable worry. And McDowell’s princi ple philo-sophical claim is that the way to give that worry rest is to reject the idea of unconceptualized qualia altogether. There are “impressions,” of course, but they put us in direct contact with the world, and they are conceptualized— they tell us about that world. But this combination of
“externalism” and conceptualism with re spect to the phenomenal char-acter of experience is, I have argued, untenable on both empirical and conceptual grounds. So what do I suggest instead?
McDowell is certainly right that appealing to qualia (“bare pres-ences”) can’t provide an answer to the question as to how concepts and experiences are connected, or, in McDowell’s terms, how experiences can rationally constrain beliefs. But to get from that observation to the conclusion that “the content of experience is conceptual,”64 McDowell needs to assimilate sensory impressions themselves to apperceptions, and that is where we disagree. In fact, there are apperceptions that have no accompanying qualia at all. Suppose I raise my right hand. My
aware-62. See Bertrand Russell, “On Denoting,” Mind 14, no. 56 (1905): 479–493.
63. Of course, any theory has to recognize the possibility of reference “by description.”
But not all reference can be by description.
64. McDowell, Mind and World, 45.
ness that I raised it (it didn’t simply “go up”) is a genuine awareness, a genuine act of apperception, but there is no quale of voluntariness. (I think I remember that Elizabeth Anscombe somewhere describes this kind of awareness as “knowledge without observation,” but this seems to me to be a misdescription. I would say that I did observe that I raised my hand, but this is observation without any par tic u lar qualia, or, to use a term employed by Alva Noë, an instance of “amodal awareness.”) Similarly, my awareness when I see a tomato that I am seeing some-thing that has a round other side and a soft seedy inside involves amodal awareness and not only qualia. McDowell thinks he has to say that im-pressions warrant beliefs, and that is the reason that he needs them to be conceptually articulated; my view is that it is apperceptions that war-rant beliefs. Of course, certain sorts of apperceptions are internally related to impressions. But it is the apperceptions and not the impressions that do the warranting.65 Babies and languageless animals do not have apperceptive awareness in the demanding Kantian or McDowellian sense, but I see no reason to deny them qualia.
Of course,66 there is as little hope of a reductive account of appercep-tion as there is of a reductive account of intenappercep-tionality; indeed, apper-ception involves intentionality because it involves recognizing things and goings-on for what they are, and recognizing involves applying concepts. Apperceiving some thing or event in my environment is what I have called a “functional state with long arms,” a world- involving functional state, in a very liberal sense of “functional state.” Under normal conditions neither our perceptual experiences nor sentences we accept are the beginning of the pro cess of forming a perceptual belief.
The beginning is outside our heads; the pro cess of forming a percep-tual judgment to the effect that there is a note pad on this table is an exercise of a “function”—in fact, a whole system of functions, some shaped by evolution, and some shaped by cultural pro cesses that con-nect me to objects and goings-on in my environment (in this case, to the note pad and to the table). Forming beliefs in accordance with our normal biological functions and our linguistic upbringing is not just uttering noises that are mere responses to qualia, although those qualia are a part of the causal chain that constitutes the normal formation of
65. I spell this out in more detail in Chapter 10.
66. Part of this paragraph is adapted from Putnam, “Corresponding with Real ity.”
a par tic u lar perceptual belief on the basis of seeing something in one’s visual fi eld.67 On a liberal functionalist story, for either our beliefs, or the proto- beliefs of animals and prelinguistic children, to have content is just for them to function as repre sen ta tions of external states of af-fairs. In brief, a belief about the surrounding environment has content by virtue of being connected to pos si ble states of the world via the ex-ternalistically identifi ed functional states of the speaker. This is the classic functionalist account, liberalized by (1) liberalizing function-alism itself (detaching it from its narrow computationfunction-alism and reduc-tionism) and (2) making functionalism externalist (functional states can involve tomatoes, and not only the senses and the motor organs). Kant would, of course, say this is a question- begging answer, and I would tell him that the sort of a priori proof that our concepts have content, the proof of the “object validity” of our categories, that he hoped for is a chimera.