Abstract
Within philosophy there is not yet an integrative account of unreflective skillful action. As a starting point, contributions would be required from philosophers from both the analytic and continental traditions. Starting from the McDowell-Dreyfus debate, shared Aristotelian-Wittgensteinian common ground is identified. McDowell and Dreyfus agree about the importance of embodied skills, situation-specific discernment and responsiveness to relevant affordances. This sheds light on the embodied and situated nature of adequate unreflective action and provides a starting point for the development of an account that does justice to insights from both philosophical traditions.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 183-207 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | Inquiry |
| Volume | 53 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Apr 2010 |
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In: Inquiry, Vol. 53, No. 2, 04.2010, p. 183-207.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review
TY - JOUR
T1 - McDowell and Dreyfus on unreflective action
AU - Rietveld, Erik
N1 - Funding Information: Note, by the way, that stepping back does not necessarily imply detachment or separation from practical significance (McDowell, 2007b, p. 369). Given the first of these remarks and McDowell’s emphasis on the possibility of linguistic articulation, which I will discuss below, he also does not claim, as was suggested by Wrathall (2005, p. 125), that “the world is presented at the outset as being propositionally articulated”. Wrathall (2005, p. 117) makes the mistake of assuming that reasons “must be” propositional for McDowell. Since Wrathall explains Merleau-Ponty’s notion of motives by contrasting them with reasons, this problematic assumption diminishes the value of his middle ground between causes and reasons for our purposes. Dreyfus characterizes Merleau-Pontian motives by responsiveness to solicitations to act: “[Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘motivation’] names the way we are directly responsive to the [. . . ] demands of our situation. In short, it is a name for the way affordances solicit one to act. [. . . ] True to the phenomenon of affordance and response, plus the [normative, ER] tendency to achieve maximal grip, Merleau-Ponty is led to introduce, between the space of causes and the space of reasons, what one might call the space of motivations” (Dreyfus, 2005a, pp. 56–57). Actions in the space of motivations are not characterized by propositional intentionality but by “motor intentionality”: “Merleau-Ponty calls the sort of intentionality definitive of the space of motivations, motor intentionality” (Dreyfus, 2005a, p. 64; cf. Thompson, 2007). It is important to see that what I call the “sphere of normative significance” encompasses both the space of motivations and the space of reasons, both motor intentionality and propositional intentionality. It is primarily meant to serve as the contrast to the non-normative domain that McDowell needs according to Taylor (to be discussed Sections V and VI). Although it is not directly relevant for understanding unreflective action, I must say that McDowell does not make it very plausible that all content is suitable for linguistic articulation. Consider Wittgenstein’s coffee aroma-example. In contrast to McDowell (2007a), he (PI 610) does not seem to think that potentially we can put the experience of the aroma of coffee into words. Wittgenstein suggests that, even if we introduce new words, something about the content of this experience will resist articulation. Let me repeat the relevant sentence for the reader’s convenience: “The point of saying that the rational agent, unlike the dog, is realizing a concept in doing what she does is that her doing, under a specification that captures the content of the practical concept that she is realizing, comes within the scope of her practical rationality – even if only in that, if asked why she caught the frisbee, she would answer ‘No particular reason; I just felt like it’” (McDowell, 2007b, p. 369). The first five sentences of McDowell’s (2007a, pp. 338–39) article emphasize the link between conceptual capacities and strong rationality. He (2007b) stresses this link between strong rationality and conceptuality also on the first page of his second response to Dreyfus. I would like to thank Chantal Bax, Giovanna Colombetti, Janna van Grunsven, Olivier Putois, Richard Ridderinkhof, Tim Thornton, Rasmus Thybo Jensen, and Paul Voester-mans for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper. I owe special thanks to Martin Stokhof and Hubert Dreyfus. I did part of the research for this paper during my stay as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley in 2006 and Harvard University in 2006 and 2008. These research visits were funded by NWO, “Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research”. I would like to express my gratitude for awarding these grants. Copyright: Copyright 2010 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2010/4
Y1 - 2010/4
N2 - Within philosophy there is not yet an integrative account of unreflective skillful action. As a starting point, contributions would be required from philosophers from both the analytic and continental traditions. Starting from the McDowell-Dreyfus debate, shared Aristotelian-Wittgensteinian common ground is identified. McDowell and Dreyfus agree about the importance of embodied skills, situation-specific discernment and responsiveness to relevant affordances. This sheds light on the embodied and situated nature of adequate unreflective action and provides a starting point for the development of an account that does justice to insights from both philosophical traditions.
AB - Within philosophy there is not yet an integrative account of unreflective skillful action. As a starting point, contributions would be required from philosophers from both the analytic and continental traditions. Starting from the McDowell-Dreyfus debate, shared Aristotelian-Wittgensteinian common ground is identified. McDowell and Dreyfus agree about the importance of embodied skills, situation-specific discernment and responsiveness to relevant affordances. This sheds light on the embodied and situated nature of adequate unreflective action and provides a starting point for the development of an account that does justice to insights from both philosophical traditions.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=77951098695&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - https://doi.org/10.1080/00201741003612203
DO - https://doi.org/10.1080/00201741003612203
M3 - Article
SN - 0020-174X
VL - 53
SP - 183
EP - 207
JO - Inquiry
JF - Inquiry
IS - 2
ER -