Abstract
In this paper, I start from a criticism that John McDowell has made of the account of perception contained in Mind and World. In the essay Avoiding the Myth of the Given, he describes his earlier account as having been flawed by his having equated the idea of the conceptuality of perceptual experience with that of its propositionality. While agreeing with this criticism, I suggest that McDowell’s diagnosis of the earlier problem, as well as his suggestions for its solution, are obscured by his continuing to situate his account of perception within the predominantly epistemological framework of Mind and World. In contrast, and guided by Hegel’s account of the logic of perceptual judgment, I invoke a different function served by Kant’s idea of the “intuitive” content of perceptual experience—its modal function of indicating actual from merely possible states of affairs. Comparing Hegel’s metaphysical position to that of contemporary modal actualists, I argue that by transforming Kant’s concept–intuition distinction into a logical distinction between different types of judgment employing different notions of predication, Hegel was able to capture the modal function played by Kantian intuition without falling into the problematic “Myth of the Given.”
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Notes
- 1.
AMG, 257.
- 2.
AMG, 258.
- 3.
See AMG, 258: “I used to assume that to conceive experiences as actualizations of conceptual capacities, we would need to credit experiences with propositional content, the sort of content judgments have. And I used to assume that the content of an experience would need to include everything the experience enables its subject to know non-inferentially. But both these assumptions now strike me as wrong.”
- 4.
Davidson (1983, 426).
- 5.
AMG, 268.
- 6.
AMG, 268–269.
- 7.
AMG, 269.
- 8.
Kant (1998, A51/B75).
- 9.
In recent work Stalnaker has emphasized that his approach to possible-world semantics involves a retreat from the principle of extensionality as applying to non-actual worlds. See especially Stalnaker (2012). Here I treat as “intensional,” any logic that cannot be interpreted as fully extensional.
- 10.
- 11.
Kant (1998, A218/B265), emphasis added.
- 12.
When Kant here repeats that “in the mere concept of a thing no characteristic of its existence can be encountered at all” he obscures the role played by the form of intuition here. “For even if this concept is so complete that it lacks nothing required for thinking of a thing with all of its inner determinations, still existence has nothing in the least to do with all of this, but only with the question of whether such a thing is given to us in such a way that the perception of it could in any case precede the concept.” Kant (1998, A225/B272).
- 13.
Kant (1998, A225/B272–3).
- 14.
In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant describes sensation as “the effect of an object on the capacity for representation, insofar as we are affected by it” and characterizes an empirical intuition as one that is “related to the object through sensation.” Kant (1998, A20/B34).
- 15.
For example, the criteria for an attitude’s content being actual is just what, in relation to the attitude itself, marks it as a case of perceiving rather than, say merely hypothesising or imagining
- 16.
See here especially Michael Friedman’s lucid presentation of these issues in Friedman (1992, Ch. 2, Concepts and Intuitions in the Mathematical Sciences).
- 17.
See here in particular Thompson (1972–1973), in which Thompson portrays Kant’s transcendental logic as anticipating Fregean formal logic, with a concomitant treatment of intuitions as semantically analogous to demonstrative pronouns.
- 18.
Sellars (1997).
- 19.
Sellars (1997, §§ 14–16).
- 20.
Phen M, Ch 1.
- 21.
See, for example, DeVries (2008).
- 22.
In modern mathematical logic, set theory is employed as a way of conceiving of how the identity of a concept is established entirely in terms of its extension. The distinction between “extension” and “intension” goes back to the Port Royal Logic and was used, although often confused, in the eighteenth century.
- 23.
Modal notions of necessity and possibility provide contexts in which the principle of extensionality does not seem to apply. That is, a term cannot always be replaced with a co-referring term and the truth value of the statement preserved.
- 24.
SL DG, 553.
- 25.
Wittgenstein , (1922, § 3.12).
- 26.
Wittgenstein , (1922, § 3.21).
- 27.
SL DG, 562. Here Hegel is talking of the initial form of the judgment of determinate being, the positive judgment, which is not truly a judgment but only a Satz.
- 28.
SL DG, 553.
- 29.
- 30.
See SL DG, 553: “It can also be mentioned in this context that a proposition [Satz] can indeed have a subject and predicate in a grammatical sense without however being a judgment [Urteil] for that. The latter requires that the predicate behave with respect to the subject in a relation of conceptual determination, hence as a universal with respect to a particular or singular.”
- 31.
SL DG, 565. Here Hegel draws on features of the logical structure of perceptual judgments later pointed out by the Cambridge logician and Russell-critic, W. E. Johnson (1921, Ch. 11), when he called such predicates the determinants of some general determinable. Arthur Prior notes the non-extensionality of this relation in Prior (1968, 94–95).
- 32.
Moreover, what counts as a determinable of any entity depends up what sort of entity it is. While numbers can be characterized as either odd or even, but not as either red, or blue, or yellow, or …, roses can be characterised as either red, or blue, or yellow, or …, but not as either odd or even.
- 33.
Brandom treats such “incompatibility entailments” as generalizations of modal judgments that do not have classical analogues. See, for example, his Brandom (2000, Ch. 6).
- 34.
Otherwise it would be a Satz rather than a Urteil.
- 35.
For an approach to modal logic along these general lines see Blackburn , de Rijke and Venema (2001).
- 36.
This general conception of the subject of such a perceptual judgment broadly coincides, I suggest, with what Hegel describes as the object of perception [Wahrnehmen] as discussed in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Chap. 2 .
- 37.
See Whitaker (1996, Ch. 7).
- 38.
- 39.
- 40.
That is, “some rose (or roses) is (or are) red” can be regarded as implying “It is not the case that all roses are not red,” and as such it is classed as a reflective judgment. It should be noted here that Hegel’s particularly quantified reflective judgments are what are treated in modern logic as existentially quantified judgments.
- 41.
This is linked to the reversal of which term plays the role of S and which P.
- 42.
Analysis, Hegel tells us in the Encyclopaedia Logic, “consists […] in dissolving [aufzulösen] the concrete that is given, isolating its distinctions and bestowing the form of abstract universality upon them; in other words, it consists in leaving the concrete as ground and making a concrete universal—the genus, or force and law—stand out through abstraction from the particularities that seem to be inessential.” EL, § 229A.
- 43.
In the Encyclopedia Logic, in commenting on empiricism, which “relies on the analytic method,” he notes that it “falls into error” when it assumes that in analysis it leaves such concrete objects of perception—Gegenstanden—“as they are.” In fact, abstraction “transforms what is concrete into something abstract [das Konkrete in ein Abstraktes verwandelt].” EL, § 38A.
- 44.
See Lewis (2001).
- 45.
Some actualists have equally counterintuitive ontological commitments, however. Here I am following approaches like that of Robert Stalnaker who pursues a metaphysically minimal type of actualism. See especially, Stalkaner (2012).
- 46.
See especially, Stalnaker (2012).
- 47.
Appealing to ordinary consciousness he notes that “when we speak of the possible, as distinct from the actual, we call it ‘merely’ possible.” EL, § 143A.
- 48.
Hegel does not see Plato as a Platonist, however. On his strong rejection of transcendentist modes of thought see my Redding (2016).
- 49.
See here especially Knappik (2015).
- 50.
“Possibility is what is essential to reality, but in such a way that it is at the same time only possibility.” EL, § 143R.
- 51.
EL, § 143R.
- 52.
Significantly, C. I. Lewis drew upon the logic of his “absolute idealist” teacher Josiah Royce.
- 53.
Lewis (1918, 333).
- 54.
Modern predicate logic employs the notions of “existential generalization” and “existential instantiation” to capture the inferences involved. Existential instantiation says that one can validly move from an existentially quantified statement to one containing a new constant, ((∃x) Fx :: Fa). Modal actualists must deny the validity of existential instantiation for non-actual worlds.
- 55.
- 56.
Work on this topic was facilitated by a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council, DP0984296. I am most grateful to John McDowell, Stephen Houlgate , Simon Lumsden, Melissa Merritt, Tom Rockmore , Markos Valaris and Ken Westphal for helpful feedback on various earlier incarnations of this paper.
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Redding, P. (2018). Hegel and McDowell on Perceptual Experience and Judgment. In: Sanguinetti, F., Abath, A. (eds) McDowell and Hegel. Studies in German Idealism, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98896-2_7
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