Programm

"No experience necessary": McDowellian pragmatism as a case study for first-order philosophy

Virginia Soro

University of Lausanne, Schweiz

John McDowell is often identified as one of the three representatives of the American pragmatist Pittsburgh school. While this designation stems from his contribution to the work of Wilfrid Sellars, it inadequately captures his philosophical interests. Not only does he reject a straightforward affiliation with Anglo-American pragmatism – possibly due to his critique of Robert Brandom’s project – but he also questions whether the concept of the Pittsburgh school accurately introduces their work. McDowell’s ‘heterodox’ approach to his pragmatist colleagues – which ironically has, unbeknownst to him, a Jamesian ring – illustrates one of the two aspects of his ill-famed quietism: his avoidance of meta-philosophy.

The other face of the quietist coin is his focus on immediate experience as first-order philosophy. While Rorty and Brandom, in response to empiricism, single-mindedly reject the concept of ‘the given’, McDowell rather revises Sellars’ epistemology to allow for an innocent concept of experience – namely, one that is not subject to the myth. McDowell’s freely engaging with sensibility seems, in a Wittgensteinian vein (PI §133), to perform a more conversational and anti-authoritarian meta-philosophy than his pragmatist colleagues.

My primary aim will be to follow McDowell in diagnosing a blind spot in Sellars’ critique of the myth, hence restoring the empirical given as making claims on our epistemic capacities, as it originally sought to. As a result, his epistemology will be equipped to solve both the difficulties with Sellars’ grain argument and manifest properties, and the alleged rivalry between scientific and manifest epistemology. Throughout my argument, the divergence between McDowell’s and Brandom’s Sellars will give prominence to McDowell’s pragmatist stance – transformative, humanistic, and more importantly, conversational – over Brandom’s scorekeeping model.