“Many who attack the idea of the given seem to have thought that the central mistake embedded in this idea is exactly the idea that there are inner episodes, whether thoughts or so-called “immediate experiences,” to which each of us has privileged access. I shall argue that this is just not so, and that the Myth of the Given can be dispelled without resorting to the crude verificationisms or operationalisms characteristic of the more dogmatic forms of recent empiricism. Then there are those who, while they do not reject the idea of inner episodes, find the Myth of the Given to consist in the idea that knowledge of these episodes furnishes premises on which empirical knowledge rests as on a foundation. But while this idea has, indeed, been the most widespread form of the Myth, it is far from constituting its essence. Everything hinges on why these philosophers reject it.”
– Wilfred Sellers, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind
As materialists it behooves us to engage those strains of thought within Idealism against which we forge our own links to theoretical praxis. We can start with a discussion of the observational language/theoretical language distinction. Many empiricists or scientistic naturalists have been wedded to the Myth of the given, assuming that there is a privileged observation vocabulary, one that can be adequate to the task of describing reality. The meanings of observation terms were determined by their relation to what is given and were thus unrevisable or incorrigible. This vocabulary grounds the meaning of all empirical language.1 John McDowel in Mind and World (1994) was influenced by Sellars’s famous diagnosis of the “myth of the given” in traditional empiricism, in which Sellars argued that the blankly causal impingement of the external world on judgement failed to supply justification, as only something with a belief-like conceptual structure could engage with rational justification. McDowell tries to explain how one can accept that we are passive in our perceptual experience of the world while active in how we conceptualise it. McDowell develops an account of that which Kant called the “spontaneity” of our judgement in perceptual experience, while trying to avoid the suggestion that the resulting account has any connection with idealism.2
Jeremy Dunham, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Sean Watson in their Idealism The History of a Philosophy align McDowell not only with Idealism but with a neo-Hegelian variant of it.3 They argue that McDowell in Mind and World is faced with two idealist problems. One is to argue for the incommensurability between mind and world as well as our experience of reality without at the same time making that reality experience-dependent; and, second, how to criticize scientistic naturalism without becoming in turn anti-naturalistic. (I, 259). His main focus is in presenting a case for a new form of Conceptuality, one that does not favor one side or the other of the divide between mind or world, but focuses instead on the bridge between them, the conceptual matrix that ties the the two together within the concept itself. The key is this: that scientific naturalism seeks to portray a world devoid of our interferring thoughts, while an absolute idealism argues for a completely mind-dependent reality. What McDowell seeks is to avoid the dilemnas of either scientistic naturalism or absolute idealism, and instead instigates a “second nature”, one that bridges the gap between mind and world without collapsing them into each other; instead, entangling them within the conceptual matrix itself.
The Dark Fantastic: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts 