McDowell's Pragmatist Anti-anti-realism

A long-standing issue central to the discussions between Richard Rorty and some of his friendly critics, notably Donald Davidson and John McDowell, has been the place of a notion of objectivity in a philosophy cleansed of the dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content. ¹ While Rorty has commended Davidson for undermining the idea of a dualism between different conceptual schemes or languages and uninterpreted content—“the idea that something like ‘mind’ or ‘language’ can bear some such relation as ‘fitting’ or ‘organizing’ to the world” (Rorty 1986, 126)—he has increasingly come to criticize Davidson for what he takes to be a metaphysical residue in the latter’s thinking. Though dismissing the scheme-content distinction, Davidson has nevertheless continued to insist on the irreducibility of the mental or intentional to the physical or non-intentional. “Davidson,” Rorty writes,

… thinks that even antirepresentationalists, people who believe (as he and I do) that our links with the world are merely causal, rather than representational or justificatory, ought to recognize the importance of the difference between the intentional and other idioms. (Rorty 1999, 577)

However, by insisting on the importance of differentiating between intentional and non-intentional idioms, Davidson’s thinking, as Rorty (1999, 576) sees it, is marred by an underlying commitment to a Quinean ontology, to “the very idea of a distinction between the presence and absence of what Quine called a ‘fact of the matter’.” ² Maintaining that the intentional is somehow special, distinct from, and irreducible to the non-intentional, Rorty argues, is nothing but

… a hang-over from an early, pre-Darwinian epoch in the history of philosophy—the epoch of Kant. As I read the history of philosophy, Brentano distilled the essence of Kant’s grandiose scheme-content distinction into his criterion of the psychical, and Quine and Davidson swallowed the resulting poisoned pill. (Rorty 1998a, 394)

More objectionable to Rorty than Davidson, however, is McDowell, who positively encourages those same elements in Davidson that Rorty finds misguided. Pleading with Davidson to shed his commitment to a distinction between vocabularies, which Rorty thinks can only be ontological, he chastises McDowell for emphasizing that very distinction, for reading Davidson as accommodating the Kantian distinction between the receptivity of the senses and the spontaneity of the understanding, and thus “leading us down a garden path at the entrance to which Sellars and Davidson have posted warnings” (Rorty 1998a, 390). McDowell’s talk of thought’s ‘answerability to the world’ or ‘world-directedness’, Rorty (1998b, 139) fears, “will provide yet another way to prolong the tedious controversies about realism vs. anti-realism.” Thus, rather than alleviating the worry about how mind or thought can be about the world, Rorty thinks the search for objectivity or ‘answerability’ will leads us to an impasse where the anxiety McDowell seeks to exorcize instead becomes acute. Only by ousting the notion of objectivity can philosophy have the peace that McDowell seeks to give it.