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This chapter examines the status of Tarskian truth. It argues that because of its connections with behaviour and psychology through the notion of translation, it is properly classified as a substantial, rather than a formal, account of truth. It also contends that Common-sense Realism might be modified by replacing the commitment it made to a formal account of truth with commitment to a substantial alternative capable of playing a part in the Fregean model of meaning. Tarskian truth, with its bland neutrality, is the obvious candidate for the replacement role. The resulting position, dubbed ‘Quietist Realism’, proves on examination to be that of John McDowell in Mind and World. Moreover, its characteristic principles, borrowed by Putnam for Common-sense Realism, are no optional extra to Tarskian truth as McDowell deploys it, but play an essential role in his defence of the notion as suitable for use in the Fregean model, against attacks mounted by Dummett.

This chapter sets out the position of Wiggins and McDowell. This theory is fatally incomplete, rather than fatally flawed. It is a view of moral truth and enquiry that has been much misunderstood, not least because of a failure to appreciate the deep differences between Wiggins and McDowell over the issue of realism. Some important background materials from the work of the later Wittgenstein are examined, followed by discussions on the ways in which cognitivism is grounded in the phenomenology of moral experience and how that phenomenology is best explained.

This chapter rejects the view that Wiggins’s and McDowell’s theories of moral motivation postulate an objectionable form of inherent normativity in a moral agent’s recognition of value. Their position is no worse off in this regard than anyone else’s, specifically Korsgaard’s. McDowell’s position, and the conflation of different considerations in his metaphor of ‘silencing’ and Wiggins’s genealogy of categorical obligations are described.

This chapter focuses on Bernard Williams's ‘What does Intuitionism Imply?’ (1988). It considers the justice of certain complaints that he makes about the position he associates with John McDowell. The chapter first considers, and reject, McDowell's appeal to the analogy with secondary qualities in his ‘Values and Secondary Qualities’ (1985). The chapter then considers and defends McDowell's reply to John Mackie's complaint that objective values do not pull their own weight; I try to show the justice of McDowell's reply in a way that detaches it from any reliance on the dispositional conception of value. Finally, the chapter turns to Williams's attempts to show that the objectivity of moral values cannot be sustained within the constraints of McDowell's approach, because of various explanatory failures. The chapters argues that everything that needs to be explained can be explained, and that we should prefer a sort of optimism to a Williams-style pessimism. The chapter ends by considering whether Williams is right to think of McDowell as an intuitionist.

This chapter presents an outline of Socrates' view of moral psychology as presented in Plato's Protagoras. The chapter concerns with the critical examination of some classical and modern views of reasons for action and motivation for action which tend, sometimes themselves to assimilate weakness to recklessness or compulsion. It focuses on Socratic account of knowledge and pleasure in the production of action, and his explanation of weakness of will. It then examines John McDowell's analysis of moral knowledge and moral motivation. A close evaluation of the shortcomings of the Socratic accounts, which equate virtue with knowledge, tends to push towards Humean account of the explanation of action. The chapter concludes that a search for a looser connection at a lower cost to common sense.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief description of the aim of this book, which is the development of a contextualist approach to epistemology. This is followed by a discussion of the theoretical foundations of this contextualist approach. An overview of the chapters included in this volume is also presented.

Although there are some important similarities, this particular undercutting way of responding to the radical sceptical problem is ultimately significantly different from a quietistic response to this problem that is often associated with epistemological disjunctivism. This chapter explores what these differences are. John McDowell is the obvious case in point in this respect, since while he advances a form of epistemological disjunctivism that is very similar to that defended here, and while he also thinks that this proposal in a sense resolves the problem of radical scepticism, he is quite clear that he does not think of the view as offering a direct response to this problem in the way that we have set out.

This chapter begins with an overview and a taxonomy of philosophical accounts of intentionality and conceptual understanding. Differences among these views often cause confusion: debates between John McDowell and Hubert Dreyfus over whether practical and perceptual skills are conceptually articulated exemplify such confusion from different understandings of the “conceptual.” Two distinctions together provide an instructive taxonomy of four philosophical approaches to the topic. First, is the difference between conceptual and non-conceptual performances determined by an operative cognitive process, or does it mark a normative status within a larger pattern of practice? Second, does the analysis start with an “empty” conceptual content that is then fulfilled or disconfirmed in perception or action, or begin instead with an agent’s perceptual and practical interaction with the world before asking how that interaction is conceptually articulated? The chapter then builds upon John Haugeland’s arguments against several strategies in this taxonomy to show why the best approach is to analyze intentionality and conceptuality as a normative status that conceptually articulates an agent’s practical and perceptual engagement with the world. The chapter also introduces a third important distinction among philosophical approaches: is intentionality or conceptual understanding a distinctively human phenomenon, or are humans and non-human animals continuous in this respect?

This chapter explores the views of John Cook Wilson, J. L. Austin, and John McDowell. Some stances aim at the world: if all goes well, stance and world match. Some stances contain the world: for one to have that stance towards something is for that thing to be so (or there). Some of these simply contain their object: taking them is not aiming at their object (which then, happily, is there to hit). John Cook Wilson saw knowledge as a stance of this last sort. John McDowell showed why knowledge needs to be like that. But it was J. L. Austin who made the idea viable. He did it by showing how a sense of occasion is required for proper ascription of epistemic notions.

This chapter is a response to the view expressed by John McDowell in which the mind relates to the world by absorbing facts, thought of as worldly items, within itself. It argues that the metaphors need unpacking, and when this is done a better view is obtained.

This chapter introduces a disjunctivist conception of acting for reasons by showing that an account of acting for reasons should give a place to knowledge. This disjunctive conception is claimed to have a role analogous to that of the disjunctive conception that John McDowell recommends in thinking about perception; and it is shown that the two conceptions have work to do in combination when they are treated as counterparts. It is also claimed that the disjunctive conception of acting for reasons safeguards the connection between what moves us to act (sometimes called ‘motivating reasons’) and what favours our acting (sometimes called ‘normative reasons’).

This chapter considers the views of two philosophers — Ronald Dworkin and John McDowell — who repudiate the premise of the location problem, namely, that causal efficacy is always the mark of the real. From the standpoint of legal philosophy, Dworkin's response is particularly significant, since his theory of law and adjudication makes a party's legal rights turn on the answer to moral questions: if those answers are not ‘objective’, then Dworkin's theory is a license for extraordinary judicial discretion. It shows that Dworkin has no good arguments against taking the location problem seriously, and that his and McDowell's alternative account of the objectivity of morality is both empty and entails counter-intuitive conclusions.

This essay has a two‐fold aim. One is to respond to Daniel Dennett's naturalistic treatment of the free will problem. According to Dennett, the idea of free will is reducible to a deliberator's unavoidable ignorance regarding the outcome of a proposed course of action, which is perfectly compatible with that action being causally determined. Against this, it is argued that Kant's account of rational agency makes a persuasive case for attributing to an agent a genuine spontaneity which eludes the naturalistic framework that is assumed by Dennett to be all‐encompassing. The other is to counter the views of John McDowell, who rejects a “bald naturalism” (such as Dennett's) and insists on the ineliminability of a conception of spontaneity like Kant's, while criticizing Kant for linking this spontaneity with transcendental idealism. In response, it is argued that McDowell misconstrues Kant's idealism and that he is himself committed to a form of idealism.

According to the non-reductive theory of testimony, an audience is entitled to believe testimony, other things being equal. And testimony is distinctive as an epistemic source in that it transmits knowledge and warrant. This chapter outlines four arguments for an entitlement to believe testimony, namely those given by Sandford Goldberg, Tony Coady, Tyler Burge, and John McDowell. And it considers two different explanations of how testimony transmits knowledge and warrant.

Naturalists have at least three core commitments: refusing appeals to what is supernatural or transcendent to nature; making scientific understanding central to philosophical understanding; and repudiating any “first philosophy” as authoritative over the sciences. This introductory chapter emphasizes that naturalism is a historically developing project, as new scientific work and philosophical criticisms of earlier versions of naturalism revise our understanding of these naturalistic commitments, and how they can be upheld. Naturalism nowadays is more influentially shaped by Sellars’s aspiration to fuse the scientific and manifest images than by Quine’s version of naturalism. This chapter explains how the prospects for a defensible naturalism have been advanced by three important, mutually supportive developments: John Haugeland’s, Robert Brandom’s and John McDowell’s refinements of the manifest image; philosophical and interdisciplinary studies of scientific practice; and recent developments in evolutionary biology that extend and revise the neo-Darwinian “modern synthesis”, especially niche construction. The chapter concludes by previewing the book’s revised account of conceptual understanding and scientific practice, and how it more adequately satisfies naturalists’ core commitments.

This chapter introduces the thesis of naive realism, which claims that the conscious aspects of our experiences are shaped by the external world. It clarifies the terminology of phenomenal character and explains how naive realism has a particular view of the phenomenal character of our experiences. It then considers various extant motivations for naive realism, including phenomenological motivations, John McDowell's claim that it can help to undermine skepticism, and motivations that concern our knowledge of demonstrative reference and the possibility of representational content.

Some of our beliefs are the product of reasoning. What is involved when we reason from one belief, or one set of beliefs, to another? Some philosophers have held that all that is involved here is some sort of causal relationship between the former belief (or beliefs) and the latter. Others have held, however, that something more is required: One must have reflected on the transition from the former to the latter and formed the belief that such a transition is warranted. It is argued, following Lewis Carroll, that such a view leads to an infinite regress. A number of technical solutions to the regress problem are considered and found to be implausible. In addition, it is argued that the reflective requirement presupposes some substantive psychological theses about the differences between human and animal cognition, and these psychological claims are, in fact, false.

This chapter argues that the non-reductive theory of testimony suffers two failings. First, the idea that we have an entitlement to believe testimony gets things wrong descriptively. Either it wrongly takes gullibly formed beliefs to be warranted, or it wrongly takes beliefs formed on trust to be unwarranted. Second, the idea that we have an entitlement to believe testimony gets things wrong normatively. Rather, testimonial uptake must be reasonable for an audience. Existing non-reductive theories misconceive what motivates this requirement, taking it to be imposed by an argument from testimonial error when it is motivated by the problem of cooperation. And the responses that Tyler Burge and John McDowell give to the argument from error do not allow a response to this problem.

Some familiar objections to the very idea that the virtues benefit their possessor can be quickly cleared away. When we consider the claim in the context of bringing up our own children or reflexion on our own lives, rather than in the context of trying to convince the wicked or the moral sceptic, we believe it. According to Phillips and McDowell, we believe it in so far as we are virtuous, because we have special conceptions of eudaimonia, benefit, harm, and loss, which guarantees its truth. But we also believe it on the basis of the sort of ethical, but non‐evaluative beliefs about human nature cited by Hare and Foot.