Abstract
McDowell’s argument to refuse a scientific approach to human rationality is that lawful explanations are unable to account for our rational agency. However, not every scientific explanation is a lawful one. There is another argument to the the same effect: (a) there are distinct inquiries concerning the space of reasons: causal inquiries and constitutive inquiries; (b) they are independent of each other; (c) science addresses only the first sort of questions; (d) therefore, it has no impact on inquiries concerning constitutive features of the space of reasons. I will argue that (b) is false, and therefore (c) is at best unclear. The idea of a second nature suggests more unified view of human knowledge, a sort of Hegelian approach. However, for Hegel, the realm of reason encompasses all of nature, and this is an untenable route towards a full re-enchantment of nature. We should be open to the consequences to our self-understanding of different inquiries of natural sciences about how our second nature emerges and how it unfolds. Once we take account of the different sorts of inquiry in the surroundings of rational agency, we see that we cannot predict in advance how our self-understanding will change as a result of changes in different scientific domains. The concept of second nature gives an appropriate frame to this sort of accommodation.
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Notes
- 1.
Davidson (1980, 208).
- 2.
PPD. 153.
- 3.
MAW, 78.
- 4.
MAW, 71.
- 5.
MAW, 115.
- 6.
TSN, 182.
- 7.
I owe this expression to Sachs (2011, 77), one of the very few papers to consider the relation between McDowell and evolutionary thought.
- 8.
Davidson (1980, 208).
- 9.
MAW, 71.
- 10.
See, e.g.: “For Adorno critical idealism and bald naturalism are different versions of the same, fundamentally idealist conception of reason, a reason which in its a priori foundations and scientific Utopian telos is so abstract, reified, and independent of its objects that it bears no trace of them, no trace of its worldliness, in its basic modes of operation. This entails that the re-enchantment of nature can only occur through a critique of formal reason rather than epistemological dualism. By focusing on the epistemological upshot rather than the cause of disenchantment, McDowell distorts his most central ideas […].” J. Bernstein (2002, 219–220).
- 11.
RRBS, 269.
- 12.
MAW, 71.
- 13.
The suggestion that a scientific account of human agency is bound to be a lawful one is not specific to Davidson’s argument, but a consequence of a certain understanding of scientific theories in general. For a historical view of the relation between scientific theories, understood as lawful explanations, and the proper account of human agency, see Daston (2014).
- 14.
- 15.
MAW, 115.
- 16.
MAW, 71–72.
- 17.
Halbig has a different construal of McDowell’s argument. According to him, the central point in McDowell’s strategy here is the refusal “to equate nature itself with the realm of law,” and the call “for a reconception of nature as including both a first and a second nature,” Halbig (2008, 76). I take it to be a partial view of McDowell’s position, that misses the force of premises (i)–(iii) in his philosophy. This construal of McDowell’s argument does not allow us to see the consequences to it of a more pluralistic vision of science.
- 18.
See, e.g., “In other words, the idea that explanation can be achieved solely on the basis of fundamental laws and initial conditions, as described by the deductive-nomological model, is now thought to be insufficient for understanding much of the physical world. We need a variety of things—fundamental theory and different kinds of models as well as laws (e.g. symmetries) that constrain the kinds of behaviours that systems display.” Morrison , (2015, 25).
- 19.
Ernst Mayr has insisted on the specificity of biological explanations, see, e.g., Mayr (2004, 11–19).
- 20.
Dupré (2012, 101–102).
- 21.
Graham Macdonald has made this objection to McDowell’s argument; see Macdonald (2006). The objection doesn’t depend on the acceptance of teleosemantics, as it seems to be the case in Macdonald’s paper, and can have a broader construal.
- 22.
RGLMO, 98.
- 23.
MAW, 124. See also RMM, in response to Macdonald .
- 24.
MAW, 123.
- 25.
“The correct understanding of McDowell’s odd aside is twofold. On the one hand, there is nothing wrong with appealing to scientific explanations of human origins in order to understand how reason emerged from mere nature. On the other hand, we should maintain a clear distinction between the intellectual vocation of scientific explanations and the intellectual vocation of transcendental description, at pains of losing our grip on our very sense of what it means to be a thinking thing qua rational animal at all.” Sachs (2011, 76).
- 26.
This is not a good label: if we see causality as a relation covered by laws, this would be a restatement of the first argument, and I do not want to engage into a discussion concerning the proper understanding of causality to avoid this trap. Ontogenetic and phylogenetic questions mentioned in McDowell’s text quoted above, for instance, are kinds of causal questions, and nomic regularities are only part of the answer one may offer to the distinct subjects they cover. I intend here merely to echo Susan Hurley , who talks about rationality as emerging as an “archipelago from the sea of causes”—see the sect. IV below.
- 27.
McDowell himself seems to assume this constraint—to my mind, correctly—in his Two Sorts of Naturalism; see TSN, 190.
- 28.
For a recent and interesting example that concerns some of the problems affecting scientific theories of human rationality, see Keller (2010).
- 29.
- 30.
Tomasello (2014, 26).
- 31.
Tomasello (2014, 29).
- 32.
Hurley (2006, 139).
- 33.
Hurley (2006, 141).
- 34.
Hurley (2006, 141).
- 35.
Hurley (2006, 157).
- 36.
Sarah Boysen and Gary Berntson say that Sheba has learned “[...] the rules and contingencies of the task. Although Sheba was not able to reliably select the smaller of two food arrays, she displayed good performance when numerical symbols were substituted for the food arrays. Moreover, her performance improved immediately on introduction of the symbolic stimuli without the requirement for additional training. These findings suggest that Sheba had, in fact, acquired an understanding of the food-division rules that had been enforced since the start of the study. Rather, it appears that the animals [Sheba and Sarah, another chimp with a lesser skill with numbers] were unable to inhibit a competing evaluative disposition to select the larger of the arrays when food items were used as stimuli.” Boysen and Berntson (1995, 85) .
- 37.
“The holism of intentional agency is located in a space that can be further articulated, into various types and degrees of flexibility and generality. A recurring theme of work on animal cognition has been the importance of escaping from a crude dichotomy between an inflexible, rigidly context-bound stimulus-response system, on the one hand, and full-fledged conceptual, inferential, and mind-reading abilities, on the other. Various finer distinctions between locations in the space of flexible generality can usefully be drawn.” Hurley (2006, 148).
- 38.
Hurley (2006, 160–163). The idea of a bounded rationality is well motivated and helps Hurley’s point.
- 39.
Noë suggests that Hurley herself has “a much too exalted conception of our own conceptual skills.” See Noë (2004, 184–190).
- 40.
Penn et al. (2008, 110).
- 41.
Penn et al. (2008, 110).
- 42.
Penn et al. (2008, 116).
- 43.
Penn et al. (2008, 119).
- 44.
See the discussion of the relational reinterpretation hypothesis in the issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences in which Penn et al. (2008) appeared.
- 45.
Sosa (1991, 240).
- 46.
See Sosa’s version of a counterfactual condition on knowledge in Sosa (2007, 25).
- 47.
Sosa (1991, 240).
- 48.
Sosa (2009, 142–143).
- 49.
See the papers in the section I of Beran et al. (2012).
- 50.
See Proust (2012).
- 51.
Proust (2012, 240).
- 52.
Proust (2013, 67).
- 53.
Proust (2013, 99).
- 54.
Proust (2013, 100).
- 55.
See Proust (2013, 73–74).
- 56.
Proust (2013, 293–302).
- 57.
Turri (2013, 158–159).
- 58.
MAW, 60.
- 59.
See, e.g., McDowell (2011: 25–27, 34, 41).
- 60.
McDowell (2011: 45–50).
- 61.
Sluga (1980, 36).
- 62.
“Natural stages follow one another with the same rational necessity — each stage resolves the contradiction in its predecessor—and so natural progression, too, can be described through a priori reasoning. Hegel thus believes that a priori reasoning can generate a basic description of natural forms which duplicates in thought the real progression that those forms objectively undergo. His a priori theory is, simultaneously, a metaphysical description of really existing natural forms. Hegel’s basic theory describes natural forms in sui generis—distinctively nonscientific—terms.” Stone (2005, 53).
- 63.
“Qui, infatti, non abbiamo più solo una azione della filosofia verso le scienze attraverso l’introduzione in esse di nuove categorie fondate secondo la necessità del concetto, ma abbiamo anche, nella misura in cui la filosofia riconosce, adopera e trasforma in suo proprio contenuto il prodotto delle scienze particolari, un’azione di non poca influenza delle scienze stesse verso la filosofia.” Illetterati (1995, 317). See also Duque (1996) and Westphal (2008a, b).
- 64.
R. Bernstein (2002).
- 65.
RGLMO, 97. I won’t engage in an exegetical dispute concerning the proper reading of McDowell’s position concerning Hegel and Kant in this respect.
- 66.
On Hegel’s Dissertatio Philosophica de Orbitis Planetarum, see Illetterati (1995, 92–112).
- 67.
Chemero (2009, 11).
- 68.
Pippin (2002, 60).
- 69.
MAW, 115.
- 70.
See Illetterati (1995, 316).
- 71.
See, e.g., R. Bernstein (2002).
- 72.
The work for this paper was supported by a grant from the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento CientĂfico e TecnolĂłgico (CNPq). It was prepared for the II International Congress Hegel in Dialogue—Hegel and McDowell. Thanks for the audience in the conference, for its kindness and patience with my lack of knowledge of Hegel, including Michela Bordignon, Stephen Houlgate , Paul Redding , and especially John McDowell. Thanks also to Giorgia Cecchinato and Ernesto Giusti, for the bibliographical help.
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Perini-Santos, E. (2018). A Second Naturalization for a Second Nature. 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_10
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