![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
McDowell's claim that “in mature human beings, embodied coping is permeated with mindedness”,1 suggests a new version of the mentalist myth which, like the others, is untrue to the phenomenon. The phenomena show that embodied skills, when we are fully absorbed in enacting them, have a kind of non‐mental content that is non‐conceptual, non‐propositional, non‐rational and non‐linguistic.
This is not to deny that we can monitor our activity while performing it. For solving problems, learning a new skill, receiving coaching, and so forth, such monitoring is invaluable. But monitoring what we are doing as we are doing it degrades performance to at best competence. On McDowell's view, there is no way to account for such a degradation in performance since the same sort of content would be involved whether we were fully absorbed in or paying attention to what we were doing.
McDowell claims that it is an advantage of his conceptualism that it avoids any foundationalist attempt to build up the objective world on the basis of an indubitable Given or any other ground‐floor experience. And, indeed, if the world is all that is the case and our minds are unproblematically open to it, all experience is on the same footing. But one must distinguish motor intentionality, and the interrelated solicitations our coping body is intertwined with, from conceptual intentionality and the world of propositional structures it opens onto. The existential phenomenologist can then agree with McDowell in rejecting traditional foundationalisms, while yet affirming and describing the ground‐floor role of motor intentionality in providing the support on which all forms of conceptual intentionality are based.
Notes
1. “What Myth?”, this issue, p. 339.
2. Ibid., 349.
3. Ibid., 339.
4. Ibid., 339.
5. Ibid., 350.
6. Hans‐Georg Gadamer (1992) Truth and Method. Translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad) 445.
7. “What Myth?”, p. 346.
8. I've read that the same disastrous result of having time to step back and reflect happened in a well‐known soccer game where a goalie, famous for his brilliant instant dives to defend the goal, failed to defend it at a crucial moment in the game, because, as he explained, he had time to think. The same phenomenon must occur in all high‐speed, skilled activities.
9. Maurice Merleau‐Ponty (1962) Phenomenology of Perception (Trans.) Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul) 238.
10. John McDowell (2006) “Conceptual Capacities in Perception” in Günter Abel (Ed.) Kreativität (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag) 1065–79.
11. “What Myth?”, p. 345.
12. Phenomenology of Perception 129.
13. “What Myth?”, p. 345.
14. Ibid., 347.
15. Ibid., 346.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 344.
18. Ibid., 347.
19. Ibid., 348. This might be taken to suggest a claim, similar to Charles Taylor's, that we are led to articulate the entities and situations we experience, where this means to bring out their as yet unclear significance. But if McDowell holds that the world is everything that is the case then everything we can isolate and focus on and name must be already implicitly present. As he says, all its content must be already present in a form in which it is suitable to constitute contents of conceptual capacities.
But Taylor's account of articulation is not like Merleau‐Ponty's either, since for Taylor we sometimes feel called to reflect on and articulate our experience in language, whereas Merleau‐Ponty's kind of articulation is an aspect of perception that is constant and need not involve reflection or language.
20. Phenomenology of Perception 6.
21. Ibid. 6. “We must recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon.”
22. Phenomenology of Perception 58. Merleau‐Ponty exploits many resources for uncovering what has been covered up: Descriptions of breakdown cases of perception, the experience of brain injured subjects, the painting of artists such as Cezanne interested in how our perception moves from indeterminate to determinate.
23. “What Myth?”, 339.
24. Phenomenology of Perception 250.
25. “What Myth?”, 345.
26. “What Myth?”, 345.
27. See Sean Kelly (2000) “Grasping at Straws: Motor Intentionality and the Cognitive Science of Skillful Action” in Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (Eds.) Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus – Vol. II (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) 161–177.
28. See, Martin Heidegger (1962) Being and Time (Trans.) J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row) 98–99, 412. See also, Samuel Todes (2001) Body and World (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) 269–277.