Second-guessing second nature

Abstract

Davidson's 'On the very idea of a conceptual scheme' (Davidson, 1984) presents compelling arguments against the idea that experience is a product of two factors, a dualism of scheme and content. If we accept those arguments, however, we are still left with at least two options regarding experience. We can conclude, as Davidson appears to dol and as Rorty emphatically does,2 that there is nothing at all to be made of the schemecontent distinction. Or we can continue to think that there are these two aspects to experience, purged of the idea that they make separate or factorizable contributions. This second view is a central contention of McDowell's Mind and World (1994b),3 though McDowell puts the point in Kantian terms: the active faculty of spontaneity and the passive faculty of receptivity make a not even 'notionally separable' contribution to experience (9). McDowell's motivation for preserving the distinction comes out clearly in a passage where he criticizes Rorty for maintaining that we must hold apart two ways of viewing beliefs: the outside or descriptive view (as causal interactions with the environment) and the inside or normative view (as rules for action). Rorty (1991: 139) argues that we are led to this position if we reject the scheme-content distinction, for without that distinction 'we have no suitable items to serve as representations, and thus no need to ask whether our beliefs represent the world accurately.' There is no way to bring together the outside view of our beliefs, the one constructed by the field linguist who observes how our utterances line up with goings on in the environment, and the inside view, according to which we see ourselves as 'earnest seekers after truth' who form our beliefs according to epistemological norms. McDowell retorts that the very point of following norms of inquiry is to improve our chances of being right about the world (151). This aim presupposes that our beliefs do genuinely bear on the world; that is, they possess empirical content or constitute 'a stand taken as to how things are' (130). By insisting that the inside and outside points of view be kept