The Intimate Harmony Between the Intellect and Sensibility: McDowell and Perceptual Learning

Abstract

This paper argues for a shift in the debate surrounding McDowell's conceptualism: from contents to capacities. This shift is important because the conceptual nature of a capacity is revealed in the way the capacity figures in the life of the animal, in particular in how the animal acquires and sustains the capacity. More specifically, I argue that a capacity is conceptual insofar as the subject can improve it by systematically exploiting interconnections among the features involved in its exercise. I first develop this notion through an analysis of skillful action, showing how a skilled agent perceives the interlocking demands of a situation and uses this perception to refine her performance. I then extend the model to perception itself, arguing that perceptual learning exhibits the same structure: theoretical knowledge can reshape perceptual organization, bringing it under conceptual control. This yields what I call a systematically rational capacity, which, I argue, comes in degrees and is not specific to humans. I next examine McDowell's account of virtue, where practical wisdom is shown to consist in an intimate harmony between intellect and sensibility rather than a computation between independent components. I argue that this harmony, far from being restricted to the ethical domain, characterizes the relation between reason and sensibility in general: our intelligence just is the properly molded state of our perceptual capacities, reflectively adjusted. Finally, I turn to the role of language, which enables a degree of systematic integration unavailable to non-linguistic animals, and argue that language's deepest contribution is not merely representational but ethical, and that here we can find what is special about us: language initiates us into a shared form of life in which we matter to one another and have a say in shaping what matters.