Paul Redding

In Mind and World and subsequent writings up to an essay first published in 2008 entitled “Avoiding the Myth of the Given”,1 John McDowell had insisted not only on the conceptuality of what is often discussed as “perceptual content” but also on the propositionality of that content. Many might find this puzzling. At the most intuitive level, one might think of the “content” of perception, what one perceives, as things— things with particular properties, and things arranged in particular relations. I look around my room and see my desk, see its colour, the variety of things on it, and so on. But, following the tractarian Wittgenstein, in Mind and World McDowell portrays the world to which one is open in perceptual experience not as a world of “things” but as a world of “facts”, and that facts rather than things is what one sees can strike one as counterintuitive. True, I can think of myself as seeing that my desk has a particular color, that it stands between the bookshelf and the window, but that I can see that such facts “obtain” (in the rather odd locution of philosophy) can seem to be, in some sense, secondary to or explainable by the fact that I see the desk. And I can see the desk only because I am in my study facing it with an unimpeded view.2 Proximity to and having an unimpeded view of as conditions for seeing seem to be an important part of what we mean by “seeing”, and “facts” can seem neither to be the sorts of things one can be close to or far from, nor things one can have unimpeded or impeded views of

In a short exchange published in 2000, Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom differed over the status of “facts” in a world containing no speakers and, hence, no speech acts. While Brandom wanted to retain the meaningfulness of talk of “facts” or “truths” about things—in this case truths about photons —in a world in which there could be no claimings about such things, Rorty denied the existence of any such “worldly items” as “facts.” In this essay the difference between Rorty and Brandom on this issue is used to explore their differing attitudes to modality. Brandom appeals to a Kantian approach of modal realism to support counterfactual claims. However, I argue that when his approach to modality is examined in the context of current debates over possible world semantics, his own “incompatibilist” semantics itself seems incompatible with a Kantian approach to modality. In turn, I suggest that this difference between Brandom and Rorty in their attitudes to modality reveals a difference in their respective attitudes to pragmatism’s relation to philosophy in general.

Usually, analytic philosophy is thought of as standing firmly within the tradition of empiricism, but recently attention has been drawn to the strongly Kantian features that have characterized this philosophical movement throughout a considerable part of its history. Those charting the history of early analytic philosophy sometimes point to a more Kantian stream of thought feeding it from both Frege and Wittgenstein, and as countering a quite different stream flowing from the early Russell and Moore. In line with this general assessment, Michael Friedman has pointed to the specifically Kantian features of the approach of Carnap and other members of the Vienna Circle. For Friedman, the positivists should be seen as having emerged from the tradition of late nineteenth-century neo-Kantianism. Although they had explicitly rejected Kant’s analysis of geometric truth and his key concept of the “synthetic a priori” because of dramatic changes within science itself, this move should not be seen as any simple abandonment of Kantianism. Rather, the positivists had redefined the nature of the Kantian a priori, by axiomatizing, relativizing and historicizing it, so as to fit with the results of the contemporary sciences.