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Inquiry
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy
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Response to Dreyfus
Online Publication Date: 01 August 2007
To cite this Article: McDowell, John (2007) 'Response to Dreyfus', Inquiry, 50:4, 366
- 370
To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/00201740701489351
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00201740701489351

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Inquiry,
Vol. 50, No. 4, 366370, August 2007

Response to Dreyfus
JOHN MCDOWELL
University of Pittsburgh, USA

(Received 3 January 2007)

Dreyfus acknowledges that he was wrong to think practical intelligence, as I

conceive it, is situation-independent. But he still thinks my view of
mindedness can be characterized in terms of detached conceptual
intentionality. Now if you assume that mindedness is detached from
immersion in activity, it is not surprising that mindedness should seem alien
to the unreflective involvement that is characteristic of the exercise of skills.
But the idea that mindedness is detached is just what I mean to oppose. The
supposed Myth of the Mental is the result of reading me through the lens of
what is by my lights a mythological conception of the mental.
In other work, I invoked the image of stepping back, with a view to
distinguishing rationality in a strong senseresponsiveness to reasons as
suchfrom the kind of responding to reasons that is exemplified by, say,
fleeing from danger, which is something non-rational animals can do. The
idea was that given the ability to step back, the capacities that are operative
in ordinary perceptual engagement with the world, and in ordinary bodily
action, belong to a subjects rationality in that strong sense: they are
conceptual in the sense in which I claim that our perceptual and active lives
are conceptually shaped. When one is unreflectively immersed, one is exactly
not exercising the ability to step back. But even so the capacities operative in
ones perceiving or acting are conceptual, and their operations are
conceptual.
Nothing is discursively explicit in these goings-on, so it might seem
natural to say, as Dreyfus does, that my view is that they are implicitly
conceptual. But it is easy to hear that as amounting to only implicitly
conceptual, with an implication that conceptuality would be properly on
the scene only after something had been made explicit in discourse or
Correspondence Address: John McDowell, University of Pittsburgh, Department of Philosophy,
1001 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh PA 15260, USA. Email: jmcdowel@pitt.edu
0020-174X Print/1502-3923 Online/07/0403665 # 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/00201740701489351

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Response to Dreyfus

367

discursive thoughtthat is, only after the subject had exercised the ability to
step back. And that is not my view at all. Making things explicit is not a
theme of my thinking. I do not recognize a view of mine in the idea that
exercises of rationality with the detachment characteristic of explicit
commentary (on the passing scene or on what one is doing) constitute, as
Dreyfus puts a view he opposes, the basic form of human activity.
This supposed connection of rationality with detachment is particularly
damaging in the case of action. The involvement of rationality in human
action, in my picture, is not a result of adding an I think to
representations of ones actions. That would fit a detached, contemplative
stance towards ones actions, but that is not my picture. Self-awareness in
action is practical, not theoretical. It is a matter of an I do rather than an
I think. And the I do is not a representation added to representations,
as Kants I think is. Conceiving action in terms of the I do is a way of
registering the essentially first-person character of the realization of
practical rational capacities that acting is. The presence of the I do in a
philosophical account of action marks the distinctive form of a kind of
phenomenon, like the presence of the I think, as at least able to
accompany representations, in Kants account of empirical consciousness.
The practical concepts realized in acting are concepts of things to do.
Realizing such a concept is doing the thing in question, not thinking about
doing it. In the most fundamental kind of casethe case of kinds of things
to do that are basic actions for the agents in question, in one of the senses of
that phrasethere is, by definition, no room for thought about how to do
the thing in question. Such thought would need to traffic in concepts of
other things to do, by doing which one would do the thing in question; and
that would contradict the hypothesis that the thing in question is a basic
action for the agent in question. This means that the sad case of Chuck
Knoblauch is no problem for me. Knoblauch had an ability to realize a
certain practical concept (the concept of throwing efficiently to first base).
But he lost his ability because he started thinking about the mechanics,
about how throwing efficiently to first base is done. The effect was that
throwing efficiently to first base stopped being a basic action for him. The
most this case could show is that when mindedness gets detached from
immersion in activity, it can be the enemy of embodied coping (to echo
Dreyfuss wording). It cannot show that mindedness is not in operation
when one is immersed in embodied coping. When Knoblauch still had the
bodily skill that he lost, his mindedness was in operation in exercises of his
skill. His throwing efficiently to first base was his realizing a concept of a
thing to do.
Knoblauch exemplifies a specific way in which practical intelligence can
lose its grip on activity. That can happen when someone with a skill whose
exercises belong to a basic action type tries to bring the limb movements that
contribute to doing the thing in question within the scope of intention

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John McDowell

otherwise than under specifications like whatever is needed to throw

efficiently to first base. Before the loss of ability that takes that shapethe
attempt to extend the scope of intentional controlthe skill itself provided
for the movements to be as they needed to be (the skill itself gave specificity
to that whatever is needed), without the agents means-end rationality
being called on to intervene. This kind of loss of skill comes about when the
agents means-end rationality tries, so to speak, to take over control of the
details of her bodily movements, and it cannot do as good a job at that as
the skill itself used to do.
Dreyfus likes to put this point by saying, in a Merleau-Pontyesque vein,
that the body knows what movements to make. That may be all right as a
metaphorical way of noting that the person, the thinking thing, who is the
agent does not need to determine the specific character of the limb
movements involved in exercising a skill. She can leave that determination
to her ingrained bodily habits. But the metaphor is dangerous in so far as it
suggests that the body, in determining which movements are required for the
thing in question to get done, exploits something that is like means-end
rationality except that, since it belongs to the body as opposed to the person,
it must be nonconceptual. And then when I claim that a rational agents
skilled bodily coping is permeated with her rationality, it looks to Dreyfus as
if I must be claiming that the limb movements that figure in exercises of a
skill are determined, not by a simulacrum of means-end rationality
possessed by the body, but by the full-blown means-end rationality that
belongs to the agent. An attempt on the part of means-end rationality to
take control of limb movements is just what went wrong in the case of
Knoblauch. So Dreyfus thinks I must be committed to the crazy idea that
Knoblauchs casein which a skill is actually lostillustrates the general
form of skilled bodily action.
But this is not my picture at all. The idea of a basic action, in the relevant
sense, is the idea of a kind of thing one just does, not by doing something
else in the relevant sense of that phrase. No doubt one does the thing in
questionsay throwing efficiently to first baseby moving ones limbs
appropriately. But that is not to say one makes the limb movements as a
means to doing the thing in question. It is not to say one does the thing in
question by doing something else in a sense that brings ones means-end
rationality into operation.
So what difference does it make, according to me, for activity to be
permeated with rationalityif it is not that it opens the way to a
Knoblauch-like loss of unreflective skills? To answer this question, we need
to think about skills that can be acquired by non-rational animals as well as
rational animals; throwing efficiently to first base will not do as our
example. So consider catching a flying object. When a rational agent catches
a frisbee, she is realizing a concept of a thing to do. In the case of a skilled
agent, she does not do that by realizing other concepts of things to do. She

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369

does not realize concepts of contributory things to do, in play for her as
concepts of what she is to do by virtue of her means-end rationality in a
context in which her overarching project is to catch the frisbee. But she does
realize a concept of, say, catching this. (Think of a case in which, as one
walks across a park, a frisbee flies towards one, and one catches it on the
spur of the moment.) When a dog catches a frisbee, he is not realizing any
practical concept; in the relevant sense, he has none. The point of saying
that the rational agent, unlike the dog, is realizing a concept in doing what
she does is that her doing, under a specification that captures the content of
the practical concept that she is realizing, comes within the scope of her
practical rationalityeven if only in that, if asked why she caught the
frisbee, she would answer No particular reason; I just felt like it.
Dreyfus contrasts my Gadamerian conception of openness to the world
with Heideggers and Merleau-Pontys. He thinks the world to which
Gadamer and I provide for openness is a world of facts, in a sense that
involves a separation from anything with practical significance. But I do not
recognize this conception of the factual as mine. The point I want to make
here is already implicit in the example I used in my paper. If someone is
trying to get to the other side of a wall, the fact that a hole in the wall is of a
certain size will be a solicitation. A subject to whom the world is disclosed is
an agent. In that context the distinction Dreyfus insists on between
affordances and solicitations does not amount to much. To an engaged
agent an affordance can be a solicitation. And its being a solicitation does
not conflict with its being a fact, something to which a rational animal can
be open in operations of its conceptual capacities. Openness to the world is
enjoyed by subjects who are essentially agents. What they are open to is not
restricted to objects of disinterested contemplation. When Gadamer talks of
a free, distanced orientation, he is not talking about an attitude that is
contemplative as opposed to practically engaged.
Dreyfus objects to me from a standpoint at which he takes for granted
that mindedness is detached from engagement in bodily life. This goes with a
dualism of embodiment and mindedness that is reminiscent of Descartes. Of
course this dualism is not exactly Cartesian; the body is not conceived as a
machine. On the contrary, the body, as Merleau-Ponty and Dreyfus
conceive it, is distinctly person-like. It is supposed to have practical
knowledge. Now I could put what I urge at the end of my paper like this: I
am the only person-like thing (person, actually) that is needed in a
description of my bodily activity. If you distinguish me from my body, and
give my body that person-like character, you have too many person-like
things in the picture when you try to describe my bodily doings. And the
need Dreyfus thinks there is for this awkward separation of me from my
body reflects a conception of mindedness that I think we should discard. We
should not start with the assumption that mindedness, the characteristic in
virtue of which I am the thinking thing I am, is alien to unreflective

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John McDowell

immersion in bodily life. If we let our conception of mindedness be

controlled by the thought that mindedness is operative even in our
unreflective perceiving and acting, we can regain an integrated conception
of ourselves, as animals, andwhat comes with thatbeings whose life is
pervasively bodily, but of a distinctively rational kind.