The Formation of Reason E-Book

David Bakhurst

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 530

Beschreibung

In The Formation of Reason, philosophy professor David Bakhurst utilizes ideas from philosopher John McDowell to develop and defend a socio-historical account of the human mind. * Provides the first detailed examination of the relevance of John McDowell's work to the Philosophy of Education * Draws on a wide-range of philosophical sources, including the work of 'analytic' philosophers Donald Davidson, Ian Hacking, Peter Strawson, David Wiggins, and Ludwig Wittgenstein * Considers non-traditional ideas from Russian philosophy and psychology, represented by Ilyenkov and Vygotsky * Discusses foundational philosophical ideas in a way that reveals their relevance to educational theory and practice

Leseprobe

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Author’s Preface

1 What Can Philosophy Tell Us About How History Made the Mind?

What Role for Philosophy?

Wittgenstein and Davidson

Wittgenstein and Davidson Contrasted

McDowell

The Idea of Bildung

Understanding the Bildungsprozess

The Conceptual and the Practical

Conclusion

2 Social Constructionism

Social Constructionism Introduced

The Social Construction of Reality

Why Bother About Global Constructionism?

Against Global Constructionism

Matters Political

The Social Construction of Mental States

Why Mental States Are Not Socially Constructed

The Social Construction of Psychological Categories

Conclusion

3 Self and Other

Problems of Self and Other

The Problem of Self and Other in One’s Own Person

Strawson on Persons

Wiggins on Persons and Human Nature

The Significance of Second Nature

Further Positives

Conclusion: Two Cautionary Notes

4 Freedom, Reflection and the Sources of Normativity

McDowell on Judgement

Owens’s Critique

Defending Intellectual Freedom

Freedom and the Sources of Normativity

Sources of Normativity I: Practical Reasoning

Sources of Normativity II: Theoretical Reasoning

A McDowellian Response

Conclusion

5 Exploring the Space of Reasons

McDowell on the Space of Reasons

Brandom’s Inferentialism

Ilyenkov on the Ideal

Conclusion

6 Reason and Its Limits: Music, Mood and Education

An Initial Response

The Challenge Reconfigured

Passivity Within Spontaneity

Mood

Mood, Salience and Shape

Music

Education

Conclusion

7 Education Makes Us What We Are

A Residual Individualism

Vygotsky’s Legacy

Reconciling Vygotsky and McDowell

Personalism

Final Thoughts on Education

References

Index

The Journal of Philosophy of Education Book Series

The Journal of Philosophy of Education Book Series publishes titles that represent a wide variety of philosophical traditions. They vary from examination of fundamental philosophical issues in their connection with education, to detailed critical engagement with current educational practice or policy from a philosophical point of view. Books in this series promote rigorous thinking on educational matters and identify and criticise the ideological forces shaping education.

Titles in the series include:

The Formation of ReasonBy David Bakhurst

What Do Philosophers of Education Do? (And How Do They Do It?)Edited by Claudia Ruitenberg

Evidence-Based Education Policy: What Evidence? What Basis? Whose Policy?Edited by David Bridges, Paul Smeyers and Richard Smith

New Philosophies of LearningEdited by Ruth Cigman and Andrew Davis

The Common School and the Compre-hensive Ideal: A Defence by Richard Pring with Complementary EssaysEdited by Mark Halstead and Graham Haydon

Philosophy, Methodology and Educational ResearchEdited by David Bridges and Richard D. Smith

Philosophy of the TeacherBy Nigel Tubbs

Conformism and Critique in Liberal SocietyEdited by Frieda Heyting and Christopher Winch

Retrieving Nature: Education for a Post-Humanist AgeBy Michael Bonnett

Education and Practice: Upholding the Integrity of Teaching and LearningEdited by Joseph Dunne and Pádraig Hogan

Educating Humanity: Bildung in Post-modernityEdited by Lars Løvlie, Klaus Peter Mortensen and Sven Erik Nordenbo

The Ethics of Educational ResearchEdited by Michael Mcnamee and David Bridges

In Defence of High CultureEdited by John Gingell and Ed Brandon

Enquiries at the Interface: Philosophical Problems of On-Line EducationEdited by Paul Standish and Nigel Blake

The Limits of Educational AssessmentEdited by Andrew Davis

Illusory Freedoms: Liberalism, Education and the MarketEdited by Ruth Jonathan

Quality and EducationEdited by Christopher Winch

This edition first published 2011© 2011 David Bakhurst

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bakhurst, David.The formation of reason / David Bakhurst.p. cm. – (Journal of philosophy of education ; 12)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-4443-3909-3 (pbk.)

1. Philosophy of mind. 2. Knowledge, Theory of. 3. Reason. 4. McDowell, John Henry. I. Title.BD418.3.B355 2011128′.33–dc22

2010044175

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444395327; Wiley Online Library 9781444395600; ePub 9781444395594

For Christine

Acknowledgements

The vast majority of this work has not appeared in print before, though in preparing the text I have occasionally made use of a few of my published writings. The discussion of David Wiggins’s work in chapter 3 is adapted from my ‘Wiggins on Persons and Human Nature’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LXXI.2, 2005, pp. 462–69, Wiley-Blackwell Publications, and my treatment of David Owens’s Freedom Without Reason in chapter 4 is based on my review of his book published in Philosophical Books, 43.2, 2002, pp. 157–59, Wiley-Blackwell Publications. In addition, my presentation of Voloshinov’s work in chapter 2 is indebted to my ‘Social Memory in Soviet Thought’, in D. Middleton and D. Edwards (eds), Collective Remembering, Sage Publications, 2000, pp. 203–26, and my exposition of Ilyenkov’s views in chapter 5 deploys a few paragraphs from my ‘Meaning, Normativity, and the Life of the Mind’, Language and Communication, 17.1, 1997, pp. 33–51, Elsevier Publications. I am grateful to the respective publishers for permission to draw on this material.

Foreword

There can be few questions more pressing for education than those that appear at the interface between philosophy and psychology, for these are critical to how we learn and how we teach, and inseparable from what it is to be a human being: they are inseparable from what it is to be minded and what it is that makes the mind. But, strangely perhaps, when philosophers and psychologists discuss these things, they are apt to pass one another by. When educationalists turn to such writings, they commonly find that their real concerns are not being addressed, or that they are being broached in a manner that disappears into abstraction, cut off from the realities that confront teachers in their daily lives. These barriers to understanding are symptomatic of deep divisions in scholarly self-conception—not just legitimate disciplinary differences but divergent notions of what a discipline can and should do. Academic specialisation, accentuated by competitive research assessment regimes, amplifies these problems, deepening the division, while the imperative to demonstrate impact, in a culture of supposedly evidence-based policy, is an enticement to some—perhaps for the psychology of education especially—to superficiality or formulaic quick fixes. What then can philosophy do? When one turns to the philosophy of education, one finds, currently, that these questions receive less direct attention that one might expect; or perhaps that their treatment tends to be partial and partisan. All this is regrettable, it goes without saying, and these theoretical and practical deficits cry out for a more creative response.

The Formation of Reason answers to these needs. Drawing upon a rich and varied range of sources, David Bakhurst transcends these limitations with an account of the acquisition of reason—of how, as human beings, we come into the ‘space of reasons’, in Wilfrid Sellars’s memorable phrase—that is remarkable for its breadth of vision. In a text that reflects the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jerome Bruner, Bakhurst brings Lev Vygotsky and Evald Ilyenkov together with Robert Brandom and John McDowell, forging connections that are sometimes surprising but always refreshing, drawing distinctions that are nicely nuanced and often revelatory: the reader is thus cautioned against too easy an acceptance of received views of any of these thinkers and any acquiescence in formulaic responses. Bakhurst moves adroitly between the detail and the big picture, always maintaining a sense of the practical responsibilities of his task, in a manner professional philosophy has schooled itself to eschew—so, at least, it would sometimes seem. To enquire into the nature and origins of human psychological powers, and the extent of their dependence upon history and culture, is to address questions central to the philosophy of mind, but it can also be to venture into borderlands with psychology that a more scrupulously anxious philosophy would avoid.

The book is an overt tribute to McDowell, and he is plainly the strongest presence in these pages. But it breaks new ground in demonstrating his significance for education, and this is achieved partly by a qualified but highly original reconciliation of his thought with that of Vygotsky. Prominent place is given to other Russian thinkers too, most notably, as we saw, the philosopher Ilyenkov, but this also extends to some acknowledgement of the insights into the semiotic nature of the human psyche of V. N. Voloshinov (that is, Mikhail Bakhtin?). This movement between disciplinary traditions and philosophical cultures gives a critical edge to Bakhurst’s discussion such that the expository elements in the text are never merely exegesis but always challenge the reader in new ways.

So too McDowell’s turn to Bildung in his account of ‘second nature’ is expanded here in such a way as to acknowledge something of the extraordinary richness of association the term carries. Thus, Bakhurst shows an appreciation of the idea’s embeddedness in the facts of human life—of human finitude and sensibility, of human beings as subject to emotion and mood. Hence, his later discussion of music and the arts becomes all the more apposite, and this is just one of the ways in which the significance of engaging intelligently with concrete subject-matter is realised. Rooted in Renaissance humanism and ultimately Ancient Greek thought, and with strong connotations of character formation, Bildung is then explicated as a process of self-making. It becomes thus incumbent upon educators to ensure that this process is informed by plausible conceptions of the good, Bakhurst’s account of which is resolutely affirmative and pluralistic. This is a vision of education, then, that conjoins freedom and reason.

When Bakhurst foregrounds the idea of autonomy as central to educational aims, he finds connections not only with Bildung but also, perhaps more obviously, with that restatement of the idea of a liberal education, in the 1960s and 1970s, that is associated with R. S. Peters, Paul Hirst and Robert Dearden. The interweaving of questions of ethics and epistemology in their enquiry, which, with its strongly Kantian inspiration, contributes to the robustness of that restatement, finds resonance in the present text also with Christine Korsgaard’s examination of the sources of normativity. But this proves to be one of the several points where apparently like-minded philosophers are shown to differ, sometimes in ways that would escape the less critical reader of their work. A similar point can be made about the various forms of social constructionism that are evaluated, some of which are clearly congenial to Bakhurst, but many of which are shown to be vacuous—notwithstanding the seemingly religious enthusiasm for them that is sometimes found in educational and social science research. With these differences clearly exposed, the account we are offered of the socio-historical character of mind, and of the salience of this for education, is all the more convincing.

What these brief preparatory remarks should have indicated is that The Formation of Reason offers something other than a mainstream approach to these mainstream questions. Yet this is not the work of a maverick. The originality arises from the seeing of connections and the ability to draw these out in ways that are often surprising and always cogent. In doing this, David Bakhurst has succeeded in writing not only a work of philosophy that can speak to that mainstream in philosophy of mind but also a book that should be read by psychologists and educators and, in fact, anyone who has the kind of interest we should all have in what it is that makes the mind.

Paul StandishSeries Editor

Author’s Preface

This book begins by posing the question of whether and in what sense our distinctively human psychological powers are essentially social in nature and origin. It responds by developing a socio-historical account of mind according to which we owe our status as rational animals to our initiation into culture. Such issues are the focus of some of my earlier writings, especially my work on Russian philosophy and psychology, and my papers on Wittgenstein and Bruner. This book affords me the opportunity to revisit ideas from those works, expounding them in greater detail and exploring their consequences, especially their relevance to our understanding of education. But there is much here that is new, in part because some of my views have evolved, and in part because my primary inspiration in this book is the philosophy of John McDowell, whose work I have long admired, but have never before given a sustained treatment. I hope the result complements my previous efforts, and offers a fruitful exploration of what we might call the conceptual foundations of the philosophy of education.

I have long been interested in questions of education, a topic dear to the hearts of many thinkers on whom I have written in the past. Nevertheless, I did not set out to write a book in philosophy of education. That came about because a number of friends and colleagues encouraged me to develop my ideas in that direction. I am especially grateful to Jan Derry for her interest in my work, her critical insight, and her marvellous generosity and enthusiasm. Through Jan, I have met many others who have influenced me, such as Paul Standish, Harry Daniels, Anne Edwards, Michael Young, David Guile, John Hardcastle and Andrew Davis (whom I first knew many years ago when he was a graduate student at Keele and I an undergraduate). I associate the writing of this book with good times spent among friends, discussing matters philosophical in seminars, and afterwards over food and wine. Very little of this philosophical camaraderie would have come to pass had Jan not made it happen.

In 2001–2, I was privileged to hold a visiting fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, where I was able to conduct preliminary research for the book in a setting supremely conducive to scholarly reflection. I thank the Warden and Fellows of the College for their kindness and hospitality. I am especially indebted to Myles Burnyeat and Hanna Pickard for making my stay at All Souls so pleasurable and productive. I am also extremely grateful to London’s Institute of Education, where I am now fortunate to have an association as a Visiting Professor. I have given numerous talks at the Institute in recent years to audiences that never fail to be perceptive in criticism and generous in spirit. I only wish I could spend more time there. I am also indebted to Queen’s University at Kingston for granting me academic leave to pursue this project, and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding the research at its embryonic stages.

I have had the opportunity to present material from the manuscript to colloquia at All Souls College, Bath University, Birmingham University, Durham University, Griffith University, Hertfordshire University, The Institute of Education, London, Queen’s University at Kingston, and York University (Toronto), at meetings of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada (in Winnipeg), the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (at New College, Oxford), the Philosophy of Education Society of the United States (in Montreal), the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research (in Amsterdam, Seville and San Diego), at the Gregynog Philosophy of Education Conference, and at workshops at Queen’s University at Kingston and Laurentian University. I thank the audiences on these occasions for their questions, comments and criticisms.

I would like to thank John McDowell for his help and encouragement over the years. His influence on the text is conspicuous; I hope he likes the result. Many other people deserve my heartfelt thanks. Paul Standish, Andrew Davis and Willem deVries read the whole manuscript with great care and provided countless astute criticisms and suggestions that made the book much better than it otherwise would have been. I am also indebted to two anonymous referees for their comments on the project, and to many friends who discussed parts of the text with me, including David Wiggins, Andrew Chitty, Michael Luntley, Adrian Moore and Hanjo Glock. Jonathan and Sarah Dancy merit special thanks—Jonathan for philosophical inspiration, Sarah for expertly copy-editing the manuscript and managing the book’s production. Other friends had a less direct but nevertheless important influence on the work, including Adam Swift, Cheryl Misak, David Dyzenhaus, Peter Jones, George Lovell, Maureen Garvie, Vladislav Lektorsky and my colleagues at Queen’s, especially Sergio Sismondo, Henry Laycock, Steve Leighton, Rahul Kumar, Deborah Knight and one other, mentioned below. Queen’s is blessed with outstanding students, and I have been fortunate to work with many. I would particularly like to thank Tom Brannen, Anthony Bruno, Octavian Busuioc, Rachel Fern, Jane Forsey, Katie Howe, Ryan McInerney, Rachel Sheffrin and John Symons. I am also very grateful to the staff of the Queen’s Philosophy Department, Marilyn Lavoie and Judy Vanhooser, for the superb job they do, and for the tremendous help and support they have given me during my time as Head of Department. On a sad note, since I began this book I have lost several people dear to me who inspired me greatly: Genia Lampert, Felix Mikhailov, Jerry Cohen, and my mother, Peggy Bakhurst. I miss them very much.

The book is dedicated to Christine Sypnowich, my wife and colleague at Queen’s. Christine and our two children, Rosemary and Hugh, are the greatest. Not a day goes by without my giving thanks for my good fortune in being part of such a family. Christine is the perfect friend to me, a wonderful mother to our children, and a constant source of inspiration, intellectual, moral and aesthetic. She’s also great fun. Many years ago when we were doctoral students in Oxford, I was writing to our friend Hanjo Glock. I asked Christine if she had a message for Hanjo. She answered self-mockingly, ‘Just tell him Christine is as lovely as ever and never ceases to delight.’ Joking she may have been, but what she said was true then, is true now, and has been true at all points in between. Thanks for everything, Christine.

1

What Can Philosophy Tell Us About How History Made the Mind?

This chapter is concerned primarily with two questions. First: to what degree do we owe our distinctively human psychological powers to history, society and culture? Second: if our relatedness to others is a precondition of our mindedness, to what extent can this be demonstrated or illuminated by philosophical reflection?1

My interest in these issues goes back to the early 1980s, when I began research on Russian philosophy. I spent the 1982–3 academic year in Moscow, trying to get inside the philosophical culture of the USSR. I was convinced that there had to be more to that culture than the tired doctrines of dialectical and historical materialism that were the official creed of the Soviet state. And I was right. I was fortunate to fall in with a group of talented philosophers, who took me under their wing. These thinkers were not dissidents; they were Marxists, but they were representatives of a very different form of Marxism from the kind peddled by the Soviet establishment. These were so-called ‘men of the ’sixties’, who had done their most creative work during the brief ‘thaw’ that succeeded the Stalin period. They were creative, critical and scholarly. They were steeped in German classical philosophy, especially Hegel. Their cast of mind was sceptical, playful and, as you might expect, dialectical. They were typically excellent orators.2

One prominent theme in their work was that the human mind is an essentially ‘socio-cultural’ or ‘socio-historical’ phenomenon. Now, I had been brought up to think that the idea that human beings are ‘socially constituted beings’ was a leitmotif of the incorrigibly feeble-minded: the sort of claim that no self-respecting philosopher would advance. So I was intrigued to find the idea flourishing among thinkers whose intelligence and ingenuity were hard to question. I therefore set about trying to establish what exactly these Russians were arguing and to explore similar ideas advanced by other thinkers. As it happens, since the early 1980s, the idea that the human mind cannot be understood without essential reference to culture has come to prominence in certain areas of Western philosophy and psychology: for example, communitarian political philosophy, feminist theory, certain readings of Wittgenstein, some forms of poststructuralism, and the various species of social-constructionist, discursive and cultural psychology.3 Even in cognitive science it is now common to hear reference to the importance of culture. Yet there remains little consensus about how exactly to understand the relation of mind to culture, or society, or history.

WHAT ROLE FOR PHILOSOPHY?

My Russians were convinced that the socio-historical character of mind is something that philosophy can illuminate. But there are grounds for scepticism here, for the influence of culture, or social interaction, or history, on the nature and development of mind must be an empirical matter, and as such one that lies outside the province of philosophy. If you muse about how great the influence of culture is on your own development, you might find yourself asking questions like: What would I have been like had I been born the child of a Roman centurion? And you might think that headway can be made by treating this as a thought experiment. But in so far as we can make sense of the question at all, surely the only interesting reading is this: How would someone with your genetic make-up have turned out had he or she been brought up as the child of a centurion? That looks like an empirical question about the respective contributions of nature and nurture, not a philosophical one. Questions about the manifestation of genetic traits in contrasting environments are the stuff of twin studies, not thought experiments.

It is interesting that my Russians strongly resisted the idea that they were making a speculative intervention in the nature–nurture debate. In fact, they explicitly argued that psychological development should not be seen in nature–nurture terms (see Mikhailov, 1995, pp. 76–7). First, they maintained that it is a mistake to suppose we can neatly distinguish two discrete causal factors, natural/biological, on the one hand, and cultural/environmental, on the other, and then sort influences on development into one kind or the other. Second, they complained that the nature–nurture debate portrays development exclusively in causal terms. It represents individual development as a product of either natural or environmental influences, or (more plausibly) of some combination of the two. But the position these philosophers were advancing was not one about the causal conditions of human development. Their argument was more transcendental in character: that initiation into culture, social interaction, having a history, and so on are not so much causes of psychological development as preconditions of the possibility of rational agency, and hence of mind, at least in its human form, since these Russian thinkers identified our mindedness with our status as rational agents. We can ask of a rational agent, say, whether she is naturally good at mathematics or prone to fits of anger, but we cannot portray rational agency as determined by nature, nurture, or anything else, for we represent an agent as rational in so far as we see her as autonomous and self-determining. The question for my Russians was the relation of history, culture and society to the possibility of self-determination, an issue that, they complained, was rendered invisible by the nature–nurture debate.

But even if we take a nuanced view of nature and nurture, human development is surely in the realm of the empirical, so what exactly is there for the philosopher to contribute? Well, the Lockean job of underlabourer for the sciences is available. But we can probably find more challenging employment even if we concede that the relation between culture and mind is to be explored by empirical investigation. One role might be to integrate material from different disciplines. Understanding the mind is an interdisciplinary project: we need insights not just from psychology, biology, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, etc., but from a number of historical disciplines, such as archaeology, ancient history, and so on. There are many reasons why practitioners in one field may be unable to see the significance of work in another, even if they are aware of its existence. So one task the philosopher can assume is to weave insights from different fields into a single synoptic vision. This is no easy job, not just because it is hard to establish a common universe of discourse, but because one has to reckon with all the entrenched reasons for thinking the project unnecessary or impossible.

I want, however, to consider whether there might not be a yet more ambitious role for the philosopher—that is, to argue that the human mind is essentially a socio-historical phenomenon. Might there not be distinctively philosophical arguments that would show what my Russians wanted to show—namely, that there is a more than merely empirical connection between possession of a mind and membership in society, culture or community?

Such a position seems to have been held by two of the greats of twentieth-century analytic philosophy: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Donald Davidson. I shall briefly sketch their respective positions.

WITTGENSTEIN AND DAVIDSON

In the passages in the Philosophical Investigations known as the ‘private language argument’ and the ‘rule-following considerations’, Wittgenstein argues—or appears to argue—that there could not be a language that is essentially private in character, from which it seems to follow that language is necessarily a public, or communal, phenomenon.

The argument is this: a language in which the meaning of the words was given by entities accessible only by the speaker (such as the speaker’s ideas or sensations) would lack standards of correctness. There would be no way to distinguish correct usage of the words of the language from usage that merely struck the speaker as correct. But a language with no standards of correctness is no language at all; therefore, a private language is impossible.

The ‘rule-following considerations’, which precede the private language argument in the Philosophical Investigations, seem to show that we can make sense of standards of correctness in a practice only by appeal to such notions as agreement and custom. There is no philosophical vantage point from which we can declare that one way of extending a mathematical series, or deploying a concept, is correct and another incorrect. Correctness and incorrectness are disclosed from within our practices—activities that cannot be underwritten by philosophy but must be accepted for what they are: namely, aspects of our natural history or ‘form of life’. Norman Malcolm concludes:

When Wittgenstein says that following a rule is a practice, I think he means that a person’s actions cannot be in accord with a rule unless they are in conformity with a common way of acting that is displayed in the behaviour of nearly everyone who has had the same training. This means the concept of following a rule implies the concept of a community of rule-followers. (1986, p. 156)

Given the intimate connection between language and thought, and between rule-following and rationality, it appears we have an argument that represents membership in a community as a precondition of mind and rational agency.4

What of Davidson? In several of his later essays, Davidson argues that interpersonal communication is a precondition of the possibility of thought. This is so in two respects. First, communication is ‘the source of the concept of objective truth’ (Davidson, 1991/2001, p. 209). Invoking Wittgenstein, Davidson argues that a person can be supposed to be engaged in a norm-governed practice—such as thinking, reasoning or speaking a language—only if a distinction can be drawn between her acting correctly or incorrectly; that is, we must be able to distinguish between what the thinker or speaker takes to be the case and what is the case. Davidson maintains that for a mind in isolation nothing can ground this distinction. He writes: ‘[W]e would not have the concept of getting things wrong or right if it were not for our interactions with other people.’ This is not because agreement determines truth, as relativists or social constructionists might argue; rather, consensus ‘creates the space’ in which the concept of truth has application (Davidson, 1997/2001, p. 129). Only a shared public language can have genuine standards of correctness.

Second, Davidson contends that the very possibility of what philosophers have come to call ‘mental content’ depends upon social interaction. He argues that our mental states owe their contents to their causes. My perceptual belief that there is a desk in front of me has the content it does in virtue of the causes that engender it. But the causal process in which the belief originates is complex and the number of contributing causal factors enormous. Why should we pick out the desk as the cause of the belief—and hence as the object the belief is about—rather than some other part of the causal chain, such as images on my retina or events in the visual centres of my brain? Davidson’s answer is that only when we introduce another person into the picture do we have reason to identify the causes of our mental states with the public objects about which we take ourselves to talk and think. Content is determined by a process of ‘triangulation’, in which two people’s responses to stimuli are traced back to a common object. Davidson concludes: ‘Without this sharing of reactions to common stimuli, thought and speech would have no particular content—that is, no content at all’ (1991/2001, p. 212).

Davidson (1991/2001) maintains that these insights resolve many of the traditional problems of epistemology. Knowledge of our own minds and knowledge of other minds are shown to be ‘mutually dependent’: triangulation presupposes that I cannot know what I think unless I can have knowledge of the minds of others, and that I cannot know what others think unless I am able to know my own mind. Both these varieties of knowledge rest in turn upon beliefs about the environment with which my interlocutor(s) and I interact. Davidson famously argues that these beliefs about the environment must be largely correct. For interpretation to be possible, interpreter and interpreted must share a significant number of true beliefs about the world. This is not just because the assumption that one’s interlocutor has largely true beliefs is a precondition of understanding her; triangulation ensures that speakers cannot be significantly in error about what they take their beliefs to be about. If knowledge of the external world, knowledge of other minds, and self-knowledge are all interdependent, and if many of our ordinary beliefs must be true, then the appearance that there is a gulf between mind and world, or between mind and mind, must be illusory. The traditional problems of philosophy are problems no more.

For present purposes, what is crucial is Davidson’s conclusion that ‘interaction among similar creatures is a necessary condition for speaking a language’ (1992/2001, p. 120) and for possessing thoughts:

Belief, intention, and the other propositional attitudes are all social in that they are states a creature cannot be in without having a concept of intersubjective truth, and this is a concept one cannot have without sharing, and knowing that one shares, a world, and a way of thinking about the world, with someone else. (1992/2001, p. 121)

If Davidson is right, minded beings are essentially social.

WITTGENSTEIN AND DAVIDSON CONTRASTED

I shall not undertake a detailed examination of the pros and cons of these much-discussed arguments, but restrict myself to a couple of observations.

It might appear as if Davidson’s and Wittgenstein’s positions are complementary—and hence that the weight of their considerable combined authority presses us to acknowledge the social character of mind.5 But things are not so simple. Even sympathetic interpreters of Wittgenstein are profoundly divided about just what his arguments show. Among the most persuasive interpretations is the one propounded by Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker, and it is far less bold than Malcolm’s quoted above.

Baker and Hacker take Wittgenstein to have shown that a language must have public standards of correctness only in the sense that its rules must be such that another agent could understand and adhere to them. It does not follow that there must be other agents who actually do understand and adhere to them. What is crucial is that language practices exhibit regularity, but there is no reason why a contingently solitary person should not establish such practices so long as the practices could in principle be learnt by someone else. Wittgenstein treats language as a system of conventions, but a convention could be set up by a solitary individual if the convention were such that someone else—if there were someone else—could adhere to it. This shows that anything that is a language must be learnable by more than one person. It does not show that speakers must be members of communities if language is to be possible (see, for example, Baker and Hacker, 1984, pp. 71–80; 1990).6

On this reading, the significance of Wittgenstein’s remarks is primarily negative: they explode Cartesian and classical empiricist conceptions of mind and language. They fall short, however, of establishing a substantive doctrine of the socio-historical self. And this, one might think, is to be expected, since Wittgenstein was clear that the aspirations of his philosophy were to criticise and dissolve philosophical misconceptions rather than to advance positive philosophical theories. Moreover, if we look at what Wittgenstein says about persons and selves in his notorious argument that the first-person pronoun is not a referring expression, we see that advancing a vision of the person as socially constituted is pretty far from his mind.7

Davidson, in contrast, is committed to the stronger view that more than one subject must actually exist if language and thought are to be possible: ‘it takes two to triangulate’, as he puts it (1991/2001, p. 213). At the same time, Davidson is profoundly opposed to the idea that language is a system of conventions or that we can understand a language as a kind of social entity or institution over and above the interpretative activities of individual speakers trying to make sense of each other. To understand others, each speaker deploys Tarski-style theories of interpretation, short-term and long-term (‘passing’ and ‘prior’, in Davidson’s terminology), speaker-specific and more general in character, but none of these describes what philosophers and linguists are inclined to call a language. In fact, for Davidson, there is ‘no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what philosophers and linguists have supposed’ (1986/2005, p. 107; see also Davidson, 1994/2005). What there is is the coincidence of idiolects.8

So Wittgenstein gives credence to the notion of language as a set of shareable conventions, but does not require that a community exist to share them, while Davidson insists that more than one speaker must actually exist for thought and language to be possible, but he has no time for the notion of language as a social institution. There are deep differences here.9

It is also notable that neither view really has a developmental dimension. Although Wittgenstein’s writings are peppered with examples about teaching and learning, he tells us relatively little about how he conceives the child’s initiation into a form of life save for a few remarks about ‘training’. Davidson recognises that we are owed an account of the emergence of thought and language in the child, but despairs of giving one. He writes:

We have many vocabularies for describing nature when we regard it as mindless, and we have a mentalistic vocabulary for describing thought and intentional action; what we lack is a way of describing what is in between. …

    It is not that we have a clear idea what sort of language we could use to describe half-formed minds; there may be a very deep conceptual difficulty or impossibility involved. That means there is a perhaps insuperable problem in giving a full description of the emergence of thought. (Davidson, 1997/2001, p. 128)

Davidson wryly concludes this passage by giving thanks that he is not in the field of developmental psychology.

McDOWELL

I want to turn now to the views of a thinker much influenced by Wittgenstein and Davidson: John McDowell.10 In Mind and World (1994), McDowell sketches a view of the emergence of mind that does have a developmental perspective, or at least it has room for one.

McDowell maintains that the distinctive feature of the kinds of minds that human beings have is that we are responsive to reasons. Human beings are not merely pushed about by blind causal forces: our thoughts and actions are guided, and in some cases determined—that is, rationally determined—by our appreciation of what there is reason to think or do. Human mindedness resides in this ability to commune with reasons. We are inhabitants of ‘the space of reasons’, as he picturesquely puts it, adopting a phrase of Wilfrid Sellars.11

McDowell advances a distinctive view of experience. He argues that experience should be understood as exercising a rational rather than merely causal influence over us. In perception, what we take in is not raw data that the mind has to work up and conceptualise before it can form the basis of judgement. The content of our experience is that things are thus and so.12 The deliverances of perception are already conceptual in character and hence fit to yield judgement and to serve as grounds for belief. If we construe experience in this way, we can think of it not as a mediator that comes between us and things as they are, but as openness to reality. Experience discloses the world to us.

If experience is both essentially conceptual in character and is able to reveal reality to us, then reality itself must be conceptual in character or at least not alien to the conceptual (see McDowell, 1994, pp. 25–9). This requires us to think of the world as ‘all that is the case’ rather than as brutely physical in character. To achieve this, McDowell argues, we must overcome the scientism that insists on representing nature as ‘disenchanted’, as bereft of significance.13

In the present context, the crucial aspect of McDowell’s position is that human beings are not born into the space of reasons but are initiated into it by education, or Bildung, as he puts it, adopting the evocative German term. The child is born a mere animal, as it were, but acquires a ‘second nature’ as she develops conceptual capacities that put her in touch with reality in experience. She thereby becomes a conscious rational being—a person. McDowell writes: ‘[I]t is not even clearly intelligible to suppose that a creature might be born at home in the space of reasons. Human beings are not: they are born mere animals, and they are transformed into thinkers and intentional agents in the course of coming to maturity’ (p. 125). McDowell gives ‘pride of place’ to the acquisition of language in this process of transformation. Initiation into language is our entrance into the conceptual realm. In this, McDowell thinks of language not just as a sophisticated symbolic system, but as a living repository of evolving forms of thought. This is a vision of language in marked contrast to Davidson’s: the language that makes ‘our orientation towards reality’ possible is, McDowell writes, ‘essentially the possession of a we’ (McDowell, 2007a/2009b, p. 149). In acquiring language, the child enters an intellectual culture or cultures, comprising conceptions of the world, styles of thinking and reasoning, values that are epistemic, moral, aesthetic, and so on. She inherits a tradition of thought, ‘a store of historically accumulated wisdom about what is a reason for what’ (McDowell, 1994, p. 126), and in so doing becomes a minded being. With this, it seems, McDowell arrives at the view that history makes the mind.

THE IDEA OF BILDUNG

It is interesting to note that there are significant parallels between the kind of socio-historical vision of mind that emerges in Mind and World and the views of my Russians. The latter also portray the child’s mind as emerging only through her initiation into culture. They too argue against scientism and the disenchantment of objective reality, urging us to think of the world as embodying meaning and value. And, as McDowell does, they draw a sharp division between the modes of thought and experience available to rational agents at home in the space of reasons and the non-conceptual forms of awareness of ‘mere animals’. There are, of course, important differences of emphasis, but the commonalities are plain. This is perhaps not so surprising: the Russians were much inspired by Hegel and ‘German classical philosophy’, a tradition that has increasingly influenced McDowell since his move from Oxford to Pittsburgh in the mid-1980s.

What, then, are we to make of McDowell’s idea of Bildung? His immediate source is the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose Truth and Method has a conspicuous influence on the concluding pages of Mind and World (see also McDowell, 2007a/2009b). Gadamer in turn describes the idea of Bildung as one of the guiding concepts of humanism (1975, p. 9), and his use of it puts him in conversation with a tradition of German philosophical and educational thinking whose participants include Herder, von Helmholtz, Schiller, Moses Mendelssohn, and Hegel among many others. The term is related to the verb bilden (to form) and the noun Bild (image), and is variously translated into English as formation, education, cultivation and culture (though the later translation, once predominant,14 can mislead). The notion came to prominence in German educational thought in the second half of the eighteenth century to characterise an idea with roots in Renaissance Humanism and ultimately Ancient Greek thought: education as character formation in accord with an ideal image of human development (see Nordenbo, 2003). This became the idea of a process of ‘formative self-development’ (Wood, 1998, p. 301), in which the individual transcends the particularity of her natural existence through the development of the intellectual, rational side of her being, thereby enabling her to commune with the universal and to enter, in von Humboldt’s phrase, ‘the most general, most animated and most unrestrained interplay’ with the world (von Humboldt, quoted by Løvlie and Standish, 2003, p. 2). Critical in this is the individual’s relation to culture and tradition, which are seen as actively appropriated and transformed to become part of the individual’s inner life.15

These rich themes all find expression in McDowell’s philosophy, albeit sometimes parenthetically and in a philosophical idiom rather different from the German thinkers in whose work the idea of Bildung is at home. Most prominent is the link to Greek thought, for McDowell takes a modified version of Aristotle’s view of the development of virtue of character as his model of the Bildungsprozess. Yet apart from this appeal to Aristotle, McDowell tells us little about how he intends Bildung to be understood. We can, however, note two important features of his use of the concept. The first is that his conception of the telos that Bildung aspires to realise is thin. The end of the Bildungsprozess is the emergence of an autonomous, critical rational agent ‘at home in the world’. To this extent, his work might be thought allied to educational philosophies that stress rational autonomy, such as the so-called London School of R. S. Peters, Paul Hirst and Robert Dearden.16 But McDowell offers no account of which of the many ways in which a life can manifest rational autonomy are worthy of cultivation, let alone a story about their developmental or educational preconditions, assigning questions of what kind of people we should be to first-order ethical and political deliberation and debate.17

Second, notwithstanding this thin teleology, McDowell takes a very strong view of what Bildung accomplishes. He casts Bildung not as the development of an already-existing self, but as the process in which minded beings come to be. He explicitly describes the transformation Bildung effects as ‘acquiring a mind’; that is, ‘the capacity to think and act intentionally’ (McDowell, 1994, p. 126). Cultural formation, then, is relevant not just to how rational agents manifest their rationality: it is a precondition of a human being’s having rationality to manifest. McDowell’s view of Bildung incorporates both senses contained in the ambiguous term self-creation. It is the process of the coming into being of a self able to engage in practices of self-making.

Just how distinctive McDowell’s position is in its relevance for philosophy of education depends in large measure on how we are to understand these claims about the transformative powers of Bildung. McDowell admits that his position ‘risks looking mysterious’ (1994, p. 125). He cannot be suggesting that the human infant is literally ‘mindless’ in the sense of lacking psychological capacity altogether. Nor will it do to lean too heavily on the distinction, favoured by his Pittsburgh colleague Robert Brandom, between sentience and sapience. For though the child may not yet be sapient, in the sense of being genuinely responsive to reasons, she is far more than merely sentient—that is, capable of being ‘aware in the sense of being awake’ (see Brandom, 1994, p. 5). There is no question that the pre-linguistic child can ‘think and act intentionally’ in a perfectly uncontentious sense of those terms. What the infant lacks are psychological capacities that enable her, as McDowell would put it, to hold the world in view. The transformation effected by Bildung makes the child not just something in the world, interacting with her immediate local environment, but a subject with a view on the world that can think and act in light of that conception.

It might be thought that the natural next step would be for McDowell to offer us an account of just how the transformation occurs. It is interesting, then, that he does not venture even a sketch of how such an account might go, or refer us to relevant empirical work. Rather, in his treatment of Bildung, he writes as if he is drawing attention to facts of human development that are there in plain view, just so long as they are not rendered invisible by scientism or philosophical prejudice.

How, then, can his account be taken further?

UNDERSTANDING THE BILDUNGSPROZESS

Perhaps McDowell is reticent to say much about Bildung because he does not think this the appropriate province of philosophy. However, although McDowell would certainly acknowledge that philosophy cannot pretend to discover facts about human development by a priori means, I do not think he believes that, having made room to acknowledge the importance of Bildung, the philosopher must simply step aside and leave it for the psychologist, linguist and cognitive scientist to make good on the notion.18 We can look to philosophy not just to observe the importance of Bildung, but to elucidate the concepts that will enable us to think its importance: person, rationality, the space of reasons, mindedness, thought, meaning, normativity, agency, second nature, and so on. Moreover, speculative reflection on aspects of human development that are in plain view can be genuinely illuminating. We should not think of such reflection simply as a place holder for a genuine theoretical account, any more than we should see Aristotle’s reflections on moral character as merely provisional, awaiting a proper empirical moral psychology.

With these considerations in mind, let us attempt to describe one way in which we might elucidate the Bildungsprozess. In this, it will be important to avoid an easy misunderstanding. Reading McDowell, or my Russians, one might think they suppose children to undergo a kind of ‘cognitive baptism’. The infant is immersed in culture by her elders and ‘acquires a mind’, emerging a conscious rational being. McDowell’s appeal to first language acquisition serves to mitigate such an impression. Yet it is still tempting to think that we must be able to identify discrete, critical moments of transition that enable the child to cross a line that divides the minded from the unminded, the pre-rational from the rational, ‘first nature’ from second nature, the merely animal from the personal. But of course there is no moment at which the child becomes rational, any more than there is a moment at which she first qualifies as a speaker of her native language. There are no lines that are crossed, just complex, many and varied developmental processes in which black and white end points are joined by numerous overlapping links in shades of grey. Moreover, the child’s location at any point in her development is influenced, causally and perhaps constitutively, by how others relate to her. In our engagement with children, we attribute to them capacities that they do not yet possess, or possess only embryonically, and this ‘lending of capacity’ is a precondition for the child’s coming to acquire the self-standing capacity itself.19 Any attempt to elucidate Bildung must be alive to these complexities.

McDowell identifies the space of reasons with the realm of the conceptual: the child enters the space of reasons in so far as she acquires conceptual powers. It is therefore natural to propose that we enrich our conception of Bildung by exploring the development of the child’s concepts, and how society, culture and history are implicated in their acquisition and their exercise.

There are, of course, many contrasting accounts of concepts in the philosophical literature.20 David Wiggins, following Frege, treats a substance concept, e.g., horse, as something general or universal (Wiggins, 2001, pp. 8–11). The concept is ‘the general thing horse’ (p. 79, n. 2). The sortal predicate ‘horse’ refers to the concept. A concept is said to have ‘marks’: a property that is a mark of the concept horse is a property that anything that is a horse has. On this view, concepts are objective in the sense that they are possible objects of analysis, the nature of which is open to discovery.

It is much more common, however, to treat concepts as purely psychological phenomena, and there are contrasting ways of thinking about concepts as psychological. One is to construe concepts as mental representations. On one version of this view, to have the concept horse is to possess a mental representation (a) which has a certain characteristic (i.e. horsey) content, (b) the occurrence of which is correlated causally with the appearance of horses, and (c) which can be deployed to form thoughts about horses.

A second view holds that to possess a concept is to have a certain range of abilities. Opinions differ about the nature of the abilities in question. On the most minimal view, they are recognitional and discriminatory abilities: to possess the concept horse is to be able to identify, individuate and keep track of horses—or, more demandingly, to be able to identify, individuate and keep track of horses as horses. A stronger view holds that the abilities are linguistic in kind. Brandom, for example, advances a ‘linguistic pragmatism’ that maintains, following Sellars, that ‘grasping a concept is mastering the use of a word’ (Brandom, 2000, p. 6). McDowell focuses on the ability to form thoughts: ‘the concept of water is an ability that is exercised in thinking about water’ (McDowell, 1992/1998b, p. 289).

Advocates of the second, ability-centred view might say that mental representations underlie the abilities in question, just as proponents of the first view might hold that, although concepts are mental representations, what is important about them is what they enable us to do. But there is nonetheless a marked difference of emphasis in the two approaches. Some advocates of the first view are atomists about concept possession: to have the concept of an x simply requires that you have the right kind of mental representation (see, for example, Fodor, 1998). At least when it comes to concepts of the substances we encounter in perception, each concept is a discrete entity, possession of which does not demand the possession of other concepts—a being could in principle have it and it alone. Advocates of the ability-centred view, in contrast, tend to be conceptual holists. Even on a minimalist account of the abilities in question, their exercise requires a whole range of concepts, not just the concept horse. These certainly include more fundamental concepts of the kind Kant thought of as ‘categories’, but they will also include lots of cognate empirical concepts. To be able to identify and re-identify something as a horse, it helps if you can make certain kinds of inferences (‘If it’s a horse, then …’) and if you have a handle on what kind of thing a horse isn’t (‘That can’t be a horse because it barks like a dog.’).

One attraction of the ability-centred approach is that it represents conceptual competence as a matter of degree: someone’s ability to identify, individuate and keep track of something can be more or less sophisticated, just as there can be different standards to which we can hold someone when we ask: ‘Does he know what an x is?’ Where competence comes in degrees, we can meaningfully ask how it develops.

Let us consider the development of children’s understanding of a straightforward substance concept. For this purpose, the concept horse will do fine. I shall suggest that we can identify four stages in the child’s developing understanding of a substance concept. However, I do not want to make much of this stage talk. It is useful simply because it enables us to illustrate the different ways in which socio-historical influences may be operative.21 Perhaps the course of conceptual development is not best seen as divided into stages, or, if we can define stages, we should delineate more than four. I want to leave these questions open.

Stage One: At the foundation of the child’s understanding of a substance concept is the ability to identify and re-identify the substance in question. So the first stage of the development of the infant’s understanding of the concept horse is simply her pre-linguistic ability to pick out and keep track of horses. The signs of this ability are pretty obvious: she responds to horses. Of course, early on there may be no clear distinction between the child’s responding to the appearance and reappearance of a particular horse and her responding to continuants of a type (or a subclass of that type). But equally, there may be: the child may be characteristically delighted at the appearance of the family pet while generally, if differently, excited when any horse is on the scene.

It might be thought that there is nothing socio-historical about this ability: it is primitive, innate, pre-linguistic and individual. In a sense, this must be true: if the child cannot ‘lock on’ to horses, there is nothing for Bildung to work with. At the same time, we should not overlook the role played by the adults and other children who surround the child. From the outset, the activities of others, including of course their speech, play a significant organising role. Many appearances of horses are accompanied by utterances of the word ‘horse’ by parents and caregivers (and not just utterances, of course; adults respond to, and interact with, horses in characteristic ways): the word starts to anticipate, register and acknowledge experience. Moreover, adults present the boundaries of the concept to the child. The child learns what does and does not count as a horse from the reactions of adults to her responses to the appearance of candidates, which might be real animals, or toys, pictures in books, photographs, and so on. Even the most primitive of conceptual abilities is exercised in a complex social context.

Stage Two: At the beginning of the child’s linguistic awareness, she starts to master simple words. She grasps that utterances of ‘horse’ refer to this continuant and to similar others, and she begins to deploy the sound herself, whether to express excitement, make a request, express fear or just for the fun of it. At first the child may overextend the term, calling all four-legged medium-sized animals ‘horses’, or underextend it, reserving the term only for Dobbin, but the influence of adults and other children brings her usage into line with their own (other things being equal, which they often are not).

At this stage, the child’s use of the concept is ‘in the space of reasons’ in the sense that her usage of the word ‘horse’ is held accountable to standards of correctness, standards that are upheld by other members of the community of speakers. (Note that even at stage one, the child’s non-linguistic responses, while at first seen by others as merely causal, are gradually treated as warranted or not by the situation and hence as accountable to standards of appropriateness: ‘Don’t get excited, Paul, it’s not a horse.’). Of course, it is one-dimensional to think of the adults’ role simply in terms of correcting and training, or even as ‘scaffolding’ linguistic usage (to use Jerome Bruner’s famous metaphor). They constantly offer the child linguistic possibilities; they encourage, play and revel in language. They initiate the child into a form of life in which meaning is ubiquitous, and, as I observed above, they invite the child into this form of life by treating her as far more competent than she actually is.

Stage Three: Now we begin to see increasing sophistication in the child’s linguistic knowledge. The child not only uses a term in response to certain circumstances, or for certain purposes; she begins to associate the term with criteria for its application. She begins to justify her use of words, and the judgements she expresses in using them, by appeal to such criteria. We need not portray such criteria as comprising a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that, in the case at hand, would specify what properties a substance has to have to count as a horse, properties that can be invoked to explain the meaning of the term ‘horse’. Not many predicates have criteria for their use that can be regimented into informative necessary and sufficient conditions, and our understanding of a concept need not take the form of something like a definition. What is critical, however, is that the child begins to justify her thought and talk, and this involves an appreciation of the kind of conceptual connections and inferential relations stressed by conceptual holists: if it is a horse, then it is an animal, four-legged, fond of hay, prone to neighing, trotting, cantering, and so on and so forth. Over time, the child’s linguistic knowledge becomes increasingly reflective.

To what extent are these abilities socio-historical in character? First, the child becomes progressively more proficient in the art of giving and taking reasons. She comes to understand that she owes others an explanation of what she says and thinks, just as others have a similar debt to her, and that the kind of explanation expected is a normative one that justifies or vindicates judgement.22 Second, the criteria with reference to which the appropriateness of the use of substance terms like ‘horse’ have to be assessed are inherited by individuals from their culture. What counts as a horse and what the word ‘horse’ means are not up to the individual. Here we see two important dimensions of the Bildungsprozess: we learn what Brandom calls ‘the game of giving and asking for reasons’, and we learn to play it by appeal to standards we inherit from our intellectual tradition.23

Stage Four