John McDowell

John McDowell reads Wittgenstein as a philosopher who frees us from the felt need for certain theories, and he has built one of the most influential bodies of work in recent philosophy on that reading. Born in 1942 in Boksburg, South Africa, he taught at University College, Oxford, from 1966 to 1986 and then moved to the University of Pittsburgh, where he is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

What he took from Wittgenstein

Two things above all. The first is a reading of rule-following. In "Wittgenstein on following a rule" (1984) he took on the sceptical reading made famous by Saul Kripke. The remark he keeps returning to says that there is

… daß es eine Auffassung einer Regel gibt, die nicht eine Deutung ist

a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation

Philosophical Investigations §201

If every grasp of a rule were an interpretation, each interpretation would need another one, without end. On McDowell's reading, Wittgenstein's way out is not a theory of what makes our steps correct. It is a reminder that someone trained in a shared practice simply sees what the rule asks, the way a pupil continuing "add 2" sees that 1002 follows 1000. Meaning is not something we build up out of meaningless behaviour. We are inside it from the start.

The second is Wittgenstein's idea that philosophy should calm worries rather than answer them with new theses: the therapeutic conception.

What he did with it

In Mind and World (1994), based on his 1991 John Locke Lectures in Oxford, McDowell applies this approach to an old puzzle. How can experience give us reasons to believe things, if it is just the world causally hitting our senses? Philosophers swing between two unsatisfying answers. McDowell's way out is that human experience is already shaped by concepts, because upbringing gives us a "second nature". Through learning a language, responding to reasons becomes as natural to us as walking. Wittgenstein makes a similar point when he says that giving orders, asking, telling and chatting are part of our natural history just as much as walking, eating and playing (Philosophical Investigations §25). It is a short step from there to his forms of life.

Where he disagrees

McDowell's Wittgenstein is not everyone's. He rejects readings, such as Kripke's or Crispin Wright's, on which correctness comes down to what a community happens to agree on. He also departs from Wittgenstein's own manner. Where Wittgenstein worked with everyday examples and kept his distance from the history of philosophy, McDowell draws freely on Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Wilfrid Sellars, and speaks of a "space of reasons" and "second nature". Critics ask whether this is still therapy or a new system in disguise. McDowell's answer is that these phrases are only meant to remove an anxiety, not to found a theory. How far he remains a quietist in Wittgenstein's sense is still debated.