Intersubjectivity and Receptive Experience

Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance

Forthcoming in Southern Journal of Philosophy

ABSTRACT: Wilfrid Sellars’s iconic exposé of the ‘myth of the

given’ taught us that experience must present the world to us

as normatively laden, in the sense that the contents of

experience must license inferences, rule out and justify

various beliefs, rationalize actions and so forth. Somehow our

beliefs must be governed by the objects as they present

themselves to us. Often this requirement is cashed out using

language that attributes agent-like properties to objects: we

are described as 'accountable to' objects, while objects 'hold

us' to standards, and so forth. But such language is either

deeply anti-naturalistic or trades on a set of metaphors in

need of a literal translation. We offer an explanation of how

the material features of the world, as received in experience,

can rationally constrain our beliefs and practices – one that

makes no recourse to this imagery. In particular, we examine

the structure of ostensive practices (that is, practices of

directing one another's attention to objects and features of

the world) and the distinctive role they play in making us

jointly beholden to how things actually are.

§1: Introduction

A crucial payoff of Wilfrid Sellars’s iconic exposé of the ‘myth

of the given’ is this: experience must present the world to us as

normatively laden, in the sense that the contents of experience must

license inferences, rule out and justify various beliefs, rationalize

actions and so forth. Otherwise the contents of receptivity will not

rationally constrain actions or beliefs, but merely bully them through

causal force, or leave them unconstrained and “spinning in the void”.1

Somehow or other our beliefs must be governed by things as they present

themselves to us. Sellars puts the point this way: our beliefs based

directly on perception must be “so to speak, evoked or wrung from the

perceiver by the object perceived.”2 We agree, but this ‘so to speak’

is a pretty substantial dodge. It is our project in this paper to find

a way of making sense of this requirement - objects must in some sense

wring beliefs out of perceivers - that doesn’t invoke a completely

implausible and deeply anti-naturalistic metaphysics.

1 McDowell, J. H. (1994) Mind and World, Harvard University Press, 67.

2 Sellars, W. (1997) Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, ed. R. Brandom, Harvard

University Press, §16. 2

Typically, philosophers who accept Sellars’s requirement resort

to talking in a funny way: they make it sound as though objects themselves

must somehow function as quasi-normative agents who can constrain the

space of reasons by issuing verdicts, exerting authority, holding us

to standards, rebelling against us, and so forth. For example, John

Haugeland speaks of the “normative authority of objects”,3 and,

employing scare quotes carefully, writes that “objects themselves,

unlike any beliefs or statements allegedly about them, can ‘talk

back’” (Ibid. 348). And more floridly: “Figuratively, we can think of

the phenomena as gaining the power to resist by “locking arms” against

the skills, with the constitutive standards providing their grip or

their ability to lock together… A complex practice can stick its neck

out empirically, by giving constituted phenomena this power to resist

or refute it” (Ibid. 338). Similarly, John McDowell asserts the

“centrality to [his] thinking … of [his] insistence that experience

mediates an authority that objects themselves have over empirical thought.”4

Surely such language of exerting authority, talking back,

resisting, and refuting is metaphorical when applied to worldly

3 Haugeland, J., “Truth and Rule-Following”, in Having Thought, Harvard

University Press 1997, 338.

4 McDowell, J., response in Reading McDowell, Routledge 2002, 305; our emphasis.3

objects. Only people – in the broadest sense – are agents. Metaphors

of worldly agency are used to avoid the Davidsonian conclusion that

“nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another

belief,”5 which seems to leave receptive encounters with the world out

of the space of reasons altogether. Davidson insists that his is the

only non-metaphorical option. For instance, he writes:

Quine tells us that science tells us that ‘our only source of

information about the external world is through the impact of

light rays and molecules upon our sensory surfaces.’ What worries

me is how to read the words ‘source’ and ‘information’. Certainly

it is true that events and objects in the external world cause us

to believe things about the external world, and much, if not all,

of the causality takes a route through the sense organs. The

notion of information, however, applies in a non-metaphorical way

only to the engendered beliefs, so ‘source’ has to be read simply

as ‘cause’ and ‘information’ as ‘true belief’ or ‘knowledge’.

(Ibid. 311-12)

5 Davidson, D. "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge", in Truth And

Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. E. LePore, Blackwell

1986, 310. 4

Like those who use the metaphors in question, we resist the

Davidsonian conclusion. But a metaphor is not a counter-argument or a

theoretical alternative.

And so we face a dilemma: if, as Davidson thinks, events and objects

impact us merely causally, then it is mysterious how the deliverances

of receptivity could rationally constrain what we do, say, or think.

If, on the other hand, we try to earn this rational constraint by

literally understanding objects as issuing verdicts, locking arms,

exerting authority, and otherwise carrying on in an agent-like manner,

then we end up stuck with an insane form of anti-naturalism.

Attributing normative properties directly to object themselves

requires us to violate a naturalistic picture of the material world,

in a way that just refraining from engaging in a reductionist project

does not.

In this paper we suggest a third path. First, we show how objects

can constrain and have normative significance within our practices

even if they have no ‘authority’ or other agent-like attributes. We

then point out how experiencing is something we do with our bodies; it

is a form of agential comportment towards the world rather than

something that just happens to us. (This is not a new thought, of

course.) We argue that experiencing is not only an embodied activity

5

but often a social, intersubjective activity. We then consider what sort of

special social practice this needs to be if it is to enable our

receptive experience to be beholden to how things actually are. In

particular, we focus on ostensive practices - that is, practices of

directing one another’s attention to objects and features of the world

- and their role in enabling perception.

§2: Instituting Normative Significance

There is a straightforward sense in which the normative

significance of worldly objects and events is neither difficult to

earn nor magical. As voices from several corners of philosophy

routinely remind us, the normative practices that people engage in are

material, embodied practices. From explicit abstract rule-following to

physically skilled coping, every normative practice is something we do

with our bodies. But what our bodies do is manipulate and negotiate the

material world. Hence our normative practices are world-involving;

material things and features play integral roles in the pragmatic

structure of these practices and therefore take on normative

significance from within the practice. There is no reason, however,

why the normative roles they play should be at all agent-like. Objects

can have normative significance without having normative authority.

6

Consider the norms of food preparation. Food preparation is

governed by norms of cultural and family tradition, aesthetic norms,

norms that mark class and social status, pragmatic norms of health,

efficiency, cleanliness, and much more. All of these are norms enacted

by social agents; it is people who prepare food and people who hold

themselves and one another to all of these norms. In this sense, they

are social norms. And yet, it makes no sense to try to understand any of

these normative practices except with reference to the material

properties of various ingredients – how they taste, how hard it is to

cut them, whether they need to be peeled or shelled or cooked, and so

forth. The material properties of ingredients constrain the normative

practices that involve them. It is just a mistake to broil tuna stakes

dry, because tuna does not have enough fat to make this preparation

palatable – it is not merely because of some historically contingent

social tradition that we broil tuna steaks over a liquid such as

water, wine, or oil. Likewise it is just a mistake to use five-day-old

tuna for sashimi, because it will poison you. At a more intimately

embodied level, imagine trying to move your fingers in the way one

does when shelling peas, without pea-pods being present. The skill is

not one of moving hands through airspace while contingently sometimes

doing so in the presence of a pea-pod, but rather a skill of

7

responding to the mass, volume, inertia, and structural resilience of

the pea-pod.

As food preparation norms - including those that are overtly

social - develop and become richer, they do so in immediate reciprocal

relation to the material properties of the objects they involve. So

for example, a culture (or family) can have a tradition wherein the

elderly ladies shell the peas, but it cannot have one in which the

very young children slaughter and butcher the pigs. This is a matter

of the brute skills, strength, and danger involved in both tasks, as

well as subtler facts about who has time, patience, and attention to

perform a task well. Hence the properties of peas and pigs have

normative significance that constrains normative practice. Once the

tradition of the old ladies shelling the peas is established, the

properties of peas will be woven into how this practice can develop.

The practice will take on a certain rhythm and timing that works well

with (say) catching up on village gossip or making certain kinds of

collective decisions. It will allow certain kinds of eye contact and

conversation and not others, and so forth. In this context, it makes

perfect sense to say that the barrel of peas to be shelled governs the

kind of conversation that will take place during the shelling. This is

not because the barrel of peas ‘tells us’ anything, but because the

8

physical properties of peas and pea-barrels are woven integrally into

the conversational practices of the elderly ladies of the village. On

the one hand, the role of the peas in the practices is fixed by the

peas themselves to the extent that their normative significance is not

subject to renegotiation by social or individual fiat. There could not

have been a tradition of getting the village gossip and decision-

making done while pig-slaughtering. On the other hand, it is

contextually specific; there is no reason at all to say that it is

somehow an internal feature of pea-barrels that they hold old ladies

to having such conversations.

And we needn’t get so fancy. Consider rain, and the multiple

normative significances it can have in the context of various

practices and goals. When it begins to rain, this can make it a bad

idea to choose the zoo over the museum today; it can make it

appropriate to take an umbrella and inappropriate to test-drive those

new $400 shoes; it can make it time to harvest the grapes; it can have

the official normative significance of signaling the end of a baseball

game; it can make it time to move the fire into the cave, and so

forth. Again, the material features of rain constrain what sorts of

world-involving normative practices can be developed in relation to

it, and once these are developed, rain has concrete normative

9

significance from inside these practices. The rain need not ‘tell us’

anything or ‘hold us’ to anything. We are the ones who institute,

maintain, and practice the norms of vinification, baseball, fashion,

and so forth. But we cannot do this except as embodied beings who

engage with rain and its absence; within such engagements, rain has

specific normative meanings and consequences.

If we accept that normative practices can imbue objects with non-

arbitrary normative significance in virtue of involving them, we can

then see that our epistemic, receptive confrontations with the world

are themselves such practices.

These are embodied practices of disclosing, whose normative upshot is

receptive knowledge of facts about or features of worldly objects;

disclosing the world is something we do. We use the term ‘disclosing’

and its cognates - borrowing and re-purposing somewhat from Heidegger

- to refer to practices of finding or discovering how things are

through a receptive encounter. (By this we mean ‘things’ in the

broadest possible sense. One might receptively discover things with no

clear perceptual correlates, such as waves of civic unrest, or even

that something is not there – that a regular customer is missing, for

example. This is part of why we use the term ‘disclosing’ as opposed

10

to ‘perceiving’, which might imply a more traditional roster of

perceptual qualities).

Of course, all other epistemic practices - inference,

experimentation, etc. - are also things we do. We are especially

interested in receptive knowledge for the purposes of this paper, for a

few reasons. First, our original question was how objects could

‘govern’ our beliefs and actions as they show up in experience. Second,

receptive disclosure, by definition, requires that the part of the world

disclosed be directly involved in our coming to know about it. Third, and

crucially, since receptivity has long been associated with passivity - an

association we fight hard to break throughout this paper - the claim

that receptive disclosure is an agential activity may be less intuitively

palatable than that other forms of acquiring knowledge are such

activities.

The point is clearest in cases where disclosing is difficult, and

perhaps mediated by the use of technology. When a doctor checks to see

whether a suspicious mass is a malignant tumor, for instance, she may

use a variety of techniques for interacting with the world, such as

manual palpation, MRI screening, and so forth. Each of these

techniques requires her to exercise normatively contoured skills,

which she may exercise successfully or unsuccessfully. Her body is

11

engaged interactively with the object she wishes to disclose, and she

is responsive to the normatively rich social context that frames her

looking. Within these practices, material features of objects take on

normative significance as indicators of how things are and of what

skills should be exercised next.

But fancy cases involving rarified skills and technology just

make vivid a much more general point. Making features of the world

receptively available is an activity – or rather, indefinitely many

activities. We discover how things are through a skillful and

sometimes openly reflective process of adjusting our bodies to them

and interacting with them, from the smallest eye adjustments upwards.

The point is twofold: (1) objects in the world need not have their own

authority, nor need they ‘hold us’ to any particular norms or beliefs,

in order for them to have specific epistemic significance for us, and

(2) our skillful, normatively structured interactions with these

objects is still receptive: it is found features of objects that are

not up to us, and that we know about in part because of our direct

empirical interactions with them, that take on normative significance;

furthermore, that significance is also not up to us once it is

situated within disclosive and other normative practices.

12

Thus disclosing is something we do and disclosedness is something

we accomplish. And receptivity should not be equated with passivity --

my encounter with objects is receptive, not to the extent that I play

a passive role in this encounter, but instead to the extent that I

find or discover them to be a certain way in a direct encounter with

them. Indeed, when it comes to object-involving practices, it seems to

us that it is conceptually foolhardy to even try to sort them into

their passive and active components. As we saw in the case of pea-

shelling, it is distorting to think of such practices as an aggregate

of voluntary activities and passive encounters with objects. Just as

the activity of pea-shelling is not one of waving one’s fingers around

voluntarily plus bumping into peas, the practice of seeing a tumor on

an MRI or hearing a heart murmur through a stethoscope is not an

aggregate of doing a bunch of stuff with my body plus images and sounds

bumping into my sense organs. In all these cases, the practice is

world-responsive from the ground up, and also essentially agential.

Tumor-spotting and pea-shelling are both normatively structured,

world-involving activities, although the first has an essentially

epistemic goal and the second has a gustatory goal instead. Just as

pea-pods constrain shelling practices, receptively encountered objects

of any sort constrain disclosive practices simply by having the

13

material features they have. What makes some but not all epistemic

events receptive disclosures is not a special passivity, but that they

involve and are suitably constrained by a direct encounter with the

part of the world they disclose.

In one sense, the point we are making here is one that has

already been pushed hard by McDowell, who has insisted, following

Kant, that the deliverances of receptivity always engage our

spontaneous faculties, so that there is no such thing as a purely

passive yet epistemically significant encounter with the world in

experience.6 However, McDowell never situates his disclosive moments

within a larger context of ongoing embodied social practice; they are

6 For instance, “Even the most immediately observational concepts are partly

constituted by their role in something that is indeed appropriately conceived

in terms of spontaneity. So we cannot simply insulate the passive involvement

of conceptual capacities in experience from the potentially unnerving effects

of the freedom implied by the idea of spontaneity … The trouble about the Myth

of the Given … shows up again here, in connection with impingements on

spontaneity by the so-called deliverances of sensibility. If those

impingements are conceived as outside the scope of spontaneity, outside the

domain of responsible freedom, then the best they can yield is that we cannot

be blamed for believing whatever they lead us to believe, not that we are

justified in believing it.” (McDowell 1994, 13). 14

moments that engage our spontaneous conceptual faculties, but not, as he

describes it, our practical skills. Rhetorically speaking, McDowell’s

encounters with the world in experience show up as oddly isolated,

self-standing moments of subject-world confrontation (albeit moments

that are conditioned by a history of second-nature habituation and

practical skill development). If we cast disclosedness as a moment of

confrontation between a subject (who has both spontaneous and

receptive faculties) and an object, then normative constraints imposed

by this confrontation would have to originate either from the

subject’s spontaneous activities at that moment (which leads to an

unacceptably voluntarist constructivism) or the object itself (which

leads to an unacceptable attribution of agency or inherent normative

authority to the object). Mixing the two together, as McDowell

sometimes seems to do, does not help – components of arbitrary

spontaneity or inherent normativity are just as philosophically

unacceptable once they are mixed together as they are separately,

unless we have a mitigating story about specific way they constrain

and enable one another, and this McDowell has never offered. In

contrast, once we see encounters with objects as situated within

established material, world-involving normative practices, we can see

15

the practices themselves as the source of the normative significance

of the objects they involve.7

§3: Intersubjectivity and Normative Commitment

We have insisted that worldly objects (other than people, broadly

construed) constrain and have normative significance for our

practices, but are not agents, or even quasi-agents. As such, they

cannot enter into any kind of second-person transactions with us. They

cannot give us orders, demand anything of us, or hold us to anything,

but insofar as we are already committed to a practice - pea-shelling,

reading MRIs, etc. - the constraints that objects place on those

7 Here and since the beginning, we have felt free to talk about receptive

encounters with objects. A good Kantian may well object that this misses the

deep problem – by the time the sensible manifold can show up to me as

synthesized into objects, we are already taking things as having a

conceptually articulate structure and hence as already planted within the

space of reasons. McDowell, for one, is often concerned with the earlier

problem of how sensibility can be received as organized in this way in the

first place. For the most part, we are just not attempting to solve this

ground-level problem here. We are concerned with the more general problem of

how the things we receive in experience grip our practices without having

inherent or arbitrarily imposed normativity. 16

practices are not up to us, but are rather based in the material

character of the things themselves.

If we allow ourselves to indulge in existentialist, individualist

fancy, we might get caught up in the following vertiginous worry:

“Sure, once I am committed to a practice, objects impose constraints

on that practice. But whether I commit to a practice in the first

place is up to me. I can opt out of any given practice. I needn’t

shell peas, or care about whether there is a tumor revealed by an MRI.

And in that case, the world constrains me only because I let it. Since

it is central to our picture that objects demand nothing of me, they

also cannot demand that I engage in practices that involve them, and

so ultimately it is optional whether and how they constrain me.” This

does not look like the robust kind of accountability to how things are

that we sought. John Haugeland, at his most Sartrean, embraces this

kind of individualist voluntarism:

The governing or normative ‘authority’ of an existential

commitment comes from nowhere other than itself, and it is

brought to bear in no way other than its own exercise – that is,

by self-discipline and resolute persistence. A committed

individual holds him or herself to the commitment by living in a

resilient, determined way. Thus, its authority is sui generis in a

17

stronger sense than just ‘of its own genus’: it is of its own

genesis, self-generated.8

But this strikes us as fundamentally wrong.9 Generally speaking,

we cannot simply opt out of our normative commitments through an

exercise of will. No amount of self-discipline or resolute persistence

can alter the fact that the wall is disclosed to me as solid, that the

cell under the microscope shows up as having divided, and so forth.

But we don’t think that the anti-voluntaristic point is restricted to

disclosive practices. In this section, we back away from disclosive

practices temporarily, and consider the broader question of how we

come to be legitimately committed to normative practices, other than

through a sheer act of self-generated individual commitment.

In a sense the answer to how we are held non-voluntaristically to

our commitments to various norms is fairly obvious: The world can

demand nothing of us and holds us to nothing, but our normative

practices are, generally speaking, intersubjective and collaborative,

and other people with whom we engage in practices are indeed agents who

hold us to all sorts of things. Add to this the fact that, as we

8 Haugeland 1997, 341.

9 As indeed it did to Haugeland himself, when the quotation was read back to

him in 2009. 18

explored above, our practices are typically essentially object-

involving, and we earn the result that other people ensure that

worldly objects and events have specific normative significances for

us that we cannot simply choose to ignore.10 It is in fact quite odd

that Haugeland feels the need to insist that “a committed individual

holds him or herself to the commitment by living in a resilient,

determined way”, for there are plenty of other people around to hold

us to our commitments. Philosophers have discussed at length how

agents enforce norms, holding one another to the standard demanded by

those norms, rewarding and punishing one another for following or

violating norms of rationality, etiquette, food preparation, etc. But

we, like Haugeland, are interested not just in how we come to be

10 One should not conflate this sort of normative inescapability with brute

causal consequences of rejecting a normative practice. The Shakers rejected

the practice of biological reproduction. Conversion aside, if they stick to

that they will cease to exist. But this dire causal consequence of their

rejection of a normative practice does not prove that the rejection itself was

impossible, since it clearly was possible. I can adhere to or reject various

norms in ways that radically increase my chance of imminent demise, but the

poor consequences of my choices don’t somehow show that I actually had

different normative commitments than I seemed to.

19

subjected to norms but how we come to be committed to them – that is, how

we each come to have the kind of stake in the norm that makes the

normative significance of the objects involved in its practice matter

to us. And the point is that we hold one another to these commitments,

and not just to the normative standards to which one becomes

committed.

Once we focus our attention on how we hold one another to our

normative commitments in the course of our world-involving,

intersubjective practices, we start to uncover a wide variety of types

and strengths of holding. Consider two extremes:

At one end of the spectrum, we have games; here there is little

or no intersubjective holding of one another to commitment to the

norms. Indeed, we might define a (mere) game as a practice such that

participation in its normative structure is voluntary. If I decide to

play chess with you, then I am bound by – and you can and will hold me

to – the rules of chess. I don’t get to move the bishop horizontally

if I am playing chess. But it is completely up to me whether or not to

play chess, and if I decide not to, then the rules of chess have

literally no grip on my practices. It is not a norm for me at all to

defend my queen if I am not playing chess. It is in the nature of

20

games that commitment to playing them is optional, whereas what is

allowed within them is intersubjectively constrained.11

At the other extreme, and leaving aside epistemic practices for

the time being, are commitments to practices that a community treats

as completely non-negotiable, as part and parcel with standing as an

agent within that community. This may be a theoretical limit that is

approached but never fully met, but we can imagine some close cases: A

very religious society may take commitment to the norms of that

religion as completely non-optional, in the sense that there is really

no way to function as a recognizable member of that society unless one

acknowledges the force of those norms. Or a society with rigid gender

roles may enforce commitment to gender norms. In other societies,

these religious norms may have no grip at all and the gender norms may

be different, but within a community, commitment to these norms may be

almost completely mandatory. In such a community, it is just not up to

an individual whether or not to take a particular baked treat as

11 Commitment to an actual game may not be quite so optional – the high

school’s star quarterback may be pressured into remaining on the team and

playing out the season; my partner may be annoyed with me if I don’t finish

the chess game – but this is just to say that in such cases these are not

functioning as ‘pure’ games.

21

having some ritual significance, for instance, or whether or not to

take a particular necktie as masculine.

Remember, our point here is not about following the norms. It is in

the nature of norms to be transgressable – it is always possible for

an individual to desecrate a sacred ritual object, or to wear gender-

transgressive clothing. The point is, rather, that in doing so, she

will indeed be transgressing: engaging in behavior that violates a norm

whose force she recognizes, and hence misusing an object with normative

significance – perhaps to make a strategic point, and perhaps just by

mistake. And this is so because she is embedded in a community that is

bound together by its members’ abilities to hold one another to

commitments, to demand and request of one another that they recognize

and participate in various normative practices, and so forth. Assuming

that no set of religious practices is grounded in true facts about the

world and no set of gender norms is fully fixed by immutable

biological facts, these bodies of norms are not only typically

culturally relative but also ontologically optional, in the sense that

the world does not determine that these must be the norms. But this

does not make commitment to them optional for individuals, who are

called upon to recognize their force even if they transgress them.

22

Between these two extremes lies a wide and rich range of

intersubjective, world-involving norms, commitment to which is neither

optional nor mandatory. For example, while playing any particular game

may be optional, it may be difficult for adolescent boys in our

culture to relinquish or refuse a commitment to the general importance

of sports and athletic success. Plenty of boys avoid athletic

competition, but failing to be committed to the value of athletics and

the norms that go along with this is a far more difficult social

achievement. Likewise, girls in our culture may resist norms of

feminine self-care (polishing one’s nails, shopping for clothes as a

social activity, shaving one’s legs, etc.), but resisting the grip of

these norms is far more difficult, because we have wide, varied, and

strong practices in place by which we hold one another to commitment

to these norms.

Practices exhibit wide variety not just in how optional our

participation in them is, but in what it takes to enter or exit them.

Think about what is involved in entering or exiting a tight-knit group

of friends, bound together by a complex web of mutual obligations,

responsibilities, and values. One cannot simply choose to enter or

extricate oneself from such a web in an act of will; one can join the

group, but only through a complicated intersubjective process through

23

which members of the group become emotionally and practically

intertwined and involved in the project of caring about one another’s

well-being in complex ways. The exit conditions are not

straightforward either: among real friends, simply violating the norms

of friendship does not automatically excommunicate you from the group

or release you from your commitment to recognizing the grip of its

norms.

Furthermore, there is a rich diversity of performances that we

use to draw one another into bodies of norms, hold one another to

them, and release each other from them. For example, consider what

happens when two people enter into a romantic relationship. Any such

relationship develops its own, internal set of normative commitments

and practices. Many of these commitments will grant new normative

significance to various objects: for instance, some objects now become

ours, rather than just mine. Particular places and events will have a

distinctive normative significance for us. Perhaps my apartment

becomes one that you now are entitled to access in new ways. And in

all sorts of ways, we will hold one another to the commitments that

afford objects this new significance. I cannot legitimately demand

that you take up these commitments; at no point can you be obligated

to enter into or stay in such a relationship with me. But just as

24

much, I do not merely state facts about my desire for you to take up

these commitments and hope that you completely voluntarily choose to

buy into a set of joint practices. Rather, we suggest, invite, and

perhaps even implore one another to do so.

Precisely because games lie at one end of the voluntaristic

spectrum, we are suspicious of the philosophical habit of treating

games as paradigmatic examples of normative practices that can be used

to exhibit the structure and ontology of normative force and

commitment more generally.12 The texture and diversity that we have

explored in the last few paragraphs does not show up in cases where

participation in a body of norms is purely voluntary. If we begin with

games, the existentialist vertigo we described near the start of this

section may seem inevitable. On our account, games are helpful

examples for some specific purposes but definitely cannot be used as

theoretical tools with which to explain full-blooded normative

responsiveness and commitment in all its many shades.

This is an opportune moment to take stock of where we are in our

larger argument. In the first part of the paper, we claimed to have

shown that objects can impose normative constraints on our receptive,

12 Several of the essays in John Haugeland’s Having Thought (Harvard University

Press 1997) and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (trans/ed. Hacker and

Schulte, Wiley-Blackwell 2009) are excellent examples. 25

disclosive practices without being agent-like. But as long as those

constraints have their origin or ground in some kind of voluntaristic

or optional choice on the part of perceiving agents, we won’t have

found the kind of objective constraint we need. In this section, we

argued that commitment to norms is not, typically, simply ‘up to me’,

but is instead socially compelled and constrained in various

interestingly different ways. But when we return to the norms of

disclosure, we need to find a stronger kind of non-optionality of

normative commitment than those we have explored in this section.

Epistemic norms are still norms, and hence not unavoidable in the way

the law of gravity or the principle of natural selection is

unavoidable. Yet it still cannot be up to us what the proper epistemic

norms are, because if it were, then it would be importantly up to us

how the world is, and when our perception of it is correct - and that

is a kind of anti-realist social constructivism that we do not take

seriously here. In the next section, we try to articulate a sense in

which disclosive practices, and more generally epistemic practices,

have the special, stronger sort of objectivity that they need.

§4: Intersubjectivity and Receptive Experience

As we have seen, once I am embedded in a practice and committed

to its norms, the normative significance of various features of the

26

material world is no longer simply ‘up to’ me. To be embedded in the

practice of pea-shelling (in a particular village) is to be subject to

constraints partly constituted by the material features of peas.

Furthermore, we have argued that whether I am embedded in a practice

and committed to its norms is also not typically simply up to me.

Other people can hold me not only to norms that I voluntarily embrace

but also to participation in various institutionalized normative

systems. And again, from within these normative systems, the

significance of various worldly objects is not up to me.

But our guiding interest in this paper is in epistemic norms, and in

particularly with norms of disclosure. We want to understand how

receptive experience can present the world in a way that constrains

belief, licenses inference, and so forth. And an important difference

between practices of perceiving and practices of pea-shelling seems to

be this: as long as pea-shelling practices are working smoothly -

their participants can coordinate their behavior and achieve their

practical goals using them - then there is no further sense in which

the practices could be wrong. Another group that shells peas

differently, but effectively, simply has different practices. There is

no inherent conflict between the two sets of practices; a tolerant

‘shell and let shell’ policy leaves no residual normative tension.

27

In contrast, epistemic practices are only successful if they get

the world right, in a sense that is independent of the practices

themselves. The proper response to noticing that the Japanese stand a

different distance in conversation than do the English is to resolve

to follow the relevant norm in the relevant context, not to assume

that one or the other must be the correct norm of conversational

distance. But if the Japanese think that a given range of empirical data

confirm theory T, and the English think it doesn’t, one is simply not

epistemically engaging if one says “well, then, T is true in Japan,

and false in England”. The norms of confirmation are not contextually

bound in the way that the norms of shelling or dressing are - this is

one sense in which they are distinctively non-optional. This

difference inherently constitutes a disagreement or conflict over how

the world is.

If a group’s or species’ practices for representing and

responding to objects as they are presented in experience are

disclosive epistemic practices, then the following scenario must be

possible: these practices work smoothly and allow for successful

coordinated activity, yet they get the world wrong, and in that sense

are failed practices. What makes the results right is not that they

allow effective and socially acceptable functioning but that they

28

disclose the world properly. There is no reason that there can’t be

systematic practices of misrepresenting or misperceiving objects that

are adaptive as far as effective coordination and action go. When the

risk of false positives greatly outweighs the risk of false negatives,

or vice versa, it can be efficient for us to misperceive. McKay and

Dennett catalogue some of these in their article, “The Evolution of

Misbelief.”13 They cite empirical evidence to suggest that men

systematically perceive women as more sexually interested in them than

they are, and that we all perceive our own babies as cuter than they

are, with evolutionary advantages in both cases. These and the other

examples they give are empirically contentious, as they point out, but

our point is a conceptual one: there is no a priori reason to assume

that true beliefs and accurate perceptions are always the most

efficient.

But this means that no story about norms of efficiency, including

social efficiency, will give us an account of the norms of truth. A

disclosive practice can be wrong quite independently of its

instrumental functionality. You can shell peas wrong within a pea-

shelling practice, and what counts as wrong will be partly determined

by the material features of peas. But as long as you are coping with 13 Ryan McKay and Daniel Dennett (2009), "The Evolution of Misbelief",

Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32, 493-561. 29

the peas successfully, by material and social standards, you are doing

it right. On the other hand, you can misperceive peas even when your

material and social pea-coping is going smoothly.

Hence our epistemic practices, including our receptive perceptual

practices, have a special normative structure. When we hold one

another to them, we are holding one another to a commitment to getting

the world right, where the standard of correctness is how things

really are. And this involves holding one another to a standard that

is itself outside any social standards of acceptability or efficiency.

Unlike McDowell or Haugeland, we are not willing to assert that

objects ‘hold’ us to standards of correctness or that we are

‘accountable’ to objects. We are in the first instance accountable to

other people and it is other people who hold us to things (although we

can perhaps derivatively be accountable to ourselves). So our task is

to understand how we can engage in collaborative social practices in which we

hold one another not just to coping appropriately with objects, but to

getting them right. We also need to understand the normative role that

the objects themselves play in those practices.

Here is one helpful way of thinking about the difference between

the two kinds of practices. Pea-shelling and similar examples are

engineering practices. In such cases, the standard of correctness for the

30

practice is internal to the practice itself; if we manage to cope

successfully with objects and with one another by engaging in such a

practice, then that practice is a success. Surely there are creatures

that engage only in engineering practices. Squirrels find and hoard

nuts, and however they do it, as long as they manage to have the nuts

they want when they want them, their practice is a success. We can

also imagine creatures that still only engage in engineering

practices, but whose practices are highly sophisticated, involving a

great deal of coordination and joint action. These super-squirrels are

exceptionally adept social and material engineers but have no beliefs

or stance on how things are at all.14 They might develop a complicated

system of differentiated labor for collecting, storing, shelling, and

distributing nuts, say. In doing so, they will have to coordinate

their responsiveness to objects. That is, they will need to have

practices that enable them to get other squirrels to engage with the

same objects they are engaging with; super-squirrel A must be able to

do something that gets super-squirrel B to deliver a certain nut to

her, or whatever. But, crucially, it doesn’t make sense to ask of the

super-squirrels whether they are getting the nuts right. As long as

14 Our super squirrels, by stipulation, are mere engineers. We have no special

advice for you if what you are trying to do is to figure out whether your pet

is a super-squirrel or an actual truth-seeking epistemic squirrel.31

they succeed in coordinating and carrying out their task, there is

nothing more to ask.

We can even posit that our engineering super-squirrels use things

we would be tempted to call representations, whether internal or

external, in order to coordinate and cope; they might mark the

location of the nuts in a way that enabled other squirrels to find

them. But whether such representations were accurate would be, by

hypothesis, a meaningless question to ask about them. All we could ask

is whether they contributed to the practice running smoothly. It is

only once values of truth and disclosure come into the picture that we

can sensibly ask whether a representation represents its reference

accurately.15

It would be easy, at this point, to confuse the question we are

asking with an epistemological question that we don’t pretend to

answer here. An epistemologist might ask: if everything is working

smoothly, how can we tell if we are getting objects right or wrong?

How do we know whether our social practices of disclosure and

justification are in fact the appropriate practices for getting the

world right? But we are trying to get at a pragmatic rather than an

15 And hence we might not want to call the squirrels’ marks representations at

all; what makes something count as a representation is a thorny nest beyond

the scope of this paper.32

epistemological question here. We want to know: What sort of social

practice involves us holding one another to getting objects right

rather than merely coping with them effectively, and how can objects

play a role in such a practice? How one would check whether that

practice is successful is a different matter. If we mistakenly think

that we are trying to answer the epistemological question, then the

problem as we have set it out here can seem insoluble: after all, the

actual norms we are committed to are the only norms we have for

telling how things are. If our practices are working smoothly for

telling how things are, from a material and social point of view, then

it seems that we have all that we can have. How could we distinguish

between practices that merely aim to get things right and those that

succeed?

But once we notice that we are asking a pragmatic question, we

can see that there are all sorts of relevant structural differences

between intra-contextual engineering practices and inter-contextual

epistemic practices. For instance, if we are engaged in epistemic

projects, then we are committed to taking any other sets of practices

that yield contrary results as in conflict with ours, and those that

follow them as disagreeing with us. We must take anyone else who is

engaged in epistemic practices as committed to beliefs that are

33

commensurable with our own; there is an essential sense in which, even

if they do things differently and come to different conclusions, we

are engaged in the same project, and one another’s findings must be

hashed out in the same space of reasons. None of this is true for

norms of pea-shelling or dressing. And we are likewise committed, in

the epistemic case, to acknowledging that our own standards of

appropriateness are not the measure of the correctness of the

practice; rather, the measure is how the world is. As Haugeland

eloquently argued in “Truth and Rule Following”, a distinctive mark of

epistemic practices is that they are always at risk of failing no

matter how internally successful and socially entrenched they are.

There is no amount of practical and social success that adds up to a

guarantee that we are disclosing objects as they really are.16 When we

hold one another to participation in an epistemic practice and

commitment to its norms, we hold one another to an openness to

discovering that a practice that is functional and socially acceptable

16 In developing this point, Haugeland makes liberal use of exactly the

language we reject; he says that our epistemic practices are accountable to

objects, that it is ‘up to the objects’ and not to us whether we get them

right, and so forth. We have reached the point in this paper where we can make

Haugeland’s point without relying on the metaphors we were trying to

eliminate. 34

still is not right, because it doesn’t capture objects properly. These

commitments make a pragmatic difference, even if we cannot thrust

ourselves outside our own functional practices in order to check them.

It would also be easy to make the mistake of giving a descriptive

pragmatic analysis of the wrong sort. As we argued above, epistemic

practices are special in that social practices that yield conflicting

results necessarily count as competitors to one another. When we try

to discern how things really are, we are seeking an answer whose

correctness is essentially inter-contextual rather than relative to a

practice. But this doesn’t mean we can’t tolerate disagreement over how

things really are. We might be completely insouciant about the fact

that the inhabitants of some village use sheep entrails to predict the

future and perceive the faces of their dead ancestors in the trees; we

needn’t hold them to defending their practices or admitting we are

right in rejecting them. This might be because we don’t take them as

having made a claim about the world at all; we could just treat them

as if they are engaging in an odd ritual dance. But even if we do take

them as claim-makers, our belief that they are using corrupt epistemic

practices may not practically trouble us. None of this undercuts the

normative fact that, if they are making claims, they are in a state of

conflict or disagreement with us, whether or not we know it or

35

practically acknowledge it. Their practices are objectively in tension

with ours, in a way that the different pea-shelling practices one

village over are not. To whatever extent we acknowledge them as making

a claim with objective purport, we also have to acknowledge this

tension.

Conversely, we are often intolerant of social practices that are

not in objective tension with our own in this way. We may be far from

insouciant about the fact that some group has different gendered dress

codes than we do, shells the peas differently, or whatever, and we may

try to hold members of that group to defending or relinquishing these

practices. But this doesn’t mean that there is any objective conflict

between the practices; they are just different, and some people don’t

like difference. So, whatever we say about the special structure of

disclosive practices, it cannot come to some variant on the idea that

we try to impose them on everyone rather than just on in-group members.

Ostension is the act of drawing someone’s attention to an object

or its features. It is in the first instance a social practice;

although I can perhaps ostend something to myself, this is at best a

derivative form of ostension. It is also a normative social practice.

An ostension is no mere causal intervention that has as a result your

looking at something. Rather, when I ostend I call on you to take up a

36

form of engagement with an object. At the same time, ostension is

essentially a disclosive practice that is governed by norms of truth.

When I point your attention towards something - a rabbit in the bush,

an unusual dark spot on an MRI - I am not merely coordinating our

actions. It is part of the normative structure of my act that I am

trying to bring you to see what is really there, how things really are.

Ostension seeks to produce an epistemic commitment with the special

inter-contextual structure we discussed above. The proper upshot of

ostension is perception. I cannot take myself to perceive x (say, a

chestnut), while at the same time allowing that if someone else

perceives that object as some other incompatible thing (a walnut

perhaps), or denies there is an object there at all, that his

perception and mine are both correct. Hence we cannot analyze what it

is for an ostension to be successful without reference to the real

character of without reference to the real character of that which is

ostended.

If I attempt to ostend something that isn’t really there, or to

direct your attention to some feature of an object that it does not

actually have, then my ostension is unsuccessful, and this is so even

if you don’t notice this and we coordinate our behavior successfully.

I might point and say to you: “Check it out! A giant spider!” and you

37

might see some patch that you take to be a spider in light of my call.

If we then run away to avoid it, our behavior might be perfectly

coordinated. But if I was actually pointing at a scorpion, my

ostension still fails, qua ostension. Again, this is not itself an

epistemological point: it is not like we have some clear standards for

telling, from the ostensive practice and its results, whether someone

has disclosed the object correctly. Rather, it is part of the

normative structure of the ostension that it only succeeds if it

results in direct receptive attention that gets the world right.

Ostending is much more than just pointing, of course. We can

ostend with speech acts- from “Lo, a rabbit!” all the way to subtle

cases such as “Remember last time Sarah and Andrea were fighting? Well

look at her facial expression now - look familiar?” Ostension can be a

complex act involving all sorts of bodily manipulation: a doctor who

wants to ostend a tumor for her student might guide the finger of a

student to a particular point in the abdomen of the surgery patient

and say, “Press this hard and note how it feels!” or give him salient

background information that allows the student to gain more by way of

his own observational engagement: “Remember the sort of tumor that was

discussed in class yesterday as you look at this image.”

38

In practices of ostension we call on one another to have a

receptive encounter with an object or feature in the world. Not all

epistemic coordination works this way; we can dispute about a claim,

cite evidence, etc., without this receptive component. But ostension

is a world-involving social practice in a direct sense that not all

social epistemic practices are. Consider again the teacher ostending a

tumor for a medical student. In order for the student to achieve the

epistemic state the teacher calls upon him to have, he must perceive

the tumor for himself. Alternatively, he might come to believe that the

doctor is right about the presence of the tumor on the basis of

indirect evidence. Perhaps he knows that this doctor has an excellent

track record for spotting tumors, and is convinced that her vision is

probably correct. This can be a completely legitimate epistemic move,

but it is not receptive disclosure. Importantly, for our purposes,

ostension requires that the tumor itself guide the student’s epistemic

state. For this to be so, the student has to come to see as the doctor can,

with her help perhaps, but for himself.

Ostension brings about such receptive encounters when it is

successful.17 Sometimes it does so by drawing on perceptual capacities

17 Our concern is with the pragmatic role that ostension plays in our

collaborative disclosive practices. Ostension is successful, for our purposes,

when it results in the target of the ostension perceiving (rather than 39

that the target already has, and merely directing his attention. In

other cases, the ostensive practice helps to develop receptive

perceptual capacities that were not yet fully formed in the target;

through the ostension, he not only comes to see what he did not

before, but he comes to be able to see what he could not before. Think

of Sellars’s necktie salesman, John, who learns to see that a necktie

is green as his colleagues take him outside and show him how the tie

changes its apparent hue.18 Sometimes, we collaborate with one another

in a joint process of ostension, coming to see things differently or

make new discriminations together by shaping one another’s practices

of attending. I might for instance discuss a new painting with a

fellow artist in a way that allows both of us to see features of it

that we couldn’t see on our own.19 This joint practice can involve

misperceiving) the thing ostended. There are plenty of famous Wittgenstein-

flavored worries about how to settle the reference of ostension. We are not

trying to respond to those worries. We are interested in the social structure

of ostension, however ‘the thing ostended’ gets settled.

18 Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind §§14-15.

19 We are grateful to an anonymous referee for drawing our attention to Arnold

Isenberg, “Critical Communication,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Jul.,

1949), 330-344. In this paper, Isenberg emphasizes this sort of ostensive call

in the case of art, and develops it into an account of the proper function of 40

physical manipulation of objects, changing our position relative to

them, talking, imagining, having some coffee and then looking again,

and much more. Ostension is an intersubjective activity that results

in receptive disclosure but practices of attending and directing

attention are by no means necessarily passive; they can be as active -

and as object-involving - as pea-shelling or anything else.

Thus, through a wide variety of practices of directing one

another’s attention, we can hold one another to engaging in practices

of disclosure that are object-involving, and more specifically we can

hold one another to letting objects have a normative significance for

our practice that cannot be cashed out in terms of significances

internal to an engineering practice. Remember, even when a super-

squirrel does something designed to get another super-squirrel to

respond to a particular object, the only standard of super-squirrel

success is smooth and functional coordinated activity. But when we

ostend, we hold the target of our ostension to a standard of

correctness that applies to all epistemic agents - one that applies

even if we don’t know about it and even if our actual perceptions are

systematically wrong. Objects cannot tell us when we have them right, nor

hold us accountable to getting them right. Rather, we hold one another art criticism.

41

to practices of disclosure in which how the object is, independent of

these practices, is the proper measure of their success. Accordingly,

in the context of ostension, we take differences in uptake as

normative tensions between commensurable epistemic states with

objective purport.

We promised that in this section we would articulate the sense in

which epistemic norms, including norms of disclosure, are ‘non-

optional’ in a way that pea-shelling norms are not. There is a sense

in which the epistemic norms are perfectly ‘optional’. Ants,

squirrels, and even super-squirrels have elaborate shared engineering

practices but presumably no epistemic practices - they are not capable

of making claims with objective purport. Nor can the objects

themselves literally make claims on us or hold us to any particular

standard; that was the jumping-off point for this paper. We are,

however, finally in a position to claim two other kinds of non-

optionality for epistemic norms.

First, any community of creatures that is engaged in any kind of

epistemic activity - any community that cares about how things really

are, unlike super-squirrels - must take their epistemic norms to be

inter-contextually valid. The right norms are the ones that get the

world right, and any incompatibility is a challenge. Second, any

42

creatures that share any epistemic practices - that is, a community

whose collaborative practices include practices of checking how the

world is, making claims to one another with objective purport,

disputing with one another, etc. - will have to share ostensive

practices. Receptive encounters have to form a part of our epistemic

activities, if these activities are to have any friction from the

empirical world at all. This point is well known, but what is less

noticed is that we need to be able to coordinate with one another, to

establish that that there is the thing we are both talking about. If we

had no norms in place for coordinating our encounters, we would be

unable to anchor our claims to be talking and arguing about the same

things. We need to be able to coordinate our epistemic practices just

like we need to be able to coordinate our other concrete, object-

involving practices. Ostension is the basic tool with which we carry

out this coordination. Although we of course each have all sorts of

receptive experience all on our own, ostension is central to our

sharing a common empirical world that we can explore and dispute about

together. The material features of our world take on normative

significance in the context of such joint exploration and disputation.

43

By participating together in these practices, we hold one another

accountable for epistemic responsiveness to our surroundings.20

20 This paper has benefitted from comments and discussion from audiences at

the International Society for Phenomenological Studies meeting in Pacific

Grove, CA in 2009, and the Sellars Centenary Conference and Workshop in

Dublin, Ireland in 2012. John McDowell provided invaluable feedback on an

earlier version of the paper. Three anonymous referees gave us exceptionally

helpful comments on the penultimate draft.44