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Training, Transformation and Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2015

David Bakhurst
David Bakhurst*
Affiliation:
Queen's University
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

In Mind and World, John McDowell concludes that human beings ‘are born mere animals’ and ‘are transformed into thinkers and intentional agents’, principally by their initiation into language. Such ‘transformational views’ of human development typically represent first-language learning as a movement from a non-rationally secured conformity with correct practice, through increasing understanding, to a state of rational mastery of correct practice. Accordingly, they tend to invoke something like Wittgenstein's concept of training to explain the first stage of this process. This essay considers the cogency of this view of learning and development. I agree with Sebastian Rödl that the idea of training (as developed, say, by Meredith Williams) is inadequate to the nature of infancy and child-parent interaction, and I draw on the work of Lev Vygotsky and Michael Tomasello to offer McDowell a richer picture, which acknowledges the child's active role in fostering the second-personal relations that underlie the possibility of language learning. Such considerations force us to revise the transformational view, but do not refute it outright as Rödl believes. I conclude by considering the relevance of McDowell's view of second nature to two striking ideas: Ian Hacking's suggestion that the development of autistic children is ‘non-Vygotskian’ and Derek Parfit's claim that persons are not human beings.

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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 76: Mind, Self and Person , May 2015 , pp. 301 - 327
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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2015 

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References

1 McDowell, J., Mind and World, 2nd edition (1st edition, 1994) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 125.

2 Ibid., 84.

3 Ibid., 126.

4 S. Rödl, ‘Education and Autonomy’, paper presented at the launch of the Centre for Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, London, May 2012, and to appear in Bakhurst, D. and Fairfield, P., Education and Conversation (London: Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming)Google Scholar; Bakhurst, D., The Formation of Reason (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 See, e.g., Bakhurst, D., Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Meaning, Normativity and the Life of the Mind’, Language and Communication 17 (1997), 33–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Ilyenkov, E.V., ‘Dialektika ideal'nogo’ (‘The Dialectic of the Ideal’), in his Isskustvo i kommunisticheckii ideal (Art and the Communist Ideal) (Moscow: Isskustvo, 1984)Google Scholar, 68. An extract from this paper appears in English translation as ‘The Concept of the Ideal’, in Ilyenkov, E.V., The Ideal in Human Activity (Pacifica, CA: Marxist Internet Archive, 2009).Google Scholar

7 McDowell, J., ‘Comment on Hans-Peter Krüger's Paper’, Philosophical Explorations, 1 (1998), 122 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, citing Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G.E.M. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell)Google Scholar, § 127. See also the conclusion of Lecture 4 of Mind and World.

8 McDowell explains: ‘What we are reminded of should be something that we knew all along, but were intelligibly induced to forget under the peculiar stress of philosophical reflection. What we are reminded of should be in itself – that is, considered in abstraction from the feeling of being confronted by deep and difficult intellectual problems that it is supposed to liberate us from – thin and obvious. I would be quite happy if someone responded to my diagnosis of some characteristic ailments of modern epistemology by saying, “Of course! How can we have been enticed into forgetting how obviously right it is to say that a repertoire of conceptual capacities belongs to the acquired nature of a mature human being?” And it is another way of making the same point to say that I feel misunderstood if someone responds rather as follows: “Second nature, that's an interesting idea; but don't we now need a philosophical theory of second nature?” This would be a refusal to take the reminder as I intend it.’ (‘Comment on Hans-Peter Krüger's Paper’, 123).

9 McDowell, , ‘Towards a Reading of Hegel on Action’, in his Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)Google Scholar, 172.

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12 Ibid., 104.

13 One might, for example, explore how in the course of their maturation and enculturation, and their acquisition of language, human children come by a conception of the world; that is, concepts, beliefs, forms of thought and reasoning, modes of self-understanding, and so on. To this end, we might emphasise the skills of narrative understanding that Alasdair MacIntyre in ch. 15 of After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981)Google Scholar deems central to the idea the unity of a human life, or the rich conception of folk psychology that Bruner, Jerome in Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar portrays as enabling our understanding of self and others. MacIntyre and Bruner, in Vygotskian fashion, describe cognitive tools that are part of the cultural inheritance that makes us what we are. And the significance of such tools is not only cognitive, since they influence many aspects of our mental lives, including the character of our emotions, feelings, and desires. Their acquisition is therefore genuinely transformative, since they enable distinctively human awareness and understanding. But neither MacIntyre nor Bruner are doing ‘constructive philosophy’ in McDowell's pejorative sense.

14 McDowell, Mind and World, 84.

15 Ibid., 126.

16 McDowell, , ‘Responses’, in Willaschek, M. (ed.), John McDowell: Reason and Nature. Lecture and Colloquium in Münster 1999 (Münster, Hamburg, Loon: LIT Verlag)Google Scholar, 98. See also McDowell, , ‘Responses’, in Lingaard, J. (ed.), John McDowell: Experience, Norm and Nature (Oxford: Blackwell)Google Scholar, 220, where he offers a more expansive view, referring to ‘education, habituation, or training’.

17 Wittgenstein, L., The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Basil Blackwell)Google Scholar, 77.

18 Huemer, W., ‘The Transition from Causes to Norms: Wittgenstein on Training’, Grazer Philosophische Studien 71 (2006), 205–225.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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20 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§ 6, 9.

21 Wittgenstein, L., Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 1. Edited by von Wright, G.H. and Nyman, H., translated by Luckhardt, G. and Aue, M. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982)Google Scholar, §§ 203 (see note), 206.

22 In The Formation of Reason (136–141), I call this ‘learning by initiation’. Meredith Williams notes the parallel between Wittgenstein and Aristotle in ‘The Significance of Learning in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (1994), 173 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I have more to say about McDowell's use of Aristotle and Wittgenstein in ‘Freedom and Second Nature in The Formation of Reason ’, Mind, Culture, and Activity 19 (2012), 172–189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Medina, J., The Unity of Wittgenstein's Philosophy: Necessity, Intelligibility, and Normativity (Albany NY: SUNY, 2002)Google Scholar, 167.

24 Though tales of Wittgenstein's own practice as a schoolteacher do give one pause. As is well known, after completing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein worked for several years in an elementary school. He eventually gave up the profession after he struck a boy so hard as to cause him to collapse. Later that day, one parent told Wittgenstein ‘he wasn't a teacher, he was an animal-trainer!’ (reported in Monk, R., Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage, 1990)Google Scholar, 233).

25 Williams, M., Blind Obedience (London: Routledge, 2010)Google Scholar, 105.

26 Ibid., 238. See also 106: ‘The status of the naïve learner's utterances (that, for example, they are taken as judgments or requests) is a function of the status extended to those utterances by masters of that practice. The initiate learner speaks, makes judgments, requests, and the like only by virtue of a courtesy extended to the learner by those who have already mastered the practice.’

27 Williams, like McDowell, uses this expression, which of course originates with Wilfrid Sellars.

28 Williams, Blind Obedience, 100.

29 Ibid., 97.

30 Wittgenstein, L., On Certainty, edited by Anscome, G.E.M. and von Wright, G.H., translated by Paul, Denis and Anscombe, G.E.M. (Oxford: Blackwell)Google Scholar, §141.

31 Some Wittgensteinians recognise that training must be distinguished from conditioning. For example, although in ‘The Significance of Learning in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy’, Williams admits that ‘[o]stensive training or teaching, for Wittgenstein, has affinities with the behaviorist notion of conditioning’ (178), she later claims that training is ‘importantly different’ because it aims to instill conformity with a normative practice rather than mere dispositions to respond (Medina takes a similar position, The Unity of Wittgenstein's Philosophy, 158–159). But this merely recognises the problem to which Luntley is drawing attention without solving it.

32 Luntley, ‘Training and Learning’, 709–10 n9.

33 Ibid., 703.

34 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §69 (Wittgenstein's emphasis).

35 Luntley, ‘Training and Learning’, 698.

36 Luntley (‘Training and Learning’, 710 n16) quotes Fodor and Lepore with approval: ‘Wittgenstein suggests that first language learning is somehow a matter of “training”; but he says nothing intelligible about how training could lead to learning in a creature that doesn't already have a mind.’ ( Fodor, J. and Lepore, E., ‘Brandom Beleagured’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXXIV (2007), 677–691 CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

37 Someone might protest that Williams poses this question as one a Quinean must confront. It is not obvious that she thinks the same question is a live issue for the Wittgensteinian. Nevertheless, her text gives the impression that the appeal to training into social practices is a way to answer the question rather than to exorcise it.

38 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §415.

39 Of course it is important that they not do things that might inhibit their child's development, such as radically isolating or otherwise abusing them.

40 Williams, Blind Obedience, 255.

41 Bakhurst, Formation of Reason, 152–157. For more detail, see my Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy, ch.3; ‘Social Memory in Soviet Thought’, in Middleton, D. and Edwards, D., Collective Remembering (London: Sage, 1990), 203–226 Google Scholar, and ‘Vygotsky's Demons’, in Cole, M., Daniels, H. and Wertsch, J. (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 50–76.Google Scholar

42 Vygotsky, L.S., History of the Development of the Higher Mental Functions. The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, Volume 4. Translated by Hall, M.. (New York: Plenum Press, 1997), 104–5.Google Scholar

43 Note that although Vygotsky here discusses an isolated gesture, he would be happy with the holistic view that, when it comes to the child's emerging facility with meaning, ‘light dawns gradually over the whole’.

44 Vygotsky, History of the Development of the Higher Mental Functions, 105.

45 Vygotsky, L.S. and Luria, A., ‘Tool and Symbol in Child Development’, in van der Veer, R. and Valsiner, J., The Vygotsky Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)Google Scholar, 113.

46 Tomasello, M., Origins of Human Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 11–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 Ibid., 104.

48 Ibid., 139 ff.

49 Tomasello, M. and Carpenter, M., ‘Shared Intentionality’, Developmental Science 10 (2007), 124.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

50 Tomasello, M., A Natural History of Human Thinking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 145–147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51 Tomasello and Carpenter, ‘Shared Intentionality’, 124. In his recent book, A Natural History of Human Thinking, Tomasello distinguishes two kinds of shared intentionality. First, there is joint intentionality, which is essentially second-personal, involving collaboration and communication between ad hoc individuals in the moment. This presupposes ‘personal’ common ground between the participants, but need not rest on any conventional modes of communication or socially-established norms. Second, there is collective intentionality, which involves a relation between an individual and a transpersonal ‘we’, mediated by cultural common ground, group norms, and conventionalised modes of communication. Tomasello thinks that both forms of shared intentionality are distinctively human. Joint intentionality is a developmental prerequisite of collective intentionality, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically (children's facility with joint intentionality emerges around their first birthday, but they are not at home with collective intentionality until age 3), and collective intentionality is a precondition of many of the characteristic forms of human mindedness. This picture further undermines the usefulness of the concept of training. It now looks very implausible to think of training, as Wittgensteinians do, as the initiation of a normatively inept creature into forms of collective intentionality. Once we countenance the significance of joint intentionality (the hallmark of which is negotiation rather than training), we see that training is only one among many avenues of the cultivation of collective intentionality. To all this, I would add one cautionary note. It can be misleading to portray joint intentionality as essentially second-personal, for what is at issue is not just I-Thou relations, but primitive first-person plural conceptions of ourselves as ‘we’ (as Rödl's reflections (below) bring out). Lurking here are vexed questions of whether there is a fundamentally irreducible ‘we-mode’ of intentionality, an issue informatively addressed in Gallotti, M., ‘A Naturalistic Argument for the Irreducibility of Collective Intentionality’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 42 (2012), 3–30 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Gallotti, M. and Frith, C., ‘Social Cognition in the We-Mode’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17 (2013), 160–165.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

52 Tomasello and Carpenter, ‘Shared Intentionality’, 121.

53 I recognise, of course, that the idea of an alliance between McDowell, Vygotsky, and Tomasello (let alone Rödl) raises many questions about the compatibility of their respective views. In The Formation of Reason I take this up with respect to Vygotsky and McDowell, though there I largely overlook the following issue. McDowell's notion of second nature draws on a distinction between two modes of intelligibility – natural-scientific and space-of-reasons intelligibility – which he sometimes glosses in terms of the distinction between explanation and understanding (‘Comment on Hans-Peter Krüger's Paper’, 121). But Vygotsky explicitly rejects the dichotomy between psychological theories that aspire to causal explanations and those that maintain that psychological phenomena demand a different order of explanation – hermeneutical understanding (see History of the Development of the Higher Mental Functions, 7–8). Where does this leave the supposed union of Vygotsky and McDowell? I do not think Vygotsky would have denied that there is an important difference between explaining particular instances of belief, action, and other intentional phenomena, and explaining natural goings-on in which reason does not figure. Moreover, Vygotsky is clear that psychology cannot explain the higher mental functions by principles of biological or physical science. We need to employ explanatory principles appropriate to the subject matter under study, at each stage of its development, and this involves understanding the mind as a cultural-historical phenomenon. However, Vygotsky aspired to a systematic and comprehensive account of psychological development worthy of the name ‘scientific’. It all depends, of course, on what counts as scientific, and he would likely have agreed with those who complain that Mind and World operates with too narrow a conception of science (such as Macdonald, G., ‘The Two Natures: Another Dogma’, in Macdonald, C. and Macdonald, G. (eds), McDowell and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 224–225CrossRefGoogle Scholar). McDowell subsequently broadened his view, but he continues to hold that responsiveness to reasons lies outside the reach of natural-scientific explanation. Vygotsky would have agreed that ‘human beings are unique among living things – outside the reach of the sort of understanding achievable by a scientific biology – in virtue of the freedom that belongs with our responsiveness to reasons as such’ (McDowell, ‘Response to Graham Macdonald, in McDowell and his Critics, 237), but recommended that McDowell broaden his conception of science still further (rather as he proposes to do with the concept of nature). I'm inclined to think that Tomasello would concur – his work is clearly scientific, but hardly displays the kind of narrow naturalism that is McDowell's target.

Discussion of the compatibility of McDowell's position and Tomasello's, which would need to take proper account of the latter's recent Natural History of Human Thinking, must await another occasion, but I must address one obvious issue. McDowell asserts that children acquire the ability to think and act intentionally as they enter the space of reasons, while Tomasello attributes individual intentionality to infants and apes. This looks like an irreconcilable difference, but it need not be. McDowell sets the bar for intentionality very high: it requires the ability to form propositional thoughts presupposing a network of concepts and a repertoire of conceptual capacities, including self-consciousness. For Tomasello, in contrast, individual intentionality presupposes only the ability to solve problems about how to act by representing situations and actions ‘off line’, operating on such representations, and monitoring the plausibility and desirability of possible outcomes. There is no reason why McDowell cannot credit infants and non-human animals with such abilities.

54 Baron-Cohen, S., Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Baron-Cohen recognises that the mindblindness theory needs significant supplementation by other approaches. For a helpful review see his Autism and Asperger Syndrome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).Google Scholar

55 Hacking, I., ‘Kinds of People: Moving Targets’, Proceedings of the British Academy 151 (2007), 285–318 Google Scholar; ‘Humans, Aliens, and Autism’, Daedalus 138 (July 2009), 44–59 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘How We Have Been Learning to Talk About Autism: A Role for Stories’, Metaphilosophy 40 (2009), 499–516.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

56 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II.iv, 178.

57 Köhler, W., Gestalt Psychology (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929), 250–251.Google Scholar

58 Hacking, ‘How We Have Been Learning to Talk About Autism’, 504.

59 See Forman, D., ‘Autonomy as Second Nature: On McDowell's Aristotelian Naturalism’, Inquiry 51 (2008), 571.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

60 McDowell, J., ‘Wittgenstein on Following a Rule’, in his Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, 253.

61 As McDowell maintains in ‘Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge’ (in his Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar). Here he suggests an important qualification. In a case where, say, we discern someone is angry from their demeanour, we do not need to insist that their emotional state is itself an object of direct perception. We need only say that their anger is expressed in their demeanour in such a way that awareness of their demeanour constitutes non-inferential knowledge of their emotional state (see in ‘Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge’, 387).

62 See Leekam, S., ‘Why Do Children With Autism Have a Joint Attention Impairment?’, in Eilen, N., Hoerl, C., McCormack, T., and Roessler, J. (eds.), Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 205–229.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63 J. McDowell, ‘Reductionism and the First Person’, in his Mind, Value, and Reality, 382; see also his ‘Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge’, 470.

64 Parfit, D., ‘We Are Not Human Beings’, Philosophy 87 (2012), 5–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

65 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 36th Annual Wittgenstein Conference on Mind, Language, Action, held in Kirchberg, Austria, in August 2013, and appears in the conference proceedings. I am grateful to the Oesterreichische Ludwig Wittgenstein Gesellschaft for the invitation to speak at that meeting and for permission to reproduce parts of my presentation in this longer essay, and to the audience for helpful comments and criticisms, which led me to revise my views into the form they take here.