Conceptual All the Way Down?

If there is no Given, the opposite conclusion beckons. Perhaps experience is concept through and through, and the world is simply what our concepts make of it.

The most careful modern form of this thought is John McDowell's. In Mind and World he argued that conceptual capacities are already at work in perceptual experience itself, which is how experience can give us reasons. The conceptual, he wrote, is unbounded. There is no outer edge beyond which a non-conceptual given waits. Readers often summarise the view as "conceptual all the way down", though that is a gloss rather than McDowell's own wording.

Hubert Dreyfus objected that this cannot be right of skilled, absorbed activity. The chess master who sees the move, and the expert who simply copes, are not applying concepts at all. McDowell's reply is one of the most instructive exchanges of recent philosophy.

The Madhyamaka sides with neither. McDowell is no idealist. He insists the world constrains what we think. But a mind whose concepts reach everywhere, read as an account of what reality is, has replaced the substance of the realist with the concept of the idealist. Substrateless World met this move in the form of idealism, panpsychism and Mind-Only. Dreyfus's absorbed coping, read in the same way, restores a pre-conceptual floor. The Given reappears in practical rather than perceptual dress. Each makes one term prior.

What the analysis keeps is a symmetry, in two parts.

• Appearance is not raw material for concepts. The ice stings with its own sharpness, and no one decides the sting. A shadow cannot be designated a bridge. The constraint that keeps designation from being arbitrary comes from the vividness itself.
• Concepts are not a veil over appearance. The cup is seen as a cup, and the duck as a duck. Designation is not a screen held in front of the world. It is in the appearing.

Neither is the ground of the other. Concepts draw their content and their correction from what appears, and what appears is picked out and made usable through designation. They are designated together, like long and short. Even the words "conceptual" and "non-conceptual" are co-defined, each identified only as the other's contrast.

Dreyfus's own examples show this. Riding a bicycle is not a set of rules stored in the head, and it is not a wordless reflex beneath all rules. The skill is designated together with rider, machine, slope and wind, and found in none of them alone. And designation is wider than language. "Conceptual all the way down" mistakes designation for a kind of sentence. "Non-conceptual at bottom" mistakes the absence of words for the absence of designation.

The ordinary distinction survives. Seeing a snake is not remembering one, and a perception can correct a thought, as the lamp corrects the rope. Dharmakīrti's line between perception and conception keeps its conventional use. What it loses is the claim to mark two natures, one beneath the other.

So the answer to the objection is neither "conceptual all the way down" nor "non-conceptual at the bottom". There is no down.