Mats Wahlberg (Auth.) - Reshaping Natural Theology - Seeing Nature As Creation-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2012)

Reshaping Natural Theology
Reshaping Natural
Theology
Seeing Nature as Creation
Mats Wahlberg
Umeå University, Sweden
© Mats Wahlberg 2012
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-39313-4
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In Memory of Lars Åke Wahlberg
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1 Introduction 1
2 Bursting Descartes’ Bubble 13

2.1 John McDowell and the Open Mind 13
2.2 Internalism vs externalism 19
2.3 An organ of thought or a system of
world-involving capacities? 25
2.4 An objection from science 30
2.5 Dissolving a problem 34
3 Perception and Concepts 37

3.1 The interface model of perception and
its ‘disjunctivist’ enemy
y 38
3.2 Perception and concepts: the argument
of Mind and World d 43
3.2.1 Conceptual capacities and the space of reasons 43
3.2.2 Spontaneity and receptivityy 46
3.2.3 The unboundedness of the conceptual 48
3.2.4 The emigration of intelligible structure from
the world 52
3.2.5 A partial re-enchantment of nature 56
3.2.6 Conclusion 60
4 Perceptual Evidence 62
4.1 The argument in a nutshell 64
4.1.1 Human behavior as expressive of mind 64
4.1.2 Nature as expressive of mind 66
4.2 Factive perceptual evidence 71
4.3 Neutralizing skepticism 75
4.4 Saving content 77
4.5 Knowing that one sees 81
4.6 Rationalityy 83
4.7 Factive perceptual evidence and the
createdness of nature 90
vii
viii Contents
5 Perceiving Other Minds 104

5.1 The problem of other minds 106
5.1.1 The argument from analogy y 107
5.1.2 The scientific inference 108
5.1.3 The ‘criterial’ approach 113
5.1.4 Conclusion 117
5.2 McDowell on other minds 118
5.3 Perception and learning 124
5.4 Perceptual and inferential knowledge 126
6 Seeing Nature as Creation 131

6.1 Creation’s testimony y 133
6.1.1 Barth’s critique 133
6.1.2 The Bible and the tradition 135
6.1.3 Disenchanted vs re-enchanted nature 139
6.2 Is there an appearance of intent in nature? 147
6.3 Can structures be expressive of mental properties? 151
6.4 Indirect support from psychology y 165
7 Possible Defeaters 172

7.1 Is divine creation incompatible with
Darwinian evolution? 173
7.2 Does evolution ‘screen off’ divine intent
from our view? 178
7.3 Are there too many inconsistencies
between (putative) perceptions of divine intent? 190
7.4 Is the impossibility of empirical
falsification a problem? 191
8 Unapologetic Theology
y 194
Notes 207
Bibliographyy 241
Index 253
Acknowledgments
Many people have contributed to making this book possible. Arne

Rasmusson has followed the process from the start, and his help and
encouragement have been invaluable. Our conversations have inspired
me to be creative, to read widely, to ‘think big’ and to move freely
between traditions and disciplines. Although our theological ‘styles’
may seem very different, it is hard to overestimate Arne’s import-
ance for the writing of this book, as well as for my general intellectual
formation.
Other colleagues (or former colleagues) at Umeå University have
also helped me a lot. All the participants in the theology seminar
deserve thanks, especially Roland Spjuth, Leif Svensson, and Carl-
Magnus Carlstein who have been very diligent and helpful readers and
commentators. The participants in the philosophy seminar have greatly
contributed to whatever philosophical qualities this book may have. Pär
Sundström and Jesper Östman in particular were very generous with
their time and expertise.
Paul J. Griffiths at Duke University and Nancey Murphy at Fuller
Theological Seminary read and commented on early drafts of the book.
For this I am deeply grateful. John Haldane, University of St Andrews,
and Ulf Zackariasson, Uppsala University, also provided very valuable
input. There are other people who have helped and inspired me in
different ways, such as Benoni Edin, Mikael Stenmark, Tord Larsson,
and Jesper Kronhamn.
The Research Division of the Church of Sweden funded the book
through a four-year scholarship. Although I am now a Catholic, I will
always feel a very deep sense of gratitude to the Church of Sweden for
giving me this opportunity.
Finally, I want to thank my mother Lena, my sisters Maria and
Margareta, and my brothers Åke and Jan, for their support, encourage-
ment and love. My deeply beloved father, Åke, died while I was writing
this book. The book is dedicated to him, as a small token of appreci-
ation for all that he has meant to and done for his family. Keep praying
for us, dad.
ix
1
Introduction
Is nature creation, or merely the product of blind, non-intentional proc-

esses? The main purpose of this book is to challenge the terms in which
this question is usually debated. The purpose, more specifically, is to
recover the classical Christian idea that it is just obvious that nature is
creation. When we look at the bodies of complex biological organisms
such as elephants and human beings it is just as obvious that they are
(in some sense) intentionally created as it is obvious that the behavior
of our fellow human beings is intentional and not merely the outcome
of blind, non-intentional processes. According to John Calvin – a good
representative of this traditional sensibility – God has been pleased
‘so to manifest his perfections in the whole structure of the universe,
and daily place himself in our view, that we cannot but open our eyes
without being compelled to behold him’.1 In the words of St Paul: ‘Ever
since the creation of the world [God’s] invisible nature, namely his
eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that
have been made’ (Rom 1:20).
This sensibility is today widely regarded as a relic. It is usually
assumed that the existence of a creator is ‘obvious’ only to people
who are naively ignorant of evolutionary theory. But is this really so?
Evolutionary theory certainly undermines a certain kind of argument
for the existence of a creator. The idea defended in this book, however,
is that knowledge of the creator need not be based on argument.
Intention is a mental concept, something that pertains to mind. To say
that the natural world is intentionally created is to say that a conscious
mind figures importantly in its causal history – that there is a Mind
behind nature. No sane person believes in the existence of other human
minds on the basis of some argument. It is, in fact, highly uncertain
whether there is any sound argument from observations of the external
1
2 Reshaping Natural Theology
behavior of my neighbor to the existence of a mind behind that

behavior. One of the main philosophical authorities on the so-called
‘problem of other minds’, Alec Hyslop, says that it is noteworthy that
so many proposed solutions to this problem are on offer. ‘Even more
noteworthy’, he says, ‘is that none of the solutions on offer can plaus-
ibly lay claim to enjoying majority support’.2 If Hyslop is right, there
is no argument for the existence of other minds that has managed to
find approval from a majority of the philosophical community. This
indicates that if our knowledge of other minds were based on argument,
that knowledge would be extremely precarious at best. But of course it is
not precarious. So this knowledge cannot be based on argument.
The claim that the existence of a creator – a mind behind nature – is
equally (or almost equally) obvious as the mindedness of our fellow
human beings is likely to meet the objection that there are perfectly
good natural scientific explanations (viz. evolutionary explanations)
of the characteristics of biological species. And these explanations, of
course, do not mention the intentions of a creator.
This objection disregards the fact that there are perfectly good
natural scientific explanations of every single piece of human behavior
too, explanations that are complete on their own level, and which do
not make reference to any mental states such as intentions, beliefs, or
desires. The only concepts that figure in explanations of the natural
scientific type refer to scientifically respectable entities such as neurons,
action potentials and projection pathways. ‘Anti-reductionists’ (such as
myself) believe, of course, that the whole story about human behavior
cannot be told in neurophysiological terms only. There are certain
holistic patterns in human behavior that can only be made intelligible
in terms of mental state-concepts. The latter concepts are therefore irre-
ducible – they cannot be replaced by talk about neurons. But those of us
who believe in a creator of nature also claim, analogously, that evolu-
tionary explanations of the existence and nature of biological species,
although complete on their own level of explanation, do not tell the
whole story about why biological species exist and have the properties
they have. If God’s intention to create does not in some wayy figure in
the complete explanation of why, for example, human beings came to
exist and have the properties they have, it would have little meaning to
call God the creator of human beings. A creator is someone who inten-
tionally supplies some of the necessary conditions for the existence of
something.3
The general point here is this. If I can know, just by looking at another
human being, that her behavior is the result of intention, despite the
Introduction 3
fact that a complete, non-intentional, natural scientific explanation of that

behavior exists, then why could it not also be possible for me to know, just
by looking at the design of natural organisms, that they are the result
of intention, despite the existence of perfectly good non-intentional,
natural scientific explanations of their various properties? Explanations
in terms of mental-state concepts such as intention are, if reductionism
is false, compatible with but irreducible to natural-scientific explana-
tions. The objection that a divine intention behind nature cannot be
clearly discerned because there are evolutionary explanations of the
characteristics of biological species should therefore be treated with a
strong dose of suspicion.4
The comparison between knowledge of God and knowledge of ‘other
minds’ is familiar to readers of Alvin Plantinga. In his magisterial book
God and Other Minds, Plantinga examined the classical arguments in
favor of theism and concluded that these do not provide the theist with
a good reason for belief in God. He also studied what he saw as the best
available arguments for belief in other minds, and came to an analo-
gous result. The general conclusion he drew from his study was that
‘belief in other minds and belief in God are in the same epistemological
boat; hence if either is rational, so is the other. But obviously the former
is rational; so, therefore, is the latter.’5
There is a certain affinity between Plantinga’s thinking on this topic
and the thesis of this book, but there are also important differences.
One difference is that Plantinga (in the above-mentioned book) does
not aim to explain how we can know either other minds or God. He
concedes that ‘the theist has no very good answer to the request that he
explain his reasons for believing in the existence of God’.6 Plantinga’s
point is just that the theist’s lack of reasons cannot be considered fatal
to theistic beliefs, because we would then have to give up belief in other
minds as well. Hence, iff we are justified in believing in other minds
(which we obviously are even though it is unclear why), then we are
also justified in believing in God.
While the present book is neutral on the question of whether there
are good reasons for believing in God, it will argue that there might be
extremely good reasons for believing in a creator of nature. This book
hence defends a version of natural theology, albeit a rather modest
version. ‘Creator of nature’ is – as I will use the term – a weaker concept
than ‘God’. The former concept does not include in its definition the
properties of being infinite and the ‘Ground of Being’. A creator is
simply a conscious agent who intentionally brings it about that some
object has certain essential properties. We are all creators in this sense.
Atheists usually claim that nature has no creator, while theists claim
that it has. Theists, of course, also claim that the creator has certain
other properties, such as being the infinite, perfectly good, omnipotent
Ground of Being. I will not, however, address the question of whether
the creator can be known to have these latter properties.
The kind of natural theology espoused in this book does not, as
mentioned, portray knowledge of the creator as being based on argu-
ment, i.e. as being generated by some type of inference. Instead, I will
suggest that biological nature could make knowledge of a creator of
nature perceptuallyy available. Knowledge of the creator is perceptually
available if nature has some perceivable properties that are intrinsic-
ally connected to a creator in the sense that their instantiation presup-
poses the existence of a creator. Consider, as an analogy, the property
of being an artwork. This is a property whose instantiation presupposes
the existence of a creator (an artist). If X exists and is an artwork, then,
necessarily, an artist exists. If being an artwork is a perceivable property
(so that it is possible to see that X is an artwork rather than merely infer
that it is an artwork from seeing that X has some other properties), then
there exists a perceivable property whose instantiation presupposes the
existence of a creator.
The idea that properties such as being an artwork are directly perceivable
is, of course, highly controversial. It is usually assumed that we always
must inferr (even though these inferences may take place subconsciously
and very quickly) that X is an artwork from observations of X’s more
basic structural properties, such as its physical shape and the particular
configuration of colors which it displays. But it is precisely assumptions of
this kind that generate the so-called ‘problem of other minds’. If the only way
in which we can know that a certain object is the result of conscious
agency is by inferring this from observations of its basic structural
properties (together with premises derived from our background know-
ledge), then how could it be otherwise with human behavior? How, but
by some kind of inference, could I know that certain movements and
sounds of a certain two-legged, upright body is the result or embodi-
ment of conscious agency?
Enter John McDowell, perhaps the most interesting and profound
contemporary analytic philosopher. McDowell has argued that mental
facts about human beings are perceptually available. It is possible to
perceive, directly, that somebody is in pain. This is because human
behavior is expressive (in a sense to be explained). To express something
is ‘to make it manifest in a given medium. I express my feelings in my
face; I express my thoughts in the words I speak or write. I express my
Introduction 5
vision of things in some work of art’.7 A state of mind, such as a feeling

or an intention, is expressed
when it is embodied in such a way as to be made manifest. And

‘manifest’ must be taken here in the strong sense. Something is
manifest when it is directly available for all to see. It is not manifest
when there are just signs of its presence, from which we can infer
that it is there, such as when I ‘see’ that you are in your office because
of your car being parked outside.8
What do we see when we look at the face of a person who is in pain?

The common – but very problematic – view is that what we really see
(in a literal sense of ‘see’) is only facial contortions. We then tacitly
and subconsciously infer that the person is in pain. The inference in
question is (when reconstructed by philosophers) usually conceived as
either some kind of argument from analogy with one’s own behavior
and experiences, or as some kind of argument-to-the-best-explanation.
To say that behavior is expressive in the sense we are talking about
here, however, is to deny the need of any such inferences.9 It is to claim
that human behavior has more properties than those that can be speci-
fied in merely physical terms, i.e. without reference to mental states.
If human behavior has expressive properties, then what we see in a
pain-ridden person’s face may be something more than contortions
of physical features. We may see expressions of pain. The property of
being an expression of pain is not identical to any ‘bodily’ or ‘behavioral’
property (such as being a certain type of facial contortion). It is a property
that makes essential reference to a mental state. It is, in other words, a
property that cannot be specified except with reference to the mental
phenomenon of pain. This property (and other expressive properties) is
essentially such that it makes a person’s mental state manifestt (‘directly
available for all to see’).
I will, following McDowell, argue that we must assume the existence
of expressive properties, or else we will not be able to explain our seem-
ingly certain and immediate knowledge of other minds. If there are
expressive properties, then (some of our) knowledge of other minds
is simply perceptual knowledge. I can know some things about other
people’s minds just by looking, in the same way as I can know that your
shirt is blue just by looking. I do not infer that the shirt is blue – I see it.
In some cases, I do not infer that you are in pain – I see it.
If there are expressive properties, why believe that they are restricted
to human behavior? Could it be that the human body is uniquely
capable of being the subject of expressive properties? This seems rather

far-fetched – as if the human body had some magical ability that other
physical objects by necessity lack. This view is also incongruent with a
natural and attractive understanding of art.
Artworks are, according to the natural understanding, capable of
making human mental properties, such as feelings, manifest. According
to Aaron Riddley, ‘artworks must be understood as objects having expres-
sive properties capable of revealing and being explained by the feelings
of the artist’.10 If Riddley is right, human behavior is just one phenom-
enon among others that can be expressive. R.G. Collingwood goes so far
as to conceive expressive human behavior as a species of art. ‘Every utter-
ance and every gesture that each one of us makes is a work of art.’11
If there are expressive properties, and if such properties can be instan-
tiated by objects, such as artworks, as well as by behavior, then it is
possible that nature is expressive. This suggestion has a clear resonance
in the Christian tradition. It is a commonplace within the tradition that
the world testifies to its creator. ‘The world itself ... proclaims’, according
to St Augustine,
by a kind of silent testimony of its own both that it has been created,
and also that it could not have been made other than by a God
ineffable and invisible in greatness, and ineffable and invisible in
beauty.12
The most common way of cashing out the metaphor of the world’s
testimony is in terms of symptoms or effects of the divine hand. From
those effects, it is said, we may infer (by analogy or by an argument-to-
the-best-explanation) that the world has been created. My suggestion,
however, is that a different explication of the traditional idea of the
world’s testimony is available. Why could it not be possible to perceive
the world (or certain aspects of it) as creation, in much the same way as
we seem to be able to perceive lumps of tissue as human beings (i.e., as
minded) and patches of paint on canvas as art? t
To see nature as creation is to see it as expressive of mind, as the
embodiment13 of intention. But do we really have experiences – percep-
tual experiences – that represent nature as the embodiment of intention?
I think that most of us do. The Duke of Argyll recounts a conversation
he once had with Charles Darwin:
In the course of that conversation I said to Mr. Darwin, with reference

to some of his own remarkable works on the Fertilisation of Orchids,
Introduction 7
and upon The Earthworms, and various other observations he made

of the wonderful contrivances for certain purposes in nature – I said
it was impossible to look at these without seeing that they were the
effect and the expression of Mind. I shall never forget Mr. Darwin’s
answer. He looked at me very hard and said, ‘Well, that often comes
over me with overwhelming force; but at other times’, and he shook
his head vaguely, adding, ‘it seems to go away’.14
Darwin, if anyone, knows that orchids and earthworms are the products
of evolution. He knows about the mechanism of natural selection. So
his reaction to the ‘wonderful contrivances’ that the mentioned organ-
isms display cannot be the result of some (tacit) piece of naïve reasoning
along the lines of the teleological argument for the existence of God.
His reaction does not seem to be the product of reasoning at all. It some-
times ‘comes over him’ with ‘overwhelming force’, as if it were the result
of an immediate experience.
When I look at human bodies, contemplating their design, I feel – like
the Duke of Argyll and Darwin – that it is impossible not to see them
as ‘expressions of mind’. Could those bodies really be merelyy the result
of blind, non-intentional processes?15 Of course not. That seems just
obvious to me.
Is my reaction to human bodies unusual? I do not think so. Darwin,
as we have seen, seems to share it. John Calvin does not intend to
express an idiosyncratic sentiment when he says that ‘In attestation of
[God’s] wondrous wisdom, both the heavens and the earth present us
with innumerable proofs ... which force themselves on the notice of the
most illiterate peasant’.16
Is my – and many others’ – spontaneous reaction to human bodies
and other wonders of nature unreasonable? Answering this question will
be the central preoccupation of this book. Here is just a preliminary
consideration: It is hard to see why my reaction to the design of human
bodies is unreasonable if my normal reaction to the behaviorr of those
bodies is not unreasonable. Could the behavior of my neighbor’s body
be merely the result of blind, non-intentional processes? My spontan-
eous reaction: of course not. Do I possess an argument for ‘other minds’
that can support this reaction, showing that it is rationally justified? I
do not. There might not even be such an argument.
Not even if I were to find out that the heads of my fellow humans are
filled with electronic circuits would I regard my spontaneous reaction to
them as misleading. Instead I would conclude – quite reasonably – that
minds can supervene on electronic circuits. Likewise, no hard-boiled
neurophysiological explanation of (e.g.) my mother’s behavior could

make me revise my belief that she is minded.
There are, however, philosophers who answer the question ‘Could the
behavior of (human) bodies be merelyy the result of blind, non-intentional
processes?’ in the affirmative. They admit, as they should, that our
common-sense, mental-state concepts such as ‘belief’ and ‘intention’
are not reducible to talk about brain-states and the like. The conclu-
sion they draw from this irreducibility, however, is that our mental-
state concepts do not refer to anything at all. In W.V. Quine’s famous
words: ‘If we are limning the true and ultimate structure of reality, the
canonical scheme for us is the austere scheme that knows no ... propos-
itional attitudes [i.e., mental states with propositional contents, such as
beliefs and intentions] but only the physical constitution and behavior
of organisms.’17 Since intentions and other mental states do not exist,
according to Quine and other ‘eliminativist’18 philosophers, it is correct
to say that the behavior of human bodies is merely the result of blind,
non-intentional processes. Those who take it to be immediately obvious
that human behavior is intentional are therefore wrong.
The case of ‘eliminativist’ philosophers shows that skepticism with
respect to the intentional nature of human behavior is possible. The
fact that skepticism with respect to the ‘intendedness’ (createdness) of
nature is widespread should therefore not come as a surprise, even for
those of us who regard the existence of a creator as obvious. The exist-
ence of the latter type of skepticism should not automatically be seen
as evidence that my and other people’s spontaneous reactions to the
wonders of nature are unreasonable.
My general point is this. If, as I have suggested, it would be reasonable
for me to cling to the idea that (e.g.) my mother’s behavior is expres-
sive of mind even in the face of evidence that demonstrates that her
every movement is the result of some neurophysiological (or electronic)
cause, then why could it not also be reasonable for me to cling to the
idea that the design of biological organisms is expressive of the mind of
a creator , even in the face of evidence that suggests that the proximate
cause of every aspect of that design is evolution by natural selection? Is
it because my mother’s behaviorr is so much more complex, functional,
‘wonderfully contrived’, and intelligent than the design of her body? y No
offense to my mother, but it is not at all obvious that her behavior beats
the design of her body in any of these respects.
It is important not to misunderstand this. I do not mean that it is
my observation of properties such as complexityy and functionalityy that
constitutes my basis for believing either that my mother is minded
Introduction 9
or that nature is creation. The properties mentioned are not expressive

properties in the sense explained – they are merely ‘physical’19 prop-
erties. If the thesis of this book is correct, we do not (need not) infer
the existence of other minds or a creator of nature from observations
of ‘physical’ (non-expressive) properties. It is likely, however, that the
expressive properties that allow us to see, directly, human behavior and
nature as expressive of mind, do to some extent supervene on proper-
ties such as complexity and functionality. If human behavior did not
display a certain degree of complexity and functionality, it would prob-
ably not instantiate any expressive properties either.
There are, of course, a number of serious problems that must be
addressed and solved if the basic idea of this book is to have any cred-
ibility. The issue of its compatibility with evolution is by no means
settled by what has been said so far. Evolution by natural selection is a
process that importantly involves chance. Can the products of a process
of this kind really be expressive of the intent of a creator? I think that it
definitely can, but there is much here that remains to be shown.
It is, furthermore, obviously the case that one has to learn to see
nature as creation by acquiring the necessary concepts and beliefs. If
this is so, can we really understand our experiences of nature as creation
as real perceptions of a property that nature actually has? Must we not
understand these experiences as more or less arbitrary ‘interpretations’
of nature? Addressing this problem requires us to consider, in depth,
the nature of perceptual experiences, the role of concepts in percep-
tion, and what it means to learn a perceptual ability. Exploring these
issues, drawing on the resources of contemporary philosophy of mind
and perception, is a substantial part of this book.
The possibility of illusion is another problem that can seem to under-
mine my proposal. It is certainly possible that nature can seem or appear
to be created (‘expressive of mind’) without beingg created, in the same
way as human behavior sometimes seems to express mental states
that are in fact absent (such as when people pretend to be in pain).
Against the background of the possibility of illusion, must we not say
that neither nature nor human behavior can make intentions (divine
or human) manifest, t that is, ‘directly available for all to see’? Must we
not conclude that what we reallyy see when we look at nature or human
behavior are merely ‘physical’ (non-expressive) properties, and that
we may at best infer the existence of intentions and suchlike behind
the visible phenomena? This is the line of reasoning that generates the
‘problem of other minds’, and it should be approached with a good deal
of suspicion. But the problem it points to cannot be ignored.
A related difficulty that my proposal encounters is the following.

My claim, as the reader will recall, is that reactions to nature of the
kind that Darwin and the Duke of Argyll testify to could be some-
thing more than unjustified projections of religious categories onto a
nature that provides no rational basis for them. My suggestion is that
those reactions could be based on perceptions of nature’s expressive
properties, perceptions that make knowledge of a creator available to
us in the same way that our perceptions of the expressive properties
of human behavior make knowledge of other human minds available.
However, even if nature is expressive of the mind of a creator in the way
suggested, and if people’s spontaneous reactions to complex organisms
are in fact based on perceptions of expressive properties, how can we
knoww that this is so? Must we not have some evidence for the reliability
of the kind of experiences that we take to reveal expressive properties
in nature? If we do not have such evidence, can it really be claimed that
the experiences in question provide knowledge of a creator?
Most of the difficulties noted above are, I will argue, generated by
certain deeply entrenched but non-necessary assumptions about the
relationship between perceptual experience and the world, or, in more
general terms, between mind and world. What prevents us from recog-
nizing the possibility of really seeingg (in the literal sense of ‘seeing’)
nature as creation is our adherence to a certain picture of the mind–
world relationship, the broad outlines of which were drawn by René
Descartes in the 17th century. Immaterialism about the mind was never
the most fundamental feature of this picture, and in its contemporary
versions the immaterial soul has been replaced by the brain. The deepest
feature of the Cartesian picture is the assumption that the mind is an
organ (material or immaterial) whose internal states are logically inde-
pendent of the environment to which it relates.
Enter John McDowell again. It has often been noticed that the
central problems of modern philosophy have to do with the difficulty
of ‘bridging the gap’ between subject and object, or mind and world.
The classical problems about our knowledge of the ‘external world’ and
‘other minds’ are aspects of this general difficulty, as is the ‘problem
of intentionality’ (the problem about how our thoughts can ‘hook on’
to the world). McDowell argues that the way to address these problems
is not by trying to solve them (which is impossible), but by disclosing
and questioning the assumptions that give rise to them. It is, according
to McDowell, the Cartesian picture and its implicit assumptions about
the mind–world relationship that creates the ‘gap’ between mind and
world. Instead of trying to bridge that gap, we should move out of the
Introduction 11
Cartesian picture. McDowell argues, furthermore, that the Cartesian

picture is fundamentally incoherent. If there is a ‘gap’ between mind
and world – if our thoughts are pictured as always being at a remove
from the world – then what we conceive as mind d cannot really be mind
at all. Mind and world cannot coherently be conceived as being inde-
pendent in the way the Cartesian picture portrays them. Instead, we
must conceive mind and world as ‘interpenetrating’.
McDowell’s contention, in sum, is that many of the central problems
of modern philosophy have a common root – the Cartesian concep-
tion of the mind. Myy contention is that the same Cartesian picture also
is the root cause of the difficulties that seem to stand in the way of
understanding nature as visibly expressive of the mind of a creator. This
means that a McDowellian ‘paradigm shift’ in our understanding of
the mind will have very important consequences for theology. Such a
paradigm shift will, if I am right, clear away certain intellectual obsta-
cles and allow contemporary theology to take seriously the classical
idea, expressed by St Paul and John Calvin, that nature’s ‘createdness’ is
immediately and visibly apparent.
Before I can make my argument about the possibility of seeing nature
as creation, I must explain the meaning of, and – as far as possible within
the limits of one book – defend the reasonability of the mentioned ‘para-
digm shift’ in our understanding of the mind–world relation. This is a
major task, and it requires that we probe deep into the inner sanctum of
contemporary analytical philosophy – the conflict-ridden and intellec-
tually demanding territory of the philosophy of mind and perception.
A substantial part of this book is pure philosophy of mind, viz. chapters
2 and 3. In these chapters, I formulate and defend a McDowell-inspired
understanding of the mind and its relationship to the world, an under-
standing which I call the ‘Open Mind’ (OM) view. The chapters that
follow (4 and 5) investigate the epistemological consequences of the
paradigm shift and the OM view, especially in relation to the ‘problem
of other minds’. We will have to wait until Chapter 4 before we are
in a position to grasp and assess my general argument, which will be
outlined at the beginning of that chapter. The epistemological discus-
sion that follows through the end of Chapter 5 will clarify what the
argument can and cannot reasonably be expected to accomplish. In
Chapter 6 my proposal is discussed in relation to the general Christian
tradition, and the details of the argument are elaborated. Chapter 7
addresses possible objections. Chapter 8 reflects on the theological
consequences of the argument and of a changed conception of the
mind–world relationship.
The main philosophical resource that I will draw on is the work of

John McDowell, and this book serves as well as an introduction to
important aspects of his thought. The urgency of a paradigm shift in
our understanding of the mind is, however, a widely shared concern.
McDowell may be the most insightful contemporary critic of Cartesian
conceptions of mind and perception, but he is certainly not the
only one. The work of philosophers such as Hilary Putnam, Charles
Taylor, John Haldane, Gregory McCulloch, and Timothy Williamson
has a considerable affinity with McDowell’s anti-Cartesian project.
Even though McDowell’s work will occupy center stage in this book,
his thought should be seen as an especially profound expression of a
sensibility that is growing increasingly common in the philosophical
community today.
2
Bursting Descartes’ Bubble
2.1 John McDowell and the Open Mind
To perceive is, according to a natural understanding, to ‘let the world in’.

Another natural characterization is in terms of outreach. In perception,
we reach outt mentally to external things and make cognitive contact
with them. A very common theory of how perception works implies,
however, that these natural characterizations are misleading. According
to the common theory, what happens when we see is something like the
following.
An object, e.g. a cow, reflects light onto the photoreceptors of the
retinas of a subject’s eyes. The neural circuitry of the retinas converts
the electrical activity of the photoreceptors into action potentials (nerve
impulses) that travel to the brain via the optic nerve. The input from
the retinas is then processed by the brain in such a way that the subject
has a visual experience. The visual experience is a mental representation
of the cow, which is generated by the brain, or constituted by some-
thing in the brain. The same visual experience could have existed even
if the relevant brain processes had not been caused by light reflected
from an actual cow but rather by, say, the clever manipulation of the
brain by scientists.
To perceive is, on this model, not for the mind to let the world
in, or to reach out to it. It is, instead, to form inner representations of
worldly objects, such as cows, and have those representations ‘in mind’.
A representation of a cow is not a cow. Neither is it an objective fact
involving a cow. So perception does not allow our minds to embrace
worldly objects and facts. Perception is, instead, a process by which the
world causes certain internal modifications in the mind. The relationship
between the world and the mind is merely causal.
13
This means that perceptual experiences, according to this view, are

logically self-standingg in relation to the world that is perceived. There is
no internal or constitutive relationship between the world outside of
our heads and our experiences. And if perceptual experiences are self-
standing in this sense, then it is natural to assume that other mental
states are so as well. So my belieff that there is a cow before me could, in
principle, have existed even if no cows ever did.
The philosopher who is most closely associated with the idea that
the mental is self-standing is René Descartes. For Descartes, the mind is
an immaterial substance, and as such independent of the world in an
extremely strong sense: the mind exists independently of all material
conditions. This means that one can think without a brain.
But it is also possible to conceive of mental states as self-standing
without subscribing to the claim that the mind is independent of the
brain. One can, as in the cow-example, identify visual experiences with
brain states, but conceive those experiences as self-standing in relation
to the external objects and facts that they are about. ‘Cartesian materi-
alism’ is an appropriate label for this kind of view. Cartesian materi-
alism simply takes Descartes’ immaterial soul and replaces it with the
brain. The brain is the mind, and mental states are (or supervene on)
brain states.
It is well known that the Cartesian picture of the mind as logically
self-standing tends to generate philosophical problems. Maybe the most
important task that philosophy has set for itself during the last 300
years or so is that of ‘bridging the gulf’ between mind and world, or
(equivalently) ‘overcoming the divide’ between subject and object. If
the world is one thing, and the mind is another (independent) thing,
then there seems to be a problem about how our minds can get a hold of
the world. This has been called the ‘matching problem’.1 One aspect of
this problem is epistemological. If our perceptual experiences are self-
standing in the sense explained above, then it is logically possible that
we could have the same experiences as we actually have, even if the
world were radically different from what it (supposedly) is. If we are in
this predicament, and if we have no other access to the objective world
except through our experiences, how can we have knowledge about the
world?
But the epistemological part of the matching problem is not its most
troublesome aspect. In order for there to be a problem about how we
can have knowledge of the world, it must be possible for our thoughts
and experiences to be aboutt the world. The Cartesian picture of the
mind’s relation to the world threatens, however, to make even this
Bursting Descartes’ Bubble 15
‘aboutness’-relation unintelligible. According to the Cartesian picture,

our experiences of the world are related to the world itself in basically
the same way as smoke is related to fire (i.e., extrinsically, as effect and
cause). The experience of an object is, according to the picture, simply
a modification of another, independent object (the brain) – a modi-
fication that is caused by the first object. The so-called problem of
intentionality – an aspect of the matching problem – arises because
it is difficult to see how one object (or a certain state of that object)
can be aboutt another object. (‘Intentionality’ means ‘aboutness’. For
something [such as a mental state] to be about something else is for it
to represent that thing. To have intentionality, hence, is to have repre-
sentational content.)
The most popular line of response to the problem of intentionality
within contemporary philosophy is the attempt to show that the about-
ness-relation can be reconstructed from causal relations between the
world and the brain. Everybody agrees, however, that a simple causal
theory about intentionality will not do. Not everything that causes a
certain kind of representational mental state (e.g., a belief about a cow)
to occur is represented d by that kind of state. On a dark night the sight
of a horse may cause me to believe that a cow is present, but my cow-
beliefs do not therefore represent horses. There are various theories
that try to accommodate this problem, for instance by appealing to the
selected function of representational states or mechanisms (maybe it is
the selected function of certain neural circuits to light up in the pres-
ence of cows rather than horses). The project of accounting for inten-
tionality by ‘naturalizing’ it in this way is still in its infancy. There are
no theories of which it can be uncontroversially said that they succeed
in accounting for the representation of even simple physical properties
such as that of being a cow.
The difficulties encountered by the naturalization-project have led
some philosophers to recoil to idealism or anti-realism, which are
other possible responses to the matching problem. If the objects that
we perceive are made by the mind, or at least dependent for their exist-
ence on the mind, then there seems to be much less of a problem of
understanding how our thoughts can be aboutt those objects. Kant’s
transcendental idealism is the paradigmatic example of this kind of
response.
Today, however, an increasing number of philosophers argue that
there is an alternative way of responding to the matching problem. The
adequate way to deal with it, they suggest, is not to propose some solu-
tion to it, or to fall back upon idealism or some form of anti-realism, but
to question the Cartesian picture of the mind and its relationship to the world
that generates it.
Putnam, in his later thinking, exemplifies this move. Focusing on
perception, he writes:
I argued that our difficulty in seeing how our minds can be in

genuine contact with the ‘external’ world is, in large part, the product
of a disastrous idea that has haunted Western philosophy since the
seventeenth century, the idea that perception involves an interface
between the mind and the ‘external’ objects we perceive. In dual-
istic versions of early modern metaphysics and epistemology, that
interface was supposed to consist of ‘impressions’ (or ‘sensations’ or
‘experiences’ or ‘sense data’ or ‘qualia’), and these were conceived
as immaterial. In materialist versions the interface has long been
conceived of as consisting of brain processes.2
The interface model of our cognitive contact with the world is, according
to Putnam, not limited to just perception, but ‘early modern epistemology
and metaphysics saddled us with an interface conception of conception [i.e.,
thinking] as well’.3
Charles Taylor makes a similar point. He says that the idea that ‘we
can understand our grasp of the world as something that is in prin-
ciple separable from what it is a grasp of’ was ‘central to the original
Cartesian thrust that we are all trying to turn back and deconstruct’.
The Cartesian idea entailed that
on the one side, there were the bits of putative information in the
mind – ideas, impressions, sense data; on the other, there was the
‘outside world’ about which these claimed to inform us. The dualism
can later take other, more sophisticated forms. Representations can
be conceived, no longer as ‘ideas’ but as sentences, in keeping with
the linguistic turn, as we see with Quine. Or the dualism itself can
be fundamentally reconceptualized, as with Kant. Instead of being
defined in terms of original and copy, it is seen on the model of form
and content, mold and filling.4
Taylor calls the theories that posit such a separation between our cogni-
tive grasp of the world (constituted by representations) and the world
itself ‘representational’ or ‘meditational’ theories. Such theories paint
an ‘Inside/Outside’ picture of the mind’s relation to the world. Our
whole culture is, according to Taylor, in the grip of representationalist
perspectives, and this is why we can ‘entertain the nightmare of being

irremediably out of touch with the real’.5
The critique of Cartesian representationalism put forward by Putnam
and Taylor expresses a similar sensibility as, and draws on, the thinking
of John McDowell. The publication of the latter’s seminal work Mind
and Worldd in 1994 caused great excitement in the philosophical world.6
The book argues that in order for it to be intelligible how our thinking
can be about an objective world, it must be possible for the world itself
to rationally constrain our thinking. This is only possible if perceptual
experience ‘lets the world in’ by constituting a direct openness to worldly
facts.7 Mind and world must be conceived as ‘interpenetrating’.
McDowell is one of the most influential philosophers writing today,8
and it has been said that his philosophy of mind belongs ‘among the most
important contributions to analytical philosophy in the last century’.9
If one is looking for a radical and powerful critique of the Cartesian
picture of the mind, McDowell’s work is probably the best place to go.
I say this well aware of the importance of Ludwig Wittgenstein as an
anti-Cartesian thinker. McDowell’s philosophy of mind is, however,
largely built around Wittgensteinian insights. It seems to me that I have
understood more of Wittgenstein’s ideas about the mental by reading
McDowell than by reading Wittgenstein himself.10
In this book, I am going to argue for the possibility of acquiring
knowledge of a creator from perceptual experiences of nature. The argu-
ment will depend on McDowell’s view of perception as openness to
the world, an ‘intake’ of the world that presupposes conceptual capaci-
ties. McDowell’s view of perception belongs, however, in the context
of his general anti-Cartesian outlook on the mind and its relation to
the world. The outlook in question can be summarized in four claims
(which each will be explained at length as we proceed):
(1) Mental states with representational content are constitutively

dependent11 on the subject’s relations to the extra-mental environ-
ment (externalism about mental content).t
(2) Mental activity is not the manipulation of ‘representations’ in an
‘organ of thought’. Rather, the mind is a system of essentially world-
involving capacities.
(3) One such capacity is the ability to ‘take in’ the world through experi-
ence. Perceptual experiences are, when all goes well, cases of having
facts (the very elements that make up the world) directly manifested
to one. Perception constitutes a direct ‘openness to the world’ that
‘enables the layout of reality itself to exert a rational influence on
what a subject thinks’.12 If it is to be intelligible how perception can

play this role, it must be the case that
(4) Perceptual experiences have conceptually structured contents.
I will refer to the outlook expressed by these four claims as the (‘Open
Mind’) OM view. It is primarily the claims about perception ([3] and
[4]) that my argument in this book depends on. These claims, however,
must be understood against the background of the general view of the
mind expressed by claims (1) and (2).
There are other philosophers, besides McDowell, who can be viewed
as (at least partial) advocates of the OM view. Charles Taylor states that
he is in ‘massive agreement’ with the main line of McDowell’s thinking
in Mind and World, and seems to affirm the four claims above.13 Putnam
explicitly affirms all four.14 Gregory McCulloch’s position is very close
to McDowell’s in many respects.15 Then there are philosophers whose
thinking is congenial to the OM view in certain limited respects, such as
John Haldane (especially his Thomistic mind/world identity theory16),
David Braine,17 Lynne Rudder Baker,18 and Timothy Williamson.19
I will argue that the OM view opens up a new way of explicating the
traditional Christian idea that nature makes knowledge of a creator
available. To show this is the task of chapters 4–7. My argument is
only interesting, of course, if the OM view is reasonable and likely to
be true. In the present chapter I will explain and, to a certain extent,
defend claims (1) and (2) of the OM view. 20 In the next chapter, I will
turn to perception and recount McDowell’s main argument in Mind
and World. The focus in that chapter is on explaining and defending
claim (4) of the OM view. Claim (3) – which probably is the most
controversial – has radical consequences for our conception of percep-
tual evidence, and thereby also for our conception of rationality. The
claim entails that rationality is not transparent – i.e., that rational
subjects are not always (even when they are fully alert and reflect
on the matter) in a position to know whether their holding a certain
belief is rational or not. I have found that the implications of (3) are
best displayed if the claim is explained and discussed in the context
of my argument for the possibility of knowledge of a creator. This is
why I will postpone the major part of the discussion of this claim
until Chapter 4.
In the remainder of the present chapter, we will scrutinize two
central features of the Cartesian picture of the mind and see what the
benefits are of rejecting them. One of the features is internalism about
mental contentt and the other is the idea that thinking is the manipulation
of representations in an ‘organ of thought’. The corresponding features of

the OM view are externalism about mental contentt (claim 1) and the idea
that the mind is a system of essentially world-involving capacities (claim 2).
2.2 Internalism vs externalism
Descartes has drawn a picture of the mind/world relationship the main

contours of which are still visible in much contemporary philosophy.
There are different opinions about whether this picture is basically right
or if it constitutes a bad framework for thought. My view, and the view
of an increasing number of philosophers, is that the central features
of the Cartesian picture are wrong. The picture is something that (in
Wittgenstein’s words) ‘holds us captive’. The first step in escaping
captivity to a picture is to identify it as a picture. In this section, we
will start with Descartes’ own version of the picture and identify two
of its features. One is superficial (substance dualism); our focus will
therefore be on another feature, content internalism, which will be
contrasted with its enemy, content externalism. The deepest feature
of the Cartesian picture (the ‘organ of thought’ assumption) will be
addressed in later sections.
For Descartes, the mind (Soul) is a substance, which is literally a self-
standing thing: ‘By Substance’, Descartes writes, ‘we can understand
nothing else than a thing which so exists that it needs no other things
in order to exist’.21 There are two kinds of substances, viz. ‘thinking
substance’ and ‘extended substance’.22
The essence of the mind is to think. This means that ‘each mind must
always be thinking some thought or other, but particular thoughts
come and go and none of them is essential’.23 The activity of thinking
is thus inseparable from the mind. The mind is a ‘thinking thing’. Since
the mind can exist whether or not any bodies exist, and since the mind
is essentially a thinking thing, it must be possible for the mind to think
even if there were no bodies at all.
What, then, is thinkingg according to Descartes? ‘By the word thought’,
Descartes writes, ‘I understand all that of which we are conscious as oper-
ating in us’.24 So ‘doubting, understanding, affirming, denying, being
willing or unwilling, imagining, and all forms of sense-perception’ are
modi cogitandi – modes of thinking. ‘Thinking’, for Descartes, is the
general name for ‘all the operations of the soul’.25
To think involves being aware of ideas. The term ‘idea’, as Descartes
uses it, stands for ‘whatever the mind directly perceives [is aware of]’.26
The relationship between ‘thoughts’ and ‘ideas’ in Descartes’ philosophy
is obscure. Sometimes he seems to use them as synonyms.27 Sometimes

it seems that an ‘idea’ is the representational content of a thought.28
According to the traditional interpretation there are some ideas that
purport to represent material and other non-mental objects, but since
ideas are intra-mental items, they are distinct from the objects that they
represent. Anthony Kenny interprets Descartes thus: ‘Whenever I am
conscious of X or think of X, then I have an idea of X. If X is something
other than my own mental activity – say, the heat of the fire, or God –
then this idea is something distinct from X that represents X.’29
Descartes’ concept of an ‘idea’ as an inner representation, a modifi-
cation of the mind, is subsequently taken over by the British empiri-
cists, and ‘the Way of Ideas’ becomes the dominant paradigm within
early modern philosophy. For Locke, ‘the mind, in all its thoughts and
reasonings, hath no other immediate object but its own ideas, which it
alone does or can contemplate’.30 Furthermore, ‘it is evident the mind
knows not things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas
it has of them’.31
There are, for Locke, two kinds of ideas: ideas of sensation and reflec-
tion. The former are derived from the senses, and the latter from the
mind’s observation of its own activity (examples of the latter kind of
ideas: reasoning, believing, and doubting). Through sensation and
reflection we passively receive ‘simple ideas’. These ideas are the building
blocks from which the mind constructs complex ideas by relating and
combining the simple ones. The picture of the mind that emerges is one
in which the mind is absolutely self-contained:
The simple ideas we receive from sensation and reflection are the
boundaries of our thoughts; beyond which the mind, whatever
efforts it would make, is not able to advance one jot; nor can it make
any discoveries, when it would pry into the nature and hidden causes
of those ideas.32
Hume comes to similar conclusions with respect to self-containedness:
For philosophy informs us, that everything, which appears to

the mind, is nothing but a perception, and is interrupted, and
dependent on the mind: whereas the vulgar confound perceptions
and objects.33
So we are screened off from the world by a ‘veil-of-ideas’ or ‘veil-of

perception’, and thought is never able to make direct contact with
external facts or objects.34 This basic model for how our minds relate
to the world has been enormously influential. I suppose that many
educated people today would regard it as a piece of common sense that
we are never directly aware of external objects, but only of the impres-
sions that such objects make on us, on our minds. Our cognitive contact
with the world is mediated by mental representations.
Something like this view was, however, seldom considered before the
14th century. In order to soften the grip of the Cartesian picture, it can
be salutary to contrast it with St Thomas Aquinas’ view of thinking,
described by John Haldane as a mind/world identity theory.35
Aquinas’ view is based on a hylomorphic metaphysics (the view that
things consist of matter and form). Every particular object is what it
is in virtue of instantiating a form. To know an object means for the
mind to assimilate the formal principle of that object. The same form
then exists both in the object and in the mind. The form of an airplane,
for instance, is the functional organization of the parts of the plane
that makes it capable of flying. This same form can be instantiated in
many particular airplanes, but also in the mind. Forms have, however,
different modes of existence in objects and in minds – in the former
they have esse naturale, in the later esse intentionale.36 For Aquinas,
accordingly, ‘no intermediary object [such as a Cartesian or Lockean
Idea] stands between the knowing subject and the object known’.37
Instead there is formal identityy between the mind and the object. 38
Only in the 14th century did representationalism replace the
Aristotelian/Thomistic idea of mind/world identity (which, however,
continued to exert influence). William of Ockham proposed a represen-
tational theory of thought, according to which the mind relates to the
world by means of concepts that stand in causal relation to the external
world. Inner entities (concepts in a language of thought) are the direct
objects of cognition. In the 17th century Descartes was faced with both
the Aristotelian/Thomistic view and the Ockhamistic representational
theory of thinking. He settled for the latter.39
We have seen that the original Cartesian picture (faithfully repro-
duced by Locke and Hume) portrays the mind as self-standing or self-
contained. This can, however, be understood in two different senses.
For Descartes and Locke the mind is self-standing in the sense that
it is a substance that can exist whether or not any bodies exist. This
feature of the Cartesian picture – substance dualism – is generally
rejected by modern philosophers.40 There is, however, another feature
of the Cartesian picture that also emerges from the short review above.
This feature is internalism about mental content. Internalism expresses a
second, logical sense in which the mind is self-standing or self-contained,

a sense that can survive the demise of dualism.
Internalism, roughly, is the view that the mind and mental states are
‘inner’ entities, logically independent of circumstances that obtain in
the ‘external’ world. For immaterialists such as Descartes and Locke,
the inner realm is the immaterial mind. For materialistt internalists (i.e.,
Cartesian materialists), the mind and mental states are ‘inner’ in a much
more literal sense: the mind is conceived as being located inside the
physical boundary that marks the subject off from her environment –
the skin. Current definitions of internalism are usually formulated so as
to fit materialist versions of the doctrine. Here is one example of such
a definition:
What is it in virtue of which I am, at this moment, thinking a thought

[that water is wet]? ... [A] natural answer ... is that I am thinking this
thought due to the fact that my brain is in some particular state or
configuration. ... This is internalism; the facts in virtue of which I am
having this thought are facts about what is occurring inside me.41
What this definition says is that the fact that I am having a certain
thought is determined d (merely) by facts about what is occurring inside
me. A common way of understanding the determination in question is
in terms of supervenience, which is an asymmetric relation of depend-
ence or determination holding between properties. ‘A set of properties
A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ
with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their
B-properties.’42 For example, the shape of a surface supervenes on the
microphysical properties of the surface. This means that if the shape
changes, some of the microphysical properties of the surface must have
changed too. However, if some of the microphysical properties change,
it is not necessary that the shape changes (for instance, two molecules
could change place without the shape changing). So the determina-
tion-relation is asymmetric or ‘one-way’. Bartlett refers to the following
supervenience thesis as ‘traditional internalism’: ‘Each of a subject’s
mental states at [time] t supervenes on the subject’s internal physical
state at t.’43
Of course, it is only some of the subject’s internal physical states
or properties that are candidates for determining mental properties.
Nobody believes that, say, states of the liver are relevant in this respect.
So drawing the boundary between the internal and the external at
the skin of the subject is just a safety measure. The relevant internal
properties on which my mental states supervene are, according to most

internalists, properties of my brain.44
Internalism was, until quite recently, simply taken for granted by
most philosophers. This is why the view did not acquire an organized
defense until Hilary Putnam and others brought it out in the light and
began to question it in the mid-1970s. The attacks on internalism by
Putnam and others started what has been called ‘the externalist revolu-
tion’ within contemporary philosophy.45 This revolution has been very
successful. It has been said that content externalism is the dominant
view in the philosophy of mind today.46 ‘Externalism’, according to Åsa
Wikforss,
is widely perceived to have overthrown traditional theories ... of

the nature of psychological states. Indeed, externalism has been so
successful that the primary focus of today’s debate is not so much
on whether externalism is right or wrong, but rather on what its
implications are.47
Externalism about mental content is the view expressed by claim (1)

of the OM view. It is simply the denial of internalism. Externalists
deny that mental properties are exclusively determined by (supervene
on) properties inside the skin of the subject, such as brain-properties.
We can understand the difference between internalism and exter-
nalism by the following analogy. For externalism, (some) mental
properties are like the property of being a father. For internalists, on
the other hand, mental properties are like the property of being a
piece of gold.
Whether an object O is a piece of gold or not is determined by O’s
internal physical constitution. The world outside of O’s boundaries
is irrelevant for whether O is a piece of gold or not. For internalists,
mental states are independent of the subject’s environment in precisely
this sense. Internalists, of course, do not deny that mental states are
dependent on environmental factors in a causal sense of ‘dependent’.
They certainly admit that beliefs and other mental states are often
caused by things that happen outside the subject’s body. What they
deny is that mental states are individuation-dependentt on environmental
factors. They deny that what makes it the case that mental state M is the
mental state it is has something to do with circumstances outside the
body of the subject who has M.
Whether S is a father or not depends on whether there exists – or
has existed – another individual who is his child. There is hence a
logical (constitutive, internal) relation between the fact that S is a father

and the fact that there exists another person who is related to S in a
particular way. This means that the property of being a father has a
broader supervenience-base than S’s internal physical properties. Two
individuals could be exactly alike with respect to their internal phys-
ical properties, but only one of them is a father. Externalists claim that
mental properties are dependent on facts outside of the subject in this
way. Two individuals whose brains are molecule for molecule identical
could be in different mental states, provided that they are (or were) situ-
ated in different environments.
Externalism about mental content is a view that has emerged in
response to a set of famous thought experiments presented by Hilary
Putnam and Tyler Burge. In order to get a sense of the motivations behind
externalist construals of mental content (the latter being fundamental
for the OM view), we must take a brief look at one of these thought-
experiments, viz. Putnam’s ‘Twin-Earth’ scenario. It was originally put
forward as an argument for semantic externalism, but it was soon real-
ized that the thought experiment (and others with a similar structure)
has implications for mental content as well.
Putnam invites us to imagine a planet – Twin-Earth – that is exactly
like Earth, except for the following difference: the liquid that flows in
its lakes, rivers, etc. is not water, but a chemically different substance
with the formula XYZ.48 This substance, however, has the same surface
properties as water. It stimulates the sense organs in exactly the same
way as water (it tastes, looks, feels, etc. like water).
Suppose that Oscar lives on Earth in the year 1750 – before it was
discovered that water is H2O. He has a doppelgängerr on Twin-Earth,
Toscar, who is molecule-for-molecule (type-) identical with Oscar.49
This, of course, means that Toscar speaks the same language – English –
as Oscar. And even though we, for the purpose of this thought experi-
ment, call Toscar ‘Toscar’, on Twin-Earth he is, of course, known as
‘Oscar’. Moreover, everything that happens to Oscar also happens to
Toscar. When Oscar reads the Daily Chronicle on Earth, Toscar reads the
Daily Chronicle (i.e., its Twin-version) on Twin-Earth.
When Oscar uses the word ‘water’ he refers to the substance that
exists on earth – H2O. When Toscar uses the word ‘water’, on the other
hand, he refers to the substance that exists on Twin-Earth – XYZ. (How
could it be otherwise? Toscar has never been in contact with H2O, and
Oscar has never been in contact with XYZ.) This means that the exten-
sion of the term ‘water’ is different for Oscar and Toscar. The extension
of a term is the set of things it is true about. The extension of the term
‘water’, as used by Oscar, is the totality of all H2O molecules. For Toscar,
however, the extension of ‘water’ is the totality of all XYZ molecules.
If Toscar were to be transported to Earth and, confronted by a sample
of H2O, were to say ‘That’s water’, he would have said something false,
since when Toscar uses the word ‘water’ he is referring to the substance
that exists on Twin-Earth, viz. XYZ.
It is universally accepted that the extension of a term is determined
by the term’s meaning.50 If two terms have the same meaning, they
cannot be true of different things (have different extensions). Since the
term ‘water’ as used by Oscar is true of a different substance than the
term ‘water’ as used by Toscar, it seems that the term must have different
meanings for Oscar and Toscar. Since Oscar’s and Toscar’s brains are (ex
hypothesi) molecule-for-molecule identical, Putnam draws the famous
conclusion that ‘meanings ain’t in the head’.51
But what about the beliefs that Oscar and Toscar have about water?
When Oscar sincerely utters the phrase ‘water is wet’, he gives expres-
sion to one of his beliefs. Since the term ‘water’, as used by Oscar, refers
to the substance on earth (H2O), his belief is about that substance. It is
true if and only if H2O is wet. Toscar’s corresponding belief, however,
is true if and only if XYZ is wet. Toscar’s belief is therefore about a
different substance than Oscar’s, which means that it has a different
content. Furthermore, beliefs and other mental states with represen-
tational content are, on the most natural view, individuated by their
contents. If two beliefs have different contents (are about different
things, have different truth-conditions), then they are different beliefs.
This means that Oscar and Toscar have different beliefs, despite the fact
that they are molecular duplicates. This conclusion can be generalized
so as to apply to all of Oscar’s and Toscar’s propositional attitudes52
involving water.
Thought experiments of this kind have convinced many philosophers
that at least some mental properties do not supervene exclusively on the
subject’s internal properties.53 Some mental properties must, instead, be
conceived as relational, like the property of being a father.54
2.3 An organ of thought or a system of

world-involving capacities?
The externalist revolution within contemporary philosophy repre-

sents an important anti-Cartesian development. A great number of
philosophers today seem to believe that mind and world interpenetrate
in the sense that at least some intentional mental states (states with
representational content) have an identity that is determined by the

subject’s relations to the environment. But one can, as we will see, accept
externalism about mental content and yet adhere to the Cartesian idea
that the mind is an ‘organ of thought’. In this section, we will place the
spotlight on this deeper feature of the Cartesian picture.
What does it mean to conceive the mind as an organ of thought? It
means to conceive it as some kind of medium in which representations
are tokened. A representation is, to use McDowell’s definition, an item
that is purportedly aboutt something (represents something), but that
has an intrinsic nature characterizable independently of considering
what it is about.55 The sentence ‘dogs have four legs’ is a representation.
We can describe its intrinsic nature in terms of physical marks, without
mentioning anything about dogs. To claim that a (token-) belieff with
the content that dogs have four legs is a representation in this sense, is to
say that it also has an intrinsic nature characterizable without reference
to dogs. If the belief in question is identical to a brain state, it is clearly
a representation. Brain states can be characterized without reference
to dogs. The cash value of the metaphor that the mind is an organ of
thought, therefore, is the claim that mental states are representations.
The OM view denies that intentional mental states are representations
(claim [2]). This means, as we will now see, that the OM view entails the
rejection of what Lynn Rudder Baker has called ‘the Standard View’.
Baker defines the Standard View as the claim that propositional atti-
tudes (e.g. beliefs) ‘if there are any, are (or are constituted by, or realized
in) particular brain states’.56 This view is rightly called the ‘Standard
View’, since it covers most of the current philosophical theories about
the nature of mental states. The Standard View covers type-identity
theories, token-identity theories, ‘constitution’ theories, all forms of
functionalism, and eliminativism.
Type-identity theories express the view that every mental state-type is
identical with an internal physical-state type (most commonly, a brain
state-type).57 (I here use the type/token distinction. Types are general
properties, such as believing that snow is white. Tokens are particular,
dateable exemplifications or instances of such properties, such as Mats’
e 58 So type-identity theories
particular belief at time t that snow is white).
claim that types of mental states (such as the type feeling pain) can be
reduced to internal physical state-types (such as the neurophysiological
type having one’s C-fibres firing).g Token identity-theorists, on the other
hand, deny that mental state-types such as feeling pain are identical to
neurophysiological state-types. Instead they make the weaker claim
that (e.g.) all token-pains are identical with some brain state-tokens.
Both kind of identity theories fall under the Standard View, since
they entail that propositional attitudes are at least token-identical to
brain states.
There are, however, theories that do not identifyy propositional atti-
tudes with brain states, but instead claim that they are constituted d by
brain states in the way pebbles are constituted by molecules. Some
of the particular molecules constituting a particular pebble could be
replaced by other molecules without the pebble losing its identity, so
the pebble is, arguably, not identical to the totality of all molecules in it.
It is merely constitutedd by those molecules. A token-belief, likewise, can
be viewed as constituted by a brain state instead of being identical with
it.59 Constitution views also fall under the Standard View.
Functionalism is a theory, or class of theories, that defines propositional
attitudes in terms of functional roles, i.e., in terms of what they do. The
concept ‘heart’ (to give an analogy) is a functionally defined concept.
What makes X a heart is not its structural properties (what it looks like,
is made of, etc.) but the fact that it performs a certain function in the
body, viz. that it pumps blood. If propositional attitude-concepts and
other mental state-concepts are functional concepts, then what makes
it the case that X is, say, a belief that there is ice-cream in the shop, is that X
plays a certain characteristic role in the subject’s cognitive economy. ‘A
functionalist’, according to Baker, ‘may identify a particular mental state
with the occupant of the [functional] role (an internal state that realizes
that role) or with the second-order property of having a state that occu-
pies that role’. Most functionalists identify particular mental states with
the ‘realizer states’ themselves, i.e. (for materialists) brain states, and so
fall unproblematically under the Standard View.60 But even functional-
ists who identify a particular mental state – e.g. a particular pain – with
the state of having a state that plays the pain-role count as belonging to
the Standard View. To be in the state of having a state that plays the pain-
role is to have a brain state that plays the pain-role.
The Standard View, which claims that mental states eitherr are non-
existent (as ‘eliminativists’ hold) orr are identical to, or constituted by,
or realized in, brain states, is a version of the view that the mind (if it
exists) is an organ of thought – a medium in which representations are
tokened. The Standard View says that intentional mental states are (or
are constituted by or realized in) brain states, which means that they are
representations – items with an intrinsic nature characterizable without
reference to the worldly objects they purportedly represent.61
It could be argued that externalism about mental content is incom-
patible with the view that mental states are representations. Externalism
claims that intentional mental states have their identity (are what they
are) by virtue of the subject’s relations to the environment. Even though
Oscar and Toscar have identical brains, they have different beliefs
because their brains are situated in different environments. Does not
this entail that their beliefs cannot be representations located in their
brains?62
This conclusion does not follow, however. A mosquito-bite is what it
is (viz. a mosquito-bite) by virtue of being caused by a mosquito. So its
identity is determined by its relation to something outside its bound-
aries – a mosquito. The mosquito-bite, however, still has an intrinsic
nature that can be characterized without reference to mosquitoes (it is
a red protuberance on the skin). Beliefs and other intentional mental
states could be like mosquito-bites in this respect. They could have
a relationally constituted nature, but nevertheless be identical to (or
constituted by, or realized in) physical structures located in the brain
of the subject, and hence identical to (constituted by, realized in) some-
thing that has an intrinsicc nature characterizable without reference to
anything outside the subject’s body.63 Fred Dretske is an externalist who
claims that beliefs are like this. ‘Beliefs are in the head, but what makes
them beliefs, what gives them their intentional content, what makes
them aboutt something, are the relations in which these internal states
stand (or stood) to external affairs.’64
If content externalism, as suggested, is compatible with the Standard
View, then it is compatible with conceiving the mind as an organ of
thought. In order to move out of the Cartesian picture of the mind, it
is therefore not enough to reject internalism. Our re-conception of the
mind must go deeper and include a rejection of the idea that mental
states are representations, in McDowell’s sense of the term.
It is important to note that to deny that mental states are representa-
tions is not to deny the possibility of mental representing. g Representingg a
state of affairs (which is an act) does not necessarily involve having a
representation (an item) figuring in one’s mind/brain. The idea that the
act of representing the world as being a certain way must involve an item
that, somehow, ‘mirrors’ the world, is not obligatory. McDowell suggests
that there are cognitive acts – ‘representings’ – with an intrinsic nature
that cannot be characterized except in terms of intentional directed-
ness at the world.65
This view does not entail that there are only mental acts and no
mental states. There certainly are mental states, but they should not
be conceived as ‘inner’ items. The view of the mind that McDowell,66
Putnam,67 Haldane,68 Taylor,69 and others70 recommend (and which is
constitutive of the OM view) is that the mind is a system of capacities

that relate the person cognitively to the world, capacities that are essen-
tially world involving. The capacity to play tennis is essentially world-
involving, since it cannot be exercised unless there are tennis balls,
rackets, and other people. That capacity, furthermore, cannot be located
in any organ or part of the human body. It is certainly not located in
the brain, since a brain in a vat cannot play tennis. By exercising the
capacity to play tennis, one ends up being in certain states, like the state
of having won the Wimbledon title, or the state of having lost against one’s
neighbor.r Likewise, by exercising our mental capacities, we end up being
in mental states such as believing that p or knowing that p. Such mental
states are, like the state of having won Wimbledon, world-involving
states of the whole person, not states of some part (whether material
or immaterial) of the person.71 We might say that mental states are not
in us. We are in them, in the way it is said that someone is in a state of
excitement.72
An institution (to give an analogy) can be in a state of financial health,
even though this state cannot be identified with any particular internal
state of the institution. Its financial health is not, in other words,
located at some of the institution’s offices. It can, however, figure
straightforwardly in causal explanations.73 Baker provides an example:
‘The Lincoln Savings and Loan filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy because
of the state of its financial health, not because ... its officers were seeking
publicity’.74
Physical fitness (to take another analogy) is a state that animals can be
in, which is causally explanatory (‘the animal lagged behind because it
was not fit enough’) but which cannot be identified with any physical
particular inside the animal to which it is ascribed. It is quite conceiv-
able that mental states could be like the states of physical fitness or
financial health in this respect.75
It is true that there are straightforward causal relations between
happenings in the brain and happenings in the mind. If you poke in
somebody’s brain at a specific location, his mental state will (at least in
theory) change in a predictable way. However, if you poke somebody in
the liver, his state of physical fitness will also change in a predictable
way. This does not mean that the state of physical fitness is located in
the liver. You can change a person’s physical fitness by poking him
in the eye as well. Furthermore, if content externalism is true then
there are (at least in theory) ways of changing the contents of a person’s
mental states without affecting her brain in any way, viz. by changing
the environment.
2.4 An objection from science
The OM view claims, as we know, that thinking is not to be conceived

as the manipulation of representations in an organ of thought. But have
not cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and similar sciences
established that thinking is all about the manipulation of representa-
tions in an organ of thought?
There are, for instance, several visual areas in the brain such that each
seems to have a topographic representation – a map – of external space.
These areas project to each other. According to a common, rather well-
established theory, visual perception is an analytic process in which
different visual areas of the brain extract different types of information
from sensory inputs. Neurons in some areas are, for example, highly
sensitive to color variations, while cells in other areas respond to lines
of different orientation, edges, etc. A particular visual area, therefore,
does not encode all the features of a perceived object, but each area
provides its own limited analysis of the input. The information is then
integrated across the areas to form a percept of the object.76
It is, furthermore, clear that there are cells in the inferior temporal
lobe that selectively respond to complex and rather specific stimuli.
There is, for instance, an area in the so-called fusiform gyrus of the
ventral temporal lobe of the right hemisphere that seems to function as
a dedicated face-perception area, which is activated by the presentation
of faces and face-like features. Cells or cell-groups that respond to such
complex stimuli are usually called ‘gnostic units’.77
It is common, and quite natural, for neuroscientists to talk about gnostic
units as ‘representations’, and the response of such units as ‘signaling’ the
presence of the relevant objects. There is nothing objectionable in this
way of talking, as long as it is remembered that terms like ‘representation’
and ‘signaling’ only have metaphoricall applications to items in the brain.
Saying that a certain cell-unit signals the presence of a certain object
is, if taken literally, to say that the unit says something that can be true
or false, viz. that a certain object is present. This, of course, is not what
neuroscientists mean. What they mean is that there is a lawful causal
connection between objects in the world and the activity of cell-groups in
the brain. Causal connections of this kind do not, in themselves, consti-
tute epistemic relations such as signalingg or representing.
g
For some state, e.g. a belief, to represent things as being a certain way
(for instance, to represent that there are birds in the garden) is for that
state to stand in a normative relation to the world. If there are no birds
in the garden, then a belief that represents the garden as containing
birds represents it incorrectly.y ‘Incorrectly’ is a normative notion. To

represent something incorrectly – to misrepresent it – is to get that thing
wrong.
g The concept of representation is hence a concept that belongs in
a normative context, a context in which the notion of correctness is
applicable. This is why smoke cannot be said to representt fire. The pres-
ence of smoke without fire is not a case in which the smoke’s presence
can be said to be, somehow, incorrect. The normative context necessary
for the notion of representation to be applicable is missing.
The difference between, on the one hand, the normative relation
between a representation (or an act of representing) and what it repre-
sents and, on the other hand, the non-normative relation between
smoke and fire, can be accounted for in terms of a distinction between
two different logical ‘spaces’. When we talk about things as representing
other things, we are (implicitly) placing the things we are talking about
in ‘the logical space of reasons’.78 This logical space (not to be confused,
of course, with a physical space) is a space of normative relations. Besides
the relation of representing, there are other types of normative rela-
tions within this space. For instance, when we say that something, e.g.
a belief, is justified
d on the basis of certain evidence, what we are talking
about is a normative relation between the evidence and the belief. By
saying that the evidence justifies the belief, we are not just saying that
the evidence has caused us to have the belief in question. We are saying
something more, viz. that given the evidence one oughtt (ceteris paribus)
to have the belief. Rational relations (such as the relation of justifying,
or the relation of logical entailment) are normative relations. This is
why the logical space we are talking about is called the space of reasons.
Knowledge is a concept that belongs within the space of reasons, since
having knowledge entails having a reason (justification).
The distinction between the space of reasons and the other logical
space – called by McDowell ‘the realm of [natural] law’, and by Rorty
the logical space of ‘causal relations to objects’79 – is central to the OM
view. The distinction is originally due to Wilfrid Sellars, who says that
in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, g we are

not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are
placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able
to justify what one says.80
To give an ‘empirical description’ of something is, according to Sellars,

to place the item or episode in question within the realm of law. We can
understand how placing something within the realm of law differs from
placing it within the space of reasons by considering two different ways

in which we can make the fact that a person S believes that p intelli-
gible. We can give a causal explanation of how S acquired the belief that
p (maybe he was hit with a hammer in the head, or maybe a perceptual
experience caused the belief). This is the kind of intelligibility sought
by natural science. Providing (merely) a causal explanation is to place
the occurrence to be explained in the logical realm of law. However,
we can give a different type of explanation of why S believes that p.
We can say that S has a sufficient reason to believe that p, for instance
that he has seen that p. This is not equivalent to (but compatible with)
saying that a perceptual experience caused d the belief in question, since
to say that S’s experience gave him a sufficient reason to believe that p
is a normative claim. It implies that S, ceteris paribus, oughtt to believe
that p, given what he saw. Saying that an experience caused the belief,
in contrast, is a claim that in itself is neutral on the reasonableness of S’s
believing that p, given the experience.81
After this excursus into the distinction between the space of reasons
and the realm of law (a distinction we will encounter again), we may
now return to the issue at hand, i.e. the question of whether science
has shown that there are items in the brain that have representational
properties. We have seen that the notion of representing is a notion that
belongs within a normative logical space, the space of reasons, and that
it therefore is doubtful whether items in the brain (which seem to relate
to each other and to the environment merely causally) can be said to
be representations.
The idea that items in the brain could have representational proper-
ties, and that our intentional mental states therefore could be identical
with brain states cannot, however, be dismissed that easily. There exists
a very respectable philosophical research program that is committed to
the idea that concepts and relations within the space of reasons (such
as representation, signaling, meaning, justifying, knowing)g will eventually
be satisfactorily explicated in terms of causal relations between brain
states, behavior, and the environment. If this research program were
to succeed, then we would have strong reasons to believe that prop-
ositional mental states are (or are realized in) items in the brain that
stand in the appropriate causal relations to behavior and the environ-
ment. This research program has, however, encountered great difficul-
ties, most notably in connection to the so-called disjunction problem.82
The principal problem encountered is the difficulty of reconstructing
the normative character of ‘space of reasons’ relations in terms of non-
normative properties and relations such as causal relations.
Presently, there seems to be little reason to believe that the reduc-

tionist research program will succeed. Hilary Putnam has said that
the task of trying to show that the referential directedness of our

thinking at the objects we think about can be constituted out of or
in some way ‘reduced to’ the causal impacts of those objects upon us
[is a task] so hopeless that philosophers have repeatedly been led to
recoil to one or another version of idealism.83
The main reason why many people still have confidence in the reduc-
tionist project is that they believe that it mustt be capable of succeeding.
This conviction is, in turn, usually based on a metaphysical belief, viz.
that the only properties and relations that really exist are those that the
paradigmatic natural sciences talk about. If the (paradigmatic84) natural
sciences only talk about non-normative properties and causal or law-
like relations (as they do), then eitherr it must be possible to reduce seem-
inglyy normative properties such as knowing, g justifyingg, and representingg to
properties and relations that figure in natural scientific descriptions of
the world, or else normative properties and relations must really be non-
existent, as ‘eliminativists’ claim.
The assumption that everything that ultimately exists is what natural
science says exists is unwarranted and should be rejected.85 If we reject
it, we do not have much reason to believe in the reductionist research
program. A prima facie much more plausible view is that our talk about
intentional mental states (and other things within the space of reasons)
picks out patterns of reality that cannot be discerned from a natural
scientific perspective. This view does not entail that intentionality
and the space of reasons somehow float free of the physical world. The
phenomenon of economic inflation cannot be discerned from a natural
scientific perspective either, but this does not mean that inflation must
take place in some spooky, non-material part of reality.
Whatever one believes about the prospects of the reductive research
program, it is clear that at the present time, it is false to claim that science
has shown that thinking is the manipulation of representations in the
mind/brain. Terms like ‘thinking’ and ‘mental’ are not scientifically well-
defined terms. One can accept all the findings of the cognitive neuro-
sciences, and yet deny that thinking is the manipulation of representations
in the mind/brain. As McCulloch points out: ‘It is one thing to say that
my understanding of ‘cat’ is made possiblee by certain internal structures
howsoever described and quite another to say that it is constituted d by
them.’86 It is certainly the case that our ability to think about the world
requires that there are items in the brain which display isomorphism with
and causally co-vary in intricate ways with features of the environment,
and which interact in lawful ways with each other.87 This does not mean,
however, that these items are representations in anything near the sense in
which we ordinarily use this term.88 And it certainly does not mean that
thoughts (or perceptions) are identical to such items in the brain. What it
means is only that these causal processes in the brain, and between the
brain, body and environment, are necessary conditions for thinking.89
Denying that talk about mental phenomena is reducible to talk about
brain states does not, of course, commit one to believing that cognitive
neuroscience is a waste of time. I certainly believe that cognitive neuro-
science can provide extremely interesting insights about the biological
factors that shape and constrain our thinking. But one can acknowledge
the fruitfulness of natural scientific studies of cognition without believing
that there is a straightforward relation between our talk about the mental,
on the one hand, and neurophysiological phenomena, on the other.
It is easy to see why it can be tempting, when one studies cognition
from a natural scientific perspective, to assume that the mind is an organ
of thought, and that the problem simply is to show how the mind is real-
ized in the brain. The connections that can be drawn between the brain
and the mental realm are, on this model, simple. However, when one
scrutinizes the ‘organ of thought’ model from a philosophical perspec-
tive, one becomes aware of the extent to which this model is responsible
for determining the shape of philosophical problems that have plagued
Western philosophy since the 17th century. The philosophically prob-
lematic nature of the model must be taken into account when we
consider how to interpret the findings of the cognitive neurosciences.
2.5 Dissolving a problem
The major problem caused by the ‘organ of thought’ view is the enormous
difficulty of explaining how intrinsically non-representational items,
tokened in an organ of thought, can acquire representational proper-
ties – how they can be aboutt things in the world. This is the so-called
problem of intentionality. Remember that a representation, according to
our definition, is an item that purportedly represents something but
which has an intrinsic nature characterizable without reference to what
it purportedly represents.90 Representations are, in themselves, nothing
more than vehicles of meaning, like linguistic signs. In the case of
linguistic signs – words and sentences – we can account for their repre-
sentational power by reference to how humans interpret them. It is we
who connect intrinsically non-representational items (strings of letters

or sounds) with the things they represent by interpreting them one way
rather than another. The same solution is not, however, applicable if
mental states are conceived (in accordance with the organ of thought-
view) as representations. This is because an ‘interpretation’ is itself a
mental state and hence (according to the ‘organ of thought’ view) a
representation. If there is a problem about how mental states, conceived
as representations, can acquire representational power, then it will do
no good to appeal to further mental states that are supposed to interpret
them. How do these get their representational power?91
Wittgenstein’s reflections on rule-following are, according to
McDowell, very relevant in this context. On McDowell’s reading they
show that the idea that mental states are representations (‘items that,
considered in themselves, just “stand there like a sign-post”’92) leads
to extremely counterintuitive and problematic consequences, e.g. that
‘no matter what is in my mind at a given time, I am free in the future
to interpret it in different ways’.93 Wittgenstein does not, as some inter-
preters have contended,94 accept those consequences and then try to
find a way to live with them. Instead, he recommends that we reject
the basic assumption from which they follow, viz. that mental states are
intrinsically non-representational items in need of being ‘connected’
to the world through interpretation (or through some naturalistically
respectable mechanism).95
If there is (as we have seen) no need to conceive of mental states as
representations, then we are free to think of them, much more natur-
ally, as entities ‘to whose very identity [a] normative link to the objective
world is essential’. On the latter view, intentional mental states are essen-
tiallyy and intrinsicallyy about the world. McDowell writes:
if I close my eyes and visualize, say, my wife’s face, it seems wildly

wrong to suggest [as the view that mental states are representations
does] that the fact that what I am visualizing is my wife’s face – a
fact that relates my mental state to the extra-psychological environ-
ment – is extraneous to the contents of my consciousness.96
McDowell’s thought (his visualization) is what it is in virtue of being

about his wife’s face, and the thought has no intrinsic nature that can
be characterized without reference to his wife’s face. His thought is not
a representation.
The problem of intentionality is, as we remember, the problem of how
intrinsically non-representational items can acquire representational
properties. The way out of this problem is the one just suggested:
to reject the assumption that mental states are intrinsically non-
representational items, which means rejecting the idea that the mind is
an organ of thought. We need not assume that mental states are iden-
tical to (or constituted by, or realized in) items in the brain any more
than we need to assume that a healthy person’s state of physical fitness
is identical to some item in her body. We could, instead, conceive of
intentional mental states as world-involving states of the whole person –
states that belong to a different level of description than the natural-
scientific. This view does not, of course, constitute a solution to the
problem of intentionality. Some problems, however, are better dissolved
than solved.
It could be objected that we still owe some explanation of how holistic
states of human beings can be intrinsically world-involving (have inten-
tionality). In virtue of whatt do they have intentionality? This question
may seem legitimate, but what it asks for is really a reduction of inten-
tionality to other, more basic, properties. Jerry Fodor has famously said
that
sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they’ve been
compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When
they do, the likes of spin, charm and charge will perhaps appear upon
their list. But aboutness surely won’t; intentionality simply doesn’t
go that deep ... If the semantic and intentional are real properties of
things, it must be in virtue of their identity with ... properties that
are themselves neitherr intentional norr semantic. If aboutness is real,
it must be really something else.97
In section 2.4 it was argued (and it will be further argued in the next
chapter) that the concepts belonging within the space of reasons could
plausibly be regarded as irreducible, sui generis (and so the phenomena
that those concepts pick out). The demand for a reductive explanation
of intentionality arises only against the background of the ‘scientistic’
presumption (embraced by Fodor in the quote) that the ultimate and
irreducible properties of the world are properties that figure in the
theories of physicists or future physicists. If that presumption is rejected,
we need not feel the pressure to think of intentionality as ‘really some-
thing else’. We can, instead, take it as an irreducible property of minds,
conceived as systems of world-involving capacities in persons.
3
Perception and Concepts
In the previous chapter, I have elaborated on the first two claims consti-
tutive of the ‘Open Mind’ (OM) view:
(1) Mental states with representational content are constitutively

dependent on the subject’s relations to the extra-mental environ-
ment (externalism about mental content).
t
(2) Mental activity is not the manipulation of ‘representations’ in an
‘organ of thought’. Rather, the mind is a system of essentially world-
involving capacities.
The first claim is, as almost all claims within philosophy, controversial,
but not exceedingly so. Content externalism in some form seems to be
accepted by a majority of philosophers. The second claim is much more
contested. I have drawn attention to considerations that speak in favor
of it and pointed to a serious problem related to the ‘organ of thought’
view. In what follows, the extent of the problems that plague that view
will become clearer as we study perception. The case for conceiving the
mind as a system of essentially world-involving capacities (claim [2] of
the OM view) will then be further strengthened.
The primary task of the present chapter, however, is to explain and
elaborate on the two reminding constituents of the OM view. These are,
as we might recall, the claims that:
(3) Perceptual experience is a direct openness to the world that ‘enables

the layout of reality to exert a rational influence on what a subject
thinks’.
(4) Perceptual experiences have conceptually structured contents.
37
McDowell argues for both these claims (which have a rather intimate
but yet intricate connection) in his seminal work Mind and World. A
problem that is only cursorily addressed in Mind and World, however,
is the problem of misleading experiences. Experiences such as percep-
tual illusions and hallucinations cannot, obviously, be said to be cases
of openness to the objective world. Such experiences, however, can be
indistinguishable (for the subject having them) from veridical experi-
ences. It has been argued that the possibility of hallucinations and illu-
sions undermines the idea that experiences, even when veridical, properly
can be characterized as cases of direct openness to the world.
This conclusion is, however, resisted by a school of thought that
has received a lot of attention within the philosophy of perception
lately. McDowell is a prominent representative of this school, which
is commonly known as ‘disjunctivism’. McDowell’s version of disjunc-
tivism will form an important part of my own argument in this book, and
I will explain and defend it primarily in Chapter 4. However, since the
argument of Mind and World d is easier to grasp against the background of
a general understanding of disjunctivism and how it differs from ‘inter-
face’ conceptions of perception, we will now briefly turn to disjunc-
tivism before we move on to the main argument of Mind and World,
which is about the involvement of concepts in perceptual experience.
3.1 The interface model of perception

and its ‘disjunctivist’ enemy
When reflecting on his own philosophical development, Hilary Putnam

writes:
In the course of the past fifteen years I have come increasingly to

appreciate the degree to which our present view of what the live
philosophical alternatives are depends precisely on a very broad, if
vague, consensus on the nature of perception.1
The consensus Putnam talks about concerns the assumption that

perception involves interfaces between us and the world. The most
straightforward versions of the interface view hold that whatt we imme-
diately perceive when we look at, say, a tomato, is not the tomato itself,
but some mental entity such as an ‘impression’, a ‘sense-datum’ or some
other kind of representation.2 According to materialistic versions of this
view, the mentioned entities are ultimately to be identified with brain
states. Perception, on this model, is indirect.
Perception and Concepts 39
The obvious alternative is to view perception as being direct. To see

a tomato is not to perceive a representation of a tomato (‘impression’,
‘sense-datum’). It is to have the real tomato itself ‘in mind’, i.e., to
perceive it directly rather than by means of some ‘interface’. Perceptual
experiences, on this view, are not ‘inner’ entities. They are cognitive
relations to real-world objects. The mind ‘reaches out’ in the objective
world.
If perception is like this, then perceptual experiences are individu-
ation-dependent on real-world objects. Experiences, in other words,
‘include’ real-world objects ‘within’ them as constitutive elements. Since
the experience I am having when I look at a certain tomato ‘includes’
the tomato itself as a constitutive element, it follows that it is logic-
ally impossible for me to have the same experience in the absence of
the tomato. If I, for instance, hallucinated a tomato that looked exactly
like the real one, that experience would nevertheless not be identical
to the one I am having when looking at the real tomato. The diffe-
rence between the hallucinatory experience and the veridical one is,
furthermore, not external to the mental states that occur in the two
cases. The two experiences must therefore be conceived as two qualita-
tively different mental states, despite the fact that they are indistinguish-
able from the subject’s point of view.
The only appropriate description of the mental state that occurs in
both the veridical perception and the (subjectively indistinguishable)
hallucination is, according to this view, a disjunctive description: the
mental state is eitherr a seeing of a tomato, orr an experience of some
other kind.3 This is why the recounted view is commonly known as
‘disjunctivism’. Disjunctivism is the currently most popular form of
direct realism, and it has, as we will see, an important role to play in the
dismantling of the Cartesian divide between mind and world.
Today it is out of fashion to claim – as early modern philosophers
often did – that perception is ‘indirect’ in the sense that the objects of
perception (whatt we perceive) are intra-mental entities such as impres-
sions or sense-data.4 Most contemporary philosophers aspire to wear
the mantle of ‘direct realism’. However, to reject the claim that the
objects of perception are intra-mental entities is not necessarily to reject
the ‘interface’ conception. John Haldane has helpfully distinguished
between ‘old’ and ‘new’ versions of representationalism (another
name for the ‘interface’ conception). Old versions claim that represen-
tations such as impressions or sense-data are the foci of perception.5
New versions, on the other hand, deny that we perceive representations,
but still picture perception as mediated d by representations.6 So-called
intentionalistt theories, for example, claim that perception is direct,

i.e., that the objects of perception are the mind-independent physical
objects in the world. However – and this is the crucial thing – they
also claim that the character (or nature, or identity) of a perceptual
experience is independent of the object perceived. So the same experi-
ence one has when one sees a tomato at location L could exist even if
no tomato existed at L. One could therefore say that intentionalism
construes the experiences themselves as the interface between the subject
and the world.
The claim that intentionalism is a form of ‘direct realism’ has been
criticized by Putnam:
All one has to do to be a direct realist (in this sense) about visual
experiences ... is to say, ‘We don’t perceive visual experiences, we have
them.’ A simple linguistic reform, and, Voila! one is a direct realist.7
Putnam’s point is that ‘new’ versions of representationalism are not

essentially different from ‘old’ ones. Perceptual experiences are still
conceived as being logically independent of the real-world objects that
we perceive, and both ‘new’ and ‘old’ versions of representationalism
therefore entail that ‘perceptual experience is not really openness to
the world, in the sense that it does not essentially involve a relation
to its objects’.8 McDowell says that ‘I am skeptical whether a concep-
tion of experience as anything but an interface is available within the
dominant contemporary philosophy of mind’.9
Why, then, is the ‘interface’ model (in either its old or new versions)
tempting? The most perspicuous way of motivating it is the ‘argument
from illusion/hallucination’.10 In order to recount (a version of) the
argument we need the concept of a case. A case is a possible world with
a distinguished subject and time (i.e., a ‘centered’ possible world).11 In
the good case the subject sees a tomato. But it is possible to conceive
of a badd case – a case that, from the subject’s point of view, is indis-
tinguishable12 from the good case, but in which no tomato is present.
Imagine, for instance, that the subject is hallucinating a tomato. The
argument is that since the bad case is indistinguishable, for the subject,
from the good case, it follows that the subject’s experiential intake –
what she ‘embraces within the scope of [her] consciousness’13 in having
the experience – must be the same in the good and the bad case. With
the help of the lemma that the subject’s experiential intake is the same
in the good and the bad case, the argument concludes that the subject’s
experiential intake is never the objective factt that a tomato is present.
In other words: when one sees a tomato, something becomes avail-

able to one’s thinking, something that can constitute the experiential
basis of a judgment or a belief. Here are two suggestions about what this
‘something’ could be:
(1) that a tomato is present.

(2) that it seems to one as iff a tomato is present.
It is natural to assume that what becomes available is (1). The possi-

bility of a bad case complicates the situation, however. The bad case is,
by definition, subjectively indistinguishable from the good case. When
the subject hallucinates a tomato, she is not in a position to know that
she is not in the good case, i.e., that she is not really seeing a tomato.
The subjective indistinguishability between the cases means, according
to the argument, that the ‘something’ that becomes available to the
subject’s thinking through an experience must be the samee in the good
and (a possible) bad case. It follows that what becomes available cannot –
even in the good case – be that a tomato is present (1). This is because
no tomato is present in the bad case. What becomes available could,
however, be (2). Both when there really is a tomato present and when one
hallucinates a tomato, it seems to one as if a tomato is present. Proposition
(2) is hence the ‘Highest Common Factor’ (HCF) between the good and
the bad case.14 The HFC is (the argument concludes) the ‘something’ that
becomes available to the subject’s thinking through the experience.
This conclusion can be generalized to all our experiences. For any
experience, there is a possible bad case, and what we ‘take in’ through
the good case-experience (what we ‘mentally embrace’ in it) cannot be
different from what we ‘take in’ through the bad case-experience. This
means that we neverr mentally embrace objective facts in experience
(such as the fact that a tomato is present).t What we ‘take in’ is always
merely some ‘perception/illusion neutral entity’ such as that it seems
to one as if a tomato is presentt (the HCF).15 Experience, therefore, is not
openness to the objective world.16
This argument is, however, fallacious. From the fact that the bad
case is subjectively indistinguishable from the good case it does not
follow that the subject’s experiential intake is the same in both cases. A
symphony by Mozart can be indistinguishable, for S, from a symphony
by Haydn. This, however, does not entail that what S hears when she
listens to the Mozart symphony is the same as (i.e. qualitatively iden-
tical to) what she hears when she listens to the Haydn symphony. The
reason why the subject cannot distinguish the two symphonies must
not necessarily be that they are identical. It could be that the subject’s
powers of discrimination are limited.
It is therefore possible that what the subject embraces within the scope
of her consciousness is differentt in the good and the bad cases. This is the
possibility that disjunctivism exploits. Nothing prevents us from holding
that two subjectively indistinguishable experiences could be of funda-
mentally different natures. (Compare: a gun and a toy-gun can, under
certain circumstances, be indistinguishable for a person, but have never-
theless fundamentally different natures: one is a piece of metal, the other
a piece of plastic.) What two fundamentally different kinds of experi-
ences make experientially available can, of course, be two different kinds
of facts (in the good case, the fact that there is a tomato present; in the
bad case, merely the fact that it seems as though a tomato is present).
The claim that mental things, such as experiences, can seem to be
identical for the subject without beingg identical violates a certain
Cartesian assumption. The assumption is that the mind is a ‘region of
reality whose layout is transparent – accessible through and through’.17
We have, in other words, infallible access to everything that occurs in
the mind. This means that if two experiences seem to be identical, then
they are identical. In the mind, esse est percipi.
Stated this bluntly, the Cartesian view is obviously false. We all know
that there are mental things (such as repressed desires and childhood
memories) that sometimes are inaccessible to the subject. But even if we
abandon the idea that the mind in its entirety is ‘accessible through and
through’ and restrict the subject’s infallibility to certain types of mental
states, such as experiences, the view is still false. There cannot be entities
such that whenever they seem identical (in the sense of being subject-
ively indistinguishable), they are identical. The reason is that identity is
a transitive relation, while indistinguishability is non-transitive.18
We should therefore reject (as most philosophers today seem inclined
to do) the Cartesian assumption about the transparency of the mind (or
a certain region of the mind),19 and instead admit that our experiences
can have properties that are sometimes inaccessible to us. This allows us
to embrace the ‘disjunctvist’ understanding of perceptual experiences
as (when all goes well) cognitive relations to external objects. In percep-
tual experience, mind and world ‘interpenetrate’. In the next section
and the following chapter, we will see that there are strong reasons to
accept this view of experience.
The natural home of disjunctivism is the view of the mind reviewed
in Chapter 2 – the mind understood as a system of essentially world-
involving capacities. Disjunctivism, as we have seen, portrays our
perceptual capacities as essentially world-involving. A veridical experi-

ence of a tomato ‘includes’ the tomato itself, or at least a fact involving a
tomato.20 The experience is not an ‘inner’ item – an interface – between
the subject’s cognitive powers and the world.
Although ‘disjunctivists’ deny that perception is mediated by inter-
faces (the HCF), they do not deny that there are causal intermediaries
involved. Perception is clearly dependent on a causal process that
involves light reflected from external surfaces to the retina, and which
continues into the brain. But when we talk about things like ‘sense-
data’, ‘qualia’, or ‘experiences’ (the kind of ‘intermediaries’ posited by
interface-theories), we are moving on a different level of description
than the natural-scientific, causal one. For example, sense-data is some-
thing that one is aware of, and the relation of awareness is a cognitive
relation, not a relation that belongs in the context of natural-scientific
description.21 The claim that perception is cognitivelyy direct is (I think
most philosophers would agree) compatible with the fact that it super-
venes on a causal process.
‘Disjunctivists’ like Putnam and McDowell, furthermore, do not deny
that our perceptual awareness of the world is mediated by concepts – the
latter being understood, however, not as inner representations but as
capacities. The central theme of McDowell’s Mind and World d is ‘the way
concepts mediate the relation between minds and the world’.22 Clarifying
how our conceptual capacities are involved in perception is crucial for
making it intelligible how perception can be openness to the world, and
therefore crucial in dismantling the Cartesian divide between mind and
world. In considering these issues, McDowell is led to reconsider the
received view of the relationship between nature and reason.
We will now acquaint ourselves with the main line of argument in
Mind and World. I will, in the course of the presentation, also refer to
ideas found in other works by McDowell, and to some of T.F. Torrance’s
ideas that I find congenial.
3.2 Perception and concepts:

the argument of Mind and World
3.2.1 Conceptual capacities and the space of reasons

Suppose I think that there are birds in the garden. This is an empirical
thought, a thought that is about the world. It represents the world
as being a certain way. (Recall that talk about representation does not
commit one to the existence of ‘representations’ – some kind of inner
items.)
It would make little sense to say that a certain thought of mine is

aboutt the world if it cannot be evaluated as being correctt or incorrect
depending on how the world happens to be. If there are no birds in the
garden, then my thought represents the world incorrectly. ‘Correctly’
and ‘incorrectly’ are normative notions. This means that the relation
between empirical thoughts and the world has a normative dimen-
sion.23 Thoughts that purport to be about the world must, so it seems,
be conceived as ‘answerable to the world’.24 The world is, on this natural
understanding, a tribunal that determines whether our thoughts
represent it correctly or incorrectly.
The only way by which the world can impact normatively on our
thought is through sensory experience. ‘How can we understand the
idea that our thinking is answerable to the empirical world’, McDowell
asks, ‘if not by way of the idea that our thinking is answerable to
experience?’25 In order for it to be intelligible that empirical thoughts
have content (are aboutt the world), there must be a way of conceiving
thoughts as answerable to sensory experience.
The relation that we must suppose obtains between empirical thoughts
and sensory experience is, as we have seen, normative, and belongs
hence within the logical space of reasons (see 2.4). The space of reasons
is, as McDowell says, the space ‘within which thought moves, and its
topography is that of the rational interconnections between concep-
tual contents’.26 Rational interconnections cannot hold between rocks,
ping-pong balls or clouds. A rock cannot justify, probabilify, or refute
anything. A proposition about a rock can, however, do all these things.
Only between items that have a conceptual structure (such as prop-
ositions, sentences, beliefs) can rational relations obtain. The space of
reasons is therefore the space of concepts. This, at least, is what philoso-
phers like Sellars, Davidson, Rorty, and McDowell claim.27
To possess concepts is, according to a common view embraced by
McDowell, to have certain abilities.28 Possessing the concept ‘red’
entails, for example, having a certain recognitional ability – the ability
to relate one sensory experience to another (they are both of some-
thing red), and being able to distinguish between red and other colors.
However, photocells can ‘distinguish’ between light and darkness, and
smoke detectors can ‘recognize’ smoke. We do not normally credit such
things with having concepts. A conceptual capacity implies something
more. Concepts stand in rational relations to each other, relations that
are meaning-constitutive. For example, in order to grasp the concept
‘red’, you have to understand that surfaces of objects can be red, but
not odors, and that there are other colors besides red. A person without
these insights would not count as mastering the concept ‘red’. So having
a certain concept means that you must master other concepts and also
have the ability to form judgments containing the concept, such as ‘this
thing is red’. A person who masters the concept must also be able to
justifyy such judgments, for instance by saying ‘I think it is red because
I can see that it is red’ or ‘because it looks red’. A person who could not
justify the judgment at all, or who tried to justify it by saying ‘because
I can smell that it is red’ would awake the suspicion that she has not
really mastered the concept.29
Conceptual capacities, in this demanding sense, can only properly
be ascribed to creatures, such as ourselves, who are engaged in ‘active
empirical thinking’.30 As rational animals, we are constantly engaged
in the activity of decidingg what to think and how to judge on the basis
of rational considerations. We do not just accept every thought or belief
that pops into our heads. We ask for its rational credentials. (‘Is this really
a zebra? I had better take a closer look.’) McDowell uses the Kantian
term ‘spontaneity’ to describe the capacity for such reflective thought.
Spontaneity has, as the term suggests, a link to the idea of freedom. To
deliberate and, on the basis of rational considerations, actively make up
one’s mind as to how things are is something that implies free action –
‘free’ in the Kantian sense, according to which ‘rational necessitation is
not just compatible with freedom but constitutive of it’.31 Everybody has
to admit that the idea of being guided by norms of rationality is very
different from the idea of merely having one’s behavior determined by
natural law. One way to capture this difference is to link the former idea
to freedom, as Kant does.
Kant characterizes our cognitive equipment in terms of different facul-
ties. The understandingg is the faculty of spontaneity – the faculty that is
responsible for conceptual thought. The complement to our spontan-
eity is our receptivity. We cannot know any contingent facts about the
world – or even think about some aspect of the world – unless we are
‘affected’ by the world, unless we somehow are receptive in relation to it.
Kant talks about our sensibility,y which is the faculty of receptivity. Kant,
furthermore, talks about whatt we receive as ‘intuitions’, which, roughly,
can be described as ‘bits of experiential intake’.32 It is all too easy, but
probably not correct, to picture Kantian intuitions as something like
sense-data. We should avoid this picture, and instead simply view intui-
tions as the sensible aspect of our ‘openness to the world’.
We have earlier encountered the Sellars/McDowell distinction between
the space of reasons and the realm of law. We have also mentioned
Kant’s emphasis on the spontaneity of the understanding – our ability
to be responsive to rational relations. Both these ideas express the same

insight, viz. that there is an aspect of our cognitive lives that can only
be captured in terms of normative concepts. The space of reasons is sui
generis – ‘of its own kind’ – which means that the concepts belonging
to this space are irreducible. It is not possible to explicate concepts like
‘evidence’, ‘representation’, and ‘knowledge’ in non-normative terms.
There are, as we have seen, those who disagree with this. Bald natur-
alism, as McDowell calls it, is ‘a reductionism which seeks to reduce our
normative notions to notions in the realm of law, or, alternatively, to do
without them’.33 ‘Bald naturalism’ denies that the distinction between
the logical spaces is ultimate. The space of reasons is not sui generis.
We have encountered versions of bald naturalism in the form of
theories that try to explicate representational content in terms of causal
relations. The aim is to explain what it is for (e.g.) a belief to be about
something in terms of how items in the world are causally related to
items in the brain. If this project were to succeed, then it could be
claimed that the seemingly normative notion of ‘representation’ can be
understood without reference to a sui generis space of reasons.
Instead of going along with this project (the prospects of which look
bleak) we should accept the sui generis character of the space of reasons.
This is the recommendation of philosophers like Sellars, Davidson,
Rorty, and McDowell. To follow this recommendation is to see ourselves
as creatures whose thinking is characterized by spontaneity. We are free
creatures (in the Kantian sense) who actively make up our minds about
how things are in the objective world by constructing, applying and
evaluating concepts. Even if this is an attractive and (in comparison
to many crude, reductionist portrayals) intuitively plausible picture,34
it nevertheless raises an important and difficult question: How is our
spontaneity related to our receptivity?
3.2.2 Spontaneity and receptivity

Here is the problem that this question points to. Our construction and
use of concepts must, somehow, be constrained by the deliverances
of our sensibility (the faculty of receptivity). Exercises of conceptual
capacities (such as when I judge: ‘this is a zebra’) that are totally uncon-
strained by some kind of ‘input’ are bound to degenerate into ‘moves
in a self-contained game’.35 Sensibility’s constraint on our exercises of
conceptual capacities must, furthermore, be of a rational (i.e. norma-
tive) nature. It is not enough if our applications of concepts are caus-
allyy constrained by the deliverances of our senses. If somebody hits me
in the head with a hammer, and this causes me to judge that a zebra
is present, then my use of the concept ‘zebra’ is causally constrained

by the world. This, however, is a non-rational constraint. Likewise, a
certain sense-experience can cause me to believe that a zebra is present.
The fact that it causes me to believe this, however, says in itself nothing
about whether I should d believe that a zebra is present on the basis of
the experience in question, or not. If the input from the senses is only
causally, not rationally, related to our exercises of conceptual capaci-
ties, then the very idea of conceptual capacities becomes unintelli-
gible. This is because the idea of an (empirical) concept is the idea of
something that is correctlyy or incorrectlyy applied to phenomena in the
world. So the existence of concepts presupposes that the world itself
rationally (normatively) constrains our use of concepts through sensory
experience. Spontaneity must be rationally constrained by receptivity.
According to McDowell, this idea has a transcendental status – we need
it in order to understand how our thoughts can have ‘objective purport’,
that is, how they can purport to be about an objective world.36
One common way of trying to satisfy this transcendental need is to
subscribe to a common picture of how perception works. According to
this picture, the senses provide us with raw, unconceptualized input
(something purely Given), which we then ‘put a construction on’ by
giving it conceptual articulation or form. The input, furthermore, is
supposed to govern or constrain our conceptualization. Our concepts
must ‘fit’ the Given, and the Given provides, according to this picture,
an external constraint on our exercise of our conceptual capacities. Our
thinking is not totally free. It must adapt itself to the Given.
The relationship between spontaneity and receptivity is, in this
picture, portrayed in terms of a dualism between our conceptual capaci-
ties (‘conceptual scheme’) and the Given. The ‘intuitions’ that sens-
ibility provides us with, and which our concepts have to fit, are bits of
the Given. This picture is central for classical empiricism – it constitutes
its ‘third dogma’, according to Davidson.37 There are, however, serious
problems with the picture – problems that Sellars, Davidson, Rorty and
McDowell are acutely aware of. Wilfrid Sellars has famously stigmatized
the idea that something without conceptual structure can rationally
constrain our conceptual thought as ‘the Myth of the Given’.38
There are many forms that this myth can take, and many ways of
understanding the essence and scope of it. In a common, empiricist
version, the Given is identified with sensory impressions conceived as
occurrences without any propositional structure. These sensory impres-
sions are just ‘brute impacts’, sensory events. The false assumption that
constitutes the myth is that sensory events conceived in this way can
stand in rational relations to, e.g., beliefs. By ‘pointing to something

that is simply received in experience’ one can acquire a ground d for a
belief.39
But what is the grounding-relation between a brute sensory event and
a propositional item, such as a belief, supposed to look like? As we have
seen, non-propositional items – ping-pong balls, rocks, thunderbolts,
etc. – cannot stand in rational relations such as entailment or proba-
bilification to anything. This means that a sensory confrontation with
a bare Given cannot satisfy the epistemic role it, according to the myth,
is supposed to satisfy. A brute event can cause us to form beliefs. But
a causal relation is not a rational relation. The idea of a Given that is
both nonpropositional and d epistemically efficacious must therefore be
a mythical idea.40 There are other versions of the myth, such as the idea
that sensory experiences have a kind d of representational content, but a
non-conceptual kind.41 McDowell rejects this idea. The very essence of
the Myth of the Given is ‘the idea that the space of reasons, the space
of justifications or warrants, extends more widely than the conceptual
sphere’.42
3.2.3 The unboundedness of the conceptual

One might ask, however, if McDowell’s line of thinking does not lead to
rampant idealism. If we are to avoid the view that reality is created by our
thought, must we not admit that there is some point at which thought
confronts something that lacks conceptual structure (‘raw experience’,
‘The World In Itself’)? And does not the problem about how this reality
can stand in rational relations to thought then inevitably surface? The
short answer is No. McDowell contends that the conceptual realm has
no outer boundary. It cannot have an outer boundary (beyond which
the world itself lies), since the space of concepts is co-extensive with
the space of reasons. For the world to be outside the space of concepts
would be for it to be outside the space of reasons, which would mean
that the world could not rationally constrain our thinking. That would,
as we have seen, mean the elimination of empirical content. In what
follows, we will try to understand what the ‘unboundedness of the
conceptual’ means, in order to provide a better response to the worry
about idealism.
In the contemporary literature, there are two common kinds of
response to the problem of the thought/reality relation. One is to insist
that there mustt be a way in which something without conceptual
structure – the Given – can impose rational constraints on our thinking.
This kind of response denies that the Myth of the Given is a myth.
It retains the dualism between conceptual scheme and Given. There is

a sound motivation behind this type of response, viz. the felt necessity
of an external constraint on our thinking (the ‘transcendental need’
referred to above).
The other type of response denies the necessity, and even intelligi-
bility, of the idea that something ‘outside’ our thought and language
can rationally constrain our thinking. Davidson and Rorty represent
this line of thought. We must, according to Rorty, let go of the hope-
less idea that thought can faithfully ‘mirror nature’ and instead think
of our thinking as only answerable to itself: ‘Nothing counts as justi-
fication unless by reference to what we already accept ... there is no
way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test
other than coherence.’43 Davidson, like Rorty, contends that we must
abandon ‘the search for a basis for knowledge outside the scope of our
beliefs’.44
The two positions that seem to be available are, according to McDowell,
both impossible. The idea that thought can be rationally constrained
by the Given is incoherent. The Davidsonian/Rortyan alternative is an
‘unconstrained coherentism’45 that portrays our thinking as ‘a friction-
less spinning in a void’.46 This picture renders unintelligible the fact
that there are subjective mental states with ‘objective purport’ (that is,
states that make ‘claims’ about an objective world). ‘We need to be able
to see how the spontaneity of the understanding can be constrained by
the receptivity of sensibility, if we are to be entitled to the very idea of
subjective postures with objective purport.’47
Modern philosophy has tended to fall into ‘an interminable oscilla-
tion’ between these two positions – the Myth of the Given and an uncon-
strained coherentism.48 The oscillation can be understood against the
background of the Kantian insight that in order for empirical content
to be possible, both concepts and intuitions (experiential intake) are
necessary. The dualistic picture in which our conceptual scheme is
set over against the Given is an attempt to accommodate the Kantian
insight by conceiving intuitions as ‘bits of the Given’. The attempt is,
however, revealed as incoherent by Sellars’ attack on the Myth of the
Given. The Sellarsian insight that only conceptual items can figure in
rational relations triggers a recoil from the Myth of the Given all the
way to the Davidsonian/Rortyan position, which denies any rational
role for experiential intake in our empirical thinking. But this position
can never be comfortably occupied, since it undermines the very idea of
empirical content.49 This causes a recoil back to the Myth of the Given.
And so the oscillation continues.
The way to ‘dismount the seesaw’ is, according to McDowell, to under-

stand that the operations of our sensibility – our capacity for experien-
tial intake – are not independent of our ‘spontaneity’, our conceptual
capacities. Our conceptual capacities are involved (‘drawn on’) in the
very process of sensory intake. ‘There is no receptivity where spontan-
eity is not already at work.’50 The idea is that the contributions of spon-
taneity and receptivity in sensory experience are inextricably linked.
‘Receptivity does not make an even notionally separable contribution
to the co-operation.’51 What receptivity ‘takes in’ already has concep-
tual form.
Even though experience involves our spontaneity – our conceptual
capacities – we are still passive in experience. We do not freely create
what we experience. We receive it.52 In experience, we find ourselves
‘saddled with content’.53 The passivity of experience is important, since
it is this that allows us to talk about receptivity.
y The very reception of
content (which is best understood as ‘openness to the world’) involves
our conceptual capacities, but these capacities are not actively exercised
in this context. They are passively ‘drawn on’ in experience.
What does it mean that conceptual capacities are passively ‘drawn
on’ in experience? Conceptual capacities are capacities that belong to
a faculty of ‘spontaneity’, which means that such capacities ‘have their
paradigmatic actualization in judgment, in making up one’s mind as
to how things are’.54 Making up one’s mind as to how things are is
a rational enterprise. Our conceptual capacities are ‘integrated into a
rationally organized network of capacities for active adjustment of one’s
thinking to the deliverances of experience’.55
We can exemplify what such a ‘network’ is by considering what ‘back-
ground knowledge’ is necessary for the possession of a concept such as
‘stone’. It is not possible to have this concept without also having the
concept of ‘physical object’.56 Having the latter concept requires that
one understands the difference between objects (which exist whether or
not they are perceived), and perceptions of objects. Having the concept of
‘stone’ therefore requires that one understands that there is an objective
world, populated by persistent and re-identifiable physical objects such
as stones, a world of which we can receive ‘glimpses’57 in subjective
experience. If one does not have this background-understanding (which
is part of an evolving world-view), one cannot be said to possess the
concept ‘stone’.
McDowell’s claim that our conceptual capacities are ‘drawn on’ in
experience means that those capacities enter into shaping the content
of sensory experiences. Concept-using creatures take their experiences
to be revelatory of an objective world. When I see a stone, I experience

it as a mind-independent object, part of an objective world which is
there even when I do not look. So a single experience must, somehow,
be capable of activating a whole network of background understand-
ings (such as that stones are persistent, do not disappear when one does
not look, etc.). The activation of the network shapes the content of the
experience itself, and this is what makes it possible for concept-using
subjects to have experiences that have the character of being ‘glimpses’
of an objective world.
So in order to experience something as a physical object, one’s
conceptual capacities must be ‘drawn on’. Those capacities can only be
recognized as conceptual capacities because they are ‘seamlessly inte-
grated into a conceptual repertoire that [the subject] employs in the
continuing activity of adjusting her world-view’.58 But when the subject
has an experience, the same capacities that are typically used in active
thinking, are passivelyy drawn on in the way described.59
The key to understanding McDowell here is to remember that
(veridical) experiences are cases of openness to the world. In experi-
ence, facts that ‘collectively constitute the world’60 are presentedd to us,
so as to allow us cognitively to embrace them (‘have them in mind’).
But one cannot cognitively embrace a fact such as that there is a red
cube over there if one does not have conceptual capacities. In order to
experience that there is a red cube over there, one must, minimally, have
the recognitional capacities implicit in the possession of the concepts
‘red’ and ‘cube’. Only if ‘spontaneity’ (conceptual capacities) is involved
in experience (albeit passively) can experience involve ‘openness’ to a
world of facts. In McDowell’s words: ‘Experience enables the layout of
reality itself to exert a rational influence on what a subject thinks.’61
A transcendental condition for the possibility of having experiences
in which the layout of reality is presented to one is the possession of
conceptual capacities.
We are now in a better position to answer the question raised above.
On pain of avoiding idealism, must there not be some point at which
thought confronts what is outside thought? McDowell’s answer is that
thought certainly must be confronted with, and rationally constrained
by, a world outside thought. This does not mean, however, that the
world that exists independently of our thinking, and which constrains
it through experience, must be seen as outside the sphere of the concep-
tual. Rather, the world itself must – on pain of making the idea of repre-
sentational content unintelligible – be pictured as having the kind of
structure capable of being picked out by concepts.
This simply means that the world is thinkable. The ‘layout of reality’
is such as to be able to figure in thought. This does not mean that the
world is dependent for its existence on our thinking. It just means that
what we think and what is the case can be the same thing. That spring
has begun is something that can be the case (a worldly fact) and d some-
thing that can be the content of a thought.62
This should, according to McDowell, be seen as a truism. However, the
idea that the world is essentially graspable in thought is often viewed as
being expressive of a closet idealism, or at least an arrogant anthropo-
centrism. ‘Why should we be so sure of our capacity to comprehend the
world if not because we conceive the world as a shadow or reflection of our
thinking?’63 In response to such accusations, McDowell says that ‘there
is no guarantee that the world is completely within the reach of a system
of concepts and conceptions as it stands at some particular moment in
its historical development’.64 Conceptual systems can be inadequate.
They can fail to enable a subject to be open to certain facts.65
This is an important point. If perception involves conceptual capaci-
ties, then people with different conceptual capacities can have different
perceptual abilities. Some people can see things that are perceptually
inaccessible to others due to the latter’s lack of adequate concepts. This is
nott to be understood as meaning that some people interprett their experi-
ences in more adequate way than others. That would be to assume that
everybody receives the same ‘raw’ (unconceptualized) input. However,
if McDowell’s model is correct, then people with different conceptual
repertoires receive different input. (Remember that the input, in veridical
experiences, is simply worldly facts.) People with a less adequate concep-
tual repertoire are not open to facts that other people may be open to.
Why does McDowell’s claim that the world consists of facts that are
‘essentially capable of being embraced in thought’ (‘constitutively apt
for conceptualization’66) evoke accusations of idealism? In order to
understand this, we must take a brief look at the history of modern
philosophy.
3.2.4 The emigration of intelligible structure from the world

The view that conceptual structure is added, by the mind, to what we
receive through experience goes back to Hume. ‘Reason, Hume insists,
does not find meaning or intelligible order in the world; rather, what-
ever intelligible order there is in our world is a product of the operations
of mind.’67
Hume pushed this picture further than most are comfortable with.
Causal relations are not to be found d in nature. The idea that something
causes something else arises in the mind when we experience the

constant conjunction of two phenomena. ‘Objects have no discoverable
connection together; nor is it from any other principle but custom oper-
ating upon imagination, that we can draw inference from the appear-
ance of one to the existence of another.’68 It is the mind that imposes a
network of causal relations on the objects of experience. Since the very
idea of objects or substances cannot be derived from simple impressions,
it is also the mind that constructs them. The senses provide us with
nothing but ‘immediately apprehended particulars’.69
The background to Hume’s picture is the scientific revolution and
the disenchantment of nature which was its consequence. The nature
of Plato and Aristotle was a meaningful order. Things were seen as
embodying forms or ideas, and existed in order to express those ideas.
The rational order was conceived as graspable by the human intellect.
Indeed, to think rationally simply was to connect cognitively with the
order of the universe. In the seventeenth century, however, the idea of a
meaningful order was put under pressure by the rise of the new science,
and came increasingly to be seen as an anthropomorphic projection
onto nature of meaning and order that are not to be found there. In
order to achieve a correct understanding of nature, such projections
must be avoided. The vision of meaningful order gave way, eventually,
to a view of the world as a domain of ‘ultimately contingent correla-
tions, to be patiently mapped by empirical observations’.70
Hume is ‘the prophet par excellence of this tendency’.71 In order to
avoid unwarranted projection, he restricted the ultimate basis for our
knowledge about the world to simple impressions. Given this meager
basis, it turns out that we do not have enough evidence to establish the
objective existence of substances or causal relations.
It is against the background of the Humean tendency to empty nature
of intelligibility and structure that the idea that the world is essentially
graspable in thought must seem idealistic. If intelligible structure is
something that can only derive from our thinking, then a world with
inherent intelligible structure must be a mind-dependent world – a
world constructed by our minds.
However, the objective world as Hume conceives it – a world without
substances, causal relations, or any other intelligible structure – does
not deserve to be called a world. As McDowell puts it: ‘The disenchant-
ment Hume applauds can seem to point to a conception of nature as
an ineffable lump, devoid of structure and order.’72 The fading away,
in Hume and much modern thinking, of the idea of the inherent
intelligibility of nature is ‘a paradoxical trend of the Enlightenment’,
since one of the powerful driving forces behind the disenchantment is

precisely the success in understandingg nature achieved through the new
science.73
T.F. Torrance explains the paradoxical trend toward viewing the
objective world as ‘ineffable’ by pointing to the role of the human
subject as an active agent of inquiry. Modern science has both theoret-
ical and empirical elements. Science proceeds by the inventive, creative
construction of concepts and theories and the empirical testing of those
constructions. However, when the idea of the human subject as homo
faberr – as creatively active in inquiry – was allied to the renaissance/clas-
sical idea of autonomous reason, then the result became an ‘isolation
of the human subject over against nature’, and a split between reason
and experience, or the theoretical and empirical aspects of inquiry. The
split between reason and experience expressed itself as ‘the transfer of
intelligibility to the human pole of the knowing relationship, with a
corresponding lapse in the concept of the inherent intelligibility of
nature’.74 Nature in itself becomes ‘an ineffable lump’, as it is we who,
by our rational and scientific operations, ‘clothe the universe around us
with form and structure’.75
This picture, paradoxical as it may be, fulfils a need for something
brutely alien to thought. The process of disenchantment is a process of
cleansing our world-picture from anthropomorphic projections. When
everything tainted with human subjectivity is removed from this
picture, what is left is the world as it is ‘in itself’. The objective is thus
identified with the wholly alien. Reason, intelligible structure, logos,
belong on the subject side of the subject/object divide.
Kant’s role in this story of disenchantment is ambiguous. He can be
conceived – depending on whether one looks at his ‘empirical realist’ or
his ‘transcendental idealist’ side – as a critic of the disenchantment or
as a promoter of it. If we ignore (as Peter Strawson and McDowell recom-
mend) Kant’s ‘transcendental story’ about mind making nature, and
focus instead on his empirical realism, then Kant is clearly opposed to
the Humean picture of the world as, in itself, an ‘ineffable lump’. Kant
argues that for experience to be possible at all, it must present us with
a world that has an inherent, intelligible structure (capable of being
captured by concepts); a unified, relatively stable world of re-identifi-
able objects and causal relations.76
Kant hence denies something assumed by Hume, viz. that the idea
of subjective experience is intelligible independently of the idea of an
objective world with an inherent structure. The Humean assumption is
the background against which the migration of intelligible order from
the world to the mind can take place.77 However, even though Kant
claimed that the Humean picture was incoherent, he also produced his
own, radicalized version of it – the picture that comes to expression in
his ‘transcendental story’ about how mind makes nature.78 The reason
whyy nature has intelligible structure is, according to this story, because
nature is ‘a joint product of the structure of subjectivity and an ineffable
“in itself”’.79 The transcendental story hence postulates a reality that is
brutely alien to subjectivity. This means that the seat of true objectivity
is not the empirical world of nature, but the supersensible ‘in itself’.80
As McDowell writes:
Once the supersensible is in the picture, its radical independence of

our thinking tends to present itself as no more than the independ-
ence any genuine reality must have. The empirical world’s claim to
independence comes to seem fraudulent by comparison.81
The transcendental framework makes Kant’s philosophy, contrary to

his intentions, idealistic.82
For Torrance, Kant is the prophet of the modern mind. His philosophy
epitomizes the ‘masterful idea that we can understand only what we can
construct for ourselves’.83 In casting Kant in this role, Torrance focuses
on Kant’s transcendental story and neglects the more sympathetic side
of Kant, his insight that the empirical world must have, in itself, an
intelligible structure in order for experience to be possible. McDowell
focuses precisely on the latter side of Kant and wants us to discard the
idea of a supersensible reality together with the story of mind making
nature.84 This is a Hegelian move, but it is, arguably, only against the
background of a Humean phobia for ‘anthropomorphic projection’ that
it must raise the specter of idealism.
Even though McDowell can take most of the sting out of the accusa-
tions of idealism by the kinds of therapeutic moves sketched above,
some doubts still remain. Charles Larmore puts his finger on the central
problem: ‘How can we avoid wondering why there should be such a
natural sympathy or pre-established harmony between mind and
world?’85 It seems perfectly possible, as Adrian Haddock points out, that
the mental constitution of finite, embodied beings like us could be such
that aspects of reality are permanently ‘beyond [our] conceptual reach’.86
Why assume, as McDowell does, that there can be no such aspects (i.e.,
that the world is essentiallyy embraceable in thought), unless the world
is, somehow, constitutively dependent on our mental constitution in
something like the way Kant’s transcendental idealism suggests?
A McDowellian response to this worry could refer to his rejection

of the dualism of conceptual scheme and world. If the very idea of a
conceptual scheme (conceptual capacities) is unintelligible without
reference to an objective world, and if the idea of a world devoid of the
kind of structure picked out by our concepts (or any concepts that we
could potentially acquire) is unintelligible to us, then it seems that the
possibility that Haddock refers to cannot, after all, be intelligibly stated.
We cannot occupy the ‘side-ways on’ perspective (‘here the conceptual
system, there the world’87) from which the worry about a possible, irre-
mediable misfit between our conceptual capacities and the world can
arise.88
I am not sure that this kind of response is sufficient to alleviate the
worry about idealism that the McDowellian harmony between mind
and world occasions. A more satisfying response may, however, be
available from a theistic perspective. Theists can claim (as they do) that
the world is essentially embraceable in thought, and at the same time
allow for the possibility that aspects of reality are permanently and
irremediably out of ourr conceptual reach. For theists, ‘thinkable’ is not
synonymous with ‘thinkable for us’.
3.2.5 A partial re-enchantment of nature

What does it mean to say that the world is essentially thinkable? It
means that the very elements that together make up the world – facts –
are also embraceable in thought. McDowell says that ‘there is no onto-
logical gap between the sort of thing one can ... think, and the sort of
thing that can be the case. When one thinks truly, what one thinks is
what is the case. So since the world is everything that is the case ... there
is no gap between thought, as such, and the world’.89 For instance, that
there are birds in the garden is something that can be the content of a
thought, but it is also something that can be the case (a fact). McDowell
position hence entails an identity theory of facts and true propositions.
To think is to entertain propositions. If the sort of thing one can think
(propositions) and the sort of thing that can be the case (facts) are the
same thing, then facts must simply be true propositions.90 This is, in my
view, a very attractive position, and it seems – despite suggestions to the
contrary – to be coherent.91
So the world itself breaks up into elements – facts – that are (as
Crispin Wright has put McDowell’s view) ‘conceptual only in so far
as essentially conceivable ... A fact is essentially such as, for an appro-
priate subject, to be conceived as the fact that P; but its existence –
what makes for the truth of the proposition that P – need not depend
on anyone’s actually exercising any of the concepts constituent in that

proposition’.92
If the world itself breaks up into facts that are true propositions, and if
perception is openness to the world, then it is possible for the world itself
rationally to constrain our thinking through experience. Experience
opens us to aspects of the world, and these aspects are themselves – as
graspable by thought – within the space of reasons. ‘That things are thus
and so is the ... content of an experience, but if the subject of experience
is not mislead, that very same thing, that things are thus and so, is also
a perceptible fact, an aspect of the perceptible world.’93 So there can be
rational relations between the world and our thinking.
At this point we need to address the problem of the relationship
between nature and normativity. The problem, as it affects the present
discussion, can be stated thus. Say that we accept that the world breaks
up into facts that are essentially thinkable – facts that have the kind of
structure picked out by concepts. So far so good. But how do we connect
cognitively with the world of structured facts? The obvious answer is:
through experience.
Here the problems begin. Sense-perception is something that we
share with animals. It is a natural process in which the world impinges
on possessors of sensory capacities.94 As a transaction in nature sense-
perception must, so it can seem, be capable of being exhaustively
understood in terms of the conceptual resources of the natural sciences.
The kind of intelligibility sought by natural science is the kind that is
achieved by subsuming events under natural laws. McDowell, however,
claims that sensory experience has a normative dimension. It involves
our conceptual capacities which are constitutive of our ‘spontaneity’,
our ability to be responsive to rational relations. Spontaneity’s involve-
ment in sensory experience results in perceptual experiences that have
conceptually structured contents. If an experience has the content that
there is a red cube over there, then the experience itself has normative
properties. For example, it follows from the content of the experience
that the red thing over there is not round. What does it mean that this
follows from the content of the experience? It means that one ought, t on
pain of irrationality, not to believe both that there is a red cube over
there and that the (same) red thing over there is round. So the experi-
ence, if it has conceptual content, has normative properties. The experi-
ence seems to tell one something about how one should d (or should not)
think.
But can natural items do that? In the Middle Ages people thought
that things in nature could teach you lessons – tell you what you ought
to think. This idea, however, is today regarded as superstitious as a

result of the ‘disenchantment’ of nature beginning with the scientific
revolution. Above we saw that Hume took this disenchantment very
far. However, a common modern position is to conceive of nature,
in itself, as embodying a certain kind of intelligible order. Nature
has a causal order, which can be accounted for by subsuming events
under natural laws. What nature in itself lacks, according to this
conception, is a normative order. The disenchantment of nature in
this moderate version is equivalent to the banishing of normativity
from nature. That nature lacks normative aspects entails that natural
phenomena cannot, in themselves, mean anything, since meaning
requires a normative context. (That a certain word, to give an analogy,
has a certain meaning entails that it is correctlyy applied only to some
objects.) If natural phenomena cannot mean anything, they cannot –
strictly speaking – tell you anything, and hence cannot tell you what
you ought to think. In other words, nature lacks, according to the
moderate modern conception, the kind of intelligibility we find in
things when we place them within the logical space of reasons. (The
smoke does not tell you that there is fire around. It is you who conclude
this on the basis of prior experience of smoke and fire. Your mother,
however, really tells you to that there is fire around. What she says has
this meaning.)
Prior to the scientific revolution, people did not distinguish clearly
between the two different types of intelligibility – the kind sought by
natural science (realm-of-law-intelligibility) and the kind that is proper
to meaning (space-of-reasons-intelligibility). McDowell regards the
distinction between the two as a valuable accomplishment of modern
thought. The mistake of modern thought is to identify the natural
aspect of something with its place within the realm of law. If one insists
on the sui generis character of the relations that obtain within the space
of reasons, and furthermore identifies the natural with the realm of
law, then it seems that our responsiveness to the demands of rationality
must be something super- r or extra-natural.
The problem of the relationship between the space of reasons and
nature is highlighted when we consider sensory experience. Sensory
events are obviouslyy natural happenings. It follows from the standard
modern conception of nature that as natural happenings, sensory expe-
riences cannot tell us how we ought to think about the world.
This means that sensory experiences cannot, if the standard modern
conception of nature is left in place, have conceptually structured
contents. The modern conception of nature allows us to say that the

world’s impingements on our sensory equipment may cause appear-
ances in us which have conceptually structured contents. The concep-
tual structure of these appearances must, however, be seen as a result
of the mind’s own activity (spontaneity) rather than as a property
of the sensory impingements. The appearances are, hence, one step
removed from the impingements themselves. The modern conception
of nature prevents us from ascribing any normative properties to the
latter.
The problem, which McDowell points out, is that our thinking must
be rationally (i.e., normatively) constrained by the world’s impinge-
ments on us. Otherwise it becomes unintelligible how our thoughts
can be aboutt the world. McDowell’s suggestion, as we have seen, is
that we conceive the world’s impingements on us as already imbued
with conceptually structured contents. This solution, however, runs
up against the modern conception of nature as a realm devoid of
normativity.
McDowell is therefore forced to question the modern identification
of nature with the realm of law. He finds it necessary to ‘rethink our
conception of nature so as to make room for spontaneity’.95 McDowell
does not question the distinction between the space of reasons and
the realm of law. This distinction is fundamental for his thinking.
However, the identification of nature with the realm of law does not
seem necessary. ‘We need not identify the dichotomy of logical spaces
with a dichotomy between the natural and the normative.’96 To reject
the identification of nature with the realm of law is to remove a ‘deep-
rooted mental block’ that prevents us from understanding conceptual
capacities as natural.97 The removal of this mental block would allow us
to embrace the Aristotelian idea that normal, mature human beings are
rational animals. ‘We need to see ourselves’, says McDowell, ‘as animals
whose natural being is permeated with rationality’.98
The human being is not, however, born as a rational animal. Our
responsiveness to the demands of rationality develops gradually as we
learn our first language and thereby become initiated into conceptual
capacities. This means that spontaneity must be conceived as second
nature to us – something that is acquired through a normal human
upbringing. In the course of such an upbringing, our eyes are opened
to reasons. We become aware of rational requirements that are there,
whether we acknowledge them or not. McDowell refers to this process
as Bildungg.99
McDowell describes his view of the human being and the relation-
ship between reason and nature as a ‘relaxed’ naturalism – a natur-
alism that leaves room for meaning. This type of naturalism requires
a ‘partial re-enchantment of nature’,100 and can equally be seen as a
‘naturalized platonism’.101 It is platonistic in that it claims that there are
requirements of reason and therefore irreducible normative properties
in the world, whether or not we acknowledge them. The platonism in
question is, however, not ‘rampant’. The space of reasons is not pictured
as independent of anything merely human. ‘The demands of reason are
essentially such that a human upbringing can open a human being’s
eyes to them.’102
3.2.6 Conclusion
The main aim of Mind and World d is to establish that perceptual experi-
ences have conceptual content, that they are ‘conceptually structured
operations of receptivity’. The reason why this is important to estab-
lish is because ‘the idea of conceptually structured operations of recep-
tivity puts us in a position to speak of experience as openness to the
layout of reality. Experience enables the layout of reality itself to exert a
rational influence on what a subject thinks’.103 Suppose that the world
consists (as common sense has it) of facts with the kind of structure
picked out by concepts, but that what we receive in experience does not
have that kind of structure. Then we would have to say that our minds
constructt perceptual representations of the world from the unstructured
raw-material provided by experience. Those representations are all we
ever ‘embrace within the scope of our consciousness’. Experience, in
this picture, can only be an interface. It cannot be a direct openness to
the world.
Why, then, do we need the idea of experience as openness? The
main argument of Mind and World d is that in order for it to be intelli-
gible how our thoughts can be about an objective world, we must be
able to conceive the world itselff as a tribunal that rationally constrains
our thinking through experience. The idea of experience as open-
ness to the world makes it possible to understand how the world can
do that. It is doubtful whether any other conception of experience
is adequate in this respect. If our thoughts are to be about the world,
they must be capable of being evaluated as being correct or incorrect
in relation to the world. But how can they be evaluated against the
world if what becomes available through experience is something that
falls short of the world itselff ? So it seems that experience must let the
world in.
I believe that the main argument of Mind and World d is sound. A proper
defense of it against its critics would, however, require at least a book of
its own. The above review is just intended to convey the overall shape
of the argument, and thereby give a general idea of why the notion
that experience is openness to the world might be philosophically
important, not to say crucial.
4
Perceptual Evidence
By sacrificing something in self-knowledge to the sceptic, we

stand to gain far more in knowledge of the world.1
Timothy Williamson
An important message of this book is that theology has neglected the

philosophy of mind and perception for too long.2 The way we conceive
the mind and its relation to the world crucially affects how we frame
epistemological issues, and epistemological issues have figured very
importantly in modern theology as a result of the Enlightenment criti-
cism of the very idea of a ‘science of God’. In this book I will defend
an idea that has been largely dismissed by modern theology, viz. that
knowledge of a creator is available on the basis of observations of nature.
Given a rejection of the Cartesian picture of the mind and the adoption
of the ‘Open Mind’ (OM) view, there is a way of explicating this trad-
itional idea which, I will argue, makes it very feasible.
The purpose of the two preceding chapters was to prepare the ground
for my argument. We have, hopefully, achieved an understanding of
why the Cartesian assumptions that permeate much modern thinking
are problematic, and how the OM view dissolves some of the difficulties
that have plagued modern philosophy.
From a theological perspective it can, furthermore, be argued that
the OM view is more congenial to a Christian world view than views of
the mind shaped by Cartesian assumptions. Modern theologians have
often sensed that the ‘autonomous’ Cartesian mind is in tension with
a Christian view of the person as essentially embodied, dependent,
and epistemically vulnerable. Since the philosophy of mind has never
attracted much theological attention, however, theologians have
often failed to perceive the extent to which the Cartesian picture has
62
Perceptual Evidence 63
continued to influence their own views. The previous chapters have

directed a spotlight onto features of the Cartesian picture that too often
have been taken for granted even by those who claim to be critical of
‘the Cartesian mind’ (features such as the ‘organ of thought’ assump-
tion, and the related interface-conception of perception).
I do not claim, of course, to have established that the OM view is
superior to various other construals of the mind/world relationship.
The Cartesian research-program is still very much alive. The preceding
chapters have merely aimed to show (and this chapter and the following
one will continue to do so) that the OM view is very promising in terms
of philosophical fruitfulness and therefore an attractive intellectual
option within contemporary philosophy of mind. Moreover, if one finds
that the OM view resonates well with a Christian world-view then one
has, as a Christian, an additional reason for accepting it. A Christian
who, for example, finds that the OM view makes it possible to under-
stand an important Christian idea in a way that makes it credible may
legitimately regard this circumstance as speaking in favor of the OM
view. Philosophical theories and perspectives should not be thought of
as foundational in relation to religious theories and perspectives. (It is,
moreover, unclear – to say the least – what makes a theory or a perspec-
tive ‘religious’ as opposed to ‘philosophical’.)
The fact that I will rely on the OM view in defending the Christian
idea of creation’s testimony does not mean that the reader, in order to
follow the argument, must agree with everything that has been argued
in the two previous chapters. My argument will, however, mainly aim
to convince people who are broadly sympathetic to the outlook just
presented, and who find McDowell’s general philosophical perspective
fruitful. This means that even though I am going to argue for some
of the philosophical assumptions on which my argument depends,
I will not argue equally extensively for all of them, and sometimes I
will just state that an assumption is entailed by the OM view, leaving
it at that.
One way to regard the argument of this book is to view it as a
constructive exploration of the consequences of the OM view for the
issue of whether and to what extent knowledge of a creator is possible.
Another way is to regard it as a straightforward argument for the possi-
bility of knowledge of a creator, an argument that (like most arguments)
sometimes builds on controversial philosophical views.
I will begin by giving a brief presentation of the proposal I am going
to defend, and of how I am going to argue for it. The presentation is
only intended as a ‘bird’s-eye-view’ and it will raise many questions and
objections that will be left unanswered. Hopefully those questions and

objections will receive satisfying answers in the following chapters.
4.1 The argument in a nutshell
4.1.1 Human behavior as expressive of mind

Since my argument draws heavily on McDowell’s conception of human
behavior as expressive, I will first present McDowell’s view on the topic
(which will be explained and defended at length in Chapter 5). Then,
in the next section, I will sketch the contours of my own argument (the
details of which will be elaborated in chapters 6 and 7).
McDowell argues that human behavior is intrinsically expressive
of mind. Part of what this means is that there are behaviors with an
intrinsic nature that cannot be characterized without reference to
mental properties. For instance, if we describe an act of walkingg as a
regular, rhythmic movement of limbs, then this characterization does
not capture the intrinsic nature of the behavior. In order to capture that
nature, we must describe the behavior as an intentional action (which is
implicit when we describe it as ‘walking’).
Furthermore, implicit in the characterization of human behavior as
expressive of the mental is the claim that we can perceive behavior as
expressive. This means that we do not just perceive a rhythmic move-
ment of limbs and inferr from this that the body we see is walking (i.e.,
that the behavior is intentional). We directly perceive the behavior as
walking, as expressive of mind.
McDowell uses (correctly, in my view) the term ‘express’ as a factive
term. This means that if S’s face expresses pain on a certain occasion,
then, necessarily, S is in pain. If S is not in pain, then her face merely
seems to express pain. The possibility of such false appearances can
tempt us to conclude that what an observer is in a position to perceive
is neverr the fact that S’s face expresses pain (a fact that entails that S is
in pain) but always merely facts such as that S’s face seems to express
pain (which does not entail that S is in pain). This is the conclusion that
the argument from illusion wants us to draw. However, as we saw in
the previous chapter, this conclusion can be avoided by a disjunctivist
move. From the fact that a bad case, phenomenally indistinguishable
from the good case, is possible, we need not conclude that whatt we see
is the same in both cases (namely the Highest Common Factor). Rather,
in the bad case what we see can be the fact that S’s face seems to express
pain, while in the good case what we see is the fact that it expresses
pain. Since the occurrence of an expression of pain entails that there
is pain, the observer can know (in the good case) that the person is in
pain.3
The knowledge of other people’s mental states that we can acquire
on the basis of perceiving expressive behavior is, it might be said, infer-
ential. But it is so only in a very trivial sense. The fact that S expresses
anger (a fact that is observable, according to McDowell) is a fact that
is not identical to the fact that S is angry, but the obtaining of the
former fact is nevertheless not compatible with S’s not being angry.
This means that if we indeed can observe expressive facts, there is no
need for us to appeal to some theory or argument (such as the classical
argument from analogy, or the ‘scientific inference’ to other minds) in
order to bridge the gap between observations of other people’s behavior
and knowledge of the relevant mental facts. There is no logical gap to
bridge. To perceive that S’s behavior expresses anger is nothing but
a way of knowingg that S is angry. Because the content of the percep-
tual judgment ‘S’s behavior expresses anger’ includes the content ‘S is
angry’, I will consider knowledge of others’ mental states based merely
on perceptions of their expressive behavior as perceptual, non-inferential
knowledge. I will reserve the label ‘inferential knowledge’ for know-
ledge whose content is generated by a transformation of the content
of some data.4 Generally when I speak of ‘inferential knowledge’, I will
have in mind knowledge based on inductive inferences.
According to McDowell, human speech is expressive of mental states
in way similar to other kinds of behavior. We can express mental states
by speaking. If I say that I believe that p, and this linguistic behavior
constitutes an expression of my belief, then an observer is in a position
to observe that I give expression to believing that p. So (by a trivial infer-
ence) he can know that I believe that p. In the bad case, I do not actually
believe that p but merely say that I do. In this case, my behavior is not
expressive of my belief. All the observer is in a position to observe in
this case is that I say that I believe that p. And the fact that I say that I
believe that p does not entail that I believe that p.
There are two very natural objections to McDowell’s view of expres-
sive behavior, which I will briefly review. One is this. Only people who
understand the relevant language can recognize linguistic behavior as
expressive of particular mental states. But language is something one
learns. Does not this indicate that what we really perceive when we hear
other people speak are not facts about what people express (for instance,
beliefs), but rather mere sounds?
According to McDowell, however, ‘there can be facts that are overtly
available (so that conviction that they obtain need not be a matter of
speculation as to something hidden behind what is overtly available),

but awareness of which is an exercise of a perceptual capacity that is not
necessarily universally shared’.5 How can this be? Since perception is
mediated by concepts, according to McDowell, we can learn to perceive
new kinds of facts by acquiring new conceptual capacities. When we
learn our first language, we acquire conceptual capacities for the first
time, which means that we are initiated into the space of concepts.
This enormous cognitive change – by which we go from being non-
rational to rational animals – makes available facts that were formerly
not available for us to perceive, viz. facts about what people say, and
facts about which mental states they express by their words. (This is
treated in 5.3.)
Another natural objection against McDowell’s account is that ‘our attri-
butions of mental states to others is dependent on a set of background
beliefs about the interconnections between mental states, expressions,
and actions’.6 If so, must not all knowledge of the mental states of other
people be construed as inferential rather than perceptual?
McDowell denies this. He admits that it is necessary to have back-
ground knowledge (such as knowledge about common-sense psycho-
logical laws) in order to be able to discern mental states in other people’s
behavior. But this does not entail that all our knowledge of other
people’s mental states is really inferential.7 Background knowledge need
not figure as a basis for inferential argument when we determine (e.g.)
that somebody is in pain. It can have a different role in that context.
(This is treated in 5.4.)
4.1.2 Nature as expressive of mind

If it is right that we can perceive, directly, certain physical phenomena
(human behavior) as being expressive of mind, it seems dogmatic to
deny the possibilityy that some other physical phenomena might be
expressive of mind too. For instance, art objects certainly seem to be
capable of expressing the feelings and other mental properties of the
artist, and advanced artifacts seem to manifest something of the intent
and intelligence of their designers. These appearances could, of course,
be explained away in various ways. But why should we think that to
be necessary if we have admitted that human behaviorr can be intrinsic-
ally expressive? I will argue that we have no good reasons to assume
that movements of the human body, and sounds directly produced by
that body, is/are uniquelyy capable of constituting the medium for expres-
sions. I will not claim, of course, that all cases in which we recognize
some structure – such as an artwork or an artifact – as a product of mind
are cases in which we directly perceive the relevant object or structure

as expressive of mind. In many cases, such recognition is surely infer-
ential. This, however, is compatible with the claim that the recogni-
tion in some cases (presumably cases involving complex artworks and
advanced artifacts) is perceptual.
The Christian tradition has long claimed that natural phenomena
‘speak’ of the creator in a perceptible way. The locus classicus for this
idea is the passage by St Paul in Romans, quoted above: ‘Ever since the
creation of the world his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and
deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made’
(Rom 1:20). Christians of different denominations have expressed
similar ideas in terms of ‘signs’, ‘marks’, or ‘traces’ of the divine mind.
A common view within the Christian tradition, however, identifies
the ‘signs’, ‘marks’, or ‘traces’ of the creator with properties such as the
orderliness, complexity, purposiveness, or beauty of nature. The ‘signs’
are, hence, conceived merely as symptoms or effects from which the exist-
ence of a divine cause may be inferred. It seems possible, however, to
understand the ‘signs’ as expressions of the divine mind in McDowell’s
sense of ‘expressions’. If some natural structures (such as the constitu-
tion of biological organisms) are expressive of mind, and if we are able
to perceive these structures as expressive, then we possess perceptual
evidence that entails the existence of a mind, a creator of natural struc-
tures.8 No inductive argument is then necessary. (Expressive properties
are subject-related, i.e., mind-entailing, properties.)
We have, I will argue, experiences that are candidates for being
genuine perceptions of biological phenomena as expressions of mind.
Even devout atheists like Richard Dawkins and Francis Crick acknow-
ledge that biological organisms strike us as ‘intentionally designed’
(in my terms: as expressive of mind). Dawkins, for instance, says that
‘biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of
having been designed for a purpose’.9 Experiences that subjects describe
as experiences of intentional design are candidates for being percep-
tions of expressive properties in nature. (I will argue, however, that the
description of the content of such experiences in terms of the concept
of design might be misleading.)
It could be argued that before anyone is entitled to take experiences
of the relevant kind as genuine perceptions of expressive properties in
nature, the existence of a Mind whose intent and intelligence comes to
expression in natural structures must first be proved or probabilified.
This is, as I will argue, an unreasonable demand. Our knowledge of other
human minds depends, if McDowell is right, on our perceptions of the
expressive properties of other people’s behavior. McDowell appeals to

the notion of expression precisely in order to explain how we can know
mental facts about other people. If we construe our evidence with respect
to other minds as consisting only of observations of ‘mere behavior’ – i.e.,
behavior conceived as psychologically neutral – then the skeptic about
other minds wins. McDowell argues, however, that nothing prevents us
from taking seriously how things appearr to be in this department. And
human behavior appears to be genuinely expressive of mind.
To demand that the theist must prove the existence of a ‘Mind behind
nature’ before she is entitled to take the apparent expressiveness of nature
seriously seems, if McDowell is right about how we know other minds,
to be unfair. That would be like demanding that I prove that you have a
mind before I am entitled to believe that your behavior is expressive of
mental properties. Of course, this is precisely what traditional epistem-
ology has demanded. The ‘problem of other minds’ arises because it is
assumed that physical phenomena cannot be intrinsically expressive of
mind. According to the traditional picture there are no expressive facts,
there are only physical facts and mental facts, and the relation between
them is contingent. When we speak of human behavior as expressive,
this can only mean that certain physical events are normally causally
correlated with certain mental events. From perceptions of physical
events, we can therefore infer the occurrence of mental events. What
McDowell does is to reject this picture.
At this point, we must try to achieve a proper perspective on the
dialectical situation with respect to the main claim of this book. It is
not the case that I am presenting a new, radical hypothesis that I must
confirm on the basis of non-question-begging premises. The idea that
nature testifies to the creator is not new or radical, but was once seen
as a commonplace. It is still the dominant view today globally From
the perspective of the Christian tradition it could be argued that any
denial of the notion that nature is expressive of the mind of the creator
should be treated as a form of skepticism, similar to, e.g., skepticism
about ‘other minds’. One possible attitude to skepticism is to accept the
skeptic’s conception of the evidence. This means, with respect to other
minds, that we accept that our evidence consists merely of observa-
tions of psychologically neutral behavior. Then we try to devise various
inductive arguments that, on the basis of our evidence conceived in
this way, purport to establish that there are other minds. This is trad-
itional epistemology.
Philosophers such as McDowell and Timothy Williamson deal with
skepticism in a different way. They question the skeptic’s conception
of the evidence. McDowell, for instance, asks: why do we think that

it is necessary to conceive our perceptual evidence concerning other
minds as consisting merely of observations of psychologically neutral
behavior? This is surely not how things seem to us. We surely seem
to be able to see, without any inductive inferences, that somebody is
in pain. McDowell then identifies the considerations and assumptions
(such as the argument from illusion and the Highest Common Factor-
conception of perceptual experience) that seem to force us to conceive
our evidence for other minds in the traditional way. Then he goes on to
show that these considerations and assumptions are non-compelling,
and that an alternative construal of our evidence for other minds is
possible.
The dialectical situation with respect to skepticism about a creator
can, from a Christian perspective, be taken to be similar. The traditional
response to such skepticism is to accept the skeptic’s conception of the
evidence and then try to argue from facts about order, complexity, etc.
to the conclusion that a Mind must figure in the causal provenance
of nature.10 This book, however, follows McDowell and Williamson in
questioning the skeptic’s conception of the evidence.
It can be objected that skepticism about a creator is, in many respects,
different from skepticism about an external world or other minds. This
may be true, but differences of this kind do not undermine my argu-
ment. We are not yet in a position fully to understand the dialectic of
the argument, so I will not address the objection here. By the end of this
chapter we will have realized why the objection is misconceived.
The proposal of this book does nott entail that the creator must have
created biological entities directly. A house can be created by an archi-
tect, and its construction can be expressive of her ideas, even though
she has never caused any modifications in the building directly. (This is
not meant to suggest that God is an architect.)
Nor does my suggestion entail that the creator must have intention-
ally brought about the existence of any particular, individual organism.
The novel Anna Karenina is written (i.e., created) by Tolstoy. This does
not entail that Tolstoy, or anyone else, intentionally brought about
the existence of my copy of the book. The staff at the printing house
might have forgotten to turn off the printing press, so that the machine
printed more copies than intended. It is not in virtue of its individuality
but in virtue of its instantiating a certain complex structural property
that my copy of Anna Karenina is expressive of Tolstoy’s mind.
My suggestion, furthermore, does not entail that the creator must
have ‘designed’ biological species, in the sense that he must have
intentionally brought it about that every species has all, or most, of

the species-typical properties it has. My account does not, in other
words, require that the creator has intentionally brought it about that
the elephant has a trunk. It may even be consistent with my proposal
if the creator only has intentionally brought about the instantiation of
very general properties, such as the property of being a complex, highly
organized system capable of reproduction and other functional activities. If
the creator has intentionally brought about the instantiation of some-
thing like that property, then the creator can correctly be said to have
created complex life. Individual organisms might then be expressive of
divine intent and intelligence as a result of instantiating the property of
being complex life forms.11 Such life forms look ‘designed’. When people
experience living organisms as ‘designed’, what they really perceive, if
my suggestion is correct, might be the fact that those organisms are
expressive of divine intent and intelligence in virtue of being created –
i.e., in virtue of instantiating a rather general but essential property as a
result of the creator’s intentional and intelligent activity.
My account is, hence, compatible with the fact that biological entities
have emerged through a process of evolution by natural selection. This
process could, as the doctrine of theistic evolution has it, constitute the
creator’s instrumentt for creating complex life. The central role played by
chance in evolution does not necessarily ‘screen off’ divine intent and
intelligence from our view.
We can see this by considering the following analogy. There exists a
computer program that writes four-part fugues.12 You give the program
a theme of your own construction, and it produces a fugue on that
theme. A fugue generated in this way has many properties that are not
intended by anyone, neither by the programmer (who cannot know
what theme a particular user will give to the program) or by the user. If
you give the program the same theme twice, it will write two different
fugues. So many of the properties of a particular computer-generated
fugue are due to chance.
Not all properties, however. It is clear that the programmer is respon-
sible for the fact that what the computer spits out are structures that
move within the western tonal system, have determinate keys, are fugues
(i.e., instantiate a certain form), exemplify certain specific artistic styles,
etc. These are all properties that the programmer has intended and
determined. It therefore seems fair to say that the computer-produced
fugues are expressive of the programmer’s intent and intelligence in
virtue of instantiating certain general (and essential) properties that
require a good deal of intelligence to bring about (it is not easy to write
a fugue, and neither is it easy to write a program that writes fugues).

If a person from the 18th century were to hear a fugue composed by
the program, she would be unable to imagine something other than
that the music is the result of intentional design down to the least
detail. She would be wrong, but her mistake would be very understand-
able, since the sounds she would hear are, arguably, expressive of the
programmer’s intent and intelligence in virtue of instantiating, e.g., the
general property of being a (Johann Sebastian) Bach-style fugue in G minor. r
Likewise, biological organisms appear to be created, and people in the
18th century no doubt thought that this appearance was due to the fact
that God had designed them down to the least detail. However, if my
suggestion is correct, they might have been wrong about that without
being totallyy wrong. It could be the case that biological structures are not
designed down to the least detail, but that they nevertheless are expres-
sive of intent and intelligence in virtue of being created d (in a similar
sense of ‘created’ in which it can be said that the computer-fugues are
created).
It is one thing to claim that it is possible or conceivable that natural
structures are expressive of mind. But why should we believe that the
possibility I am pointing to is realized in the actual world? Let me
answer this question by asking and answering another question: how
do we know that the behavior of certain (human) bodies is expressive of
mind? Because we perceive it to be. The most natural (maybe the only
possible) evidence for the claim that biological nature is expressive of
mind is, likewise, empirical evidence. We know that nature is expres-
sive of mind (if we do) because we perceive it to be. This answer, which
may seem extremely unsatisfactory at this point, will be explained and
contextualized in the remainder of this chapter. In order to understand
how I can appeal to our perceptions of nature as evidence, we must
deepen our understanding of the idea that perception is openness to
the world (claim [3] of the OM view). When we have a proper grasp of
the view of perceptual evidence implicit in the OM view, we will be in
a position to understand what my argument (sketched in this section)
can and cannot be expected to establish. The argument will then be
elaborated on in the following chapters.
4.2 Factive perceptual evidence
In Chapter 3, we saw that McDowell defends – against philosophers like

Davidson and Rorty – the idea that perceptual experiences can justify
beliefs. This is possible, McDowell argues, because the experiences
themselves have conceptually structured contents. McDowell’s claim

is, however, misunderstood if we think of the conceptual structure that
experiences have as something that is added, by the mind, to something
more primitively given. Perceptual experiences are not to be conceived
as ‘inner’ entities – constructions of our minds elicited by more or less
brute impacts from the world. If we think of experiences that way, we
are back at the ‘unconstrained coherentism’ of Davidson and Rorty.
Perceptual experiences, rather, must be conceived as occurrences in
which parts of the world are made directly available to our minds. To
have a perceptual experience is (when all goes well) to be open to a
worldly fact, to have that fact ‘made manifest’ to one, to embrace that
fact within the scope of one’s consciousness (these are all equivalent
ways of putting the same idea). Such openness to the world requires
that the subject possess conceptual capacities and that these capacities
are ‘drawn on’ in the process of perceiving.
It is hence meaningful, on McDowell’s construal, to speak of percep-
tual evidence or (equivalently) perceptual reasons (I will use ‘evidence’
and ‘reasons’ interchangeably). This type of evidence/reasons is not, on
McDowell’s view, constituted by perceptual beliefs (beliefs caused by
experiences) but by the perceptual experiences themselves.
What does it mean to say that perceptual experiences can be cases of
openness to the world, i.e., that they can make worldly facts ‘directly
available’ to us? The kind of availability McDowell talks about is
epistemicc availability. To have a fact made available (manifest) to one in
experience is for knowledge of that fact to be available to one.13
There is, on the surface of it, nothing very revolutionary about the
idea of perception as openness to the world. McDowell’s claim to the
effect that a perceptual experience can make a worldly fact ‘available’
amounts to no more than the commonsensical claim that seeing that p
can make the subject rationally entitled d to believe that p.14 Seeing that p
can, in other words, constitute a perfectly fine justification for believing
that p, a justification good enough for knowledge of p. For a fact to be
‘manifest’ or ‘directly available’ to a subject is for the subject to be in
a position to know15 that fact. Knowledge entails rational entitlement
(justification, warrant). In order for a subject to be in a position to know
that p she must be (in a position to become) rationally entitled d to believe
that p, (i.e., justified
d in believing that p, or warranted
d in believing that
p, or rational in believing that p).16 A common view is that a subject’s
rational entitlement to empirical beliefs is constituted by something
to which the subject has reflective access,17 viz. evidence/reasons.
McDowell accepts this common view. His claim is that seeing that p can
constitute a subject’s evidence/reason for p, and thereby provide the

subject with a rational entitlement sufficient for knowledge that p.
Seeing that p – in the sense in which this locution is normally used – is
factive. If a subject sees that there is a cow in front of her, then, neces-
sarily, there is a cow in front of her. If there is no cow there, then it is
incorrect to ascribe the state of seeing a cow w to the subject. It can, of
course, appearr to the subject as if there is a cow in front of her even
when no cow is there. But in such a case, the subject does not see that
there is a cow in front of her.
The reader might be surprised to learn that the idea that perceptual
experiences can make knowledge of objective facts directly available to
a subject is rejected by vast portions of the epistemological tradition.
Mainstream epistemology does not just deny that we actually have
experiences that make knowledge of worldly facts directly available.
The mainstream epistemological tradition conceives of our epistemic
relation to the world in a way that implies that experiences of this type
are not even possible. A subject’s perceptual justification can never, on
the mainstream view, be correctly captured by saying that the subject
sees that p. There can be no such thing as factive perceptual evidence.
The rejection of factive perceptual evidence is often motivated by
something like the following line of reasoning (which we recognize as a
version of the argument from illusion/hallucination).
A case in which S sees that p (the good case) may be indistinguishable,
for S, from a case in which it falsely seems to S as if p (the bad case). From
this possibility the argument from illusion concludes that the perceptual
evidence that S has (i.e., the evidence that S’s experience supplies) must
be the same in the good and the bad case. So even when S actually sees
that p, his perceptual evidence is merely that it seems to him as if p. We
can call the latter type of perceptual evidence ‘phenomenal evidence’.
This is not very good evidence. From the fact that it seems to S that p, it
does not follow that p is true.
If this construal of our perceptual evidence (i.e., the Highest Common
Factor conception) is correct, it follows that something more than a
perceptual experience is always needed in order for a subject to have
knowledge of a worldly fact. The subject must, besides the relevant
experience, also have independent knowledge (or justified belief) to the
effect that she is not in the bad case. So no perceptual experience can, by
itself,
f make knowledge of a worldly fact available to a subject. Perception
is not a direct openness to the world.
The argument from illusion is, however, fallacious18 (as we saw in
Chapter 3). The subjective indistinguishability of the good case from
the bad one does not entail that what the subject ‘embraces within
the scope of her consciousness’ when she has a perceptual experience
is always some ‘perception/illusion-neutral entity’ (which we have
called the Highest Common Factor) between the good and bad cases. A
disjunctivist construal of perceptual evidence – according to which the
perceptual evidence is differentt in the good and bad cases – is therefore
possible. Such a construal could look like this.
In the good case, S sees that a cow is present. Seeing that a cow is
present amounts to having the relevant fact directly manifested to one
(i.e., being in a position to know that fact). So the perceptual evidence
that the ‘good case’ experience provides S with is excellent. In the bad
case, however, no fact about a cow is made manifest to S since no cow
is (ex hypothesi) present. It merely appears to S as iff a cow is present. The
perceptual evidence that the ‘bad case’ experience supplies is merely
phenomenal. So it is not very good evidence. (It could, of course,
contribute to justifying a claim about the presence of a cow inferentially
if it is combined with background knowledge to the effect that appear-
ances of the relevant kind are generally reliable.)
This construal of perceptual evidence, which as we have noted earlier
is advocated by McDowell, is commonly called ‘epistemological disjunc-
tivism’. The qualification ‘epistemological’ is motivated by the fact that
the disjunctivism in question primarily is concerned with the epistemic
aspect of perception, rather than its metaphysical structure.19 Although
it may seem like a fancy philosophical position, epistemological disjunc-
tivism is, at bottom, no more than a way of defending the commonsen-
sical claim that seeing (or otherwise perceiving) that p rationally entitles the
subject to believe that p.20 Seeing that p is, on the disjunctivist view, to
be open to the fact that p, which means being in a position to know
that fact non-inferentially (without further evidence or inferences from
background knowledge).
In the rest of this chapter, I will defend the view of perception as open-
ness to the world (claim [3] of the OM view which, as we now can see,
is equivalent to epistemological disjunctivism). I will follow McDowell
in arguing that embracing this view is a way of avoiding a Cartesian
separation of mind and world, and thereby a way of avoiding some of
the problems generated by the Cartesian picture. We will also see that
resistance to the openness-view is primarily motivated by a ‘fantasy of
a sphere within which reason is in full autonomous control’.21 Toward
the end of the chapter, we will see that the question of whether percep-
tion is a direct openness to worldly facts is very relevant for assessing
my claim made above that our perceptions of nature could constitute
satisfactory evidence for a creator. I will argue that if the commonsen-

sical idea that seeing that p can constitute a satisfactory justification for
believing that p is correct, it is possible that some people have knowledge
of the existence of a creator – knowledge justified by excellent percep-
tual evidence.
4.3 Neutralizing skepticism
A first consideration in favor of conceiving perception as openness to

the world is that such a conception has the potential to neutralize post-
Cartesian skepticism – for example the skeptical challenges against our
knowledge of an ‘external world’. Post-Cartesian skepticism is often
viewed as an expression of a ridiculous demand for absolute certainty.
McDowell, however, contends that this is a superficial assessment.
The sources of skepticism are deep. Skepticism reflects, according to
McDowell, a transcendental anxiety about being out of touch with the
objective world. What generates the skeptical challenge to our know-
ledge of an objective world is
the thought that even in the best possible case, the most that percep-
tual experience can yield falls short of a subject’s having an environ-
mental state of affairs directly available to her.22
Mainstream epistemology has, as we have seen, assumed that even in

the best possible case (i.e., a case in which the subject really sees, say,
that there is a fireplace before her), the most that the experience by
itselff23 can warrant (justify) is the claim that it appears to the subject as if
there is a fireplace before her. The best conceivable perceptual evidence
we can ever have is hence constituted by the HCF between the good and
the bad cases. If this contention is true, then we are in effect trapped
behind a ‘veil of appearances’. That this is our epistemic predicament
has usually been taken for granted by both the skeptic and the anti-
skeptic. The contending parties have then debated whether there is
some way to arrive at knowledge of an objective world ‘beyond’ the
appearances by way of some type of inferential argument.
It is not strange that accepting the HCF-conception of perceptual
evidence tends to generate skeptical doubts. What that conception says
is, in effect, that it is impossible to have an objective fact directly available
to one’s thinking.
g So the HCF-conception opens up a gulf between the
mind and the world. The facts we can get our minds around directly are
only subjective facts. Once we have portrayed our relation to the world
in this way, the skeptic has already won the game. We have conceded
to the skeptic that we are out of touch with the world. It is then up to
philosophy to show that there is a way to argue from appearances to
reality. This is a task that has turned out to be hard to fulfill, but given
the picture of our epistemic predicament shared by the skeptic and the
anti-skeptic it is not easy to see how we can refuse to take it on. If we
have accepted that there is a gulf between mind and world, how can we
refuse to explain how the gulf can be bridged?
The McDowellian diagnosis of skepticism points the way to a cure.
The right way to deal with skepticism is, according to McDowell, to
question the assumption about our perceptual relation to the world that
generates it. Do we need to accept that ‘even in the best possible case,
the most that perceptual experience can yield falls short of a subject’s
having an environmental state of affairs directly available to her’? As we
saw above, we need not. A disjunctive construal of perceptual evidence
is available, one which allows us to accept the idea that experiences
could make objective facts directly available. So we need not picture
ourselves as out of touch with the objective world.24
But does accepting the mere possibilityy that experiences could make
objective facts directly available really help against the skeptic? It may
be thought that the skeptic could accept that this type of experience is
possible, but then point out that we have no reason to believe that we
actually have them. We could, for all we know, be in the bad case all the
time. So we do not know facts about an objective world.
What the skeptic here requires is that we must prove (or at least show
that we have good reasons to believe) that we are not in the bad case
before we are entitled to take any of our experiences as warranting claims
about an objective world. But this request by the skeptic (and this is
the absolutely crucial point) amounts to a denial of the very possibility
of having experiences that make objective facts directly available (i.e.
that by themselves warrant claims about an objective world). The skeptic
assumes that even if we in fact are in the good case (i.e., if objective facts
are made directly available to us through perception), this is still not
sufficient for us to have knowledge of the facts made available. We must
also (the skeptic implies) have independent knowledge to the effect that
we are not in the bad case (for instance, that we are not dreaming). But
this claim by the skeptic does not make sense. To have the objective fact
that p made directly available to one is to have a perfectly good warrant
for claiming that p – a warrant that by itself supports knowledge that p.
This is what it means for an experience to make an objective fact directly
available. ‘Available’ means ‘available to know’, and an experience does
not make a fact available to know unless the experience itself provides
sufficient warrant (justification) for knowledge of that fact. If an experi-
ence makes knowledge that p directly available, it cannot be necessary
that one have some additional support for p, such as independent know-
ledge to the effect that one is not dreaming (or is in some other kind of
bad case). The skeptic’s demand for such independent knowledge shows
that the he has not, after all, accepted even the possibilityy that an experi-
ence could make a fact directly available. The skeptic still assumes that
what an experience can provide in the way of warrant for p is neces-
sarily something that is compatible with not-p - . This assumption is what
McDowell rejects.
It is important to understand that McDowell does not attempt
to answerr the skeptical challenge. To answer it would require him to
demonstrate, on the basis of premises that are available without begging
the question against the skeptic, that we are indeed warranted in believing
things about an external world. Instead of embarking on this project
(which many have deemed hopeless) McDowell merely ‘remove[s] a
prop on which skeptical doubt depends’.25 ‘The prop is the thought that
the warrant for a perceptual claim provided by an experience can never
be that the experience reveals how things are.’26 Removing the prop
does not mean that the skeptic is refuted. It only means that the skep-
tical challenge loses its urgency. We can responsibly ignore it.
So McDowell does not claim to be able to show, on the basis of prem-
ises that the skeptic accepts, that we are not in the bad case. He only
points out that there is no problem with the idea that experiences can
make objective facts directly available to us. If we in factt have such expe-
riences (which we have no reason to deny) then there is no problem
about how we can know objective facts. The warrant provided by our
experiences is not, as the skeptic assumes, undermined by the bare
possibility of a bad case.
4.4 Saving content
A second reason to embrace the commonsensical claim that perceptual

experiences can make objective facts directly available is that accepting
this idea is necessary in order to make it intelligible how our thoughts
can have representational content.
The epistemological tradition’s usual way of conceiving perceptual
evidence is, according to McDowell, the result of an ‘interiorization’
of the space of reasons.27 The space of reasons, as we remember, is the
logical space we are moving in when we do not just describe what causes
somebody to claim that p, but rather ask whether she is entitled d to claim
that p. The space of reasons is the space of rational entitlements.28 If a
claim of mine is to count as knowledge, I must have a rational entitle-
ment to (justification for) the claim. Such an entitlement or justifica-
tion is, in McDowell’s terms, a ‘standing in the space of reasons’.
The ‘interiorized’ conception of the space of reasons is a conception
that allows only non-factive standings within this space. Factive stand-
ings such as seeing that p, which relate the subject to the external envir-
onment, are extruded from the space of reasons. The interiorization is
hence a ‘withdrawal’ of the space of reasons from the external world.
This withdrawal happens ‘when we suppose we ought to be able to
achieve flawless standings in the space of reasons by our own unaided
resources, without needing the world to do us any favors’.29
If seeing that p is counted as a standing in the space of reasons – as
something that can function as one’s justification or entitlement for
one’s claim that p – then one is dependent on a ‘favor from the world’
in order to achieve such a standing. This dependence is due to the possi-
bility that any given perceptual experience is not – contrary to what
one takes it to be – a seeing that p, but rather a mere seemingg that p. If the
world is the way it looks to be, then this is something for which I can take
no credit, but rather a favor I have received from the world. This means
that if I ‘want to restrict myself to standings in the space of reasons
whose flawlessness I can ensure without external help, I must go no
further than taking it that it looks to me as if things are thus and so’.30
If I conceive my perceptual evidence as consisting merely of phenom-
enal evidence, then it seems that I can ensure – without depending on
‘favors’ – that I do not take myself to have better evidence than I in
fact have (it can plausibly be argued that we cannot be wrong about
how things subjectively appear to us, i.e., what phenomenal perceptual
evidence we have). If I, on the other hand, were to rely on factive percep-
tual evidence in support of some claim, then it would partly be up to
the world whether I have the evidence I take myself to have (it would
depend on whether the world is the way it appears to be). Adopting the
policy of never appealing to (what one takes to be) factive standings in
the space of reasons constitutes a withdrawal into the phenomenal, an
interiorization of the space of reasons.
Of course, even proponents of an interiorized conception of the space
of reasons admit that we are dependent on ‘favors from the world’ in
the sense that we cannot have empirical knowledge unless the world
provides us with appearances. The point of the interiorization is not
to deny this dependence, but only to ensure that ‘we need no outside
help in avoiding being led astray by whatever appearances the world

is kind enough to afford us’.31 The proponents of interiorization do
not, furthermore, deny that even the most rational person can make
mistakes in her reasoning. The idea of ‘a sphere within which reason
is in full autonomous control’ does not require that we are infallible
in our operations within that sphere.32 It only requires that we are not
dependent on any external help in order to avoid unsatisfactory stand-
ings (unjustified beliefs). Unsatisfactory standings are in principle avoid-
able if we play our cards right.33
So we want to picture ourselves as in total control of our standings
within the space of reasons. This requires that we picture the space
of reasons as interiorized, which means that factive positions must be
banned from it. The epistemic standings that factive reasons would give
us must instead be reconstructed out of material (‘seemings’, ‘appear-
ances’, ‘looks’) that fits into the space of reasons conceived as interior-
ized. The hope is that this withdrawal into the phenomenal is only
temporary, and that it will be possible for us to work our way outwards
by inferringg facts about the objective world from the items (‘appear-
ances’) that the interiorized conception of the space of reasons allows
us to appeal to. This way we could achieve satisfactory standings within
the space of reasons with respect to how the objective world is without
dependence on ‘favors’ from the world. However, ‘anyone who knows
the dreary history of epistemology knows that this hope is rather faint’.34
The interiorization of the space of reasons tends to generate skepticism.
Even worse, it threatens to make unintelligible how our thoughts can
have world-directed contents.35
For an empirical thought, e.g. a belief, to have representational
content is (as we have said) for it to be rationally evaluable as correct
or incorrect in relation to how the world is. The interiorization of the
space of reasons means, however, that no worldly facts are allowed to
figure within this space. No standing within the space of reasons can,
on the interiorized conception, consist of the subject’s having a direct
cognitive relation to a worldly fact. This is what it means to deny that
factive reasons such as seeing that p can constitute a subject’s justifica-
tion for believing that p. So the interiorized conception of the space
of reasons pictures this space as removed from the world. Subjective
entities (appearances, beliefs) are its only inhabitants. Given this view,
it becomes hard to see how appearances, beliefs, etc. can be evaluated
as correct or incorrect in relation to the world, since the world, on this
conception, is outside the space of reasons. But if beliefs and appearances
cannot be evaluated against the world, they cannot be understood as
having representational content. If it is unintelligible how the inhabit-

ants of the space of reasons can have content, it also becomes unintel-
ligible how they could be related to each other by the kind of rational
relations that constitute the space of reasons (only contentful items can
figure in rational relations):
If moves in the space of reasons are not allowed to start from facts,
riskily accepted as such on the basis of such direct modes of cogni-
tive contact with them as perception and memory, then it becomes
unintelligible how our picture can be a picture of a space whose posi-
tions are connected by relations reason can exploit.36
This should get us to realize that the world cannott be pictured as being
outside the space of reasons. We must allow factive states such as seeing
that there is a cow presentt (which is constituted by a relation to the
objective factt that there is a cow present) to figure within this space.
In Chapter 3 we encountered McDowell’s critique of the dualism
between conceptual scheme and the Given. It is common within
modern philosophy to picture the sphere of thought (which is the
sphere of concepts) as set over against a ‘pure pre-categorized reality’.37
We are supposed to be able to distinguish sharply between something
that organizes (namely our conceptual thinking) and something that
gets organized (the world, or the inputs to our conceptual thinking
which the world provides). McDowell says that
we can see the interiorization of the space of reasons as a form of

a familiar tendency in philosophy: the tendency to picture the
objective world as set over against a ‘conceptual scheme’ that has
withdrawn into a kind of self-sufficiency.38
The dualistic schism between conceptual scheme and the world (or
the input from the world) is a dualism between the subjective and
the objective. The subjective realm is pictured as alienated from the
objective realm, the world. But the subjective thereby becomes, as we
have seen, unrecognizable as a realm of thought, since thought entails
content, and content is lost by the alienation of the subjective from the
objective.39
The HCF-conception of perceptual evidence (which restricts percep-
tual evidence to phenomenal evidence) hence creates an incoherent
picture. It is assumed, by the HCF-conception’s proponents, that there
is an inner ‘realm of thought’ inhabited by subjective entities such as
concepts, beliefs, appearances. Because this realm of thought is pictured

as alienated from the objective world, however, it becomes unintelligible
as to how those inner entities can have content. So it becomes unintel-
ligible how the inner realm can be a realm of thought. ‘Everything goes
dark in the interior as we picture it.’40 The lesson to learn is that we must
accept that experience can make objective facts directly available. This
means that we must reject the HCF-conception of perceptual evidence.
4.5 Knowing that one sees
There are, as we have seen in the preceding sections, strong reasons

to believe that perceptual experiences are (when everything goes well)
capable of making objective facts directly available – to provide factive
evidence.41 It could be argued, however, that the mere circumstance
that one has factive perceptual evidence for p – for instance, that one
sees that p – is not sufficient for one to be in a position to know w that
p. One must also have a proper cognitive grasp of one’s evidence. One
must, in other words, know thatt one’s evidence is a ‘seeing’ as opposed
to some kind of illusory perceptual state (a mere ‘seeming’).
This objection assumes that in order for one to know that p, one must
know (or at least be in a position to know) that one’s evidence for p satis-
factorily supports p to the extent that p has the status of knowledge.
This means that one must know w (or be in a position to know) that one
knows.
It is not at all clear that this is true.42 The so-called KK-principle is
rejected by a lot of philosophers.43 More importantly, however, it seems
that McDowell’s disjunctive conception of perceptual evidence is
compatible with the requirement that a subject, in order to know that p
on the basis of seeing that p, must know that her experience is a seeing
(i.e., that it constitutes fully satisfactory evidence for p), as opposed to
being something else (a mere ‘seeming’).
Suppose that I know that there is a cow before me, and that my only
reason to believe that there is a cow before me is a certain visual experi-
ence E. Then I am in a position to know that E is not illusory. If E were
illusory, I would not know that there is a cow before me.44 McDowell’s
claim that perceptual experiences could make knowledge of objective
facts directly available seems, therefore, to entail that such experiences
also make available knowledge to the effect that the relevant perceptual
experiences are not illusory.
The Cartesian skeptic, however, claims that knowing that a certain
experience is not illusory is a condition for accepting that it provides
knowledge of the objective world. So the skeptic portrays knowledge

that one’s experience is a genuine perception as priorr, in the space of
reasons, to the knowledge of the environment that the experience makes
available. This is why the skeptic requires that we must know that we
are not dreaming before we are entitled to take any of our experiences as
warranting claims about objective facts. This requirement is impossible
to satisfy, and it amounts, as we have seen, to a denial of the very possi-
bilityy that an experience, by itself, could make an objective fact directly
available. If we accept McDowell’s construal of perceptual evidence, we
can instead construe the knowledge that we are not dreaming as some-
thing that we acquire simultaneously with (and something which is
logically on a level with) the knowledge about the objective world that
our experiences provide us with. If we were dreaming, our experiences
would not provide us with knowledge of an objective world. Since they
provide us with such knowledge, we know that we are not dreaming.
McDowell, hence, stands the skeptic’s construal of our epistemic situ-
ation on its head.45
A very reasonable view, congruent with common sense, is that seeing
that p (sometimes) puts a subject in a position to know both that p, and
that she sees that p. I know that p by seeing, and I know that I am seeing
that p by reflecting on my own mental state.46
Is it strange to claim that a person can, just by seeing (e.g.) that there is
a cow before her and reflecting on her own mental state, know that her
experience is a seeingg rather than a mere ‘seeming’? I suspect that the
feeling of strangeness (which some may have) is caused by internalistic
intuitions acquired through reading philosophy. Common sense does
not regard the claim as the least problematic. According to common
sense, people can often know that they see a cow in the same direct,
non-inferential way as they can know that there is a cow before them.
It could be argued that the state of seeing that p is not (purely) a mental
state. It is a composite state, consisting of a mental component (the
inner experience) and an external, causal relation to an objective fact
( p). Internalists – who, as we remember, claim that mental states super-
vene ‘narrowly’, i.e., merely on facts about the subject’s brain – construe
states like seeing that p in this way. If one denies that seeing that p is a
mental state, then it is certainly natural to deny that one can know that
one sees that p just by seeing that p and reflecting on one’s own mental
state.
If externalism is true, however, then seeing that p could be a mental state.
Externalists admit that mental states supervene ‘broadly’, i.e., also on
facts about the subject’s environment. Everybody agrees, furthermore,
that some mental states are such that we (sometimes) can know that we
are in them by reflection (introspection) alone. If seeing that p is a mental
state (which it could be if externalism is true), and if some mental states
are such that we can know that we are in them by reflection alone, then
what good reasons do we have to deny what common sense affirms, viz.
that sometimes when I see that p, I can know that I am in the state of
seeingg that p just by reflecting on my own mental state?47
A common intuition that may cause one to resist the latter claim is
the intuition that mental states that supervene exclusively on things in
the subject’s head (which seeing that p does not) must be more directly
accessible to the subject than states that also supervene on conditions
in the external environment. But this intuition is completely ground-
less. There are a lot of things going on in my head that I have absolutely
no epistemic access to. If other people had not told me so, I would not
even know that there is a brain in my head. So there is no reason to
believe that only those mental states (if there are any) that supervene
exclusively on things in the head are such that one can know that one
is in them just by being in them and reflecting on one’s own mental
state.
4.6 Rationality
We have found, so far, nothing that prevents us from adopting a

disjunctive conception of perceptual evidence along the following
lines: a case in which it appears to one as if p can be eitherr a case of
seeing that p (and hence having factive perceptual evidence for p), orr a
case of merely having it appear to one as if p (and hence merely having
phenomenal evidence for p).
Suppose, then, that in a particular case I take myself to know that
there is a fireplace before me, and I take myself to know this because
I see that there is one. If the particular case I am in is, in fact, the good
case, then I have excellent perceptual evidence in support of my claim
that there is a fireplace before me. My perceptual evidence is, in that
case, such that it logically entails that there is a fireplace before me (it
is, in other words, factive). As we saw in the last section, in such a case I
might also be in a position to know that my experience is a seeing. g This
means that I am in a position to know that I am in the good case. This
is what is so good about the good case.
Had I been in the bad d case, however, I would also have taken myself
to see that there is a fireplace before me, and hence to know that there
is. In the bad case, however, I would have been wrong. g In fact, I would
not merely have been wrong. My belief about a fireplace would also
have been unjustified. (The fact that it appears to me as if there is a
fireplace before me is not, by itself, sufficient for me to be justified in
believing that there is a fireplace before me.48) Furthermore, had I been
in the bad case, I would not have been in a position to know that my
experience was not a seeing. So I would not have been in a position to
know that I was not in the good case. This is what makes the bad case
so bad.49
‘This means’, the critic will say, ‘that if we construe your percep-
tual evidence in this disjunctive way (i.e., as of different quality in the
good and the bad case) then it is a matter of luck whether your claim
about a fireplace is justified or not. If you are lucky enough to be in
the good case, then your knowledge-claim is justified. You will believe
that there is a fireplace before you on the basis of factive evidence and
therefore rationally. But this is simply a stroke of good fortune, and
not something that you can take credit for yourself. You mightt as well
have been in the bad case, and hence believed that there is a fireplace
before you without sufficient evidence and therefore non-rationally. If
you succeed in conducting yourself rationally in this epistemic matter,
this is because you are lucky enough to be situated in favorable circum-
stances (the good case). So the idea that one can have factive evidence
entails that the rationalityy of a (rational) subject’s epistemic conduct is
not within that subject’s own control. Surely this is an absurd conse-
quence. We must therefore reject the view that entails it.’
I will not argue with this critic, except concerning the last conclusion.
It is not at all absurd to claim that one’s rationality is not always within
one’s own control. It is the idea of a sphere in which one’s control is
total that is absurd. The fantasy of such a sphere is one of the main
factors behind the Cartesian separation of mind and world.
The above critic is completely right that if we accept that perceptual
experiences can make objective facts directly, cognitively available, then
we cannot picture ourselves as independent of ‘favors from the world’ at
the level of rationality. Philosophers have usually admitted that whether
a subject has knowledge of an objective fact or not is, to a certain extent,
a matter of luck. The belief that there is a fireplace before me can only
constitute knowledge if the ‘external’ world is arranged a certain way,
viz. in such a way that there is a fireplace at a certain location in it
(knowledge entails truth). Most contemporary philosophers agree that
no matterr how responsible I am when I form beliefs of this kind, and no
matter what measures I take to ensure that I am not deceived, it is still
possible that I am wrong when I claim that there is a fireplace before me.
This possibility entails that two subjects who have formed the belief
that there is a fireplace before them in equally responsibly ways can
still differ in a crucial respect: only one of them knows that there is
a fireplace before him, since only one of them is, in fact, situated in
front of a fireplace. The other subject has, let us say, had the bad luck of
being the victim of a Cartesian demon (or is dreaming, hallucinating,
or whatever). So whether one has knowledge of an objective fact – such
as a fact about a fireplace – is to a certain degree a matter of receiving
(or failing to receive) a ‘favor from the world’. Sometimes the world does
one the favor of actually beingg the way it seems to be. In such cases, one’s
perceptual beliefs will normally constitute knowledge. Sometimes, on
the other hand, the world plays one false, and there may have been
nothing one could have done in order to avoid being fooled. In such
cases, one’s perceptual beliefs will not constitute knowledge, due to no
fault of one’s own.
So whether one has knowledge of objective facts or not depends, to a
certain extent, on things one cannot control. This much is admitted
by the mainstream epistemological tradition. The mainstream epis-
temological tradition has, however, usually claimed that at the level of
rationality,
y we are nott dependent on ‘favors from the world’ in the above
sense. Whether one is rationally justifiedd in believing that there is a fire-
place before one is something that is wholly within a rational subject’s
own control.
Above we encountered McDowell’s critique of the ‘interiorization’ of
the space of reasons. Such interiorization concerns, strictly speaking,
our conception of that space. We conceive the space of reasons as ‘inte-
riorized’ when we deny that factive positions, such as seeing that p, can
function as a subject’s reason (justification, entitlement) for beliefs. The
interiorization happens, as we have noted, ‘when we suppose that we
ought to be able to achieve flawless standings in the space of reasons
by our own unaided resources, without needing the world to do us any
favors’.50 The aim of the interiorization is to
picture reason as having a proper province in which it can be

immune to the effects of luck ... in the sense of factors that reason
cannot control, or control for. The idea is that reason can ensure that
we have only acceptable standings in the space of reasons [i.e., that
our claims are justified], without being indebted to the world for
favors received; if we exercise reason properly, we cannot arrive at
defective standings in the space of reasons, in a way that could only
be explained in terms of the world’s unkindness.51
So the reason why it is tempting to ‘interiorize’ the space of reasons

is that we thereby can picture our rational deliberation as operating
within a luck-free zone. The interiorization seems to make it possible to
picture our epistemic rationality as ‘wholly up to us’.
To be rational in epistemic matters means to respect one’s evidence
(to conform one’s beliefs to one’s evidence, or at least try not to
believe what one’s evidence indicates is false). If the rationality of our
belief-forming is to be ‘wholly up to us’, then we must always be in
a position to know what our evidence is. If we sometimes are not in
a position to know what our evidence is, then we are sometimes not
in a position to know what constitutes respectingg our evidence, and
hence not in a position to know what obeying the dictates of ration-
ality require. A presupposition for our rationality to be wholly up
to us is therefore that we always are in a position to know what our
evidence is. 52
The view of our rationality as being wholly up to us (which may be
regarded as the received view) is equivalent to the claim that ration-
ality is transparentt – that a rational agent always (when she possess the
necessary concepts and is capable of reflecting about her rational status)
is in a position to know what constitutes obeying the dictates of ration-
ality.53 But rationality can only be conceived as transparent for us in
this sense if we conceive our perceptual evidence as consisting exclu-
sively of phenomenal evidence. Phenomenal facts are the only plausible
candidates for evidence, given the requirement that we must always be
in a position to know what our evidence is. So the interiorization of the
space of reasons can be described as a withdrawal into the phenomenal,
a withdrawal of the space of reasons from the external world. Only by
portraying ourselves as relating to the world through an interface of
appearances, of phenomenal facts that we are always in a position to
know, can we picture reason as ‘self-sufficient within its own proper
province’.54
As we saw above, however, we cannot consistently portray ourselves
as cut off from the objective world in the way that a total control of
our own rationality requires. The interiorized conception of the space
of reasons makes it unintelligible how our thoughts can have world-
directed contents. This should make us realize that
we cannot eliminate what the interiorized conception of reason

conceives as a quite alien factor, the kindness of the world, as a
contributor to our coming to occupy epistemically satisfactory posi-
tions in the space of reasons.55
Instead of trying to eliminate any dependence on ‘the kindness of the

world’, we should accept that occupying a factive position such as seeing
that p makes a subject rationally entitled to claim that p, even though
her occupying this position depends on her receiving a favor from the
world.
What is going on here in McDowell’s thought is a sort of ‘coales-
cence’ between the space of reasons and the objective world.56 A piece
of factive perceptual evidence, such as seeing that there is a cow before one,
is both something that can constitute a subject’s rational entitlement
for holding a belief (and therefore something that belongs to the space
of reasons) and d something that includes a part of the world, viz. a fact
about a cow. Since we are fallible in our judgments about how the world
is, we are also fallible in our judgments about our standings within
the space of reasons, i.e., about our own rational entitlements.57 This is
something that we simply must learn to live with.
Perhaps a practical analogy can help us see the futility of trying to
isolate the space of reasons from the objective world in order to create a
luck-free zone for reason to operate within.
When we act, we intervene in the world. I can, for instance, make
a car start. But in doing this, I am dependent on a whole bunch of
factors that I do not control directly. If the spark-plugs do not give any
sparks when I turn the key, the car will not start. It is tempting, then,
to make a ‘withdrawal’ move, and try to separate what is really ‘up to
me’, and what is up to the world. We could, for instance, say that what
I am really doing is just to turn the key. This is myy action, which I can
control, and the rest of the process of making the car start is dependent
on circumstances that I do not control directly. But what if my arms are
paralyzed? Then I cannot turn the key. So it seems that even this action
is not completely within my control. But maybe the decision to turn the
key is something that is independent of any ‘external’ circumstances?
There are, however, certain kinds of brain damage that can prevent
decisions from being made. So even the act of deciding to turn the key
seems to depend on conditions that I do not control.
This shows that ‘the concept of what one does, understood as applying
to one’s interventions in the objective world, cannot mark out a sphere
within which one has total control, immune to luck’.58 The same goes,
according to McDowell, for one’s rationality. It is pointless to try to
isolate myy contributions to my epistemic rationality from the world’s
contribution. An internalist conception of the mind can entice one to
believe that it is possible to isolate reason from the world. If the mind
is in the head, then, surely, reason must be in the head too, and hence
independent of external circumstances. However, the mind is not in

the head, so why believe that reason must be autonomous in relation to
the world outside the head?
The rise of epistemological externalism (not to be confused with
content externalism) since the 1970s is a clear indication that the idea of
a ‘sphere within which reason is in full autonomous control’ is increas-
ingly coming to be seen as unrealistic.59 Internalism and externalism in
epistemology are different views about the proper form of a theory of
epistemic justification. More specifically, they are different views about
what can confer justification on beliefs. One common internalist view
is that ‘in order to confer justification something must be within the
subject’s “perspective” or “viewpoint” on the world’.60 Nothing can
confer justification – be a justifierr – unless the subject has ‘taken note’
of it. A less demanding form of internalism requires only that justifiers
must be ‘accessible to the subject in some special way’, typically access-
ible ‘by reflection alone’ (or ‘by introspection alone’). This second form
hence ‘enlarges the conception of the subject’s perspective to include
not only what does in fact occur in that perspective ... but also what
couldd be there if the subject were to turn his attention to it’.61 Beliefs and
appearances are common internalist candidates for justifiers.
Epistemological externalism is the denial of the claim that justifiers
must be things that the subject has ‘taken note of’ or at least has access
to by reflection alone. A prominent form of externalism is the reliable
process theory of epistemic justification, according to which a person S
is justified in believing that p if and only if S’s belief that p is produced
or sustained by a process or method with a propensity to produce or
sustain mostly true beliefs.62 It is sufficient if the process or method is
in factt reliable (produces mostly true beliefs) in order for S’s beliefs to
be justified. S does not need to know, or even be in a position to know,
thatt the process or method is reliable. So the factor that confers justifica-
tion on S’s beliefs – the reliability of the process or method – can hence
be external to S’s perspective or subjective conception of the world.
Laurence Bonjour notes that
when viewed from the general standpoint of the western epistemo-

logical tradition, externalism represents a very radical departure. It
seems safe to say that until very recent times, no serious philoso-
pher of knowledge would have dreamed of suggesting that a person’s
beliefs might be epistemically justified simply in virtue of facts or
relations that were external to his subjective conception. Descartes,
for example, would surely have been quite unimpressed by the
suggestion that his problematic beliefs about the external world

were justified if only they were in fact reliably related to the world –
whether or not he had any reason for thinking this to be so.63
The very fact that externalism is a common position in contemporary

epistemology indicates that many have given up the traditional quest
for self-sufficiency at the level of rationality. It indicates that many are
prepared to agree with McDowell that
the very idea of reason as having a sphere of operation within which

it is capable of ensuring, without being beholden to the world, that
one’s postures are all right ... has the look of a fantasy, something we
spin to console ourselves for the palpable limits on our powers.64
Externalists willingly accept that we are dependent on ‘favors from the

world’ in order for our beliefs to have the status of being rationally justi-
fied. Acceptance of such dependence is, hence, a garden-variety feature
among contemporary epistemological theories, and not at all unique
to McDowell’s account of justification. Externalism, however, throws
out the baby with the bath water. Disillusioned about the possibility
of establishing a luck-free zone for reason to operate within, external-
ists reject the very idea that knowledge is a standing within the space
of reasons. They reject, in other words, the idea that knowledge is
something that has to do with having reasons (evidence) for what one
believes. To have a reason for a belief is to have a cognitive grasp of (i.e.,
be aware of, or at least be in a position to become aware of by reflection
alone) something that grounds the belief.
McDowell wants to preserve the idea that knowledge is based on
reasons. He therefore requires, in typical internalist fashion, that ‘for p
to be able to serve as an agent’s reason for belief, the agent must be able
to know that p, and know it by reflection alone’.65At the same time, he
claims that a subject’s reason (evidence) for a belief can be factive, and
hence dependent on the obtaining of an ‘outer’ fact. The claim that a
subject’s perceptual reason (evidence) can be both factive and d accessible
to her by reflection alone is, as Neta and Pritchard show, completely
coherent.66 Only Cartesian intuitions about the mind as something
‘inner’ can seem to suggest that the factive, world-involving nature
of reasons such as seeing that p must make those reasons reflectively
inaccessible to the subject.67
Just because we agree with epistemological externalism that the idea
of a luck-free zone for reason to operate within is doomed, we need not
follow externalism in rejecting the idea that knowledge is a standing in

the space of reasons. The latter idea can be divorced from the fantasy of
self-sufficiency at the level of rationality, as McDowell has shown. The
trick is to resist the interiorization of the space of reasons and instead
conceive of this space as coalescing with the objective world. Doing so
undermines an important motivation for epistemological externalism.
4.7 Factive perceptual evidence and

the createdness of nature
It is time to sum up. In this chapter, I have argued in favor of the idea that
factive perceptual standings such as seeing that p can constitute a subject’s
reason/evidence for believing that p. This idea is equivalent to the claim
that a perceptual experience can, in favorable circumstances, constitute
a direct, cognitive purchase on an objective fact, i.e., that an experience,
by itself, can make knowledge of an objective fact directly available to
the subject. So the idea I have defended is that perception should be
conceived as openness to the world (claim [3] of the OM view).
This idea is, arguably, commonsensical. The onus of proof should
therefore be placed on those who want to reject it. We have seen that
the major motivation behind denying that perceptual evidence can be
factive is the desire to portray rationality as transparent. Only if ration-
ality is conceived as transparent can we think of ourselves as capable
of ensuring, without depending on ‘favors from the world’, that our
epistemic conduct is rational.
The price for portraying rationality as transparent is, however, too
high. It requires an interiorization of the space of reasons, a withdrawal
of this space from the objective world. Such an interiorization is what
the denial of factive perceptual evidence amounts to. But interiorizing
the space of reasons makes it unintelligible how our empirical thoughts
can be about the objective world. McDowell presents something like
a transcendental argument in favor of the idea of factive perceptual
evidence – an argument that starts from the fact that our thoughts have
content. If there are no factive positions within the space of reasons (if
one’s rational entitlement for a claim about an objective fact cannot
consist of one’s having that fact itself made directly manifest to one),
then it becomes unintelligible how our thoughts can have content. So
there must be factive positions within the space of reasons. The space of
reasons must coalesce with the objective world.
The view of perceptual evidence advocated in this chapter is incon-
sistent with content internalism. It hence entails content externalism
(claim [1] of the OM view). The view also presupposes that perceptual
experiences have conceptually structured contents (claim [4] of the OM
view). The view will, furthermore, appear very counter-intuitive and
strange if one conceives mental states as ‘representations’ in the sense
explained in Chapter 1. Uncontroversially, perceptual experiences are,
or at least include, mental occurrences. If mental activity in general is
conceived as the instantiation and manipulation of ‘representations’ in
an organ of thought, then it is hard to see how perceptual experiences
(as mental occurrences) could constitute cases of direct openness to
worldly facts. If the mental experience one has when one sees a cow is
identical to (or constituted by, or realized in) a representation tokened in
the mind/brain, then it seems unnatural, to say the least, to claim that
having that experience constitutes being directly, cognitively related to
an objective fact involving a cow. How can having a representation of a
fact about a cow (which is something else than the fact itself) tokened
in one’s mind/brain constitute having the relevant fact about a cow
made directly manifest to one?
If we reject the view of the mind as an organ of thought, however,
and instead conceive it as a system of essentially world-involving
capacities (claim [2] of the OM view), then matters appear in a different
light. Against the background of the latter view, it does not seem at all
unnatural to conceive an experience of a cow as a case of being directly,
cognitively related to a worldly state of affairs involving a cow. The
experience (as a mental occurrence) is not, on this conception, to be
identified with some inner vehicle, a representation. The experience can
instead naturally be identified with the relation itself,
f one of whose terms
is the whole person rather than some inner state of her. Our capacity to
relate cognitively to the world in this way is one of those capacities that
together make up the mind.
The view of perceptual evidence advocated in this chapter there-
fore belongs naturally with (and to some extent presupposes) the other
elements of the anti-Cartesian picture of the mind and its relation to
the world which I have called the OM view.
It is now time to see what implications the idea of factive percep-
tual evidence has for the argument I summarized at the beginning of
the chapter (and which will be pursued in the following chapters). To
recapitulate I claimed that natural structures, such as the constitutions
of organisms, could possibly be expressive of the intent and intelligence
of a creator, and that they could, possibly, be perceived as such. So
there could exist, in the world of nature, expressive properties waiting
to be perceived. Expressive properties are, as we saw, mind-entailing
(subject-related). If some natural structure is expressive of intent and

intelligence, then, necessarily, there is at least one subjectt whose intent
and intelligence are expressed in that structure.
These claims are about possibilities. In this book, I will not argue that
the constitutions of biological organisms actuallyy instantiate expressive
properties, i.e., that they are expressive of the mind of a creator. Does
this mean that I think that we have insufficient evidence for the claim
that nature actually is expressive of the mind of a creator? It does not.
I think that we, at least some of us, have excellent evidence for that
claim – evidence that allows us to know w that biological structures have
been intentionally created. The evidence I am talking about is percep-
tual evidence.
Iff we (or some of us) have factive perceptual evidence for the expres-
siveness of natural structures (that is, if we see that some such structures
are expressive of intent and intelligence), then we are in a position to
know w that those structures are expressive of intent and intelligence, and
hence created.
Thatt we have such evidence is, however, not something I claim to
be able to establish by philosophical argument from non-question-
beggingly available premises. There is no shame in admitting this.
The history of modern epistemology has shown that it is exceedingly
difficult to establish, by philosophical argument from non-question-
beggingly available premises, that we see physical objects. If it were
possible to establish, by philosophical argument, that we see physical
objects, then it would be possible to establish that physical objects exist
(seeing is factive), and hence to refute external-world-skepticism. It is,
however, highly doubtful whether that can be done.
If we could establish, by philosophical argument, that we have factive
perceptual evidence for the expressiveness of natural structures, then
we would thereby have established that a creator exists. I do not claim
to be able to do that. This is why I will not try to argue for the claim
that natural structures are expressive of the intent and intelligence of
a creator.
But suppose that biological structure X is expressive of intent and
intelligence, and that S sees that it is. This means, according to the
conception of perceptual evidence I have defended, that the fact that
X is expressive of intent and intelligence is made directly, cognitively
available to S. S is hence in a position to know w that X is expressive of
intent and intelligence (and hence that X is created) merelyy on the basis
of the perceptual experience she has. No further evidence is needed. The
possibility of a bad case, in which X merely appears to S as expressive
of intent and intelligence, does not undermine S’s rational entitlement,

when S is in the good case, to the claim that a creator exists. The possi-
bility of a bad case is compatible with S’s having knowledge of a creator
in the good case.
What I will argue for in this book is that the ‘good case scenario’
just sketched is possible. I will argue that we have no good reasons to
deny that nature, like human behavior and art, could d be expressive of
the mental properties of a creator, and perceived as such. The mere
possibility of such an understanding of nature would, however, not
be very interesting, were it not for the fact that the expressiveness of
nature is highly plausible from the perspective of the Christian tradition
(and other religious traditions as well). Christians believe that there is
a creator, and the mainstream of the Christian tradition also believes
in a ‘general revelation’. If it is possible to understand nature as directly
expressive of the mind of a creator (if there are no intellectual obstacles
to such an understanding), and if you already believe in a creator and
in general revelation, then the idea suggested in this book will appear
as very plausible. In sum, the argument of this book aims at convin-
cing everybody – Christians as well as non-Christian – of the possibility
that nature is expressive of the divine mind. Whether this possibility
appears as interesting or not to you depends, however, on what back-
ground beliefs you have.
The claim that S can know, merely by seeingg that biological struc-
ture X is expressive of intent and intelligence, that a creator exists,
is a good ‘litmus test’ for whether the reader has accepted the idea of
factive perceptual evidence. If you denyy that S, in the ‘good case scen-
ario’ sketched above, can know that a creator exists merely on the basis
of her perceptual experiences of nature, then you have not accepted the
possibility that perceptual evidence could be factive. Your denial shows
that you reject the very idea that perceptual experiences could make
objective facts directly, epistemically available.
This might seem like too strong a claim. Can one not accept the idea
of factive perceptual evidence but deny that there are any facts of the
relevant kind (such as that organism X’s constitution is expressive of intent
and intelligence)e or that it is possible to perceive such facts?
It is certainly possible to deny the existence or perceptibility of facts of
the relevant type, but this observation is totally misplaced here. In the
above good case-scenario it is stipulated d that S’s perceptual experience is,
in fact, a veridical perception of an expressive property. My claim was
that if this is indeed the case, then S can know that X is created without
having access to any additional evidence or supporting considerations68
besides the experience itself. A rejection of this conditional claim is a

rejection of the very idea of factive perceptual evidence.
It could be argued that in order for S to be rationally entitled to take
herself to see facts such as that X is expressive of intent and intelligence, S
must first know, or have good reason to believe, that facts of this type
exist and are perceivable. However, if such (logically) priorr knowledge
is necessary, then the idea of factive perceptual evidence cannot do the
work it is intended to do. We can see this by considering how the idea of
factive evidence is supposed to ward off skepticism and also to explain
how our empirical thoughts can have representational content.
The skeptical challenge against our knowledge of the ‘external world’
is a challenge against the possibility of knowing that mind-inde-
pendent, physical objects exist. McDowell responds to this challenge
by pointing out a possibility the skeptic has overlooked – the possi-
bility that experiences could make objective facts directly available. So
McDowell claims that we can know that physical objects exists because
we see them (i.e., because we have factive perceptual evidence for their
existence). But suppose it is required that before we are rationally enti-
tled to take ourselves to have factive perceptual evidence for the exist-
ence of physical objects, we must first know, or have good reason to
believe, that physical objects exist and can be seen. If we could satisfy
this demand, then, obviously, we would not need d to appeal to the idea
of factive perceptual evidence in order to explain how we can know
that physical objects exist, and the notion of factive evidence would
hence be explanatorily idle. As McDowell has shown, however, we do
need the idea of factive perceptual evidence in order to explain how
we can know or even think aboutt an objective world of physical objects,
so we must deny that the above requirement applies, or surrender to
skepticism.
Is the McDowellian view of perceptual evidence which I have
defended a version of classical foundationalism? It might seem that it
is. What McDowell claims is that if S has a factive reason, viz. that she
sees that p, then S is in a position to know that p – just in virtue of having
this experience. However, the charge of foundationalism is unwarranted.
McDowell has, as we saw in Chapter 3, a very demanding view of what
it takes to have perceptual experiences. Animals’ and small children’s
sensory awareness of the world do not constitute experiences in the epis-
temically loaded sense which McDowell gives this term. A perceptual
experience, for McDowell, is essentially a standing in the space of reasons,
i.e., an occurrence that by its very nature constitutes a reason (a rational
entitlement) for claims about the world. McDowell contends that in
order to have perceptual experiences in this sense, one must be a rational

animal with conceptual capacities, and in order to have such capacities
one must have a lot of background-understanding about the world. This
means that observational knowledge does not ‘stand on its own feet’ as
traditional empiricism claims. The foundations are dependent on the
superstructure, but in a different way from that in which the super-
structure is dependent on the foundations. We will return to this issue
in the next chapter.
In order further to clarify the McDowellian position, we must now
consider the following possible objection:
Suppose that S has a visual experience in which it appears to her

as if there is a fireplace before her, and suppose that this experi-
ence is a veridical perception of the relevant fact. So S has a factive
reason for the claim that there is a fireplace before her. But suppose
that S also has excellent reasons to believe that she is hallucinating.
She knows that a doctor, before she went to bed last night, gave her
a drug that tends to induce hallucinations of fireplaces. She also
knows that there was no fireplace in her room last night. She does
not know, however, that during the night she was moved to another
room, equipped with a fireplace, and that the hallucinatory drug has
not yet kicked in. Would it be correct to say that S – in this scenario –
knows, just in virtue of her perception of a fireplace, that there is a
fireplace before her?
The answer is that S in this scenario does nott know that there is a fire-
place before her. Seeing that there is a fireplace before one is, on the
McDowellian view we are working with here, a standing in the space
of reasons. It is a satisfactory standing in the sense that if one has this
standing, then it is true that there is a fireplace before one. However,
precisely because seeing is a standing in the space of reasons, one
can only have this standing if one is ‘responsive to the rational force
of independently available considerations’.69 In the scenario above, S
has access to information that is available to her independently of her
visual experience of the fireplace, viz. information about the hallucin-
atory drug, etc. In order for S’s experience to constitute a standing in
the space of reasons, S must be sensitive to the rational force of this
information. This means that S must be aware that the information
strongly speaks against the veridicality of the experience, and she must
also let this awareness affect her epistemic conduct. She must, in other
words, abstain from claiming to know that there is a fireplace before
her. Failure to be sensitive to the rational force of independently avail-

able information constitutes a violation of the requirements of doxastic
responsibility. Such violations deprive one of the rational entitlements
that one’s experiences would otherwise give one.70
This means that seeing that p is a mediated d epistemic position, in the
sense that whether one occupies it or not depends on whether certain
other conditions are satisfied. One important condition is that one must
not act in a doxastically irresponsible way when one takes oneself to be
in the position of seeing that p.
There are, according to McDowell, no immediate standings in the
space of reasons, i.e., no positions that one can occupy ‘without needing
a suitable rational sensitivity to [their] surroundings’.71 The idea that
there are immediate standings in the space of reasons is the Myth of the
Given: the idea of reasons/evidence that one can have independently of
whatever else one has or lacks.
That an epistemic position such as seeing that p is mediated does
not mean, however, that one’s justification for p must be understood
as consisting of an inferential argument from the mediating consid-
erations. Seeing that p is, by itself, a perfectly good justification for p.
Its justificatory force can be undermined d by surrounding considerations,
but it is not derivedd from those considerations. McDowell puts it like
this:
A standing in the space of reasons can be mediated by the rational

force of surrounding considerations, in that the concept of that
standing cannot be applied to a subject who is not responsive to that
rational force. But that is not to say that the epistemic satisfactoriness
of the standing consists in that rational force.
In order to know that p, it is sufficient that S sees that p. She needs no

other positive epistemic support for p. She must, however, be sensitivity
to considerations that speak againstt the truth of p, or that speak against
the reliability of the perceptual experience that constitutes S’s reason to
believe that p. That S must withdraw her claim to know that p if she gets
access to information that strongly speaks againstt the reliability of her
perceptual experience does not mean (and this is absolutely crucial) that
S must have independent reasons in favor off the reliability of the relevant
experience in order to be entitled to take it as veridical. She must not.
This is the whole point of the idea of factive perceptual evidence. To
demand that S must have independent evidence for the reliability (non-
illusoriness) of an experience as a condition for acquiring knowledge
on the basis of that experience is, as we have seen, to reject the very
idea that experiences can make objective facts directly available. One
cannot both claim that an experience can make the objective fact that
p directly available to a subject and d claim that the experience itself is
not enough for the subject to be in a position to know that p, because
evidence for the reliabilityy of the experience is also needed. To demand
independent evidence for reliability is to presume that the most an
experience can provide one with is phenomenal evidence (i.e. that an
experience, taken by itself, can merely inform one that things appearr to
be a certain way, not that they are that way).
The concept of doxastic responsibilityy has largely to do with the kind
of negative rational sensitivity that we have been talking about. It
is important to note that the concept should not, as it functions in
McDowell’s account, be confused with the notion of epistemic justifi-
cation. To be doxastically responsible is a necessary condition for one’s
perceptual beliefs to be justified, but it is not (normally) a sufficient
condition. One’s justifications for perceptual beliefs are normally
constituted by factive standings such as seeing that p. The attempt to
explicate the notion of epistemic justification exclusively in terms of the
notion of doxastic responsibility is one way in which the interiorization
of the space of reasons can express itself. It is important to remember, in
what follows, that doxastic responsibility is, on McDowell’s construal,
a weaker notion than justification, and that the former notion is not
supposed to fill the role of the latter.
What implications do these reflections about doxastic responsibility
have for the above ‘good case scenario’? The implication is that if S
acts in a doxastically irresponsible way when she takes herself to see
an expressive property in nature, then even though her experience is a
veridical perception, its status as evidence is undermined. S must be
rationally responsive to evidence and considerations that are available
to her independently of the evidence that her experience provides. If
independent evidence strongly suggests to S that, say, natural organ-
isms cannot possibly be created, or that the idea of perceiving expres-
sive properties in natural structures is unintelligible, then S’s rational
entitlement to claim that she sees that natural structure X is expressive
of mind is undermined.
Much of the rest of this book will be devoted to showing that a
normal, well-educated subject need not violate the requirements of
doxastic responsibility in order to take her experiences as of intent
and intelligence in nature as veridical. I will argue that the idea that
one can perceive natural structures as expressive of mind is completely
reasonable, and faces no cogent objections. From the perspective of the

Christian tradition (and other theistic traditions) it must be considered
very plausible.
If I am right about the absence of considerations that undermine the
idea that nature is perceptibly expressive of mind, and if nature in factt is
perceptibly expressive of mind, then it follows that normal, well-educated
subjects are in a position to know that a creator exists. The evidence that
makes this knowledge available is, then, perceptual evidence.
The task of the rest of this book will therefore not be to present
any additional reasons why we should believe that nature is percep-
tibly expressive of mind. If the perspective advocated in this chapter is
correct, we may have all the evidence we need for this belief, viz. excel-
lent perceptual evidence. What we have to do from here on is only nega-
tive epistemic work – showing that there are no cogent objections against
the possibility of nature’s expressiveness. Of course, if nobody actually
believed that nature ‘speaks’ about a creator, then my argument would
be rather uninteresting. My claim that iff nature is perceptibly expressive
of mind, then we are in a position to know w that it is, is only interesting
because many people actually take nature to be expressive of the mind
of a creator. The claim of this book is that these people may take nature
as being expressive of the mind of a creator on the basis of excellent
evidence, and that they therefore may know that a creator exists.
We have, as it turns out, by a very different route arrived at a position
somewhat similar to the one Alvin Plantinga defends in Warranted
Christian Belieff 72 Plantinga notices that the standard objections
against Christian beliefs are of two fundamentally different kinds,
viz. de facto and de jure objections. De facto objections are arguments
that conclude that Christian beliefs are false. De jure objections, on the
other hand, are
arguments or claims to the effect that Christian belief, whether

or not true, is at any rate unjustifiable, or rationally unjustified, or
irrational, or not intellectually respectable ... or without sufficient
evidence, or in some other way rationally unacceptable, not up to
snuff from an intellectual point of view.73
After having reviewed a lot of ways of putting the de jure objection (in
terms of justification, rationality, and warrant), he finds that
the de jure question ... is not, after all, really independent of the de
facto question; to answer the former we must answer the latter. This
is important: what it shows is that a successful atheological objection

will have to be to the truth of theism, not to its rationality, justifi-
cation, intellectual respectability, rational justification, or whatever.
Atheologians ... can’t any longer adopt the following stance. ‘Well, I
certainly don’t know whether theistic belief is true – who could know
a thing like that? – but I do know this: it is irrational, or unjustified,
or not rationally justified, or contrary to reason or intellectually irre-
sponsibly or ... ’ There isn’t a sensible de jure question or criticism that
is independent of the de facto question.74
A structurally similar conclusion follows from the argument of this

book. McDowell contends, as we have seen, that we must picture the
space of reasons and the objective world as coalescing. This is what
allowing factive perceptual reasons to figure within the space of reasons
means. The consequence of McDowell’s view is that whether one has
a satisfactory standing within the space of reasons with respect to a
perceptual belief about the world usually depends on how the world
actually is. So the question of whether one is rationally entitled d (justi-
fied) in having a certain perceptual belief cannot, in many cases, be
answered independently of answering the question of whether one’s
perceptual belief is true. So the coalescence of the space of reasons and
the world entails that a Plantingian situation often obtains: the de jure
question cannot (always, or even usually) be answered independently of
the de facto question when it comes to perceptual beliefs.
The denial of the claim that the objective world and the space of
reasons coalesce in this way, is the interiorization of the space of
reasons. This is, as we have seen, a position with strong Cartesian
implications. Our reasons (evidence) for believing things are, according
to this position, entities that belong to an ‘inner’, subjective sphere
separated from the objective world. If we reject this Cartesian view, we
must accept that the question of justification cannot always, or even
usually, be answered independently of the question of truth for percep-
tual beliefs.
This is why, if the argument of this book is sound, the following
Plantingian situation obtains. If biological structures in factt are percep-
tibly expressive of mind (and hence created), and if S sees that they are,
then S is satisfactorily justified in believing that a creator exists (provided
that S does not violate the requirements of doxastic responsibility). If
biological structures are nott expressive but merely seem to be, then S is
in the bad case. Then she is not satisfactorily justified in believing that
a creator exists (unless she has satisfactory reasons for this belief other
than her experiences of nature). In order to know w whether or not S is

justified, we must know whether she sees that biological structures are
expressive of mind. This in turn means, since seeing is factive, that we
must know whether those structures are expressive of mind. So the de
jure question with respect to S’s belief cannot be answered independ-
ently of the de facto question. Whether S is justified
d in believing that a
creator exists depends on what the world is like – on whether nature is
in fact expressive of the mind of a creator. Hence, if the argument of
this book is sound, nobody can rationally say
Well, I certainly don’t know whether belief in a creator is true – who

could know a thing like that? – but I do know this: it is irrational, or
unjustified, or not rationally justified, or contrary to reason or intel-
lectually irresponsibly or ... 75
The connection between the rationalityy of belief in the expressiveness

of nature and the truth of that belief, which the view here advocated
entails, might seem counterintuitive. Is not the point of determining
whether one is rational/justified with respect to a belief that one thereby
can decide, without already knowing whether the belief is true, whether one
should hold it or not?
This objection assumes that rational entitlement is something that
is part of a methodd – rationality – whose ultimate aim is truth.76 When
we cannot attain truth directly, the next best thing is to try to conduct
ourselves rationally. So we aim at rational entitlement (justified belief).
This is the method. But we need not think of rational entitlement in this
way (or at least not exclusively in this way). To think of it as part of a
method tempts us to think of rational entitlement as something we can
always accomplish by our own autonomous powers, without relying on
favors from the world. This is, as we have seen, a disastrous idea. It cuts
reason off from the objective world and shuts it up in a Cartesian bubble.
However, one can think of rationality as a method, and rational
entitlement as something at which one should aim when one cannot
aim directly at truth, without having to reject the McDowellian account
of perceptual justification here defended. One can subscribe to the view
that rationality is a method without believing that it is always easier,
or even in most cases easier, to know whether one’s belief that p is justi-
fied
d than whether it is true. It is enough if it is sometimes easier to know
whether the belief is justified than whether it is true. If it is sometimes
easier to know whether the belief is justified than whether it is true,
then one can use rationality as a method.77 In order for a method to be
useful, it does not have to be useful all the time, or even most of the
time. The method of using vision in order to get to know the properties
of physical objects is useful in many cases. In some cases, however, it is
not useful, such as when it is dark. Even if we lived in a world where it
was dark most of the time, the method of gaining knowledge by using
vision would still be useful, provided that it was light some of the time.
The claim that it is not, for many values of p, easier to know whether
one’s belief that p is justified than whether it is true, does not entail that
rationality is a useless method. It only means that it is not an omnipo-
tent method. The idea that rationality is an omnipotent method is,
however, an Enlightenment fantasy.
It is important to understand that the McDowellian account of the
justification of perceptual beliefs here defended is totally compatible
with belief in universal norms of rationality. The account is, for example,
compatible with W.K. Clifford’s doctrine ‘it is wrong, always, every-
where, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence’.78
Nothing I have said entails that we should not try to adapt our epistemic
conduct so that it accords with this doctrine.79 The account I have
defended entails, of course, that we sometimes are not in a position to
know what our evidence is, and hence not in a position to know when
our evidence is insufficient for believing what we believe. So we are
not capable of ensuring that we always obey what Clifford’s doctrine
dictates. This, however, does not mean that it is a bad doctrine.
The above account does not deny that there are universal dictates of
reason. It just denies that the universal dictates of reason are such that
we are always in a position to know what constitutes obeying them.
Those philosophers (such as Clifford himself, presumably) who assume
that we are always in a position to know what constitutes obeying the
dictates of reason are probably motivated by an irrational demand for
autonomy and control.
It is easy to see why this irrational demand arises. If we accept
that evidence can be factive and that we therefore are not always in
a position to know what our evidence is, it follows that ‘a theory of
evidence cannot be expected to provide a decision procedure which
will always enable us to determine in practice whether our evidence
includes a given item’.80 If there can be no such decision procedure
for evidence, then there can be no decision procedure for justification
either, since the degree to which a subject is justified with respect to a
belief is determined (at least in part) by what evidence she has.
This also applies to the idea of a publicc decision procedure for justifi-
cation. Since any socially shared body of empirical evidence would have
to consist of perceptual evidence contributed by individuals, ‘society’

cannot always know which items are included in its total body of empir-
ical evidence. Hence, there cannot be a decision procedure that will
always enable ‘society’ to distinguish, on evidential grounds, between
the epistemically unjustified ‘fanatic’ or ‘enthusiast’ and the reason-
able person. Does S – who claims that a creator exists, and who appeals
to her perceptions of nature as evidence – obey Clifford’s maxim, or
does she believe something ‘upon insufficient evidence’? That depends,
if the argument of this chapter is sound, on whether the good or the
bad case actually obtains (i.e., on what the objective world is actually
like). The demand for a decision procedure of the mentioned type is a
demand for a procedure for determining whether S’s belief is justified
that works both in the good and in the bad case. That it works both in the
good and in the bad case means that it works whatever the objective world
is actually like. This is why the demand for such a procedure inevitably
leads to an interiorization of the space of reasons, a withdrawal of it
from the objective world.
There are, of course, people who claim that the Very Idea of Rationality
depends on the existence of a decision procedure that works whatever
the objective world is like. Those people take for granted that ration-
ality, by nature, is transparent. One motivation behind this unsus-
tainable view of rationality is, I suspect, the following Enlightenment
dream.
If rationality is transparent, then everybody is always in a position
to know propositions about their own rational standing with respect
to any belief. If so, it should be possible to educate people so that they
actualize their potential for knowledge of such propositions. By proper
schooling, people could be taught to determine the extent to which
they are justified with respect to any belief. This might not enable them
to stop having unjustified beliefs (our beliefs are not always under our
direct voluntary control), but they would be able to tell their unjustified
and justified beliefs apart. This would allow them to gain an indirect
control over their beliefs. More importantly, the ability of well-educated
people to distinguish between justified and unjustified beliefs could
constitute the epistemic foundation of a secular society. Everybody who
had received a proper training would be able to come to a rational agree-
ment concerning what is rationally believable and what is myth, what
is faith and what is knowledge. Unjustified beliefs could be relegated to
the private sphere, and only knowledge and justified beliefs be allowed
to figure in public debate. Religion (unjustified belief) could be sepa-
rated from Reason (justified belief and knowledge).
Rationality, however, is not transparent and this Enlightenment

dream is therefore unrealizable. We can, of course, insistt that ration-
ality, by definition, is transparent. We can insist that it is impossible
that a subject’s rational standing with respect to a belief can depend on
circumstances beyond her control. But this seems to be a mere expres-
sion of a value judgment to the effect that the values of rationalityy and
autonomous control are inseparable. And this value-judgment does not
seem to be reasonable in light of the considerations presented in this
chapter. The idea of universal reason should therefore be divorced
from the idea of autonomous control. In fact, it needs to be, in order
to make the idea of rationality coherent. Nevertheless, the identifica-
tion of rationality with autonomous control is deeply ingrained in our
Western consciousness. This is why the perspective advocated in this
book might be hard, for some, to swallow.
5
Perceiving Other Minds
It is as natural to interpret the world as communicating the

will of God, or perhaps of many gods, as it is to interpret parts
of our sensory impressions as communicating the purposes of
other people.1
Keith Ward
A butterfly’s wing shows me traces of an intelligence a thou-

sand times more distinct than the indications you have that
another human being thinks.2
Denis Diderot
In the previous chapter, I argued that the idea of factive perceptual reasons/
evidence is intelligible and very reasonable. I also clarified the dialectical
situation. If we indeed have factive perceptual reasons to believe that
nature (or some aspects of it) is expressive of mind, then we do not need
any additional evidence in order to know that nature is expressive of
mind. Our perceptual evidence does all the positive epistemic work.
However, perceiving that p is a ‘standing’ or ‘position’ in the space of
reasons. In order to occupy such a position one must be sufficiently
sensitive to the rational force of independently available considerations,
e.g. evidence that tells against the veridicality of one’s perceptual experi-
ence. If one does not display such sensitivity, the position in the space
of reasons that one’s perceptual experience would otherwise consti-
tute is undermined. What remains to be seen with respect to my claim
about the perceptible expressiveness of natural structures is whether
the requirements of doxastic responsibility can be met. Can one take
oneself to perceive natural structures as expressive of the intent and
intelligence of a creator without violating these requirements?
104
Perceiving Other Minds 105
I will argue that one can. First I will argue, with the help of McDowell’s
ideas, that the idea of perceiving physical phenomena as expressive of
mind is intelligible and very reasonable, not to say necessary. Secondly,
I will argue that we have experiences that are plausible candidates for
being perceptions of expressions of the divine mind, viz. experiences in
which it appears to us as if biological organisms are created. Thirdly, I
will argue that there are no cogent reasons to believe that those experi-
ences are illusory.
In this chapter I will only begin to work on the first of these three
tasks by defending the idea that physical phenomena can be intrinsic-
ally expressive of mind. The chapter focuses on one particular kind of
physical phenomenon – human behavior.
This chapter prepares the ground for the next, where I will argue
that it is reasonable, against the background of a McDowellian view
of human behavior, to believe that structures can also be intrinsically
expressive of mind. Artworks and advanced artifacts, for instance, are
obvious candidates for being structures that manifest (express) some of
the mental properties of their creators. If structures can be expressive of
mind, then it is possible, I will argue, that biological structures are.
In this chapter, I will proceed as follows. As in the previous chapter,
I will consider a form of skepticism. This time it is skepticism about
other minds. I will state the traditional ‘problem of other minds’ as
it is relevant for this book. Then I will review the main responses to
the problem which are on offer. I will focus on the currently most
popular form of response, the so-called ‘scientific inference’ to other
minds. My purpose is not to refute this or any other ‘solutions’ to
the other minds problem. I will, however, suggest that they all suffer
from serious weaknesses. I will then present McDowell’s account of
our knowledge of other minds, and suggest that it is plausible and
attractive – especially against the background of the shortcomings
of other approaches. Central elements in McDowell’s account are the
claims that human behavior is intrinsically expressive of the mental,
and that our knowledge of other people’s mental states is not always
inferential, but sometimes observational. At the end of the chapter
I will discuss the distinction between observational and inferential
knowledge implicit in McDowell’s account. The overarching purpose
of the chapter is to argue that some physical phenomena can plausibly
be understood as intrinsically expressive of mind. Another purpose
is to raise the reader’s awareness of the difficulty of establishing, by
inferential argument, the existence of other minds and the expressive-
ness of human behavior. Awareness of this will affect our view of what
inferential argument can be expected to establish with respect to the

expressiveness of nature.
5.1 The problem of other minds
Our ability to judge, on the basis of perceptual experiences, whether

another person is in a certain mental state, is fallible. It can visually
appear to me as if S is angry, although she is not. She can, for instance,
fake anger. The fact that we can be deceived by behavior has often
been taken to entail that we never perceive facts about anybody else’s
mental states. What we perceive is always onlyy behavior, and from
facts about behavior we infer mental facts. As we might recall, the
argument from illusion/hallucination concludes, from the fact that
a veridical experience can be subjectively indistinguishable from an
illusory experience, that what we perceive (the content or object of the
experience) must be the same in the good and the bad cases, viz. some
illusion/perception-neutral entity, a Highest Common Factor (HCF).
When this argument is applied to our perceptual relation to other
people’s mental lives, the argument concludes that what we ‘embrace
within the scope of our consciousness’ when we observe, say, an angry
person, are merely facts about her behavior conceived as psychologic-
ally neutral. By ‘psychologically neutral behavior’ I mean behavior
characterized in merely ‘physical’ terms, i.e., behavior conceived as
something that can be exhaustively described without reference to
mental states. (I will often use the term ‘mere behavior’ to refer to
behavior conceived in this way.)
Behind the argument from illusion is a particular ‘epistemological
outlook’ or ‘framework’, according to McDowell.3 The core of this
outlook is the assumption that when some types of judgments or
claims are epistemically problematic, we need ‘a basis for the claims
that we can assure ourselves of possessing before we go on to evaluate
the credentials of the claims themselves’.4 For instance, we often deliver
judgments about other people’s mental states. We are, however, fallible
in making such judgments, so they can, as a category, be consid-
ered epistemically problematic. Because of this, the ‘epistemological
outlook’ urges us to look for some basis for such judgments, i.e., to find
some other (less problematic) type of judgments the truth of which
we can ascertain independently of the truth of the problematic kind
of judgments, and from which the problematic kind of judgments can
be inferred. Judgments about ‘mere behavior’ could constitute such
a basis. I can assure myself of the truth of my judgments about S’s

‘bodily’ behavior without having to know any proposition about S’s
mental life. From judgments about ‘mere behavior’, I might then, hope-
fully, be able to infer judgments about S’s mental states. So judgments
about ‘mere behavior’ could constitute the basis for my claims about S’s
mental life.
McDowell argues that we should reject this framework. If we do so,
the rug will be pulled out from under the ‘problem of other minds’,
as we will see. If we buy into the framework, however, we are faced
with some serious challenges with respect to knowledge of other minds.
The skeptical problems which this epistemological framework generates
indicates, I will argue, that something is wrong with it.
The problem of other minds can be put thus: if all we ever perceive
when we turn our attention to other humans is ‘mere behavior’, how
can we ever be justified in believing (and a fortiori know) that somebody
else is minded?5 Behind this epistemological problem lurks a deeper
conceptual issue: how can our attributions of mental states to others
even be meaningful? There are three common ways of responding to the
problem of other minds.
5.1.1 The argument from analogy

This argument assumes that our mental state-concepts get their mean-
ings from our relating them to our own experiences. I know from my
own case what (e.g.) pain is. I also know from my own case that pain
causes certain behavior (or, at least, that it is correlated with certain
behavior), such as groaning. Furthermore, when I look around, I find
that there are other bodies very much like my own, which often behave
like I do in similar circumstances. From these premises I can infer that
other people’s behavior probably is caused by mental states much like
my own.
This argument was popular until the middle of the twentieth century,
but is today widely thought to be inadequate.6 The classical objections
are that the argument has a logically uncheckable conclusion, and that
it is an induction based on only one case.7 The latter objection is ‘gener-
ally seen as fatal’.8 Hyslop says that ‘this feature is seen as so problem-
atic that the one element common to all other responses to the problem
of other minds is a desire to avoid having our own experience play the
central role in the evidence’.9
Wittgenstein, however, has offered a deeper critique of the assump-
tion on which the argument rests, viz. that we can learn ‘from our own
case’ what mental terms mean. In Norman Malcolm’s interpretation,

the Wittgensteinian argument goes like this:
If I were to learn what pain is from perceiving my own pain then I

should, necessarily, have learned that pain is something that exists
only when I feel pain. For the pain that serves as my paradigm of
pain (i.e., my own) has the property of existing only when I feel it.
That property is essential, not accidental.10
It would hence be contradictory to talk about otherr people’s pains, since

these are pains that I do not feel. The argument from analogy does
not even address this conceptual problem. Furthermore, Wittgenstein’s
‘private language argument’ seems to imply that the very idea of
concepts whose meaning is given by private episodes is incoherent. If
the argument is sound, then the meaning of terms like ‘pain’ is not
something that we can learn ‘from our own case’.
Alvin Plantinga argues, however, that the analogical argument
survives the Wittgensteinian attacks,11 but that it nevertheless fails to
support the conclusion it is intended to support, viz. that the bulk of my
common sense beliefs about minds and mental states are more probable
than not on my total evidence.12 The analogical argument is, according
to Plantinga, the best we have, but it is still unsatisfactory. It suffers, in
fact, from the same ‘crippling defect’ as the teleological argument for
the existence of God.13
Alec Hyslop also defends the analogical argument against several
Wittgenstein-inspired objections. He ends up defending a version of
the argument that is best described as a hybrid between the analogical
argument and the ‘scientific inference’ to other minds. His position will
be considered below. According to Hyslop, ‘defenders of the analogical
inference to other minds now generally present it in a hybrid form
incorporating an inference to the best explanation (scientific inference,
hypothetic inference)’.14 So we need not spend any more time on the
classical analogical inference argument.
5.1.2 The scientific inference

The most fashionable approach to other minds within analytic phil-
osophy today is to regard mental states as theoretical (unobserved)
entities (at least other people’s mental states).15 This approach argues
that the best explanation of why people behave as they do is that they
have mental states that cause their behavior. Even though we cannot
observe others’ mental states (as mental), we are justified in ascribing
such states to others because of the explanatory power of the theory

that assumes the existence of such states. This view has been called the
‘scientific inference’ (SI) model, since it claims that our beliefs about
other minds are justified in the same way as scientific theories:
On this account, my reason for believing in the existence of other

minds similar to my own is in all important respects the same as the
scientific realist’s reason for believing in the existence of sub-atomic
particles, and for believing in such scientific accounts and theories
as the kinetic theory of gases.16
There are, however, two rather different versions of the SI model. Robert
Pargetter, the author of the above quote, presents one version. Pargetter
assumes that I know, from my own case, that mental states cause my
behavior. For instance, I know that pain sometimes causes me to groan
and grunt. When I see other people behave in similar ways, one possible
explanation is that their behavior is caused in the same way as my
behavior, viz. by pain. Of course, there are other possible explanations.
But I seem to have reason to choose the suggested explanation before
other explanations, since it is a good explanation, and since I already
know that this explanation is the correct one in my own case:
I know that my mind is the explanation of my behavior in general,

and the hypothesis that [another man whom I observe] has a mind,
with mental events qualitatively similar to mine, certainly explains
his behavior very well. In the absence of any really plausible alter-
native, it would seem rational to believe that this man, and in fact
people in general, are minded.17
Hyslop has convincingly argued, however, that this version of the SI

model is weak. It depends on the principle that like effects have like
causes. This is a highly dubious principle. One day the lawn might be
wet because it has rained. Another day it may be because the water
sprinkler has been going. Similar physical behavior might, likewise,
have very different causes. However, proponents of the SI, such as
Pargetter, could argue that in the absence of plausible alternative explana-
tions of others’ behavior it is reasonable to assume that what explains
my behavior explains theirs and hence let the principle that like effects
have like causes rule in favor of the hypothesis that other people have
minds like mine. The problem with this reasoning, which Hyslop points
out, is that there is a highly plausible alternative explanation of other
people’s behavior available. If all I know directly about other people are
facts about their behavior, then surely the most plausible hypothesis
is that their behavior is caused by purelyy physical states, such as brain
states, without any ‘mental’ or ‘phenomenal’ aspects. The availability of
this purely physical explanation makes it question-begging to appeal to
the principle that like effects have like causes, since this principle can
only be legitimately appealed to in the absence of plausible alternative
explanations.
Unless I already know that A has mental states, it seems uncalled-
for to explain A’s behavior by reference to mental states. So the best
explanation of A’s behavior seems to be an explanation in purely phys-
ical terms. The only reason I can think of to prefer an explanation in
mental rather than merely physical terms for A’s behavior is that A is
in certain outer respects similar to me, and I know that I have mental
states. But then we are back with the analogical argument.
Hyslop has, as mentioned, argued for a model that combines the
analogical and the SI models:
We reach other minds by inferring in our own case that our mental
states are produced by (certain of) our physical (brain) states and
then inferring that it will be the same with others. Similar physical
(brain) states will have the same consequences [i.e., the same effects].
The relevant principle is benign; not that like effects have like causes
but that like causes have like effects. In effect, this is an appeal to the
Uniformity of Nature.18
While the traditional analogical argument argues from the similarity

of behavior between me and others, and concludes that other people’s
behavior has the same type of cause as mine, this version argues from
the similarity of physical (brain) constitution. I know that I have mental
states. I hypothesize, reasonably, that those states are caused by certain
physical states, viz. brain states. If nature is uniform, then similar brain
states in other people should have the same causal effect, viz. to produce
mental states. So I am justified in believing that others have mental
states like mine.
Hyslop’s hybrid model, however, has the strange consequence that
people who do not know or believe that brain states cause mental states
lack justification for believing that other people have minds (unless
there is some other cogent argument for other minds, which Hyslop
does not seem to think). This is highly counterintuitive. One does not
have to know or even believe that brains cause mental states in order
to know that other people have minds. Many people in the history of
humanity did not believe that physical states cause consciousness, but
surely they knew that others have minds.
David Chalmers’ approach to the other minds problem is similar to
Hyslop’s.
We note regularities between experience and physical or functional

states in our own case, postulate simple and homogenous underlying
laws to explain them, and use those laws to infer the existence of
consciousness in others.19
This is ‘as good a solution to the problem of other minds as we are

going to get’. This means that one must first hypothesize about the
causal provenance of one’s own mental states in order to be able to infer
that others have minds. Chalmers admits that ‘this may or may not be
the reasoning we implicitly use in believing that others are conscious,
but in any case it seems to provide a reasonable justification for our
beliefs’.20
Pargetter’s, Hyslop’s and Chalmers’ models can be accused of being
vulnerable to the Wittgensteinian objection to the idea that we can
learn the meaning of mental-state terms ‘from our own case’. There is,
however, another version of the SI model that is very different from
the one we have reviewed, and which can avoid this objection entirely.
This model (SI2) claims that the justification for belief in the existence
of anyy mental states (including my own) is that such states explain
behavior. There is no essential difference between my justification for
belief in other minds and my justification for belief in my own mind.
Paul Churchland writes:
The hypothesis that a specific individual has conscious intelligence

is ... an explanatory hypothesis ... it is plausible to the degree that the
individual’s continuing behavior is best explained and predicted in
terms of desires, beliefs, perceptions, emotions, and so on.21
So while Pargetter and Hyslop conceive other people’s mental states as

theoretical entities and their own mental states as directly observed
entities, the SI2 model conceives all mental states as theoretical entities.
Functionalism is a theory that fits this approach especially well.
According to (most forms of) functionalism, mental states just are phys-
ical states (brain states) that occupy certain causal roles. For a brain state
to be, say, a desire for ice-cream is for it to be a state that, together with
certain other brain states (such as beliefs about the whereabouts of ice-
cream), tends to cause certain behavior.
Any rational person must, however, be open to the possibility that
a certain theory is superseded by a more successful theory that does
not include the theoretical entities posited by the superseded theory.
Hence, any rational person who believes that mental states are theoret-
ical entities must accept that it is possible to discover that there are no
minds.
This is an implication some philosophers unblinkingly accept. I am,
however, more inclined to view the implication as a reason to reject the
construal of minds and mental states as theoretical entities, and the
concomitant idea that our knowledge of minds is justified on the basis
of a scientific inference from behavior. Åsa Wikforss writes:
What characterizes theoretical terms is their principled dispens-

ability; if a better explanatory theory is made available then we can
dispense with the term and, by implication, the concept. But how
could we abandon the first-person use of mental concepts?22
Plantinga has pointed out a fundamental problem with the SI model,

viz. that ‘the relationship between a scientific theory and the grounds
for accepting it is still a black and boundless mystery’.23 The quagmire
that opens up here can be illustrated by comparing the scientific infer-
ence to other minds to another type of (supposedly) scientific infer-
ence: intelligent design theory. Proponents of this school argue that
certain biological structures require explanation in terms of intelligent
design. In other words: the best (or only) explanation of the existence
of those structures is that they have been intentionally designed by
an Intelligence. A common criticism against this movement points out
that explanations in terms of intelligent design are not scientificc expla-
nations. Even though it might be the case that at the present time we
are not able to produce a physical explanation of the existence of some
structure, we are nevertheless not entitled – if we aspire to do science – to
draw the conclusion that this structure is designed by an intelligence.
Explanations in terms of intelligence are pseudo-explanations.
If the same standards for scientific explanation are applied to the
purportedly ‘scientific’ inference to other minds, in its SI1 version, then
that kind of explanations must receive the same unfavorable verdict.
To explain the behavior of some physical body by reference to, say,
an intention, is to give up the scientific explanatory ambition. It is like
explaining the existence of the bacterial flagellum by appeal to an
intention (a divine one, in this case). Much better, then, to opt for an
explanation in purely physical terms.
Proponents of the scientific inference approach can respond to this
challenge by claiming that the mental states they hypothesize are, e.g.,
functionally characterized brain states. Those states are therefore legit-
imate scientific entities with physical, causal powers. This response,
which is perfectly fine, reveals an important truth about the SI model.
Proponents of the scientific inference had better claim that mental
states are (or are realized in) brain states. Otherwise it will be difficult
to defend the scientificc nature of the inference.
In Chapter 2 we saw that the view that mental states are (or are consti-
tuted by or realized in) brain states is a version of the ‘organ of thought’
view and therefore associated with serious problems. We also saw that
there is an attractive alternative: the view of the mind as a system of
essentially world-involving capacities. Acceptance of the scientific infer-
ence model’s solution to the problem of other minds hence comes at a
price. It requires that we stay with the questionable Cartesian picture
of the mind.
Another problem with the SI model is this. Even if the SI model were
to succeed in establishing that the hypothesis that other people have
minds is more probable than any alternative hypothesis, the model still
cannot account for the complete confidence we often have about other
people’s mental states.24 Sometimes I feel completely certain that some-
body else is in pain. If our knowledge of other minds is justified by a
scientific inference, then we should (if we are epistemically rational)
believe in other minds as a tentative hypothesis. But we do not believe
in other minds that way. Are we therefore less than fully rational in this
respect? Rather than accepting that we are, we should regard this conse-
quence as a reductio ad absurdum of the view that entails it.
5.1.3 The ‘criterial’ approach

A third way of construing our knowledge of other minds is suggested by
the ‘criterial’ approach. This approach can seem attractive in comparison
to accounts that portray our knowledge of other minds as inferential.
Wittgenstein distinguishes between symptoms and criteria. A symptom
of X is some circumstance of which we have learned, through experi-
ence, that it is correlated with X. For example, a falling barometer is a
symptom of rain. A criterion of X, on the other hand, is a circumstance
that is linked to X as a matter of ‘definition’.25
When we teach a child what ‘rain’ means, we teach it that when it
looks like thatt outdoors, then it is raining. Our knowledge that it is
raining when it looks like thatt outdoors seems to be constitutive of our

very understanding of the meaning of ‘rain’. So it appears to be concep-
tual rather than empirical knowledge. The ‘look’ of rain is a criterion of
rain, not a symptom of it.
The relation between pain and certain behaviors is likewise, according
to this approach, criterial rather than symptomatic. We have not learned
by induction that pain is correlated with groaning. Rather, the very
concept of pain links pain with behaviors such as groaning.
Because of the conceptual connection between pain and certain
behavior, the behavior in question constitutes, according to some
versions of the criterial approach, ‘non-inductive evidence’ for pain.26
‘Criterial evidence for p is that which is evidence for p in virtue of the
meaning of p ... If X is a criterion of p, then it is logically necessary that X
is evidence for p.’27 We know that certain behavior is evidence for pain
‘not by having observed correlations and discovered empirical generali-
zations, but by understanding the concept [of pain]’.28
When I experience the satisfaction of a criterion for pain (for instance,
when I see somebody exhibiting certain types of behavior) I have
criterial evidence for the belief that the person is in pain. The behavior
in question constitutes evidence in virtue of a conceptual link between
behavior of that kind and pain.
However, criterial theorists do not claim that the satisfaction of
a criterion for pain entails that the person in question is in pain.
Everybody knows that it is possible to fake ‘pain behavior’. And when
one fakes pain behavior, then a criterion for pain is satisfied even
though there is no pain. This means that ‘a claim made on the basis of
satisfaction of its criteria can subsequently be jettisoned, consistently
with retention of the belief that criteria were indeed satisfied’. 29 The
evidential support that the satisfaction of criteria gives is, in other
words, defeasible. 30 To see somebody exhibiting pain-behavior is to
experience the satisfaction of a criterion for pain. However, if I subse-
quently discover that the person I saw was an actor in a play, the
criterial evidence I have loses, as a consequence of this new informa-
tion, its warranting status. ‘A state of information in which one is in
possession of a “criterial” warrant for a claim can always be expanded
into a state of information in which the claim would not be warranted
at all.’31 Criterial support can always be undermined. It is, further-
more, impossible to list in advance all possible circumstances that can
undermine criterial evidence. The list of imaginable circumstances in
which a claim about somebody’s mental state has to be withdrawn is
open-ended.
The admission that criterial evidence is defeasible causes trouble

for the criterial approach. The purpose of this approach is to avoid
construing our knowledge of other minds as mediated by theory.
According to the criterial approach, we can know – without relying on
some empirical theory – facts about other people’s mental states on the
basis of criterial evidence. Such evidence does not derive its evidential
force from theory, but constitutes evidence in virtue of the meaning of
mental-state concepts.
However, as McDowell points out, if criteria are defeasible, then there
seems to be a logical gap between the satisfaction of criteria and the
obtaining of the relevant mental state.32 The criteria for pain may be
satisfied, even though the person observed is not in pain. This situation
seems to require that the ‘gap’ between the satisfaction of criteria and
the occurrence of the mental state is bridged. But it cannot be bridged
by some argument or theory, such as the analogical argument or the
scientific inference (if they worked). The whole point of the criterial
approach is to avoid reliance on argument or theory.
If, on the other hand, the satisfaction of criteria for a mental state
logically entailed
d that the attribution of that mental state is correct, then
there would be no logical gap between the satisfaction of criteria and
the obtaining of the mental state. But this, according to the standard
criterial view, is not the case. Criteria are defeasible – the support for a
claim which they provide can always be undermined.
The logical gap between criteria and mental states means that the
epistemological problem of other minds remains unaddressed by the
criterial approach. When I experience the satisfaction of a criterion for
pain in another person, this by itself is supposed to put me in a position
to know that the other person is in pain. But since the epistemic support
that the satisfaction of the criterion gives is defeasible, what I experience
(the satisfaction of a criterion for pain) is compatible with the falsity of
the claim that the other person is in pain. But if I can have the same
experiential evidence – experiencing the satisfaction of a criterion for
pain – whether or not the other person is in pain, and if my evidence is
restricted to experiential evidence (any appeal to theory being excluded),
then how can it reasonably be claimed that I know w that the person is
in pain, just in virtue of experiencing the satisfaction of a criterion for
pain?33
It may be enlightening to compare the criterial view with another
possible view of other-minds knowledge. McDowell claims, as we will
see, that sometimes the circumstance that somebody is in pain (the
mental fact itself) can be directly perceived. If I perceive the fact that
somebody is in pain, then what I experience is nott compatible with the

falsity of the claim that the person in question is in pain. From the fact
that I see that he is in pain, it follows that he is in pain. But from the
fact that I experience the satisfaction of criteria for pain, it does not
follow that the person is in pain. There is a logical gap between the
evidence and the claim it is supposed to underpin.
The traditional way to close this gap is by appealing to theory. This
is, as we saw, rejected by the criterial approach in favor of an appeal
to convention or ‘grammar’. The problem is that ‘convention ... cannot
decree an entailment from behavior to inner state’.34 The gap cannot
be bridged by stipulation. It seems, however, that this is precisely what
the criterial theory attempts to do. This is why it looks like a strangely
dogmatic response to the skeptic:
The ‘criterial’ view looks no more impressive than any other instance
of a genre of responses to scepticism to which it seems to belong:
a genre in which it is concluded that the sceptic’s complaints are
substantially correct, but we are supposedly saved from having to
draw the sceptic’s conclusions by the fact that it is not done – in
violation of a ‘convention’ – to talk that way.35
McDowell’s criticism of the criterial approach has been accused of being

an indiscriminate attack on the possibility of any kind of knowledge
that is ‘based on an experiential intake that falls short of the fact known
(in the sense ... [of] being compatible with there being no such fact)’.36
Paul Robinson, for instance, claims that McDowell is committed to the
denial of the thesis that ‘we can know that p even though one’s basis for
believing that p is compatible with not-p - ’.37 If McDowell were indeed
committed to the denial of this principle, his critique of the criterial
approach would be extremely suspect. It seems completely reasonable
to say that a physicist can know that an electron was emitted, even
though the basis for her claim is some perceptual evidence (such as a
trace in a cloud chamber) that is compatible with the falsity of the claim
about the electron.
McDowell, however, is not committed to the denial of this kind of
knowledge. He can, and does, acknowledge that a subject’s possession of
theoretical knowledge can extend her cognitive reach beyond what ever
empirical basis she has. This, however, cannot be what happens when
we know mental facts about other people by observing the satisfaction
of criteria. To claim that theoryy fills the gap between one’s empirical
basis (the observed satisfaction of criteria) and mental fact would be
to ‘obliterate the distinction between “criteria” and “symptoms”’.38

Nothing would then remain of the criterial approach. ‘Criteria’ for
mental states would be equivalent to inductive evidence. The defining
feature of criteria, however, is that they are non-inductive evidence.
Criteria are supposed to be evidence in virtue of the meaning of mental-
state terms, not in virtue of some theory or inductively established
correlation between mental states and criteria.39
5.1.4 Conclusion
The analogical inference, the scientific inference, and the criterial
approaches all seem to be unsatisfactory as accounts of our knowledge
of other minds. The criterial approach ignores the skeptical challenge
without showing that the skeptic’s complaints are in any way miscon-
ceived. This is unacceptable. The analogical inference is generally
considered to be a weak argument. Moreover, both the analogical and
(especially) the scientific inference approaches portray our epistemic
situation with respect to other people’s mental lives in an extremely
counter-intuitive way. As Rudd puts it, ‘the idea that we need any kind
of explanatory hypothesis is already a distortion of our experience of
others, of our practices of social interaction’.40 I do not seem to need any
scientific hypothesis about the causal provenance of my own mental
states, or to compare different hypotheses about the mechanisms
behind other people’s behavior, in order to know that the face at the
opposite end of the table belongs to a minded creature. The knowledge
I have of other minds seems to be much more direct.
There are, of course, other arguments for other minds than the
ones considered above.41 However, none of the existing ‘solutions’ (or
‘dissolutions’) to the other-minds problem enjoys anything remotely
like universal assent among philosophers. Hyslop writes, as we noted
earlier: ‘It is noteworthy that so many [proposed solutions to the
other minds- problem] are on offer. Even more noteworthy is that
none of the solutions on offer can plausibly lay claim to enjoying
majority support.’42 So almost everybody agrees that we are justified
in believing in other minds. But it seems to be extremely difficult to
explain how we can be justified. This paradoxical situation indicates, I
suggest, that something is wrong with some deep-seated philosophical
assumptions.43
Above I mentioned that if we discard a certain ‘epistemological frame-
work’, then the rug will be pulled out from under the feet of the problem
of other minds. The benefit of discarding the framework is that it allows
us to construe our knowledge of other minds (for, really, nobody doubts
that we have such knowledge) as direct, or semi-direct. It is time to turn

to McDowell’s account of knowledge of other minds.
5.2 McDowell on other minds
One possible explanation of how we can know mental facts about other
people is that we can perceive such facts. For some types of mental
facts, this is how McDowell construes our knowledge. He claims that
sometimes one can ‘literally perceive, in another person’s facial expres-
sion ... that he is in pain’.44 There is no inference from ‘mere’ behavior to
mental fact. The mental fact itself is manifested ‘in’ the behavior, and
therefore open to view.
What about pretense then? The possibility of pretense (and of zombies)
only entails that our capacity to perceive mental facts ‘in’ other people’s
behavior is fallible. What it does not entail is that we neverr perceive
mental facts but rather always only ‘behavioral’ facts which constitute
‘a highest common factorr of what is available ... in the deceptive and the
non-deceptive cases alike’.45
It seems natural to say that, on the appropriate occasions, we can see,
directly, that somebody is in pain. However, it does not seem reasonable
to say that we can directly perceive that somebody else hears a tinnitus
tone in his head. When it comes to mental facts like these, McDowell
appeals to the idea of expression. What a person says or otherwise does
can express her mental states. So we can know that somebody else hears
a tone in his head ‘on the basis of what he says and does’. In such cases
‘we might think of what is directly available to experience in some such
terms as “his giving expression to his being in that ‘inner’ state”’.46
McDowell’s position here can seem close to the ‘criterial’ view we
studied above. Criterial theorists talk about ‘outer criteria for inner
states’. By that they mean that we can know, on the basis of perceiving
certain behaviors (the criteria), that the person we are observing is in
a certain mental state. The expressive behavior McDowell talks about
seems to constitute ‘outer criteria’ in this sense.
Indeed, McDowell’s view can be thought of as a version of the ‘criterial’
approach, and he presents it as an interpretation of Wittgenstein.
The difference between McDowell’s view and other ‘criterial’ views is,
however, considerable. McDowell claims that the standard versions of the
criterial approach are based on a misunderstanding of what Wittgenstein
means. I will not discuss the relation between McDowell’s view and
Wittgenstein’s here. Instead, I will focus on the content of McDowell’s
view, and the relation of his view to the standard criterial view.
The standard criterial view holds that criteria are defeasible. If I see that
a criterion for a certain mental state is satisfied, I am entitled to claim to
knoww that the person I am observing is in that mental state. However, it
might nevertheless happen that I gain some new information that defeats
my criterial evidence, and which therefore undermines my knowledge-
claim. In such a case, I need not give up my claim that the criteria were
satisfied. They were satisfied, but the relevant mental state was nevertheless
missing. In the last section, we saw that this view is very problematic.
McDowell’s idea, however, is that there might be indefeasible behav-
ioral criteria for mental states. The satisfaction of an indefeasible
criterion for mental state M is nott compatible with the non-obtaining
of M. So the fact that an indefeasible criterion for M is satisfied entails
that M obtains.
The indefeasible criteria McDowell envisages are pieces of expres-
sive behavior. Suppose we say that a certain piece of behavior only is
an expression of pain if the person in question really is in pain. So the
obtaining of an expression of pain entails that the person is in pain.
Since the possibility of pretense exists, there can of course be behaviors
that, from the point of view of an observer, are indistinguishable from
expressions of pain, but which nevertheless (in the absence of pain) do
not constitute expressions of pain.
To say that human behavior is expressive (in this factive sense) is
to say that it has an intrinsic nature that cannot be characterized in
merely ‘physical’ terms. In order adequately to characterize most pieces
of human behavior, one must refer to the mental states they express.
What a piece of behavior expresses – the ‘meaning’ of the behavior – is
a property of the behavior itself, not just a property of an interpretation
of the behavior in some observer’s mind.47
Let us take an example. Karl wants a banana. He gives expression
to being in this mental state by saying ‘I want a banana’. This makes
it possible for an appropriately equipped observer to perceive the fact
that Karl expresses his desire for having a banana. The obtaining of this
fact entails that Karl is in the mental state of desiring a banana (‘give
expression to ... ’ is factive). In a possible bad case, Karl pretends that
he wants a banana. In such a case, what the observer is in a position
to perceive is the fact that Karl says ‘I want a banana’. The obtaining of
this fact does not entail that Karl wants a banana. In the good case,
knowledge of Karl’s mental state is available on the basis of perceiving
his behavior (what he says). In the bad case, however, knowledge of the
relevant mental state is not available by perceiving his behavior. It only
seems to be available.
The alternative to this disjunctivist construal is the HCF-conception,

which is a natural consequence of the ‘epistemological outlook’ I
mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. That outlook, remember,
says that when some type of claims are epistemically problematic, we
need to look for ‘a basis for [those] claims that we can assure ourselves
of possessing before we go on to evaluate the credentials of the claims
themselves’.48 McDowell agrees that, in cases when some type of mental
facts cannot be directly perceived, we need to deliver judgments about
such facts on the basis of perceptions of something else. McDowell
suggests that we can deliver judgments about such mental facts on the
basis of perceiving expressive behavior.r
However, the fact that S expresses his desire for a banana is not a fact that
I can assure myself of knowing before I go on to evaluate the credentials
of the claim that S desires a banana. If I indeed know that S expresses
his desire for a banana (by perceiving this fact), then I alreadyy know that
S desires a banana. This means that the question of whether I have an
adequate grasp of the basis of my judgment about S’s mental state cannot
be settled independently of the question of whether the judgment itself
(delivered on this basis) is true. The ‘epistemological outlook’, however,
urges us to look for a basis of epistemically problematic judgments which
is itself less epistemologically problematic than the type of claims it is
to ground. This is why the outlook forces us to conceive the basis of
our judgments about other people’s mental states as facts about ‘mere’
behavior. I can assure myself that I possess perceptual knowledge of S’s
‘bodily’ behavior prior to knowing anything about S’s mental life.
But what if there are types of judgments which we have a fallible
capacity to deliver (and which are hence epistemically problematic),
but which cannot be inferred from any other type of (less fallible)
judgments? Judgments about material objects probably belong in this
category. Attempts to infer propositions about material objects from
propositions about, say, sense-data are notorious failures. But the
persistence of the ‘problem of other minds’ (the fact that no solution to
it enjoys anything nearly resembling a consensus, despite the fact that
everybody agrees that we have knowledge of other minds) indicates that
judgments about other people’s mental states may be similar to judg-
ments about material objects in this respect.
At this point, we should ask whether we really have to accept the
‘epistemological framework’ that forces us to look for a category of less
problematic judgments from which to infer propositions about other
minds. Do we really have to accept that ‘a basis for a judgment must be
something on which we have a firmer cognitive purchase than we do
on the judgment itself?’49 This idea does not seem to be obligatory. If we

reject it, we can construe our judgments about (some of) other people’s
mental states as delivered on the basis of expressive behavior. Facts
about expressive behavior are not such that we can assure ourselves
of knowing them before we go on to evaluate whether our judgments
about the relevant mental states (those expressed by the behavior) are
true. If we have rejected the ‘epistemological framework’, however, this
need not be seen as a problem.
Here is a toss-away argument against the ‘epistemological framework’.
The epistemological framework forces us to assume that our knowledge
of other minds is inferred from propositions about ‘mere’ behavior.
If our knowledge of other minds is inferred from propositions about
‘mere’ behavior, then knowledge of other minds is, at best, precarious.
But knowledge of other minds is not precarious. So the epistemological
framework should be rejected.
A possible objection to the McDowellian, disjunctivist view runs as
follows. When I hear Karl utter the words ‘I want a banana’, my audi-
tory system is stimulated in a certain way. It does not matter whether
the person who utters the words expresses his desire by these words, or if
he just utters them because he wants to fool me into believing that he
wants a banana. In both the good and the bad case, my auditory system
receives the same input. How, then, can it nott be the case that what I
auditorily perceive is the same in both cases?
This objection assumes that the mind is in the head. But we have
reason to believe that this is not the case, and that mental states super-
vene on facts about the environment, as externalism claims. If exter-
nalism is true, it does not follow, from the fact that my auditory system
and brain are in the same state in the good and the bad cases, that my
auditory experience (the mental state) is the same in the good and the
bad cases. So it could be different. Hence, the ‘good case’ experience
could make knowledge of an expressive fact available, even though no
such fact is made available by the ‘bad case’ experience.
The McDowellian view entails, as we saw in the previous chapter,
that we are not always in a position to know the contents of our own
experiences. That we are not always in a position to know this is, as we
have seen, a very plausible view, and by accepting it we can ward off
Cartesian skepticism about the world and other minds. As Williamson
says: ‘By sacrificing something in self-knowledge to the skeptic, we
stand to gain far more in knowledge of the world.’50
There is, however, one thing about McDowell’s proposal which can
seem especially problematic. Is it really possible to hearr a fact such as
that S expresses the belief that p, if ‘expresses’ is understood factively, that

is, as guaranteeing that S really believes that p?
Why do we have a feeling that this may not be possible? Because,
I suggest, we moderns tend to assume that there are no (genuinely)
expressive facts to be perceived. There are only mental facts, on the one
hand (such as that S believes that p) and then there are behavioral facts,
on the other hand (such as that S produces the words ‘I believe that p’).
The relation between these kinds of facts is merely contingent. This
means that phrases like ‘Karl expresses his desire for a banana’ must
be understood not as stating one fact, but as a sloppy way of stating
three logically independent facts, viz. (1) the fact that Karl is in a certain
mental state, and (2) the fact that Karl utters certain sounds, and (3) the
fact that Karl’s mental state causes him, in the appropriate way, to utter
the sounds he utters.
Behind this analysis of what ‘expression’ mustt mean (according to
the standard modern view) is a dualistic picture that firmly divides the
human being into a mental and a material/behavioral part. The result
is that the human body and behavior – which falls on the material
side of the divide – is objectified. The human body is conceived of as
just another material object, and as such it cannot be in states that are
intrinsicallyy expressive of mental properties.
Wittgenstein accepts, according to a common interpretation,
this dualistic picture of the human being. The human body with its
behavior is, in itself, psychologically neutral, a mere material object
that moves in certain ways. But rather than claiming that an empirical
theory of some kind is needed in order for us to be able to know mental
facts about others on the basis of observations of ‘mere behavior’,
Wittgenstein is supposed to have suggested that a linguistic convention is
sufficient to connect behavior with mental facts.51 But this is, according
to McDowell, a misreading of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein does not
‘propose an alteration of detail within the skeptic’s position’.52 Rather,
he rejects the skeptic’s basic assumption concerning what is given to us
in experience. The skeptic assumes that what is experientially available
to us is mere ‘bodily’ and ‘behavioral’ information about our fellows.
(The scare-quotes around ‘bodily’ and ‘behavioral’ are intended to indi-
cate that the information in question is, on this view, psychologically
neutral. It is information about the movement of matter.) But the skep-
tic’s picture of what is experientially given
is attainable only by displacing the concept of a human beingg from

its focal position in an account of our experience of our fellows, and
replacing it with a philosophically generated concept of a human

y 53
body.
A human beingg is, as opposed to a human body, a kind of object whose

states and behavior cannot be adequately described without the use of
psychological (mental) concepts. What McDowell’s Wittgenstein says
is that what we perceive when we observe our friends are facts about
human beings, not facts about human bodies. I see that you are walking, g
I hear that you are talking.
g So we see and hear minded creatures as such,
not just bodies. It is a mistake, according to McDowell/Wittgenstein, to
interpret this fact away by saying that, strictly speaking, what we see is
just ‘bodily motions’. Instead we should take the notion of perceiving
human beings literally.54
There is, however, an important source of resistance to McDowell’s/
Wittgenstein’s restoration of the concept of a human beingg to its proper
place. This source is the kind of naturalism that leaves nature disen-
chanted (see Chapter 3). If the natural is identified with ‘the realm of
natural law’, and if the human body (as everyone agrees) is a natural
object, then it follows that human behavior cannot be intrinsically
expressive. The property of being expressive is not a property that belongs
within the realm of law, since it has to do with meaning (content). For
a piece of behavior B to be expressive of mental state M is for B to be
intrinsically aboutt M, to ‘say’ something about M.55 But natural events
cannot be intrinsically about anything, according to narrow naturalism.
The ‘disenchantment of nature’ was the abandonment of the idea that
natural events embody meanings. Natural events, on the disenchanted
conception, do not say anything. If this is right, then the human body,
as a natural object, has to be expressively mute.
McDowell rejects, as we saw earlier, the kind of naturalism that leaves
nature disenchanted. This naturalism makes it unintelligible as to how
sensory experiences (which must be conceived as natural events) can
justify beliefs, since epistemic relations such as the relation of justi-
fyingg are normative relations, and cannot be accounted for in terms
of non-normative relations such as those that figure within the realm
of law. If McDowell is right, the picture of nature implicit in contem-
porary naturalism is not obligatory, and we have, furthermore, strong
reasons to reject it on pain of making the idea of empirical thought
unintelligible.
Maybe the strongest reason to reject this type of naturalism is that
it entails that human behavior cannot be intrinsically expressive of
mental states. My suggestion is that we take this as a reductio ad absurdum.
Human behavior can be intrinsically expressive of mental states. This is

what makes such behavior human.56
5.3 Perception and learning
In the above presentation of McDowell’s view of knowledge of other

minds, it was suggested that linguisticc behavior can be intrinsically
expressive of mental states. However, in order to be able to perceive
(hear) speech as expressive of mental states, one must, of course, master
the relevant language. It is tempting to assume that if one has to learn
how to recognize utterances as expressive of thoughts and beliefs by
learning language, then what one reallyy perceives when one listens to
speech cannot be facts about what people express by their words. What
one really perceives must be mere sounds. In this section, we are going
to see why this is not the case.
McDowell claims, as we might recall, that ‘there can be facts that
are overtly available (so that conviction that they obtain need not be
a matter of speculation as to something hidden behind what is overtly
available), but awareness of which is an exercise of a perceptual capacity
that is not necessarily universally shared’.57 Learning one’s first language
endows one with such a perceptual capacity. It puts one in a position
to perceive kinds of facts one previously was unable to perceive – facts
about what people are saying. This can be misinterpreted as a rather
banal observation, but rightly understood, it is quite radical.
According to the standard picture of language-learning (which
McDowell criticizes) learning a language is a process in which one
learns how to put a theoretical construction on sounds that anyone can
hear. So a person who knows the language hears the same things as one
who does not – viz. ‘mere sounds’ – he just interprets, or organizes, the
sounds differently in his mind. But McDowell contends that learning at
least one’s first language really gives one new perceptual skills, and the
perceptual nature of these skills should be understood literally. Learning
a language makes a new range of facts perceptually available to one.
In order to grasp this correctly, we must remember that according to
McDowell the meaning of what somebody says is there, in the speech
itself, not hidden in the head of the speaker, or the head of the hearer.
So there are facts about meaning that supervene on speech-behavior. In
order to perceive such facts, one must learn how to perceive them.
McDowell’s position must be understood against the background of
his conceptualism. He rejects, as we noted above, the common picture of
perception which portrays it as a two-stage process: intake of something
non-conceptual, and conceptualization. When we reject this picture,

and accept that what we ‘take in’ is always already conceptualized, then
it becomes conceivable how one can become capable of receiving new
‘input’ from the world by acquiring the requisite conceptual capacities.
It is by learning one’s first language that one acquires conceptual
capacities in the first place. To learn a language is to be initiated into the
space of concepts (the space of reasons). The cognitive change that this
signifies can hardly be overestimated. McDowell says that ‘the language
into which a human being is first initiated stands over against her as
a prior embodiment of mindedness, of the possibility of an orienta-
tion to the world’.58 We are not ‘born at home in the space of reasons’.
Rather, humans are ‘transformed into thinkers and intentional agents’
through the learning of language.59 This transformation does not leave
the content of our perceptions unaltered.60
By being ‘drilled in a behavioral repertoire’ – which is what learning a
language is – one’s perceptual capacities are ‘stretched’.61 One becomes
directly aware of facts that one could not be aware of without the
training. How is this possible? McDowell describes the process in terms
of the metaphor ‘light dawns’.
For light to dawn is for one’s dealings with language to cease to be

blind responses to stimuli: one comes to hear utterances as expres-
sive of thoughts, and to make one’s own utterances as expressive of
thoughts. This seems indistinguishable from coming to have some-
thing to say.62
By learning language, one begins to conceive of oneself and other people

as persons with thoughts and things to say. And one does not hear mere
sounds anymore. One hears meanings directly in speech.
To learn one’s first language is simultaneously to be initiated into a
tradition. ‘A natural language ... serves as a repository of tradition, a store
of historically accumulated wisdom about what is a reason for what.’63
To be initiated into a tradition is a necessary condition for acquiring a
human mind, ‘the capacity to think and act intentionally’.64 So there is
no thinking outside of all traditions. There is also no perceiving outside
all traditions. To perceive the objective, physical world as an objective,
physical world is something one learns in the process of going from being
a ‘mere animal’ to a ‘rational animal’. So to perceive physical objects as
physical objects requires what McDowell calls ‘Bildung ’ – the acquisition
of a ‘second nature’.65 It is no wonder, then, that perceiving linguistic
behavior as expressive of mental properties also is an acquired skill.
5.4 Perceptual and inferential knowledge
McDowell’s claim that genuinely perceptual skills can be learned d actual-

izes another problem, viz. the role of background knowledge in percep-
tion. McDowell construes, as we have seen, (some of) our knowledge
of other people’s mental states or their expressive behavior as percep-
tual or (equivalently) observational knowledge (I will use these terms
interchangeably).66 That this knowledge is perceptual/observational
means that it is ‘direct’ (non-inferential), and that it therefore is to be
contrasted with ‘indirect’ or inferential knowledge.67 McDowell seems
to be committed to upholding a distinction between these two kinds
of knowledge. The question, however, is what the distinction really
amounts to.
One suggestion is that the distinction should be drawn merely in
phenomenological terms. If I deliver a judgment about some empirical
matter which I am not aware of having reached through some inferen-
tial reasoning (i.e., if the judgment is ‘cognitively spontaneous’), then
the judgment is perceptual. If I, on the other hand, consciously engage
in some inferential reasoning in order to arrive at the judgment, then
it is inferential.
According to this suggestion, the distinction between perceptual and
inferential knowledge is a matter of individual psychology. What type
of judgments count as perceptual or not depends on whether the one
who delivers them does so in a cognitively spontaneous way or not.
Robert Brandom, who represents this view, says that
a properly trained physicist, who can respond systematically

differently to differently shaped tracks in a cloud chamber will, if
responding non-inferentially reporting the presence of mu mesons,
count as genuinely observingg those subatomic particles.68
McDowell, however, rejects the idea that we should distinguish between

perceptual and inferential knowledge on the basis of phenomenology
only. He recognizes that ‘theory can partly ground a claim to know-
ledge even in cases where it is not consciously brought to bear’.69
A better suggestion about how to draw the distinction is to say that
perceptual judgments are judgments that report the contents of, and
are directly justified by, perceptual experiences, whereas inferential
judgments do not simply report the contents of experiences, but are
arrived at by inferences from experiences and background beliefs, and
are justified accordingly.
This suggestion is essentially correct, according to McDowell.70 He

contends, as we have seen, that we have perceptual experiences that
represent (or present) facts such as S is in pain, or S expresses a desire for
a banana. If we report the content of such (veridical) perceptual experi-
ences (and if some other conditions are satisfied71), then those reports
constitute perceptual (direct, non-inferential) knowledge.
There are, however, some complications. For instance, what prevents
us from saying that concepts such as ‘electron’ or ‘quark’ can structure
the contents of our experiences, so that we can rightly be said to observe
such particles? If there is no limit to what can be experienced, then the
distinction between perceptual and inferential knowledge seems to be
empty, or at least epistemologically insignificant.72
There is a debate within the philosophy of perception about which
properties our perceptual systems can represent to us. Which properties
can figure in the contents of perceptual experiences? Some philoso-
phers are minimalists. They claim that only low-level properties such
as colors and shapes can be perceptually represented.73 If they are right,
it cannot visually appear to one that a cow is present, since the prop-
erty of being a cow (or being any other natural kind) is not a prop-
erty that our visual system can represent. This means that we see colors
and shapes, and arrive inferentially at judgments or beliefs about cows.
Other philosophers are maximalists, and argue that high-level proper-
ties can also be represented by perceptual experiences.74
Susanna Siegel has addressed these issues systematically by proposing
a method of phenomenological comparison as a way of deciding the
question of which properties we can experience.75
The method works, very roughly, like this. By learning a new
language, a subject acquires a new recognitional ability – the ability to
recognize what the words and sentences of the relevant language mean.
If a person hears, e.g., the same Russian sentence spoken both before
and after she has learnt the language, she can compare the phenom-
enal character of her experiences of hearing the sentence between the
two occasions (i.e., what it is like to hear the sentence). In such cases,
subjects usually report that what they hear sounds different once they
have learned the language. One plausible explanation for this is that
our auditory system represents semantic properties, so that when a
person has learned to recognize what Russian sentences mean, she hears
more in Russian speech than she did before. Similar comparisons can
be made between how a Russian text looks before and after one has
learned to read Russian. Subjects usually report that texts look different,
a circumstance that can be taken to indicate that our visual experiences
also represent semantic properties. Siegel argues, on the basis of the

recounted method, that perceptual experiences can represent high-
level properties such as semantic properties, natural kind properties,
and causal properties.
Siegel’s argument in favor of the idea that we can perceive semantic
properties supports McDowell’s claim that a person can acquire new
perceptual skills by learning a language. By learning language, McDowell
contends, we become able to hear meanings (i.e., semantic properties)
‘directly in speech’. McDowell also claims, as we have mentioned, that
we can perceive mental facts about other people, and – what amounts
to almost the same thing – perceive expressions of mental states in their
behavior. If this is to be possible, then our perceptual experiences must
be capable of representing mental properties. Against the background of
Siegel’s results, these claims by McDowell seem not at all implausible.76
Can McDowell’s distinction between perceptual and theoretical know-
ledge be upheld, as we have suggested, merely in terms of the contents
of perceptual experiences? Åsa Wikforss thinks not, and points to a
potential difficulty for McDowell.77 Experiences (which are supposed
to justify observational knowledge directly) have conceptually struc-
tured contents, according to McDowell. Concepts, furthermore, always
‘come together’ – they are linked by rational relations. This is why a
person, in order to master an observational concept such as ‘red’, must
also master other concepts and have a certain amount of relevant back-
ground knowledge. A consequence of this view is that even the most
observational judgments are theory-dependent in the sense that they
require background knowledge in order to be justified. This means,
Wikforss argues, that the distinction between observational and theor-
etical/inferential knowledge collapses.
Wikforss’ conclusion is, however, unwarranted. The fact that all judg-
ments are theory-dependentt does not entail that all judgments are inferen-
tially justified. In order to be able to see that a strawberry is red, one needs
background knowledge about (e.g.) how the circumstances of observa-
tion affect one’s capacity to tell the color of things by looking. The
subject does not, however, inferr that the strawberry is red from know-
ledge about how the circumstances of observation affect one’s capacity
to tell the color of things. ‘The fact that the circumstances are suitable
does not in any good sense constitute the subject’s reason for believing
that the strawberry is red. Her reason is that she sees it to be red.’78 The
kindd of dependence that exists between observational judgments (‘this
is red’) and background knowledge is, therefore, very different from the
kind of dependence that exists between theoretical judgments and the
observational judgments that support them. If I see that the strawberry

is red and therefore conclude that it is ripe, then my reason for believing
that it is ripe is that I see it to be red. The judgment that the strawberry
is ripe, hence, is inferentially justified. The judgment that it is red, as we
saw, is not. The latter judgment is justified directly by experience even
though a condition for having the relevant (conceptually structured)
experience is that one has the appropriate background knowledge.
This means that it is meaningful to retain a modified version of the
traditional empiricist distinction between foundation (observational
knowledge) and superstructure (theoretical knowledge). Sellars writes:
If I reject the framework of traditional empiricism, it is not because

I want to say that empirical knowledge has no foundation ... There is
clearly some point to the picture of human knowledge as resting on
a level of propositions – observation reports – which do not rest on
other propositions in the same way as other propositions rest on them.
On the other hand, I do want to insist that the metaphor of ‘foun-
dation’ is misleading in that it keeps us from seeing that if there is
a logical dimension in which other empirical propositions rest on
observation reports, there is another logical dimension in which the
latter rest on the former.79
McDowell concurs:
there is indeed a relation of rational dependence, of ... ‘superstruc-

ture’ on ... ‘foundations.’ But just because concepts are involved in
experience, and the conceptual realm is a seamless web of rational
interconnections, there is also a rational dependence (of a different
sort)
t in the opposite direction ... The ‘foundations’ are partly held in
place by the ‘superstructure.’80
The key sentence here is ‘of a different sort’. The superstructure (theor-
etical knowledge) rests on the foundations (observational knowledge).
The foundations, however, do not ‘rest’ on the superstructure, but are
dependent on them in a different way (as explained above). The diffe-
rence between the two sorts of dependence-relation makes it possible
to distinguish foundation from superstructure, or observational from
theoretical knowledge.81
Åsa Wikforss correctly points out that ‘our attributions of mental
states to others is dependent on a set of background beliefs about the
interconnection between mental states, expressions, and actions; i.e.
the set of background beliefs commonly referred to as “common sense

psychology”’.82 Wikforss thinks that this entails that our knowledge of
other minds cannot be observational. We can now see why Wikforss is
wrong. To be able to perceive that somebody is in pain requires that one
has the concept ‘pain’. This requires, in turn, that one knows certain
common sense psychological facts such as that pain is something that
both I and other people can have, that pain is unpleasant, that pain
can be feigned, that pain can be hidden, etc. One must also know
some things about the relations between pain, other mental states, and
behavior. A person lacking this background knowledge cannot be said
to have fully mastered the concept ‘pain’.
This, however, does not mean that my knowledge that S is in pain
is justified inferentially by an argument from perceptions of other
facts (such as facts about S’s ‘bodily’ behavior) together with premises
provided by the relevant background knowledge. What justifies my
belief that S is in pain is that I see that S is in pain. This is my reason for
the belief. The belief that S is in pain is, therefore, justified directly by
experience – even though a condition for having the relevant kind of
experience is that one has the appropriate background knowledge.
6
Seeing Nature as Creation
Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely
his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the
things that have been made.
Rom 1:20
Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was
not designed, but rather evolved.1
Francis Crick
It is time to draw together some threads from the preceding chapters.

Human behavior appears to us as expressive of mind. It seems to us as
if we see people acting and expressing feelings, not just bodies moving
and emitting sounds. The common-sense view is that we really perceive
such psychologically loaded facts. Mainstream philosophy has, however,
taught us that there are serious problems with taking this picture of our
epistemic relations with respect to each others’ minds seriously. One
problem is that human behavior is a natural phenomenon, and as such
it cannot – given the modern, disenchanted conception of nature –
have any intrinsic properties other than those that figure in natural
scientific descriptions of things. Expressive properties are not natural
properties in this sense. So behavior, as a natural phenomenon, cannot
be intrinsically expressive of mental states. Behavior can at most consti-
tute symptoms of mental states.
A second problem with the common-sense picture is that sometimes
the behavior of other people deceives us. What appear to us as expres-
sions of pain can be the sounds and movements of a skilled actor. We
can also imagine the possibility of zombies. The argument from illu-
sion makes a great deal of this. From the premise that our perceptual
131
judgments about other people’s mental states are fallible, it draws the
conclusion that all we ever perceive are psychologically neutral facts.
We do not see people acting and expressing feelings.
A third problem is that ‘our attributions of mental states to others is
dependent on a set of background beliefs about the interconnection
between mental states, expressions, and actions’.2 If this is the case, how
could our knowledge of other minds be perceptual (observational)?
In the preceding chapters, we have seen that McDowell has suggested
plausible solutions to (or dissolutions of) these problems. One of his
main concerns is to overcome the modern ‘dualism of norm and nature’.
Instead of a naturalism that equates the natural with the ‘realm of law’
he argues for the necessity of embracing a ‘naturalism that makes room
for meaning’.3 Such a naturalism is compatible with the expressivity of
human behavior.
McDowell also argues that the modern obsession with the argument
from illusion is misguided. We can move out from the ‘epistemological
framework’ that underpins this argument, and which seems to force the
‘Highest Common Factor’ conception of perceptual evidence upon us.
Rejecting the HCF conception allows us to take seriously the idea that
we can perceive behavior as expressive of mental states even though
our capacity to deliver judgments about what other people’s behavior
expresses is fallible.
The third problem mentioned above – the theory-dependence of our
attributions of mental states to other people – is handled by a Sellarsian
move. Knowledge can be observational and yet presuppose background
beliefs. There are mutual-dependence relations between the ‘founda-
tions’ and the ‘superstructure’, but – crucially – the dependence rela-
tions are of two different sorts.
McDowell has, I think, made it intelligible how a natural, physical
phenomenon – human behavior – can be perceptibly expressive of
mind. He has not, however, proved that human behavior is expressive.
Normally, such propositions cannot, if McDowell is right, be established
by philosophical argument from non-question-begging premises. They
can only be known empirically. I know that human behavior is expres-
sive (if I do) because I see and hearr it to be.
McDowell’s philosophical moves with respect to our knowledge of
other minds have, as I will attempt to show, also cleared the way for
an understanding of nature as expressive of the divine mind. In this
chapter, I will build on McDowell’s ideas in order to elaborate on my
own argument. Before we proceed, however, I want to situate my claim
about the perceptible manifestation of creative intent in nature within
Seeing Nature as Creation 133
the context of the general Christian tradition. My proposal, as the

reader might recall, is intended as a reasonable explication of a trad-
itional idea.4
6.1 Creation’s testimony
6.1.1 Barth’s critique

The idea that creation testifies to its creator is part of what is usually
called ‘natural theology’ – a concept surrounded by much contro-
versy and confusion. Karl Barth is famous for denouncing the very
idea of a natural theology as more or less blasphemous. ‘All one
can do is to turn one’s back upon it as upon a great temptation and
source of error.’5 However, as Ned Wisnefske has argued, ‘the natural
theology against which Barth inveighed had little to do with nature
or knowledge of God’. Barth’s main target was the type of theology
that presumed that only a non-objective, non-cognitive relation to
God is possible.6 One main source of inspiration for this kind of
theology was Kant.
Kant claimed that God cannot be an object of knowledge, and that
the concept of ‘God’ therefore must be conceived as a ‘regulative idea’.
Modern, Protestant theology largely accepted the Kantian restriction,
and
for much of theology after Kant, ‘God’ is defined by the function it

served in consciousness: it is whatever makes possible the feeling of
absolute dependence; it is whatever conditions authentic existence.
Whatever fills a certain function in human experience, or condi-
tions certain activity is ‘God’.7
The consequence of this view was the subordination of theology to

anthropology, and a reduction of talk about God to talk about human
religiosity. This was what Barth resisted. He did so by emphasizing that
our relation to God is indeed cognitive – we have knowledge of God – but
that the possibility of such knowledge is grounded in God himself rather
than in human nature. Knowledge of God does not come about through
the actualization of human religious capacities but through God’s self-
revelation in Christ, which creates the conditions for its own reception.
‘God is known through God and through God alone.’8 If it is allowed
that we have a natural capacity to inform ourselves about God, then
the unique status of God’s revelation in Christ would be compromised,
according to Barth. ‘Natural theology’ inevitably becomes something
to which the revelation in Christ must be adapted, and it will therefore

control the interpretation of the divine Word.
The focus of Barth’s critique of natural theology is, hence, the idea that
we humans can achieve a (cognitive or non-cognitive) relation to God ‘on
our own steam’. The assumption that we can do this is an expression of
our tendency toward self-affirmation and our desire for self-sufficiency.
As Torrance says, ‘the claim to a natural knowledge of God, as Barth
understands it, cannot be separated out from a whole movement of man
in which he seeks to justify himself over against the grace of God’.9
James Barr has written that ‘even among those who recognize [Barth]
as the greatest theologian of the period, few today feel that his rejection
of natural theology was his masterstroke, few accept that it was right to
make this into the central and pivotal issue’.10
Alister McGrath writes, in a similar spirit:
There is a growing feeling within the theological community that

Barth’s theology marks an over-correction of the Reformed theo-
logical position [which, according to McGrath, displays a positive
attitude toward natural theology], and that an informed recovery of
an older position is overdue.11
Evidence suggests, however, that Barth’s own position on natural

theology was not completely static over time. Although Barth never
explicitly admits to having changed his mind about the topic, Wisnefske
can nevertheless talk about the later Barth’s ‘positive turn to natural
theology’.12 The Barth of the last volume of the Church Dogmatics says
that ‘God ... is very well known in the world and world history, in the
human, non-Christian world’.13 However, he qualifies this statement
when he distinguishes between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ knowledge
of God. ‘We are referring to the objective knowledge of God as the
Creator of human nature, not to man’s corresponding knowledge of
God. To know him man must recognize him, that is, to honour and love
him.’14 Man, however, does not honor and love God and, consequently,
does not know him.
It is in vain that God is well known to him in nature, that ‘what can
be known about God is plain to them’ ... Yet all this does not alter in
the least the objective knowledge of God in the world, the offer that
is made to man in his own nature even if it is rejected by him. As
the one who is recognized by God, every person has the chance to
recognize God in return and therefore to know him. Man, not God,
is at fault if a subjective knowledge of God on man’s side does not

correspond to God’s objective knowledge.15
This is somewhat obscure. Maybe Barth means that knowledge of God

is objectively availablee in the world, but that humans fail to appropriate
it. If this is what Barth means, then I have very little to object to in his
position, at least if it is allowed that it is possible – and sometimes actually
happens – that people outside the Christian tradition avail themselves of
the available knowledge. Barth himself seems to be open to this:
Should it not also be noted that the concealment in which [God]

does it, which is due to man’s blindness, is in fact broken and
becomes transparent, if not everywhere, at least in places? ... In spite
of all the worldliness and unfaithfulness and ignorance of people,
does not God in fact see to it that the knowledge of God is not inef-
fective, that people must ... know about God and therefore know
what they do not want to know or in fact seem to know? ... Will not
this objective knowledge be at least as strong in places as that medi-
ated to the world through the witness of Christianity? These impres-
sions should not be generalized and systematized along the lines of
natural theology, but when they lay hold of us with serious force,
they cannot be denied.16
In the context of this book it is the objective availability of knowledge

of God through nature that is of relevance. On this issue, the mature
Barth offers an interesting remark in a letter to Carl Zuckmayer: ‘I would
gladly concede that nature does objectively offer a proof of God, though
man overlooks or misunderstands it.’17
Later Barth-inspired thinkers such as T.F. Torrance have tried to show
that Barth’s thinking indeed has room for a natural theology. ‘What
Barth objects to in natural theology’, according to Torrance,
is not its rational structure as such but its independentt character, i.e.
the autonomous rational structure which it develops on the ground
of ‘nature alone’ in abstraction from the active self-disclosure of the
living God.18
6.1.2 The Bible and the tradition

James Barr has argued, against Barth, that ‘natural theology is not only
sporadically present in the Bible, but widely and deeply involved in
it’.19 Writing about Psalm 104, Barr says that it ‘is part of that dominant
tendency of Hebrew natural theology, in focusing on the existing
cosmos as evidence and manifestation of the divine beneficence’.20
Another example of Hebrew natural theology is Psalm 19: ‘The heavens
declare the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.’
This Psalm should, according to Barr, be understood as saying that ‘God
makes himself known in two complementary ways, first through the
great works of creation ... and secondly through his special communi-
cation exemplified here by his law’.21 Barr argues that, although New
Testament natural theology is heavily affected by Greek conceptuality
and thought-forms, ‘the real source from which Christian natural
theology sprang is Hebraic’.22 He points to the similarities between
Wisdom 13:5, where it says that ‘from the greatness and beauty of created
things the Creator of them is by analogy perceived’, and St Paul’s words
in Romans 1:20 (quoted at the beginning of this chapter). Barr contends
that Paul is drawing on the tradition from Wisdom and the natural
theology it embodies.23 It appears to me that the dominant position
within contemporary New Testament scholarship supports Barr’s claim
that Rom 1:20 expresses some form of natural theology.24
Rom 1:20 is of particular interest in the context of this book, since the
verse seems to give perception a crucial role. Biblical scholars disagree,
however, about how to understand the perception involved. James
Dunn understands Paul as talking about an intellectual perception of
the ‘invisible things of God’. ‘Paul is trading upon, without necessarily
committing himself to, the Greek (particularly Stoic) understanding of
an invisible realm of reality, invisible to sense perception, which can be
known only through the rational power of the mind.’25 Fitzmyer reads
the passage in a similar way: the ‘unseen things’, which are ‘in se invis-
ible’, are ‘nevertheless perceptible by the human nous’.26 Young uses the
locution ‘mentally perceived’ in his paraphrase of the verse: ‘Ever since
the time of creation, humans have mentally perceived something about
the invisible God by means of observing things that are made.’27
The reason why scholars tend to talk about an ‘intellectual’ or ‘mental’
perception is because the verb kathoratai (which is a passive form derived
from horaō, ‘perceive’) is preceded by the passive participle nooumena,
which derives from noeō, ‘understand’. One plausible interpretation is
to take nooumena as an adverbial modifier of kathoratai – which exegetes
like Bruce, Harrisville and others do.28 This will yield something like
‘being perceived by means of reason’. However, the occurrence of
nooumena can also be taken to imply that two distinct processes are
involved – first ordinary sense-perception, and then an intellectual
process of understanding. This interpretation is reflected in the trans-

lation that renders the verse: ‘have been clearly seen, being understood
from what has been made’ (New International Version). This can be taken
to imply an inferential account: first we see, then we contemplate what
we see, and finally realize what it implies. One interpretation, defended
by Cranfield, is to understand the whole expression nooumena katho-
ratai as referring to physical sight.29 Swart has recently argued (reviving
a hypothesis by Schjött) that nooumena should be interpreted as a noun
so that it means ‘what is thought’ (i.e. ‘thoughts’). In this rendering, the
meaning of the verse would be something like: ‘His eternal power and
divinity, just as his invisible thoughts, have since creation been known
(‘seen’) in his ... works.’30 So understood, ‘this verse simply says nothing
about the role human nous plays in the process of acquiring knowledge
of God’.31
In the pre-modern Christian tradition, there are two very different
understandings of Paul’s words in this verse. Aquinas quotes Romans
1:20 in exegetical support for the Five Ways.32 He hence seems to believe
that the knowledge of God which Paul is talking about is arrived at by
way of argument. In Summa contra Gentiles, Aquinas clearly states his
inferential view:
Meditation on [God’s] works enables us, at least to some extent, to

admire and reflect on God’s wisdom ... We are thus able to infer God’s
wisdom from reflection upon God’s works ... This consideration of
God’s works leads to an admiration of God’s sublime power.33
Calvin rejects the interpretation of Rom 1:20 implied by Aquinas. He

claims that the possibility of knowledge of God through creation does
not require ‘a long and laborious train of argument’ (such as the Five
Ways).34 Instead he emphasizes the immediate character of the know-
ledge of God through creation, and adduces Rom 1:20 in support.
Calvin claims, as we remember, that God has been pleased ‘so to mani-
fest his perfections in the whole structure of the universe, and daily
place himself in our view, that we cannot but open our eyes without
being compelled to behold him’.35 ‘None who have the use of their eyes
can be ignorant of the divine skill manifested so conspicuously in the
endless variety, yet distinct and well-ordered array of the heavenly host
[i.e., the celestial bodies].’36 The clearest manifestation of divine artistry
is the human being. The human body ‘bears on its face such proofs
of ingenious contrivance as are sufficient to proclaim the admirable
wisdom of its Maker’.37
However, although the ‘evidences’ are available to all, the noetic

effects of sin make us misread creation. We do not wantt to see what is
plainly before our eyes. Different commentators have different views
about whether Calvin is for or against ‘natural theology’. Clearly, he
is pessimistic about the actual outcome of God’s self-manifestation in
nature. Maybe it is possible, as Edward Adams suggests, ‘to recognize
and appreciate (with Brunner) Calvin’s highly positive evaluation of
natural revelation, without underplaying his extreme pessimism about
human ability to appropriate it’.38
If Aquinas’ interpretation of Paul is correct, then Paul presents a rather
weak argument. Paul argues that people are without excuse for not
honoring God, since knowledge of God is available through creation.
However, if knowledge of God through creation can be arrived at only
by way of ‘a long and laborious train of argument’ then it seems that
many people have a pretty good excuse for not honoring God. Swart
says: ‘If this knowledge were presented as contingent upon human intel-
lectual prowess, it would offer a possible excuse of ignorance that would
greatly weaken the argument.’39 The situation would be very different
if, as Calvin says, ‘proofs which force themselves on the notice of the
most illiterate peasant’ are available.40 Then Paul’s argument would be
rather persuasive. It therefore seems to me that something like Calvin’s
interpretation of Paul is preferable to that implied by Aquinas.41
Numerous examples from different strands of the Christian tradition
can be cited in favor of the idea that the natural world reveals some-
thing about God. Vatican II says that ‘God, who through the Word
creates all things ... gives men an enduring witness to Himself in created
realities’.42 The ‘two books’ tradition was an ‘integral element’ within
Reformed theology before Barth, according to McGrath. This tradition
regarded ‘nature and Scripture as two complementary sources of our
knowledge of God’.43 The Belgic Confession, drawing on this tradition,
talks about the two means by which knowledge of God comes about:
First, by the creation, preservation and government of the universe,

which is before our eyes as a most beautiful book, in which all crea-
tures, great and small, are like so many characters leading us to
contemplate the invisible things of God ... Second, he makes himself
known more clearly and fully to us by his holy and divine Word.44
John Wesley also draws on this tradition when he says that ‘[t]he world
around us is a mighty volume wherewith God hath declared himself’.45
Jonathan Edwards, likewise: ‘The works of God are but a kind of voice
or language of God to instruct intelligent beings in things pertaining

to Himself.’46
The idea that the world is God’s symbolic self-expression is, of course,
much older. For Augustine, God’s thoughts – the Verbum – are expressed
in created realities. Those realities embody God’s ideas in much the
same way as our speech embodies our ideas. The world is God’s language
or speech.47
These ideas develop into the ‘semiological ontologies’ of the Middle
Ages and early Renaissance, which picture the world as a meaningful
order, or a text.48 Funkenstein talks about the ‘medieval sense of
God’s symbolic presence in his creation, and the sense of a universe
replete with transcendent meanings and hints’.49 ‘Nature reveals God’s
symbolic presence, and was seen as a system of symbols, of signatures
of God.’50
If things are symbolic expressions of the divine mind, then they are
not related to it merely causally. They participate in it. As Funkenstein
states: ‘A true symbol, to use a phrase of Durkheim, manifests a partici-
pation mystique with that of which it is a symbol.’ Nature and history
were, according to Funkenstein, ‘a mirror of the divine – not only
through God’s acts, in and through them, but through his participa-
tory-symbolic presence in them’.51
The examples cited show that the idea that the natural world reveals
something of God, and that knowledge of God therefore is available
by observing the natural world, is firmly anchored within the general
Christian tradition. Even Barth might be able to assent to this idea in
his better moments. There is much less agreement within the tradition
about whatt nature reveals of God, to what extent we are able to appro-
priate the available knowledge, and in what way it comes about. Is it
acquired through a process of inferential reasoning, or does it arise in
some more immediate and spontaneous manner as Calvin, and prob-
ably Paul, suggest?
6.1.3 Disenchanted vs re-enchanted nature

When modern religious people say that nature ‘speaks’ of God, or that
natural phenomena are ‘signs’ that reveal the divine, what they usually
mean is the following: just as smoke ‘says’ that there is fire around,
certain natural phenomena ‘speak’ of God.
The expressions ‘says’ and ‘speaks’ are, in this context, used as mere
metaphors. Smoke, of course, does not really sayy anything about fire.
When we say that smoke is a ‘sign’ of fire, all we mean is that we have
learnt, from experience, that there is a causal correlation between fire and
smoke in virtue of which smoke is inductive evidence for fire. The claim
that natural phenomena ‘speak’ about God is today often understood in
the same way. Natural phenomena constitute inductive evidence from
which we can infer the existence of a divine cause.52
The patristic and medieval thinkers meant, as we have seen, some-
thing different when they claimed that created realities are ‘signs’ of
God, or ‘speak’ of God. They usually meant that created realities say
something about God in much the same way as the judgment ‘It rains
in Paris’ says something about Paris. In order to understand the diffe-
rence of this view from the standard modern one, we must repeat what
we learned from McDowell about meaning in Chapter 3.
The judgment ‘It rains in Paris’ says something about Paris because it
constitutes a posture or stance that can be evaluated as correctlyy or incor-
rectlyy adopted, depending on how things are in the world (i.e. what the
weather is actually like in Paris).53 So our thoughts and utterances say
something (have content or meaning) in virtue of standing in certain
normative relations to the world. The relation between smoke and fire is
nott normative, however. It is a relation within the ‘realm of law’.
Prior to the scientific revolution, people did not distinguish between
the sense in which an utterance says things about Paris and the sense
in which smoke ‘says’ something about fire. They failed, in other words,
to distinguish between relations within the space of reasons and rela-
tions within the realm of law. ‘In a common medieval outlook, what
we now see as the subject matter of natural science was conceived as
filled with meaning, as if all of nature were a book of lessons for us.’54
Different natural phenomena were conceived as capable of expressing
the same idea. For instance, the lion, the eagle, and the king were seen
as expressing the idea of ruler-hood.
The ‘disenchantment of nature’, starting with the scientific revolu-
tion, meant that the natural world was purged of meaning. Nature came
to be identified with the realm of law – a domain of external relations,
such as causal relations, which can fit into the explanatory models of
the natural sciences.
This view of nature has implications for how the mind is conceived. If
the natural realm cannot house meanings, then the realm where mean-
ings belong – the mind – must be portrayed as a non-natural reality.
The mind must be viewed as capable of performing tricks that natural
phenomena cannot do. Substance dualism of the kind advocated by
Descartes and Locke is a theory suitable for underpinning this view.
Minds, according to Descartes and Locke, are substances that do not
depend on any material substrate for their existence. Dualism therefore
leaves us free to conceive the world of matter (nature) as a disenchanted

realm, while the mind is preserved as the seat of meanings.
Today, however, dualism is usually perceived as philosophically prob-
lematic. Philosophers are disinclined to cast the mind in the role of
a deus ex machina that explains how meanings can exist in a disen-
chanted world.55 Given the rejection of substance dualism and any
other view that regards the mental realm as non-natural, we seem to
have two basic options. One is to push the disenchantment further by
claiming that meanings and other phenomena that pertain to subject-
ivity can be completely accounted for by the explanatory resources of
natural science (or, if this turns out to be impossible, that they should
be eliminated from serious descriptions of the world). The alternative
to the reductive/eliminative option is to resist the total disenchantment
of nature. To do so is to admit that there are natural phenomena, such
as human behavior, with an intrinsic nature that cannot be character-
ized except in terms of meaning. We must, if we choose this option,
admit that natural phenomena, precisely as natural, can be intrinsically
meaningful.56
So if we reject the reductive/eliminative position, the question is not
whether we should accept a re-enchantment of nature or not, but rather
to what extentt nature should be re-enchanted. McDowell is worried
that his injunction to (partially) re-enchant nature may be taken as
a ‘regress into a pre-scientific superstition, a crazily nostalgic attempt
to re-enchant the natural world’.57 He makes it clear, however, that he
does not recommend that we ‘reinstate the idea that the movements of
the planets, or the fall of a sparrow, is rightly approached in the sort of
way we approach a text or an utterance or some other kind of action’.58
What he recommends is just that we do not exclude the kind of intelli-
gibility that belongs to meaning from the natural.59
Let us remind ourselves of why McDowell thinks that a partial
re-enchantment of nature is necessary. He argues that there must be
rational, not merely causal, relations between our thoughts about the
world and the world itself. This requires that we conceive the world
as made up of facts capable of standing in rational relations to beliefs
through experience. Facts (and experiences) must, in order to satisfy this
requirement, be ‘meaningful’ items (items with the kind of structure
picked out by concepts). The non-human world, in other words, cannot
be conceived as being ‘outside’ the conceptual realm, i.e., outside the
realm of meaning-relations.
Another reason why nature cannot be conceived as totally disen-
chanted is that human behavior is a natural phenomenon. A total
disenchantment of nature means that behavior is objectified d (see 5.2).

It cannot be intrinsically meaningful, ‘no more than the behavior of
the planets’. On the disenchanted view, human behavior can only ‘say’
something about the mental states of people in the same way as smoke
can ‘say’ something about fire. The mind retreats inwards, and the
problem of other minds becomes unavoidable.
We have seen that for many people throughout history, it has seemed
obvious that the natural world is expressive of the divine in a sense
similar to that in which human behavior (or art) is expressive of the
mental states of humans. Calvin talks, as we remember, repeatedly
about the ‘manifestation’ of God in his works, ‘being too clear to escape
the notice of any people, however obtuse’.60 The aim of this book is to
show that the expressiveness of nature can be salvaged by the same
philosophical moves that McDowell uses to save the expressiveness of
human behavior. This does not mean that I will advocate a return to a
medieval world-view in which God’s ideas and intentions can be read
from nature as from a book. That would indeed constitute ‘regress into
a pre-scientific superstition’.61 The knowledge of the creator that nature
makes available is, according to my proposal, of a much more modest
nature.
The mere fact that this book portrays biological nature as a source of
knowledge of a creator makes it nevertheless necessary to address the
critique of modern natural theology made by Michael Buckley. Buckley
has argued that modern atheism is the result of the self-alienation of
the Christian religion in early modernity. In the seventeenth century
the Catholic theologians Leonard Lessius and Marin Mersenne began
to see philosophical argument as the way to combat unbelief. They
appealed, crucially, to the argument from design, and saw it as their
task to defend belief in God without reference to the revelation in
Christ or religious experience. By choosing this strategy, they contrib-
uted to creating self-contradictions within theology. One such contra-
diction was that ‘impersonal nature was made the primary warrant
for a profoundly personal Christian god’.62 Another contradiction was
that ‘philosophical inference’ became ‘the fundamental form for the
defense of religious knowledge or awareness’ so that ‘the Christian god
was to be justified without Christ’.63 ‘In their search for proof of the
divine existence, the theologians had shifted from the god defined by
and disclosed in Christ and religious experience to the god disclosed in
impersonal nature.’64
It could be argued that in focusing on nature as a source of know-
ledge of the creator, I work within the same basic paradigm as Lessius
and Mersenne. This, however, would be a misconception. Early modern

natural theology of the kind Buckley criticizes accepted d the disenchant-
ment and mechanization of nature. It viewed, in other words, nature
as (in Buckley’s word) ‘impersonal’. A disenchanted nature, of course,
cannot embody expressions of the divine mind. Such a nature can only
testify to the creator in the way smoke testifies to fire. Lessius’ arguments
for the existence of God were, accordingly, ‘variations on the argument
from design, from some particular evidence of structure which demands
an intelligence to account for its complex interrelationship’.65
It is very telling that the same objectification and disenchantment
of nature which have made it seem impossible to conceive nature as
genuinely expressive of the divine, have also generated the ‘problem of
other minds’. The structural similarity between the problem of know-
ledge of God and the problem of knowledge of other minds was, as we
might remember, pointed out by Alvin Plantinga in his magisterial God
and Other Minds from 1967. Belief in other minds and belief in God
are ‘in the same epistemological boat’.66 In a new foreword from 1990,
Plantinga says that his chief aim with the book ‘was to make a suitable
reply to the evidentialist objection to theistic belief:f the objection that
theistic belief is irrational or unreasonable ... because there is insuffi-
cient evidence for it’.67 Since we believe in other minds without suffi-
cient evidence, and since we are obviously rational in doing so (even
though it is unclear why), we must also be entitled to believe in God
without sufficient evidence. ‘If my belief in other minds is rational, so
is my belief in God. But obviously the former is rational; so, therefore,
is the latter.’68 The lesson to learn from this, Plantinga seems to say in
1990, is that evidentialism (the claim that one is rationally entitled to
believe only that for which one has sufficient evidence) is untenable.
The aim of the present book, however, is to show that the presump-
tions that force us to conceive our evidence both for belief in other
minds and d for belief in God (in the sense of a creator) as insufficient
can and should be rejected. To have this aim is not to work within the
same paradigm as Lessius and Mersenne. It is, on the contrary, to move
out of that paradigm, albeit in a way different from the one Plantinga
suggests.
Furthermore, the form of natural theology advocated in this book
does not, as some traditional forms, lead up to an impersonal ‘necessary
being’, ‘causa sui’, or ‘ens realissimum’. It leads up to a personal being – a
subject or agent who has intentions and acts. The god-concept implicit
in this natural theology has more do with ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob’ than ‘the God of the Philosophers’.
This, of course, is likely to draw criticism from those who regard the
conception of God as a personal reality who has intentions and acts as
a flagrant expression of anthropomorphism. According to some theo-
logians, the only intellectually respectable way of speaking of God
today (if there is any such way) is to speak in terms that emphasize the
difference between us and God and the enormous extent to which our
conceptions of God fall short of the reality of God. Apophatic theology
is the only proper theology, and ‘ultimate mystery’ the only legitimate
name for God.
This criticism presupposes that we know exactly what we are talking
about when we talk about persons or subjects. But of course we do not.
We know persons, but we do not understand very much of what it
means to be a person. Augustine is not alone within the Christian trad-
ition to emphasize the extent to which we are a mystery to ourselves,
a mystery intimately linked to the mystery of God. Gregory of Nyssa,
for instance, asks: ‘Who has known his own mind? ... Our mind bears
the imprint of the incomprehensible nature through the mystery that
it is to itself.’69 Karl Rahner: ‘Man is a mystery. He is so in his very
essence, his nature ... When we have said everything the mind can
take in ... about ourselves, we have as yet said nothing, unless we have
included in every statement the fact of our reference to the incompre-
hensible God.’70 Duns Scotus says that to ‘accept that our nature, our
intellective potency, is naturally knowable to us; this is false ... our soul
is not known to us’.71 Karol Wojtyla: ‘Transcendence ... is to a certain
extent another name for the person.’72
John Calvin is especially fond of emphasizing the logical connection
between self-knowledge and knowledge of God, which testifies to the
inscrutability of human nature: ‘It is evident that man never attains to
a true self-knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of
God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself.’73
That we have a very dim comprehension of what personhood is
becomes especially clear against the background of the Old Testament
description of the human being as the Image of God. An image is a thing
with a relationally defined nature. An image is only an image in relation
to that of which it is an image. If the essential nature of human person-
hood is captured by the phrase ‘image of God’, then we cannot under-
stand what a person or subjectt is unless we understand what God is.
John Zizioluas rightly points out that ‘historicallyy as well as existentially
the concept of the person is indissolubly bound up with theology’.74
Wolfhart Pannenberg says that ‘the modern idea of human personality
has a starting-point in the Old Testament and another root in Greek
thought. Both roots are religious in character, and point to man’s soli-
darity with the divine realm’.75 The modern notion of persons as unique,
inviolable, and endowed with rights cannot be understood historically
without taking into account the connection – assumed by the Jewish and
Christian traditions – between the mystery of persons and the mystery
of God.
To conceive of God as a personal reality who has intentions and
acts is therefore not to domesticate God. It is not to detract from his
transcendence.
Finally a word about the logical relationship between the perceptual
version of natural theology defended in this book and classical, inferen-
tial versions. They are, in short, compatible. It is possible for knowledge
of a creator to be both perceptually and inferentially available. A person
can know (e.g.) that a cannonball is heavy either by feeling its weight,
or by inferring that it is heavy from prior knowledge that it is made of
lead. Even if nature is expressive of mind, there will always be people
who think that the appearance of intent and intelligence in nature is
deceptive. If such persons are presented with a sound argumentt for the
existence of a creator, it might convince them that nature is created.
Their knowledge of the creator would then be inferential.
Moreover, knowledge of the existence of a creator is not, as such,
knowledge of the existence of God. I have only argued that knowledge
of a creator is perceptually available, not that knowledge of God is. Our
perceptions of nature do not tell us (e.g.) that the creator exists neces-
sarily, that the creator is omnipotent, omniscient, or perfectly good.
They do not even tell us that the creator is one. So they do not tell us
that the creator is God. If there are arguments that can establish the
existence of God, then those arguments would be very valuable even if
nature can be directly perceived to have been created.
I have argued that inferential accounts of other-minds knowledge
suffer from serious problems. This might be taken to imply that infer-
ential accounts of natural theology also suffer from serious problems.
How could it be possible to infer the existence of God, or a creator, if it
is doubtful that we can infer the existence of other human minds?
The problem of knowledge of God, or a creator of nature, is, however,
on a different logical level than the problem of other minds. The problem
of other minds is the problem of how I can know that there are minds
other than my own. The problem of knowledge of God or a creator is,
on the other hand, the problem of how I can come to know, given that
I already know that minds other than my own exist, t that there is also a
mind behind nature. The former problem has a conceptual dimension
which the latter, at least to some extent, lacks. The conceptual problem
concerns the very meaningfulness of mental-state concepts of the type
that we have – concepts that are applicable both to oneself and to other
people.76 The difficulties connected with the idea that one can learn
the meaning of (e.g.) ‘pain’ ‘from one’s own case’ and then simply apply
that concept to other people (whose pains I do not feel) are symptom-
atic of this general conceptual problem.
When we discuss whether a creator of nature can be known to exist,
we take for granted that we (some way or other) have knowledge of ‘other
minds’.77 We assume, in other words, that mental state-concepts are
meaningful and that mental states can intelligibly and legitimately be
attributed to beings other than ourselves. This means that the concep-
tual problem disappears out of view,78 and we have (or at least take
ourselves to have) a certain amount of relevant background knowledge
that we can appeal to in the context of arguing for the existence of a
mind behind nature. We can, for example, presuppose the meaningful-
ness and explanatory power of attributions of mental states to beings
other than ourselves. It mightt be easier to infer that a mind behind
nature exists given the knowledge that a lot of (human) minds other
than my own exist, than it is to infer that other human minds exist
given knowledge of my own mind only. On the other hand, it might
not.79 My point is just that the problems are different. The difficulties
connected to the former inferential project are therefore not automatic-
ally relevant in the context of the latter.
The project of inferring the existence of a creator may, of course,
have difficulties of its own. It is clear that the traditional design-argu-
ment is in serious trouble today.80 There are, however, contemporary
design-arguments that seem to be more promising, such as arguments
from the apparent ‘fine-tuning’ of the basic physical parameters of
the universe. Nothing said in this book entails that arguments of this
kind must necessarily fail (or conversely that they have any chance
to succeed). Moreover, even if it turned out to be impossible to infer
the existence of a ‘designer’ from nature’s non-expressive properties,
it could still be possible to infer the existence of a necessary beingg or
a first cause. The traditional, inferential approach to natural theology
is therefore neither contradicted nor made redundant by the thesis of
this book.
It is now time to elaborate on the main argument, which was summa-
rized in section 4.1.2. I will argue that we, or at least some of us, have
experiences in which it perceptually appears to us as if natural structures
are expressions of intent and intelligence. If we have such experiences,
then we have experiences that are possible candidates for being percep-
tions of expressions of the divine mind. But is it really intelligible that
structures – such as the constitution of organisms – can constitute the
medium of expression? In section 6.3, I will argue that it is not only
intelligible but plausible – given the acceptance of human behavior as
genuinely expressive of mind.
6.2 Is there an appearance of intent in nature?
In Chapter 1 I quoted the Duke of Argyll who recounted a conver-

sation with Darwin about ‘the wonderful contrivances for certain
purposes in nature’. The Duke said that ‘it was impossible to look at
these without seeing that they were the effect and the expression of
Mind’, and Darwin admitted that this often comes over him too with
‘overwhelming force’.
Del Ratzsch has noted that both the Duke of Argyll and Darwin talk
as though it perceptually appears to them as if certain natural structures
are expressive of Mind. They report what ‘comes over’ them in ‘passive,
experiential, phenomenological terms’.81
It is common knowledge that things can visually appear to a subject
to be one way, even though she knows or believes that things are not
that way. The Müller–Lyer illusion, for instance, is a drawing in which
two equally long lines are made to look as if they are of different length.
Even when one knows that the lines are equally long, the illusion
persists, which means that one’s knowledge does not affect how the
lines appearr to one. This indicates that it is the experience itself that
represents the lines as of different length. Susanna Siegel writes:
There are the contents that a perceiver comes to believe on the basis
of her perception, on the one hand; and there are the contents prop-
erly attributed to the perception itself, on the other.82
Some properties are, in other words, represented by our experiences;

other properties are just represented in beliefs that experiences cause.
For example, an experience that represents the strawberry as red might
immediately cause me to believe that the strawberry is ripe, despite
the fact that the experience itself does not represent the strawberry
as ripe.
The idea that I will defend is that some perceptual experiences83
represent biological structures as created
d – as expressive of intent and
intelligence – in much the same way that (if McDowell is right) our
experiences of other people’s movements and sounds represent them as

expressive of mental properties.
From here on I will assume that McDowell is right that mental prop-
erties can be represented in perception.84 But how can we tell whether
such properties, and more specifically the properties of intent and intel-
ligence, are really represented in some of our perceptual experiences of
nature? The Duke of Argyll certainly expresses himself in perceptual
terms. He talks about seeingg that ‘they are the effects and expression
of mind’. However, it might be the case that the actual contents of his
perceptual experiences do not represent any mental properties. Maybe
he just – immediately after seeing some complex natural structure –
comes to believe that it is an ‘expression of mind’.
This is a very difficult area. Siegel has, as we saw in the last chapter,
proposed a method for determining which properties our perceptions
represent. The method does not, unfortunately, seem to be applicable
to the present problem (at least I do not see how). There is, however,
one thing that can support my claim about the contents of experiences
of nature, and that is the testimony of atheists. If people who do not
believe that nature is created tell us that it appears to them as if some
natural structure is ‘designed’ or ‘created’ or ‘expressive of mind’, it
seems reasonable to ascribe that content to their experience rather than
to any of their beliefs.85
This type of testimony from atheists (or agnostics) is not hard to find.
We have already mentioned the testimony of Darwin who, at the end
of his life, was at least ambivalent about the idea that there is a God.86
Richard Dawkins says, as we remember, that ‘Biology is the study of
complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed
for a purpose’.87 And Francis Crick, another devout atheist, warns that
‘biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not
designed, but rather evolved’.88
Hume, who was not an atheist, but highly critical of the argument
from design, seems to have experienced Darwin’s ‘overwhelming force’.
Hume puts the following words in the mouth of Cleanthes:
Consider, anatomize the eye; Survey its structure and contrivance;

and tell me, from your own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not
immediately flow in upon you with a force like that of sensation ... Who
can behold the male and female of each species, the correspondence
of their parts and instincts, their passions and whole course of life
before and after generation, but must be sensible, that the propaga-
tion of the species is intended by nature?89
The examples of Darwin, Dawkins, Crick and Hume are telling.

Dawkins, of course, does not believe that biological things are
designed or created. So when he says that biological things ‘give the
appearance of having been designed for a purpose’, the appearance he
is talking about cannot be construed as a belief or judgment, formed
on the basis of a perception, to the effect that some biological entity
is purposefully designed. There are no such beliefs in Dawkins’ mind.
Obviously he is not saying that even though any beliefs about design
are lacking in his own case, it would be reasonable to form such beliefs
on the basis of perceiving biological things. He does not think that
it is reasonable. This is why he spends much of his academic career
fighting this type of belief. The fact that Dawkins finds it appro-
priate to mention the appearance of purposeful design in his charac-
terization of biology as a discipline suggests that natural organisms
perceptuallyy strike many people, including Dawkins, as – in some sense –
expressive of mind.90
Why does Crick say that biologists must constantly keep in mind that
what they see was nott designed? Biologists, if any, know that biological
organisms have evolved. It does not seem likely that they would
suddenly forget this fact. So why does Crick see the need for a constant
reminder? Maybe because what biologists see perceptually appearr to be
expressions of mind.
That things appear to be a certain way does not, of course, entail
that they are that way. My purpose here, however, is only to argue for
the existence of perceptual experiences that representt the constitution
of biological organisms as expressive of intent and intelligence. By this
I do not mean – and this is crucial – that those experiences represent
the constitution of biological organisms as complex, orderly, functional,
highly organized, or something like that. Of course, when it appears to
the subject that some organism is an expression of mind, it may also
(and probably does) appear to that subject that the organism has some
of these other properties. But the property we are talking about here is
a mind-related d or expressive property in McDowell’s sense.
According to McDowell, human behavior can have the property of
being expressive of joy.y If I see that a piece of behavior is expressive of
joy, I do not just see that this behavior has certain properties that can
be characterized in purely physical terms. I also see that the behavior
is expressive of a mental state. So by seeing that the property being
expressive of joyy is instantiated in some behavior, I thereby know that
the mental property of being joyful is also instantiated. This means
that I know that the behavior I observe belongs to a minded creature.
Likewise, if I see that some behavior is intentional (expressive of inten-

tion) I thereby know that the body displaying it is minded.
If there were no expressive properties, the skeptic about other minds
would win, according to McDowell. We would have to say that the
only way to know other peoples’ mental states is by way of inductive
inference (and it is, as we have seen, questionable if there is any cogent
inductive argument available). However, if there are expressive proper-
ties, then the mental properties of other people are sometimes easily
accessible.
Charles Taylor says, as we noted, that
something is expressed, when it is embodied in such a way as to

be made manifest. And ‘manifest’ must be taken here in the strong
sense. Something is manifest when it is directly available for all to
see. It is not manifest when there are just signs of its presence, from
which we can infer that it is there, such as when I ‘see’ that you are
in your office because of your car being parked outside.91
Taylor goes on to say that ‘what expression manifests can onlyy be mani-
fested in expression’. This means that a defining characteristic of an
expression or manifestation of some circumstance is that it cannot
be contrasted with another, more direct mode of presentation of that
circumstance. This is why seeing your car in the driveway does not
count as having the fact that you are in your office being made manifest
to one. There exists another, more direct mode of presentation of the
fact that you are in your office, viz. that I see that you are in your office.
Taylor takes the example of feelings manifested in faces. ‘If you have
an expressive face, I can see your joy or sorrow in your face. There is no
inference here; I see your moods and feelings, they are manifest, in the
only way they can be manifest in public space.’92
In order not to create confusion, we should correct Taylor’s statement.
He says that ‘there is no inference involved’ when one comes to know
that somebody is joyful by seeing joy expressed in the person’s face.
However, I think that it is more correct to say that there is an inference
involved, but a very trivial one. What I see is the fact that the person’s face
expresses joy. The obtaining of this fact logically entails the obtaining of
another fact, viz. that the person is joyful. There is hence a distinction
between the expressive fact (that S’s face expresses joy) and the mental
fact (that S is joyful), but the relation between those facts is not contin-
gent. If S’s face expresses joy, then, necessarily, S feels joyful. This is
what McDowell means by calling expressions of mental states indefeas-
ible criteria of mental states. Facial expressions are not mere symptoms of
mental states (=contingent relation), but express them (=non-contingent

relation).93 And even though the fact that S is joyful is distinct from
the fact that S’s face expresses joy, there is nevertheless no more direct
access to the mental fact than by perceiving the expressive fact, i.e., by
perceiving that S’s face expresses joy.
It is important to note that it is not just the mental properties we
are talking about here – intention and joy – that are subject-related in
the sense that if there is intention or joy, then there must be some-
bodyy who intends or feels joyful. The idea of expression is also internally
linked to the idea of a subject – somebody who expresses something for
somebody. ‘Expression is the power of a subject; and expressions mani-
festt things, and hence essentially refer us to subjects for whom these
things can be manifest.’94 The very idea of expression presupposes the
idea of subjects who sayy (express, mean) things and grasp things (have a
perspective on the world).
There is, however, a long-standing tradition within philosophy that
tries to get rid of subjects. Being a subject – to be able to mean, express,
and mentally grasp things – is, according to this tradition, nothing more
than to be causally related to the world in some extremely complex
ways. Taylor and McDowell, among others, claim, in contrast, that
phenomena such as meaning and understanding belong to a sui generis
subject-related aspect of reality. The property of being a subject cannot
be reduced to other properties. There is no way of getting rid of subjects.
This view, which is implicit in the Open Mind-view, is presupposed by
the argument of this book.
To sum up: my contention is that some of us (probably most) have
perceptual experiences that represent complex biological structures as
expressive of intent and intelligence. The testimony of Darwin, Dawkins,
Crick, and others supports this contention. Hopefully it will by now be
clear that the property of being expressive of intent and intelligence is
to be understood as a mind-entailing or subject-related property. Being
expressive of intent and intelligence is being ‘expressive of mind’, as the
Duke of Argyll put it. If we know that natural structures instantiate this
property, we thereby know that there exists at least one subject whose
intent and intelligence are expressed in those structures.
6.3 Can structures be expressive of mental properties?
It could be objected that it is one thing to claim that things that have
minds can behave in a way that is expressive of mind. But how can one
perceive expressions of mind in structures, such as the constitution of
biological organisms?
This idea, however, is not at all counter-intuitive. Think of a book.

It is an object, it does not display any behavior, but it is natural to say
that it constitutes an expression of mind in virtue of its physical consti-
tution (the pattern of marks in it). When I read a book it seems to me
that the organization of letters in it is expressive of thoughts, ideas,
and feelings. Surely it is not the behavior of the author when writing
the book that is expressive of those thoughts, ideas and feelings. It is, if
anything, the text itself. And McDowell, recall, claims that we can hear
the sounds that other people utter as expressive of thoughts and beliefs.
It seems rather far-fetched to claim that vibrations in the air produced
by humans can be expressive of thoughts and beliefs, but not marks on
a paper produced by humans.
The idea that non-linguistic works of art – such as paintings and music –
are also capable of expressing the feelings and other mental properties of
artists is, although controversial in some camps, surely completely intel-
ligible. It is, I think, the prevalent view among the general public.
Aaron Riddley describes what he calls ‘Everyman’s’ view of artistic
expression. The view is that ‘in expressing what he feels, the artist creates
an object of a certain sort, a work of art – and this object shows in some
way what that feeling is or was’.95 Artistic expression involves an artist’s
feeling something and embodying that feeling in an object.96 Artistic
expression is hence very much like ordinary expression. When a person
expresses something through a facial expression, the state of mind of the
person is revealed in his face, and the facial expression is explained by the
state of mind of the person.97 In the case of artistic expression, the work
of art has the same function as the facial expression. It reveals the artist’s
state of mind, and its properties are explained by that state of mind.
Collingwood is a famous defender of this position. He says, as we have
noted, that ‘every utterance and every gesture that each one of us makes
is a work of art’.98 Riddley also defends Everyman’s position. He claims
that ‘artworks must be understood as objects having expressive properties
capable of revealing and being explained by the feelings of artists’.99
Peter Kivy represents the opposing camp. The emotional character of
a work of art is, according to him, logically independent of the state of
mind of the artist who created it, which means that art is nott compar-
able to ordinary expression:
Many, and perhaps most, of our emotive descriptions of music are

logically independent of the states of mind of the composers of that
music, whereas whether my clenched fist is or is not an expression of
anger is logically dependent upon whether or not I am angry.100
Even if we were to find out that Mozart was happy when writing
the opening bars of the great G minor symphony,101 we would not,
according to Kivy, amend our characterization of these bars as somber.
No evidence whatsoever about Mozart’s state of mind could make us
change our mind about what the opening bars ‘express’. The emotional
(‘expressive’) properties of a work of art are therefore logically inde-
pendent of the artist’s state of mind. This means that art cannot be
conceived as really expressingg the artist’s feeling, in the sense of revealing
or embodying them. Art is only ‘expressive’ in the Pickwickian sense
that it can arouse feelings in the audience.
There is, however, a very simple explanation available of the fact
that no evidence about Mozart’s state of mind can make us revise our
description of the opening bars of the G minor symphony as somber.
The explanation is that the symphony itself constitutes the best possible
evidence we can have of what Mozart felt. Riddley writes:
The evidence of the symphony itself trumps whatever imaginary

evidence Kivy thinks of himself as discovering – just as, for instance,
the publicly manifest evidence of Hitler’s megalomania would
trump any imagined ‘discovery’ about his modest, self-effacing
nature in private ... There is no sort of discovery about Mozart – and
what could it be? a letter? a diary entry? – that would make plaus-
ible the radical splitting off of him from the expressive properties
of his work.102
What Riddley points out is simply
the ordinary, everyday fact that actions speak louder than words –
that what one does, how one behaves, reveals how one feels in a way
that nothing else can. From the fact that the making of a work of art
is standardly a peculiarly rich, reflective and elaborate sort of action,
therefore, one should conclude that, standardly, a work of art offers
the best possible (‘logical’) evidence of an artist’s state, and so that,
standardly, what a work of art expresses reveals that state, and is to
be explained by it.
Riddley therefore recommends
that the artist must be seen as present in his work, much as a person
must be seen as present in his behavior, rather than as separate from
it, behind it, or, above all, ‘logically independent’ of it.103
The ‘expression’ theory of art is, of course, controversial. It is, however,

clearly intelligible, and many find it plausible.104
It could be argued that the idea of intrinsically expressive behavior
is more natural than the idea that structures (whether human-made
or biological) can be intrinsically expressive of mind. When we see
expressive behavior, we also see the subjectt whose mental properties are
expressed. The subject simply is the body that displays the behavior.
When we see an expressive structure such as an artwork, on the other
hand, we do not thereby see the subject whose properties are expressed.
But how can it then be possible to know, without inference, that the struc-
ture is expressive of the properties of a subject?
This objection neglects the distinction between seeing a subject and
seeing thatt something is a subject. If I look at a conscious, intelligent crea-
ture from outer space but mistake it for an unconscious thing, then I see a
subject, but I do not see it as a subject. Likewise, when I look at an active
human body, I see a subject. But the interesting question, in this context
is: how can I come to knoww that it is a subject? The McDowellian answer is
that I can come to know this only if I am capable of perceiving the body’s
behavior as being expressive of mind (as having expressive properties).
This answer entails that a creature unable to perceive expressive proper-
ties could not recognize a subject even if he looked right at it.
This means that the mere physical presence of a subject within the
visual field of an observer does nothing to explain how the observer can
know thatt there is a subject within his visual field. The explanation, as
we saw, has instead to do with the observer’s ability to perceive expres-
sive properties. If expressive properties can supervene on phenomena
that are physically distinct from the subject of expression (which the
expression theory of art claims), then it is quite intelligible how an
observer can know, without inference, that a structure that is not a
subject is expressive of the mental properties of a subject.
A difference between perceiving expressive human behavior and
perceiving expressive structures is the following: by perceiving human
behavior, we acquire knowledge of subjects who are identical to the
objects we have in view (the human beings). By perceiving expressive
structures (such as artworks and, if I am right, biological structures) we
acquire knowledge of subjects who are nott identical to the objects we
have in view. (We seem to naturally construe such structures as expres-
sive of, respectively, the mind of a human creator [artworks], and God/
gods [biological structures]). This difference, however, is epistemically
irrelevant, which we can see by reflecting on the following skeptical
scenarios.
If any structure is intrinsically expressive of mind, then probably

The Last Judgmentt by Michelangelo is. But, for all we know, there could
exist an impersonal, non-intentional natural process that all by itself is
capable of producing a qualitatively identical structure. So if I never saw
any artist paint The Last Judgmentt (or have reasons other than my experi-
ence of the painting for believing that it is a product of mind), is it not
possible, for all I know, that the painting I see is nott the result of inten-
tional activity, but a product merely of impersonal, non-intentional
natural processes?
What this skeptical challenge says is that I could be in the bad case.
It could appear to me as if a certain structure is a product of mind,
although it is not. The crucial point I want to make is that exactly the
same skeptical possibility exists even if I have the opportunity to watch
when Michelangelo paints the painting. The same skeptical question
can be raised about the process of painting: is this process an intentional
activity by a subject,
t or merely a non-intentional, natural process?
This shows that when we perceive something as being expressive
of mind, it does not matter, from an epistemic point of view, whether
what we perceive is the subject itself, or some structure that is phys-
ically distinct from the subject but expressive of the subject’s mental
properties. In both cases, similar skeptical challenges can be raised. The
possibility that a seemingly mind-expressive structure is not, after all,
a product of mind is one skeptical scenario. The possibility that a seem-
ingly mind-expressive behavior is not really minded is another. There
are, as we can recall, philosophers (‘eliminativists’) who claim that the
second skeptical scenario in fact obtains whenever we look at another
human being. If they are right, the painting of The Last Judgmentt will
eventually be explained exclusively in non-intentional, non-subject-
related terms like any natural process.
The idea that we can recognize something as an expression of mind
without having any conscious subject in view is surely congruent
with common sense. If I read a book, I do not have to perceive the
author in order to recognize the book as an expression of mind (i.e.,
in order to know that there is at least one author). I can also recognize
that Michelangelo’s The Last Judgmentt is an expression of mind merely
by looking at the painting. At least I seem to be able to recognize the
painting as an expression of mind in the same direct way as I would
be able to recognize (if I had the opportunity to watch) Michelangelo’s
movements when he painted the work as being expressive of mind.
This, however, is merely an observation about the phenomenologyy of
mind-recognition in artworks and other structures that are products
of mind. It seems as if no inferential reasoning is involved when we

recognize artworks as artworks. But, as we saw in the last chapter, a
well-trained physicist can recognize mu mesons in the same seemingly
direct manner. This does not mean that the physicist’s knowledge of mu
mesons is best characterized as observational knowledge. It is probably
better to say that her knowledge is inferentially derived from observa-
tions of traces in cloud chambers together with background knowledge.
Since the background knowledge is deeply internalized, the inferences
involved are tacit and swift. Nevertheless, there are inferences involved
and they can, if necessary, be made explicit by the physicist.
Proponents of inferential accounts of other-minds knowledge claim
that unconscious, tacit inferences of this type are involved when we
recognize human behavior as minded. What we really observe are
merely physical facts, from which we infer knowledge of minds. We
have seen, however, that it is doubtful whether there are any valid infer-
ences of this kind.
One position that suggests itself at this point is the following. In
order to get around the problem of other minds, we accept that human
behavior is intrinsically expressive of the mental. But we claim that
onlyy human behavior is intrinsically expressive of the mental. When we
recognize artworks as products of mind, this recognition is never due to
a perception of intrinsic expressive properties of artworks, but is always
based on (more or less tacit) inferential reasoning. It may seem to us that
our recognition of artworks as products of mind is as non-inferential
and direct as our recognition of human behavior as minded, but this
impression is misleading.
This is indeed a position which, I think, can be occupied without
irrationality. I will argue, however, that a more reasonable – and less
ad hocc – view is to acknowledge that phenomena other than human
behavior can be intrinsically expressive of mind.
The above-recounted (possible) position, which I am going to criti-
cize, follows McDowell in allowing that human behavior is intrinsic-
ally expressive. One important aspect of human behavior, however,
is linguistic behavior, and the McDowellian view says that linguistic
behavior is expressive. I can hear another person’s speech as expressive
of her mental states.
It seems strange to claim that spoken but not written strings of words
can constitute expressions of mental states. Of course, a written message
need not, like most spoken ones, reveal who the subject of the expres-
sion is. But why assume that something can only be a genuine expres-
sion if an observer is able to point out the subject behind it? It does not
seem far-fetched to say that a reader of an anonymous written message

can perceive the text as an expression of somebody’s mental states. Texts,
of course, are structures. If texts can be expressive, then other things
than human behavior can be expressive.105
Furthermore, when we speak, what we do is to create vibrations in
the air. It seems perfectly appropriate to say that this acoustic phenom-
enon – the vibrations in the air – is the medium through which speakers
express themselves. So it is not clear, even in the case of speech, that the
expressiveness is best viewed as a property of the behavior rather than
as a property of the physical phenomenon produced by the behavior.
Another reason why the position we are considering is problem-
atic is that it entails a rather unattractive view of art. In order fully to
appreciate this, we must rehearse the distinction between expressions
(as a kind of indefeasible criterion) and symptoms. Expressions are, as
opposed to symptoms, non-contingently related to what they express.
For instance, if my grimace is an expression of pain, then, necessarily, I
am in pain. Smoke, however, is merely a symptom of fire. This means
that it is logically possible for there to be smoke without fire. Note that
there is a rather common use of the term ‘expression’ in which it merely
means ‘symptom’. If you deny that, necessarily, a person who expresses
pain is in pain, then you are using the term ‘expression’ as synonymous
with ‘symptom’. This is not how the term is used in this book.
McDowell’s claim, to recapitulate, is that human behavior can
indeed be expressive of mental properties and, implicit in this, that we
are able to recognize it as such perceptually. This means that we can
perceive facts such as his behavior expresses anger. r We are not infallible
in perceiving such facts, but when we perceive them, we do not have
to infer that the mental state (in this case, the anger) is present. Since
we have perceived that his behavior expresses anger, necessarily, the
person is angry. (In the case of expressive artworks, we have to formu-
late the non-contingent relation between the expressive properties and
the artist’s state of mind differently. We cannot say that if a painting
expresses joy then, necessarily, the artist feels joyful. The artist’s feelings
change over time, of course, without the expressive properties of the
painting changing. We have to say, instead, that if a painting expresses
joy then, necessarily, the artist feltt joyful, at some point.)
The position I am criticizing admits, as we remember, that human
behavior can be intrinsically expressive of mind, but says that nothing
else is. This means that when we see Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, we do not
directly perceive the work as being expressive of mind. There are no
expressive properties in the painting to be perceived. Since we cannot
perceive the painting as expressive of mind, we can only recognize

the painting as a product of mind by way of an inductive inference
from perceptions of the object’s merely physical properties, together
with background knowledge. The required background knowledge is
derived from prior experience. We have seen humans intentionally
produce other objects. By a process of abstraction, we have learned to
recognize certain physical properties as reliable marks of human, inten-
tional design. When we see the Mona Lisa, we perceive some of these
properties, and we (unconsciously, of course) infer that the Mona Lisa
is a product of intentional design. If we could perceive the Mona Lisa as
expressive of mind, we would not need to infer that the structure is a
product of mind.
So the position I am criticizing takes the view that the Mona Lisa –
and other paintings, books, etc. – are mere symptoms of the mental
life of their authors. There is only a contingent relation between the
artwork and the artist’s state of mind, a relation like the one between
smoke and fire. We have to know that smoke is normally caused by
fire in order to be able to infer the existence of fire from the presence
of smoke. Likewise, we have to know that objects with such-and-such
physical properties are normally caused by minded subjects in order to
be able to infer that the Mona Lisa was designed by a minded subject.
The emotional qualities of artworks are not, according to this account,
to be explained in terms of the expression of the artist’s feelings. Rather,
an artwork can only indicate the artist’s feelings by producing a certain
emotional response in the observer of the artwork, who can infer that
this type of emotional response probably was what the artist wanted to
accomplish, maybe because she herself experienced a similar feeling.106
Such a construal of art is perhaps acceptable against the background
of the assumption that the mental life of others can, in principle, never
be made manifest to an observer by being expressed, but is always only
accessible by way of inductive inferences. Given this assumption, we
have no choice but to admit that talk about ‘expressions’ – both in the
context of human behavior and art – is really only talk about symp-
toms (as the use of ‘expression’ I mentioned above has it). However,
once McDowell’s claim that human behavior is genuinelyy expressive is
accepted, then the construal of artworks as merely symptomatically
related to the artist’s mind appears unacceptable. Why try to ‘express’
oneself through writing poems, painting, or composing music, when
the only really expressive medium is the human body? The view that
mental states can be expressed but that artworks cannot be the media of
expression has strange consequences for our view of art.
I find it, for example, hard to swallow that it is possible to hear

Beethoven’s feelings expressed d when he curses at the brass section
during the rehearsal of the fifth symphony, but not when one listens
to the fifth symphony itself. I find it equally hard to swallow that
Hemingway’s gestures can express his inner life, but not his novels. The
view that entails these consequences has got things completely wrong.
Artworks are often capable of making the inner life of artists manifestt in
a way that far surpasses what their bodies are capable of.
Another strange consequence of the view we are considering is that
it entails that art forms involving the human body, such as dancing,
can express the artist’s state of mind, while other art forms (painting,
writing, composing) cannot. This seems very peculiar.
It could be argued that the position we are discussing nevertheless
has a certain plausibility. Human behavior seems to be special when it
comes to expression. For one thing, there are natural behavioral expres-
sions of mental properties like pain. People from all corners of the world
can recognize certain behaviors as expressive of pain. Artistic expres-
sion, however, is often heavily dependent on convention.
Secondly, and closely linked to this: art seems to require interpretation
to a higher degree than does behavior. Art critics often have different
and incompatible opinions about the meanings of artworks. This can
seem to indicate that artistic ‘expression’ really is no expression at all,
and that we always have to infer the artist’s state of mind from percep-
tions of the non-expressive properties of artworks.
Thirdly, it seems likely that humans are innately predisposed to
apply psychological principles of explanation to objects with human-
like bodily features and biomechanical patterns of motion. A common
view among psychologists is that ‘at its ontogenetically earliest emer-
gence naïve psychological reasoning is applied exclusively to its proper
domain, that is, to the intentional actions of human beings. The initial
categorization of an object as human is thought to be based on the
detection of perceptual and/or behavioral features characteristic of
human beings.’107 This can seem to support the claim that only human
behavior, if anything, is genuinely expressive of mind.
The first objection presupposes something that is incompatible with
McDowell’s position. McDowell argues that human linguisticc behavior
is expressive. Linguistic behavior – speech – is as heavily dependent on
convention as anything. If one accepts the expressiveness of linguistic
behavior, one cannot consistently claim that convention-dependence
disqualifies art from being expressive. There are, moreover, artworks
whose expressive qualities do not seem to depend on convention at all.
The position I am defending does not deny that human behavior is

speciall as a medium of expression. Human behavior is certainly, in
several respects, expressive in quite a unique way. What I am committed
to denying is merely the claim that onlyy human behavior is genuinely
expressive at all. This claim has not the intuitive appeal that the objection
suggests it has. It is certainly true that anybody – no matter from which
culture she comes – can recognize pain-behavior as expressive of pain. But
anybody can recognize a diesel bulldozer as a product of mind too.108
That art requires interpretation to a much higher degree than behavior,
as the second objection has it, is false. People spend enormous amounts
of time trying to interpret each others’ behavior: ‘She has avoided me all
evening, is this because she is embarrassed about what happened?’ The
fact that we often have to infer which mental states people are in from
their behavior is, of course, fully compatible with McDowell’s claim
that sometimes we can directly perceive, without inference, mental
states expressedd in their behavior. Similarly, the fact that art critics often
argue about how to understand a certain artwork is fully compatible
with the claim that sometimes we can directly perceive, without infer-
ence, mental states expressed in art.
As to the third objection, the fact that we learn to recognize human
behavior as minded before we learn to recognize artworks and other
artifacts as products of mind does not in any way contradict my view. I
do not (and need not) deny that our ability to perceive expressive prop-
erties is initiallyy acquired in the context of observing human behavior.
Perceptual abilities acquired in one context can often be extended to
and applied in other contexts as well. For example, even though Lisa
first learns to perceive expressions of pain in the context of observing
human behavior it is very natural to think that her ability can subse-
quently be applied to non-human animals as well.
It is also worth remembering that a good deal of human behavior is
aimed at modifying our environments. Learning how to perceive human
behavior as expressive of mental states is therefore likely to be intim-
ately bound up with learning to see how human intentions become
embodied in human-made structures. There is no clear-cut distinction
between human behavior ‘in itself’ and the environmental consequences
of human behavior. For example, in order to correctly understand the
intention behind the gardener’s behavior as she prunes the trees, one
needs to understand what a garden is.
It is natural to think that the process of learning to see expressions of
mind begins when the child observes human behavior and the modi-
fications of the environment that behavior causes. If the thesis of this
book is correct, the ability which the child thereby acquires will then
allow her to go on and discover expressions of mind in natural struc-
tures too.
Csibra et al. have shown that our ability to ‘detect’ intentions or
purposes has, from a very early age, a much broader application than
human behavior. They argue that ‘the domain of naïve psychology is
initially defined only by the applicability of its core principles and its
ontology is not restricted to (featurally identified) object kinds such as
persons, animates, or agents’.109 This means that what triggers infants
to ‘reason’ mentalistically (or quasi-mentalistically) about some object
is not, primarily, that the object has face-like features and displays
biomechanical motion. Computer animated shapes with no human
features can, according to Csibra et al., activate the mentalistic reasoning
of infants, who seem to ascribe goals to the activities of the shapes.110
This indicates that even if the human body is special, we neverthe-
less possess, from early on, an ability to ‘reason’ (quasi-)mentalistically
about non-human objects.
Before we leave the topic of whether structures can be expressive of
mind, a few clarifications are necessary.
The view defended here does not entail that whenever we recognize
some structure as a product of mind this is because we directly perceive
it to be so. On the contrary, in many cases tacit inferences are most
certainly involved. My suggestion is only that in some cases (presumably
cases involving highly organized and complex structures), we directly
perceive structures as expressive of mind.
It is also important to note that a structure can be a productt of mind
without being expressive of mind. If I intentionally arrange some stones
in a random-looking pattern, then this pattern is a product of mind. It
is not, however, expressive of mind. The same applies to behavior. If I
choose to stumble and fall, then my behavior is intentional. If I am a
half-decent actor, however, I can ensure that my behavior is not expres-
sive of intention. The behavior looks unintended.
The latter considerations put us in a position to respond to a possible
objection. It could be argued that if the Christian tradition is right, then
there are no objects that are not products of mind. Everything that exists
is created. This means that the capacity to recognize things as products
of mind can never go wrong. The problem with this is that recognition
is a contrastive notion. The very idea of a recognitional capacity is the
idea of a capacity that discriminates one type of phenomena from other
types. If all existing phenomena belong to the same type in a certain
respect, discrimination is not possible with regard to this.
This objection cuts no ice, since the capacity we are talking about is
a capacity to recognize phenomena as expressive of mind (of intent and
intelligence). The Christian claim that everything is created by an intel-
ligent subject does not entail that everything is expressive of the creator’s
intent and intelligence. God does not have to manifest his properties in
everything he creates. If we look around in the universe, much of what
we see does not strike us as expressive of mind (rocks, polar ice, gaseous
clouds, supernovae, etc.). This is probably because much of what we
see is nott expressive of mind. Only by reference to background beliefs –
such as the Christian doctrine of creation – can we claim that everything
is created.
Does the view here defended entail that we could recognize artworks
and advanced artifacts as products of mind without any prior experi-
ence of artworks and artifacts and the processes by which they come
into being? Certainly not. The concepts ‘designed object’ or ‘created
object’ can only be acquired by creatures that are capable of partici-
pating in creative processes. This means that we need to see people
making things, as well as make things ourselves, in order to grasp the
relevant concepts. Without those concepts, we cannot recognize any
object as intentionally created.
However, what we learn by observing and participating in creative
processes, if my suggestion is correct, is to perceive structures as inten-
tionally created, and the perceptual nature of this skill should be taken
literally. By becoming animals who understand what it means to create
or design (which is an integral part of becoming a rational animal) we
extend our perceptual skills. We become able to see objects and struc-
tures as expressive of mind. Learning this perceptual ability requires
experience. We must not assume, however, that whatt we learn through
experience is merely to recognize certain physical properties – proper-
ties that we could perceive already from the start – as reliable symptoms
of createdness. This would not be to acquire a new perceptual skill.
This is easily misunderstood. A classical account of how we learn to
‘see’ nature as creation goes as follows. By observing and participating
in human creative processes, we learn that certain properties (which we
had the ability to perceive already from the start) are reliable symptoms
of mind. That those properties are ‘symptoms’ of mind means that it
is logically possible for them to be instantiated even though no mind
has been at work in producing the structures that instantiate them
(examples of such properties: organization, functionality, ‘complex
specificity’111). Then we turn to nature. There we discover the same
properties. We reason inductively from the fact that these properties
are instantiated in nature to the conclusion that nature is creation. If

this reasoning takes place subconsciously and habitually, we may say
that we have learned to ‘see’ or ‘interpret’ nature as creation.
It is very important to grasp the difference between this traditional
account and the account being proposed here. According to the latter,
we also begin by observing and participating in human creative proc-
esses. What we thereby learn, however, is to perceptually recognize
certain properties that we could not perceive at all when the process of
learning began. The properties we learn to see are expressions of mind,
which means that it is nott logically possible for them to be instantiated
in objects that are not produced by (or otherwise related to) minds.
After we have learned to recognize some of the expressive properties of
human-made structures, we turn to nature.112 There we also perceive
the same, or similar, properties. Since the properties we perceive are
intrinsically mind-related, there is now no need for inferences and
reasoning. The perceptual evidence we have is simply incompatible
with the non-createdness of nature. It tells us, directly and by itself,
that nature is creation. The fact that we first learned how to recognize
intrinsically mind-related properties in the context of observing and
participating in human creative processes is irrelevant. Obviously, I first
learned how to recognize colors in the context of observing terrestrial
things. This does not entail that I need to acquire some new w skill (or
perform some inferences) in order to be able to recognize the same color
properties instantiated in extra-terrestrial things. Likewise, the fact that
I first learned how to perceive expressive properties of objects in the
context of human-made objects does not entail that I have to acquire
some new skill (or perform some inference) in order to recognize the
same, or similar, properties instantiated by natural objects.
In this chapter, I have been talking about perceiving human behavior
as well as human-made structures as ‘expressive of mind’ – expressive
of intent and intelligence. Behavior and structures are, however, very
different media of expression. Human behavior is expressive in the
sense that it appears to normal observers as minded d – as intentional
and intelligent, while artworks and other human-made structures are
expressive in the sense that they appear, to normal observers, as having
been intentionally produced d by minded beings.
If things, according to our everyday experience, can be expressive of
mind in these two very different senses, how are we to determine in
what sense biological structures are expressive of mind? What prevents us
from construing nature’s expressivity in terms of the behavior-paradigm
rather than the artwork-paradigm? It could be argued, for example, that
nature should be understood as expressive of mind in the sense that

occurrences in nature constitute divine behavior. r The world could be
understood as God’s body through which the divine mind expresses
itself. Why not take our experiences of nature as validating this view?
The answer is that this is not how things perceptually appear to us.
My starting point is our actual experience of nature. I have argued that
we, or at any rate many of us, experience complex biological structures
as created. The world may very well be the body of a cosmic mind, and
biological organisms may very well be part of God’s body. But we, or at
any rate most of us, do not have experiences that representt elephants,
humans and other complex organisms as part of the body of a cosmic
mind, or that represent occurrences in nature as the behavior of an
all-embracing being. Our experiences do, however, (as I have argued)
represent humans and elephants as intentionally created. (The following
section will provide further support for this claim.) This means that
our experiences of complex organisms are very similar, in this respect,
to our experiences of human artifacts and artworks. Our experiences
of artworks do not tell us who the artist is (they do not, in other words,
represent the artist). They just tell us that there is at least one artist.
The same can be said of our experiences of biological structures.
Those experiences do not represent any ‘artist’. What they do is to
represent natural structures as the embodiment of creative intent and
intelligence.
There are, of course, all kinds of differences between biological entities
and artworks, and between our experiences of biological entities and
artworks. My point is just that the artwork-paradigm captures the way
in which nature is expressive of mind much better than the behavior-
paradigm.
If the suggestion that we can directly perceive natural structures as
expressive of intent and intelligence is correct, then there is a good
explanation for why the project of inferring divine design from the
(non-expressive) properties of biological nature has been, and still is, so
popular – even though it has turned out to be so difficult. People have,
if the suggestion is correct, always seen biological structures as created.
It has therefore seemed very obvious to many that nature is creation
and that knowledge of this fact is available from biological nature itself,
independently of any ‘special’ revelation. This conviction has made
people very persistent in their search for a cogent ‘design-inference’.113
Even when the design-inference project has suffered severe setbacks,
its proponents have still been convinced that it mustt be capable of
succeeding. Nature’s createdness is just that obvious.
What I have suggested in this book is that a clear and certain know-
ledge of nature’s createdness might be available from observations of
biological organisms, even though there is no cogent inference from
the existence of biological organisms to the existence of a creator.114 If
biological nature has expressive properties which we can perceive, then
we can know that nature is creation without any recourse to inference.
People have, however, usually assumed that iff complex biological
structures ‘testify’ to a creator (which they, according to many, clearly
do), then it must be because knowledge of a creator is inferentially
available from observations of those structures. The insight that it can
be true both that biological structures testify to a creator and
d that the
design-inference project is doomed, has been lacking.115
6.4 Indirect support from psychology
If it is correct that natural structures are perceptibly expressive of the

intent of a creator, then we should expect beliefs about creation to arise
naturally in humans, and rather early in life.
This seems to be the case. Jean Piaget famously claimed that chil-
dren are ‘artificialists’, which means that they believe that all things are
made by people for a purpose.116 This claim was based on 600 observa-
tions of children between four and twelve years old. Piaget believed
that children lack a sense of physical causality and therefore tend to
explain everything in terms of a form of causality of which they have
first-person knowledge – the causality of intentional agency. However,
the idea that children are ‘pre-causal’ – incapable of reasoning in
physical-causal terms – has been more or less rebutted by subsequent
studies.117 Neither do children seem to believe that natural phenomena
are human-made.118 There are, however, now ‘a growing number of
studies indicating that children have a broad teleo-functional bias to
treat objects and behaviors of all kinds as existing for a purpose’.119
There is also evidence that children’s thinking about natural objects in
teleo-functional terms is connected to ideas about intentional design.
Children view things as having a purpose because they view them
as intentionally created. Evans has found that both fundamentalist
and non-fundamentalist American Midwest children tend to explain
how species originate in intentional terms. They favored ‘creationist’
accounts of the origin of natural objects, especially living things.120
The connection between children’s teleo-functional explanations of
the origins of natural objects and their intuitions about non-human
intelligent design was confirmed in a study by Kelemen and DiYanni
performed on British children from West London representing a broad

ethnic and cultural mix. The study suggests ‘that children who endorse
purpose-based explanations of nature also endorse the existence of a
creator agent’.121
Kelemen et al. found that the British children ‘were most likely to
generate teleo-functional explanations of artifacts, with a similar but
less marked pattern emerging for natural objects and animals that were
ascribed artifact-like functions’.122 Children, however, tended not to
give teleo-functional explanations of natural events, but preferred phys-
ical-causal explanations of these. The result for natural events ‘suggests
that British elementary-school children’s ideas are not overwhelmingly
influenced by probable exposure to theologically based narratives about,
for example, Noah and the first flood’.123 The results of the study
not only indicate that children treat teleo-functional explanations

and intelligent design explanations of living and nonliving natural
entities as particularly viable but that attributions of purpose are
related to intuitions about intelligent design. That this is the case
among children whose ambient culture is relatively unsupportive of
a creationist design stance is also interesting.124
Kelemen concludes that recent cognitive research, including her own

studies, suggest that children are ‘intuitive theists’.125
If Kelemen et al. are right, we are all initially inclined to view nature as
intentionally created by an agent. The transition to adulthood, further-
more, does not seem to involve any fundamental cognitive change in
this respect. Referring to studies of Romanian ‘gypsies’, Kelemen et al.
say that
when adults (who are not formally religious) are denied the kind of
science education that would normally scaffold alternative explana-
tions for natural phenomena, their intuitions remain promiscuously
teleological ... Thus, cognitive immaturity in itself does not seem key
to the maintenance of broad teleo-functional ideas.
Such ideas may be ‘a developmental constant, providing the explana-

tory default or “backdrop” against which alternative explanatory strat-
egies are elaborated over a lifetime’.126
There are, of course, many possible explanations for why both chil-
dren and adults naturally tend to view intentional explanations of
natural objects as satisfying.127 One possible explanation, however, is
that nature is perceptibly expressive of mind, and that many natural

phenomena therefore visually appearr to children and adults as inten-
tionally created. If this is how nature appears to normal people, we
should expect theistic intuitions to be widespread.128 If, on the other
hand, children and uneducated adults were naturally disinclined to
explain natural phenomena in terms of intentional agency, then this
would tell against the proposal of this book. The studies by Kelemen,
DiYanni and others hence provide indirect support for the proposal.
One cognitive psychologist who explicitly connects our bias toward
teleological-intentional explanations of natural phenomena to issues
about perception is Stewart Guthrie. Guthrie believes, like Kelemen
et al., that Piaget is basically right in his claim that children are natur-
ally inclined to explain natural phenomena in terms of intentional
agency. He also agrees with Kelemen et al. that Piaget’s own explan-
ation of this tendency is wrong. ‘Piaget ... underestimates the persist-
ence of artificialism and the depth of its source.’129 Guthrie points out
the many ways in which artificialism – or ‘anthropocentrism’ as he
calls it – persists in adult life. Even mature, well-informed adults tend
to use humanlike models extensively in their dealings with the non-
human world. We anthropomorphize animals and computers, we ‘see
or hear human form or action in things and events – faces in the moon
and armies in the clouds’.130 ‘Humanlike models offer the dominant,
though not exclusive or inevitable, model for our interpretation of the
world.’131
So anthropomorphism permeates our very perception of the world. We
scan the fragmentary data presented to us by the environment equipped
with perceptual schemata, ‘templates’, to which we try to fit the data,
according to Guthrie. These schemata are of varying complexity; there
are schemata for low-level features such as lines, surfaces, and for
higher-level entities such as inanimate objects, animate objects, and
persons. Schemata of humans are especially useful, and our perception
is therefore to a large extent structured by humanlike models. Guthrie
views the phenomenon of anthropomorphism as a perceptual strategy
that is evolutionary rational. Our tendency to see the world as human-
like is ‘a good bet’, since the interaction with other humans is essential
for everybody, and the ability to detect human presence, as well as to
predict and manipulate the behavior of others, is vital for survival.
Guthrie’s central claim is that anthropomorphism is the main
explanation for religion. Religion simply is anthropomorphism. When
we perceive the world, we perceive it through ‘human like’ perceptual
templates, and this give rise to concepts of supernatural agents.
Scott Atran agrees with Guthrie that our tendency to ‘perceive’ the
world in human-like terms is a crucial factor behind the emergence of
religion.132 ‘The concept of the supernatural agent is culturally derived
from innate cognitive schema, “mental modules”, for the recognition
and interpretation of agents, such as people and animals.’133 A module
is a functionally specialized unit that processes a certain type of input,
‘a specific domain of recurrent stimuli’. There is a special module that
is responsible for processing information pertaining to both human
and non-human agents, an ‘Agent Detection Device’ (ADD). Intentional
agents behave in more complex ways than inanimate objects, and their
behavior can only be satisfactorily interpreted and predicted in teleo-
logical/mentalistic terms. ‘Folk psychology’ – the fundamental princi-
ples that guide our interpretation of agents – explains behavior by the
ascription of internal motivations to objects, such as intentions, beliefs,
and desires.
The proper domain of the ADD is people and animals. It is the
selected function of the module to detect such agents. However, the
actual domain of the module is all objects and events that trigger
the module so that it responds. Dots on a computer-screen which
behave in a ‘social’ way can set off the module, as can unexpected
noises, shadows, etc. The agent detection module ‘primes us to antici-
pate intention in the unseen cases of uncertain situations’. The module
is governed by a ‘better safe than sorry’ strategy. If the movements in
the bushes were not those of a stalker, no harm is done. But if we fail to
detect the presence of an agent, then we are in a potentially dangerous
situation. The ADD is therefore ‘trip wired to respond to fragmentary
information, inciting perception of figures lurking in the shadows’.134
‘Natural selection may have prepared us to induce agency in potentially
important but causally opaque situations.’135
The module is also triggered to respond to ‘evidence of complex
design’. ‘Whether in nature or society, directly observable, short term
productions of complex design are caused by animal or human agents.’
When no obvious cause for some complex phenomenon is at hand,
‘agency detection is deployed as the default program’. ‘Unobservable or
longer-term productions, such as the complex spatiotemporal patterns
of stars, geography, seasons, plants, animals, societies, and people
themselves, have no intuitively natural causal interpretation.’136 Such
information activates the agency-detection schema, which produces
an explanation in terms of agents. This mechanism is at work in the
classical argument from design for the existence of God. Atran, relying
on some results by Csibra et al., claims that ‘neither humanlike facial
or bodily features nor biomechanical movements are necessary for the

attribution of psychological principles, such as goal-directed behavior,
motivation (e.g., emotion), intention to communicate, or social referen-
cing’.137 Atran concludes that ‘spontaneous attribution of agency to physic-
ally unidentified sources isn’t counterintuitive’.138
In sum, psychological evidence indicates that people are naturally
inclined to view natural structures as having been intentionally created
by an agent. Children are ‘intuitive theists’. This is what we should
expect if nature is perceptibly expressive of mind. Guthrie, further-
more, claims that the tendency to understand the world in terms of
intentional causes is rooted in our perceptual apprehension of the world.
Atran, likewise, suggests that our perceptual systems are innately wired
to respond to signs of intentional agency. Moreover, both Guthrie and
Atran contend that the same cognitive equipment that helps us to recog-
nize human agency is responsible for our belief in supernatural agents.
These claims by cognitive psychologists are, of course, framed by
assumptions about the world and about human cognition which are
incompatible with the general philosophical outlook of this book.139 We
should not, however, let this fact blind us to the congeniality between
my proposal about the possibility of seeing nature as creation and the
hypotheses of the cognitive psychologists. Their empirical results and
many of their theoretical conclusions are not only compatible with, but
actually support, my case. One claim that resonates especially well with
my main thesis is Guthrie’s and Atran’s contention that the same cogni-
tive equipment that puts us in a position to know other human minds
is also responsible for the emergence of belief in supernatural agents.
If the argument of this book is sound, Guthrie and Atran are right on
the spot in this matter. Our social minds (in my terms: our abilities to
perceive expressions of mind) are indeed an important factor behind
religion.
But the theories of Atran/Guthrie also have a sting in the tail, of
course. The mechanisms behind the ‘perception’ of supernatural agency
and intent are, as they claim, ‘error-prone’. Uncontroversially, we often
‘perceive’ agents or intent where none is to be found, such as when
we ‘see’ a face in the moon, or ‘hear’ an intruder in the squeaking of a
window. The agent detection device is, in Justin Barrett’s word, ‘hyper-
sensitive’.140 This can constitute a premise for an argument along the
following lines:
If we know that gods exist, we do so on the basis of perceptual infor-
mation provided by the Agent Detection Device (ADD). But the ADD
is error-prone and not a reliable source of perceptual information.
Knowledge based on perceptual information requires that the source is

reliable. Hence, we do not know that gods exist.141
The problem with this argument is that it creates ‘collateral damage’,
as Barrett points out.142 If the ADD is too unreliable for knowledge,
then none of the beliefs that are generated by it constitutes knowledge.
Since our belief in the existence of other intentional agents in general is
(ex hypothesi) generated by the ADD, we must conclude that we do not
know that other intentional agents exist. Denying that the ADD can
give us knowledge of gods hence commits us to denying that we know
other minds. The collateral damage is too extensive.
It could be argued that the ADD was selected for detecting human
and animal agents, not gods. We have therefore reason to trust the ADD
when it comes to detecting human and animal agents, but not when
it comes to detecting gods. However, if gods are agents, there is little
reason to believe that the ADD could not reliably detect them too.143
The ADD was not selected for detecting extra-terrestrials, but if the
extra-terrestrials are agents the ADD would, very likely, detect them
too.
Before we move on, we must consider the question of why the vision
of the world as intentionally created for some people eventually fades
away to be replaced by a world of mechanism.
That some people stop believingg that the world is created does not
mean, of course, that it stops appearingg to them as created. Beliefs do not
always, or even usually, affect how things appear to one, as the examples
of Darwin, Dawkins and Crick illustrate. It is easy to see, however, how
for some people even the appearance of createdness could, at least to
some extent, go away. If my proposal is correct, the whole biological
kingdom is expressive of divine intention. This wealth of expression
leads easily and naturally to a de-sensitization. Since the world is replete
with meaning, we tend to focus on those meanings that are immediately
relevant to us, such as the meanings embodied in human action and
communication. If we furthermore become convinced, by theoretical
considerations, that the seemingly meaningful world is really devoid
of meaning and intent, then the appearance of createdness might fade
from conscious attention to the point of oblivion.
It may be the case that the appearance of intent in nature is not
as strong as the appearance of intent and other mental properties in
human behavior (even though I sometimes feel that it is). There are,
indeed, philosophers who, as a result of false beliefs, can resist the
expressiveness of human behavior and opt for a de-humanizing view
of humans which portrays them as causal machines. Nevertheless,
‘eliminativists’ are harder to find than atheists. It seems to be easier to

objectify creation and view it as the result of (merely) non-intentional
physical processes than it is to do the same with human behavior.
This does not tell against the expressiveness of nature. In fact, since
the mind of God is very different from our minds (even though we,
according to the Jewish and Christian story, are created in the image of
God), it is to be expected that we should experience much less famil-
iarity with expressions of the divine mind than with human expres-
sions. The Christian tradition’s view of sin is also highly relevant in
this context. The essence of sin is to put oneself in the place of God.
If Christianity is right, we, as sinners, do not wantt to recognize God as
God, since such recognition is incompatible with exalting ourselves to
the position of God. One way of avoiding recognizing God is to suppress
the perception of God’s self-manifestation in the world. It is quite
conceivable that not only individuals but entire cultures can develop
in ways that render difficult the recognition of intent and intelligence
in nature. For members of such cultures, the constitution of biological
organisms may not even appearr as expressive of intent. The Western
culture, however, is not such a culture. As we have seen, even the most
ardent atheists in this culture tend to be sensitive to the appearance that
nature is creation.144
7
Possible Defeaters
In the previous chapter, I have argued:
(1) that it is likely that at least some of us have experiences that represent
biological structures as expressive of the intent of a creator, and
(2) that the idea that we can perceive structures as expressive of the
properties of a creator is completely intelligible, congruent with
common sense (as the case of art shows), and very plausible given
the admission that human behaviorr has expressive properties.
However, we might nevertheless have reason to believe that our experi-

ences of intent in naturee are deceptive, or that they cannot, for other
reasons, responsibly be taken as genuine perceptions. As we remember
from Chapter 4, we must be sensitive to the rational force of independ-
ently available considerations in order to be entitled to avail ourselves of
the evidence that our experiences provide us with. If S sees that organism
X is an expression of intent and intelligence, then she possesses percep-
tual evidence that, by itself, is sufficient for knowledgee that X has been
created. However, if she also has beliefs that strongly suggest that her
experience is deceptive, then her status as a knower is undermined.1
Likewise, if she has sufficiently strong independent reasons to believe
that there exists no creator of X, then her status as a knower of the fact
that X has been created is also undermined. S must, in other words, be
sensitive to the rational force of undercutting and rebutting defeaters.
This is what McDowell calls ‘doxastic responsibility’. McDowell says that
‘if one’s takings of things to be thus and so are to be cases of knowledge,
they must be sensitive to the requirements of doxastic responsibility’. This
is because ‘knowledge in general, and the specific epistemic positions like
remembering and seeing, are standings in the space of reasons’.2 Having
172
Possible Defeaters 173
such standings requires that one exercise rationality, and following the
dictates of doxastic responsibility is part of what that means.
In this chapter we are going to look for potential undercutting and
rebutting defeaters for the claim that we – or at least some of us – (veridi-
cally) perceive biological structures as created. Of course, whether some
item (such as a belief or piece of knowledge) constitutes a defeater or
not for a person S at a time t depends on what other beliefs S has. As
Plantinga says, ‘defeaters depend on and are relative to the rest of your
noetic structure, the rest of what you know and believe’.3
We are in this context not interested in what actual defeaters people
may have. A person who believes that science has proved that God does
not exist has a defeater for the claim that nature is perceptibly expres-
sive of mind. The fact that she has this defeater is, however, not very
interesting since her belief about science and God is unwarranted and
false. What we are looking for in this chapter are propositions such that
rationality would require a well-educated, intellectually sophisticated
person to accept them, and such that they, if accepted, would make
it doxastically irresponsible for the subject to take herself to be able
to perceive divine intent in nature.4 Of course, the notion of doxastic
responsibility is vague, and it can always be debated what, in particular
situations, such responsibility dictates. This chapter is only intended
to make plausible the claim that one need not behave in a doxastically
irresponsible way in order to take oneself to be able to perceive nature
as expressive of the intent of a creator.
7.1 Is divine creation incompatible

with Darwinian evolution?
One candidate for being a defeater of the claim that nature is expressive
of divine intent and intelligence is knowledge of Darwinian evolution.
It could be argued either that
(1) the fact that biological species are products of Darwinian evolu-
tion defeats the claim that organisms are created, and thereby also
defeats the claim that the constitution of organisms is expressive of
divine intent and intelligence;
or it could be argued that
(2) the fact that species have evolved does not defeat the claim that
organisms are, in some sense, created, but it nevertheless defeats the
claim that the constitution of organisms is expressive of divine intent

and intelligence.
In this section, I will address claim (1) and show that it is false. In the
next section, I will address claim (2).
Peter van Inwagen has argued that Darwinian evolution is compatible
with divine design.
If God (or any intelligent being) did establish an environment in

which this mechanism [of natural selection] could operate, and if
its operations in due course produced a biosphere having certain
features, and if God foresaw and intended the existence of a biosphere
having these features – then why would it not be correct to say that
these features were products of intelligent design?5
It might be felt that the term ‘design’ is somewhat inappropriate if

the biological features that God has intended and foreseen are rather
general. In that case, it might be better to speak (as I do) of creation. If
God has intentionally brought it about, say, that the species elephantt has
all or most of the features that characterizes it, then it seems right to say
that God has designed that species. If God, on the other hand, only has
intentionally brought it about that biological organisms in general exist,
without intending the existence of any particular species of organisms,
then it may seem wrong to say that God has designed d biological organ-
isms. It would still, I think, be appropriate to say that he has created
them. Between these two extremes (down-to-the-least-detail-design of
biological species, on the one hand, and intentional creation merely
of biological organisms in general, on the other) there are, of course,
all kinds of middle positions. It is absolutely clear that Christianity is
committed to claiming something more than that God intentionally
brought it about that biological organisms in general exist. If thatt is all
God intended, then it is just a fluke that conscious creatures such as
us exist. God merely intended there to be life, and his intention would
have been satisfied even if nothing but amoebae came to exist. For a
Christian to admit this would be a sign of sheer stupidity.
Christians are committed to claiming that at least consciousness has
been intentionally brought about by God. If God intentionally brought
it about that consciousness exists, then it is correct to say that God has
created conscious life. It might also be correct to say, with van Inwagen,
that consciousness is a ‘product of intelligent design’, and that conscious
organisms are designed with respect to being conscious. It is well worth
remembering that all things that are designed are designed only with
respect to some of their properties. A carpenter has not intentionally
brought it about that the spice rack she has built has all the properties
it has. The spice rack has (e.g.) a lot of molecular properties that the
carpenter did not intend it to have. A gardener who designs a garden
does not intend or foresee that a certain bush is going to have exactly
18 branches. And so on. Intentional design is clearly compatible with
letting chance determine a good deal.
Is it possible for God (or any agent) to use evolution as an ‘instrument’
for creating very specific biological properties? What might, arguably,
present a problem for this idea is if the process of natural selection is, by
its nature, radically contingent. For the output of the selectional process
to be radically contingent means, very roughly, for it to be such that
given complete knowledge of some initial state of the universe, together
with knowledge of the relevant laws and other constraints on evolu-
tion, it still cannot be predicted that evolution will produce any specific
features (such as opposable thumbs, or consciousness) as output. If this
cannot be predicted, then God cannot use evolution as an instrumentt to
produce such features (unless he intervenes in the evolutionary process
as it unfolds).
It has been said that ‘the view that evolution is open-ended, without
predictabilities and indeterminate in terms of its outcomes, has
achieved a dominant position in evolutionary biology’.6 Stephen Jay
Gould is probably the most prominent defender of this view. According
to Gould, ‘We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the
fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not
the predictable product of any definite process’.7 If we were to rewind
the tape of evolutionary history and play it again, we would see a very
different unfolding of events.
Simon Conway Morris, an evolutionary paleo-biologist greatly admired
by Gould, argues that Gould is wrong. Evolution is not a process char-
acterized mostly by contingency. It is highly constrained.8 ‘Far from
being a contingent muddle, life is pervaded with directionality; by no
means everything is possible, but what is possible will evolve repeat-
edly.’9 ‘Short of utter devastation, such as might be inflicted by a super-
nova exploding nearby, the emergence of various biological properties
during the course of evolution is virtually guaranteed.’10
Conway Morris supports claims such as these by reference to the
ubiquity of evolutionary convergence.11 The camera eye, for instance,
has evolved independently several times.12 Such evidence for evolu-
tionary convergence ‘suggests that navigation to stable and functional
nodes is achieved in a biological “hyperspace” of virtual alternatives via

the narrowest “roads”’. One can argue ‘that here on earth it was very
likely, perhaps even inevitable, that sooner or later an eye would see
a flower, perhaps even to pluck it?’13 ‘If Homo sapiens had not evolved
then, I would argue, something similar, sooner or later, would have
emerged.’14 Life ‘“navigates” to inevitable solutions’ – a conclusion that,
according to Conway Morris, is ‘surely consistent with a Creation’.15
If Conway Morris is right, it is very much conceivable that God could
have used evolution as an instrument to produce very specific biological
features, without having to affect the course of evolution ‘supernatur-
ally’ in any way.
The ‘supernatural’ possibility cannot, however, be dismissed. Even
if Gould is right and the output of the evolutionary process is radic-
ally contingent, God could have guided its course by affecting chance
events. God could, for instance, deliberately have caused certain muta-
tions to occur and thereby influenced the process in the direction of a
certain outcome. Van Inwagen points out that ‘if God has been doing
this, it does not follow that the history of terrestrial life would reveal
anything inconsistent with the Darwinian thesis that all mutations are
due to chance’.16
This would, of course, mean that not just natural causes are at work
in the evolutionary process. But, as van Inwagen argues, it seems unrea-
sonable to include in the Darwinian theory of evolution the metaphys-
ical claim that onlyy natural causes are at work in the production of
biological diversity. It does not follow from the methodological atheism
that is (arguably) an integral part of scientific inquiry that ‘it is proper
for a scientific theory to include, to have as part of its propositional
content, the thesis that the phenomena of which it treats never have
supernatural causes’.17 Newton’s theory of gravitation and his laws of
motion, for instance, ‘no more contain within themselves the statement
“Supernatural agencies never affect the motion of massive bodies” than
they contain within themselves the statement “Electromagnetic forces
never affect the motions of massive bodies”’.18 Van Inwagen concludes
that ‘I do not see why anyone who thinks that God had a hand in the
way evolution went can properly be said – just in virtue of having that
very general belief ... – to reject any theory of evolution that could prop-
erly be called scientific’.19
Keith Ward says that
it is a statement of faith, not of science, that everything that

happens, even on the physical level, must do so in accordance with
exceptionless laws of nature. It will probably never be possible to

trace in detail all of the causal factors that go to determine the evolu-
tionary process. So if theistic evolution posits that God causally
influences evolution in order to ensure, for example, that it results
in the existence of free moral agents, it is virtually certain that the
natural sciences could not falsify the claim.20
John Polkinghorne has suggested that divine influence on the evolu-

tionary process need not be construed as ‘going against the grain’ of
nature (by violating natural laws). If determinism is false, and there are
‘intrinsic unpredictabilities’ in nature such as indeterminacies at the
quantum-level, then it is conceivable that God could act ‘within the open
grain of nature and not against that grain’. ‘Science’, Polkinghorne says,
‘does not preclude the possibility of divine interaction within unfolding
evolutionary process’.21
As things stand, it seems to be possible rationally to believe that
biological features are products of Darwinian evolution and d that some
of them are ‘products of intelligent design’. When we explain features
in terms of divine intention and intelligence, we move, as Ward points
out, on the level of personal explanations, which is a type of explana-
tions distinct from but compatible with natural scientific explanations.
Ward writes:
If it makes sense to speak of intentions causing actions, in the human

case, then it probably makes as much sense to speak of divine inten-
tions causing physical states of affairs. We do not speak of the laws
of nature being broken in the one case, so why should we do so in
the other?22
So we could view evolutionary explanations of how biological features

emerge as having a logical status similar to natural scientific explana-
tions of how human limb-movements are generated. Neuroscience can
explain why a person’s arm moves a certain way by reference to the
activity of lower motor neurons in the spinal cord innervating skel-
etal muscles, upper motor neurons in the brainstem and primary motor
cortex, and neurons in the pre-motor cortex responsible for the initiation
of movements.23 The existence of this type of explanation does not entail
that mental states having to do with movements, such as intentions,
can either be reduced
d to firings of neurons in the pre-motor cortex (or
anywhere else), or eliminated without loss of explanatory power. There
might be patterns in our behavior which cannot be captured except in
terms of intentional explanations. Likewise, there might be features of

the evolutionary process which cannot be explained d in natural scien-
tific terms, and which therefore, from a natural scientific perspective,
must be taken as brute facts. Assume, for instance, that Conway Morris
is right that ‘the processes of evolution are necessarily underpinned
by a deeper structure, the outlines of which we are only beginning to
discern’24 and that ‘the world ... is an eerily well-constructed place in
which the emergence of intelligence is an evolutionary inevitability’.25
The question of whyy the constraints on the evolutionary process are
such that they necessitate the emergence of intelligence etc. might be
incapable of receiving a natural scientific answer. This does not mean
that there is no answer. It just means that the answer is not natural
scientific. Presently, we have no more reason to believe that the prop-
erties of the evolutionary process can be completely explained without
reference to divine purpose and intention than we have to believe that
human behavior can be completely explained by mechanism without
reference to human purposes and intentions.
7.2 Does evolution ‘screen off’ divine intent

from our view?
It could be argued, however, that if God has not created biological

organisms directly,
y but indirectly through a long process of evolution,
then his intent and intelligence cannot be reflected in the structure of
biological species.
This is not so much an argument as an assertion. And it seems to rest
on the assumption that things that have been created indirectlyy cannot
reflect the mental properties of their creator. This assumption is false.
Imagine an architect who has a plan for a castle. She instructs a number
of different people to do various things. She tells one person to erect a
wall here, another to build a door there, etc. Nobody who works on the
building knows the plan. Nevertheless, when the building is finished,
the architect’s plan for the castle as a whole – her idea – is clearly mani-
fested in the overall structure of the building. This is the case despite the
fact that she never caused any modifications in the building directly.
Remember also the computer program that writes fugues (4.1.2). The
computer would not produce fugues in the baroque-style if the program-
mers had not intentionally, and by exercising a great deal of intelli-
gence, constructed it so that it would. Is a fugue written by the program
expressive of anyone’s intent and intelligence? I would say that it is
clearly expressive of the programmer’s intent and intelligence, at least if
it is true that advanced artifacts and artworks in general are expressive

of human mental properties. Above I argued that strange consequences
follow from the assumption that human behaviorr is uniquely capable
of instantiating expressive properties. I argued that if we construe
human behavior as expressive, we had better also construe advanced
artworks and artifacts as expressive. Accepting that I was right about
that, I do not see any reason to deny that the structures produced by the
computer program are expressive of the intent and intelligence of the
programmers in virtue of having the property of being, say, fugues in
the baroque-style. Nevertheless, the directt cause of the relevant structures
is a completely mechanical, non-intentional device – the computer. So
the circumstance that God creates indirectlyy is not a reason to suppose
that his intent and intelligence cannot come to expression in what he
creates.
It could be argued, however, that the important involvement of chance
in the evolutionary process must necessarily ‘screen off’ God’s intent
and intelligence from our view.
Again, the fugue-program comes to our assistance. Many of the prop-
erties of particular fugues produced by the program are not intended or
foreseen by anyone. They could not be, for the simple reason that the
properties of any particular fugue depend on both (1) the properties of
the program, and (2) the properties of the theme that is given to the
program. The programmers, who are responsible for the properties of
the program, do not know the properties of the themes that will be fed
into it by users. Hence, what a particular fugue produced by the program
sounds like is to a large extent a matter of chance from the point of view
of the programmers. Moreover, if you give the program the same theme
twice, it will write two different (although, of course, rather similar
sounding) fugues. So not even if you knew all the properties of the
program and all the properties of the theme fed into the program would
it be possible to predict all the properties of the resulting fugue.
Nevertheless, the programmers have intended and foreseen some of
the properties that anything produced by the program will have. They
have intended and foreseen that the products will have the property
of being a fugue, and – as far as possible depending on the proper-
ties of the theme – that it will exemplify some of a limited number of
musical styles (the user can choose between a few alternatives). These
are very important properties, and it takes a good deal of intelligence to
bring it about that some structure instantiates either of them. It is not
too easy to bring it about that something instantiates the property of
being a fugue, and it is not too easy to bring it about that something
instantiates the property of being a piece of music in the baroque-style.

It is, furthermore, more difficult to bring about the instantiation of
those properties in the indirectt way that the programmers have achieved
than to bring it about directly. Even though I can write a baroque-fugue
directly, I would not be capable of constructing a program that writes
baroque-fugues. However, a person who cannot write a baroque-fugue
herself can obviously not write a program that writes baroque-fugues
either (unless she is helped by someone with the appropriate skill).
If a person intentionallyy brings it about that some essential property
is instantiated, and if this property is such that it requires a great deal
of intelligence to bring about its instantiation, then it seems plausible
to assume that the substance or structure that instantiates the rele-
vant property could be expressive of the intent and intelligence of the
person who is responsible for the property being instantiated. It does
not matter that the instantiation of the property is brought about indir-
ectly,
y or that it is brought about by means of a process that importantly
involves chance.
The example of the fugue-writing program seems to confirm this
claim. The structures produced by the program are, it seems, expressive
of intent and intelligence in virtue of being fugues in the baroque-style,
despite the fact that many of the properties of those structures are deter-
mined by chance and not by intention. Or do we have to assume that
only a structure whose everyy property has been intentionally brought
about by an intelligent subject can be expressive of intent and intel-
ligence? That assumption is, however, clearly unreasonable, since no
human-made object is (as we saw above) such that its every property is
intentionally determined by an intelligent subject (remember the spice
rack).
Hence, if God has intentionally brought it about that the (essential)
property of (e.g.) being a complex, highly organized system capable of func-
tional activityy is instantiated, and if this property is such that it takes
great intelligence to bring about its instantiation, then it seems possible
that the structures that exemplify the relevant property are expressive
of intent and intelligence. It does not matter if God has brought about
the instantiation of the property indirectly and by means of a process
that importantly involves chance.
But is the property of being a complex, highly organized system capable
of functional activityy such that its instantiation requires the intentional
activity of an intelligent subject? Does it, in other words, take great
intelligence to bring about the existence of complex organisms? This
is a question on which theists and atheists are divided. Atheists, of
course, claim that it does not. No intelligence was needed in order to

bring about the existence of complex organisms. This claim is, however,
irrelevant in the present context, since the truth of atheism is anyway
incompatible with my suggestion that nature is expressive of mind. The
truth of theism, however, entails that immense intelligence was needed
in order to bring about the existence of complex organisms. We can see
this by the following reasoning.
Even rather modest versions of theism claim that God is, in some
sense, the creator of complex biological organisms. Creation, as Ward
points out, ‘is an intentional act, it is a bringing about in order to realize
some purpose’.26 To say that complex biological organisms have been
created by God need not mean, as we have seen, that God has ‘designed’
particular species of organisms. However, since creation is an intentional
act, God must have intended somethingg with respect to complex organ-
isms; otherwise it would be nonsense to say that they are God’s creatures.
Minimally, then, God must have intended that complex organisms in
general exist (in much the same way as the computer programmers
intended fugues in general to be produced by the program).27 In order for
it to be correct to say that God created complex organisms, it must also
be true that God’s intention to bring about such organisms was causally
responsible for their emergence. God must, in other words, have inten-
tionally brought aboutt the existence of complex organisms (creation is,
as Ward says, ‘an intentional act ... a bringing about’).
Traditionally it was believed that God brought about the existence
of complex organisms by directly bringing about the existence of
particular species and individuals. To do so (i.e., to build organisms, in
effect) would of course require immense intelligence. No human has
ever come close to building a single cell.28 Today, however, we know
that God did not build organisms by ‘hands-on-design’. If God has
intentionally brought it about that complex biological organisms exist,
then it must be the case that God has done so indirectly, by using evolu-
tion as an instrument for accomplishing his purpose. This entails that
God’s intentional activity must eitherr have figured in determining the
laws and basic parameters of the universe (and the laws of evolution) so
as to make the evolution of complex organisms very probable without
further activity on the part of God, orr God must also have acted along
the way so as to make sure that complex organisms would result from
the process. Both these ways of realizing the intention to bring about
the existence of complex organisms requires immense intelligence. An
agent who operates in either of these ways must be capable of predicting
the consequences of different possible basic laws and parameters of the
universe, and/or predicting the consequences of his interventions in

the evolutionary process. So the conjunction of the claim that God
has intentionally brought about the existence of complex organisms
in general, and the claim that life has emerged through an evolutionary
process, entails that immense intelligence was a crucial factor behind
the emergence of complex life.
Furthermore, implicit in most forms of theism is the claim that God’s
act of creating life was not superfluous. If it were at all probable that life
of the sort that actually exists would have emerged even if God had not
intentionally brought it about, then God’s act of creating such life could
have been superfluous. So theism is committed to the following coun-
terfactual: if God had not intentionally brought it about that complex
organisms exist, no complex organisms would have existed.29
Theism hence entails that God’s immense intelligence and inten-
tional activity are necessary conditions for the emergence of complex
organisms. From this it follows that it requires immense intelligence to
bring it about that the property of being a complex organism is instan-
tiated.30 The latter claim, of course, is highly plausible. It seems to be
very hard to create, from non-living matter, the highly organized struc-
tures constitutive of life. It does not seem to be any easier to do this
by providing the necessary conditions for a process one predicts will
eventually produce complex life from lifeless matter. Charles Kingsley
famously said, when arguing that Darwin’s theory of evolution merely
clarified the mechanism of divine creation, that ‘we knew of old that
God was so wise that he could make all things: but behold, He is so
much wiser than that, that he can make all things make themselves’.31
If Kingsley is right, then it takes more wisdom to create through an
evolutionary process, than to do it by ‘hands-on-design’. (Compare: it
takes more intelligence to write a program that writes fugues, than to
write a fugue.32) If it takes more wisdom to create through an evolu-
tionary process than by hands-on-design, and if structures created by
hands-on-design by humans are expressive of human intent and intel-
ligence, why could not structures created by God in that more wisdom-
demanding way reflect divine intent and intelligence? After having
said that he cannot persuade himself that ‘a beneficent & omnipotent
God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express
intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or
that a cat should play with mice’, Darwin goes on to say:
On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contended to view this

wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude
that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at

everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether
good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.33
Later in the same letter he says: ‘I cannot persuade myself that electri-
city acts, that the tree grows, that man aspires to loftiest conceptions all
from blind, brute force.’ I would guess that most people sometimes feel
like Darwin. The seemingg createdness of nature is just overwhelming,
even for people who – like Darwin – refuse to believe in detailed d divine
design.
One more objection: is it not metaphysically possible that evolution
couldd have occurred and produced the same output as it actually did,
even if God did not exist? If this is possible, can it really be true that
God’s intent and intelligence – if God indeed exists and created the
world – is visible in nature? Yes. The expressiveness of nature in the
actual world is compatible with the existence of a possible world in
which God does not exist and evolution anyway occurs. The latter
possibility can, from a theistic perspective, be compared with a zombie-
scenario. It is metaphysically possible that all human bodies could
have moved in exactly the way they move in the actual world, and
emitted exactly the same sounds, even though there were no minds.
It is also possible that the proximate causes of those movements and
sounds could be the same as in the actual world, viz. action poten-
tials in nerves. It could be the case, however, that the remote cause
of those action potentials were something other than mental states,
for instance epileptic seizures that, coincidentally, caused humans to
move and sound in exactly the ways they do in the actual world. Does
this metaphysical possibility (which must be admitted by anybody)
undermine the claim that human behavior is expressive of mind in the
actual world? It does not. In the zombie world, human behavior would
not have any expressive properties, it would just seem like it had (so it
would just seem like the behavior was human behavior). But as we saw
in Chapter 5, the existence of a bad case, in which it merely seems as if
some piece of behavior is expressive of, e.g., pain, does not entail that
we can never perceive behavior as genuinely expressive of pain. The
epileptic-seizure scenario is a global bad case in which it would merely
seem as if behavior was expressive of mental properties. The possibility
of such a bad case does not entail that what we see in the good d case (in
which behavior is related to minds in the usual way) is nothing but
‘mere behavior’. In the good case, there are expressive properties, and
we perceive them.
From the point of view of theism, the case in which God does not exist
but evolution takes place anyway is also a global bad case. As a theist,
one has no reason to think, furthermore, that this bad case is any more
probable than the zombie scenario described above. It is surely metaphys-
icallyy possible that evolution could have occurred without God, but is
it physicallyy (nomologically) possible? For all we know, the evolution of
life might have required a constant divine guidance (that God has caus-
ally intervened in the evolutionary process is, as we saw above, clearly
compatible with everything we know about that process). But even if
no divine interventions were necessary, and God’s contribution was just
to provide the conditions for a self-propelled evolutionary process, my
point still holds. For all we know, it could be incredibly unlikely that a
universe with exactly the right properties for an evolutionary process to
occur would have existed if God had not created such a universe with
the intention that a certain type of evolution would occur. This could d be
as unlikely to occur as a case in which it seems exactly as if I intentionally
play Chopin’s Ballade in G minor while in reality I do not intend d to do
this at all, but an epileptic seizure causes me to perform the appropriate
movements anyway. The metaphysical possibility we are considering,
therefore, does not threaten the claim that nature is expressive of the
divine mind.
A conclusion that emerges from the above reflections is this: the idea
of the expressiveness of nature does not presuppose that God has inten-
tionally designed biological species down to the least detail. In fact, the
expressiveness of nature seems to be compatible even with a scenario
in which God’s creative intention merely has the content ‘Let there be
carbon-based, highly organized systems capable of reproduction and
other functional activities!’ Biological structures could still, in this scen-
ario, be expressive of divine intent and intelligence merely in virtue
of instantiating that essential and (if theism is true) extremely-hard-
to-accomplish property. (Compare the expressiveness of the computer-
generated fugues, which is a result of their instantiating a general,
hard-to-accomplish property.) As we have seen, however, nothing that
evolutionary theory (or science in general) has taught us prevents us
from believing that God could intentionally have brought about the
instantiation of much more specific properties.
So the proposal here defended can handle the fact that there are
cases of seemingly malevolentt ‘design’ in nature. I am not committed
to claiming that God has intentionally brought about the characteristic
properties of all biological species, so I am not committed to claiming
that God has intended the malaria virus to do what it does. The malaria
virus is, we could say, expressive of divine intent and intelligence by

virtue of being capable of displaying rather clever functional behavior.
However, the specific kind d of functional behavior it displays need not, if
I am right, have been intended by God. Teleology (functional behavior),
as such, is a good thing intentionally brought about by God. The world
would have been very boring without it. If God has given creation a
certain freedom and independence,34 then it is, however, possible that
there might develop teleological behavior with teli that are not good.
For instance, there might emerge viruses that target essential organs
while successfully avoiding the human immune system.
We can understand this in terms of Augustine’s idea of evil as lack
of being. Everything that exists is created by God, and hence good,
according to Augustine. Even the devil is good, insofar as he exists. If he
were nothing but evil, he could not exist, since evil is the negation of
the God-given gift of existence. Similarly, we might say that the malaria
virus is created by God and thus good, in so far as it has certain proper-
ties, such as teleological behavior. Due to the indeterminacies inherent
in the evolutionary process (which can be said to constitute nature’s
God-given ‘freedom’), basically good things can, however, become
twisted. The twistedness of good things (such as teleological behavior
directed at evil) is something that God is not responsible for, at least not
in the sense of having brought it about intentionally.
In the Middle Ages, people believed that they could know the exact
contentt of God’s intentions by looking at nature. They thought they
could see, for instance, that God intended the elephant to have a trunk
and floppy ears. What I am suggesting, however, is something much
more modest. I suggest that we can see biological nature as created, as
expressive of divine intent and intelligence, without necessarily being
able to know exactly in which respects what we see is intended.
Is this possible? Can one see that something is the result of inten-
tion without knowing exactly what was intended? Everyday examples
suggest that one can. We can all see, so it seems, that something is a
garden, i.e. an intentionally designed structure. We might not know,
however, whether the gardener intentionally has let the garden run
wild. Maybe he wants it that way, or maybe he has just neglected it. Did
he intend the grass on the hill to be longer than elsewhere, or has he
just been lazy? Is the rhubarb supposed to occupy all that space? And
so on.
A person who hears a fugue composed by the fugue-program will
immediately know that what she hears is the result of intent and intel-
ligence. This is, I suggest, because the fugue is expressive of intent and
intelligence. The hearer, however, might very well believe that every
property of the fugue is intended by a composer. In that case, she would
be wrong. This suggests that it possible to perceive something as expres-
sive of intent and intelligence without knowing, or being in a position
to know, exactly in which respects the structure she perceives is the
result of intention.
It is therefore possible that medieval people correctly saw that
complex organisms have been intentionally created, but that they
were mistaken – like the hearer of the computer-generated fugue – in
ascribing too detailed design-intentions to the creator.
When I look at my colleague Arne, it appears to me as if he has been
created. If the argument of this book is sound, this experience may
be a genuine perception of Arne’s physical and functional constitution
as expressive of intent and intelligence. Suppose that it is a genuine
perception. Does the fact that I see that Arne has been created entail
that I must be in a position to know exactly what it is about Arne that
the creator intended? It does not. There are a lot of different scenarios
all of which are compatible with the circumstance that Arne appears
to have been, and indeed has been, created. God could, for instance,
have intended the particular individual Arne to exist and be exactly
as he is. Alternatively, God could merely have intended human beings
in general to exist, or merely vertebrates in general, or merely complex
organisms in general. In all of these scenarios, Arne could, as we have
seen, be said to be have been created in virtue of being, respectively, a
human, a vertebrate, and a complex organism. The properties of being
a human, being a vertebrate, and being a complex organism, moreover, all
make the substances that instantiate them appearr as if they have been
created. This means that my perceptual experience of Arne, which
represents him as created, does not (or at least need not) tell me which
of the suggested scenarios that actually obtains.
What about if God just intended physical objects to exist? In that
case, Arne could be said to have been created in virtue of being a phys-
ical object. However, the property of being a physical object does not
make the substances that instantiate it look created. Stones are physical
objects, but stones do not look created. If God just intended physical
objects in general to exist (and hence did not intentionally provide the
necessary conditions for an evolutionary process capable of generating
Arne), then the existence of an extremely advanced physical object
such as Arne is (from the perspective of theism) an enormous fluke. The
appearance that Arne has been created would, in this scenario, not be
due to the factt that Arne is a created being. It would not be due to this
fact because Arne’s createdness pertains only to his status as a phys-

ical object, and not to his status as a complex organism/human. Since
having the status of being a physical object does not make an object
appearr created, and since Arne is only a created being with respect to
being a physical object, we must say that the appearance that Arne is a
created being is, in this scenario, illusory. If theism is true, this scenario
is, however, extremely unlikely, and should be considered as analogous
to a zombie-scenario.
The modest nature of the kind of natural theology that this book
proposes can be conveyed by means of an analogy. Suppose we encounter
conscious, intelligent beings from outer space that are very different from
us. It is not at all implausible that we would still be able to know, just by
observing their behavior for a while, that they are conscious, intelligent
beings. It is very likely, however, that just by observing their behavior
for a while, we would nott be able to tell whether they are happy, sad, in
pain, angry, surprised, or curious (or in some other mental states with
no human equivalents). Learning how to ‘read’ their behavior in detail
would probably require that we interact with them over extended periods
of time, and even this might not help if they are sufficiently different.
Or suppose we encounter the remains of an alien civilization. Then
we might find constructions the purposes of which we could not figure
out. Are they works of art? Religious objects? Tools? An alien form of life
could have cultural categories with no counterparts in ours. It is not at
all implausible, however, that we would be able to tell, just by taking a
quick look at the mysterious objects, that they are artifacts made by an
alien civilization.
These imaginary scenarios illustrate the possibility of perceiving some-
thing as expressive of mind in a very vague way. It seems to be possible
for a subject to perceive the behavior of minded agents as the behavior of
minded agents without being capable of distinguishing which specific
mental properties their behavior expresses. (This possibility can also
be illustrated by everyday examples. Sometimes it seems that we can
see a person’s behavior as expressive of emotion without being capable
of telling which emotion it is expressive of. For instance, when I made
that comment at the seminar, I immediately saw that it provoked an
emotional reaction from Karl. I could not tell, however, whether he was
annoyed, embarrassed, or just surprised. Or: it is obvious that Ruth is in
a strong emotional state. But is she very happy or very sad?)
If nature is expressive of the mind of God, then nature is expressive of
a mind very different from ours. So we should not expect to be able to
know the exact contents of God’s creative intentions from observations
of nature. We are, possibly, in a situation analogous to the imagined

alien-encounter scenario. If God’s mind were totallyy different from ours,
however, we would not be able to see nature as creation – as expressive
of mind – at all. But the God of the Jewish and Christian traditions is
not totally different from us. If the Imago Dei means anything, it means
that there is some similarity between us and God, even if this similarity
is dwarfed by a much greater difference.
Above I have talked as if the relationship between God and the world
is like the relationship between humans and the products of their
minds, such as artworks and artifacts. However, according to Christian
orthodoxy, the relationship between God and creation is not like that.
The doctrine of creation ex nihilo says that the world is dependent on its
creator to an extent that artworks are not dependent on their makers.
The metaphysical relation between God and the world is different from,
and in some respects much closer than, the relation between humans
and the products of their creativity. Even though God is distinct from
the world, he is also immanent in it as its sustainer, or even as its very
g 35 Against the background of these ideas of Christian orthodoxy,
being.
the claim that some of God’s properties could be perceptibly mani-
fested in creation seems more plausible than against the background
of a ‘deistic’ picture of the God/world relationship in which God is
merely extrinsically related to the world. The point of adopting a some-
what ‘deistic’ view of the God/world-relationship, as I have done in this
section, was to show that my claim about the expressiveness of nature
is compatible with the fact that a natural process – evolution – is the
proximate cause of the design of biological organisms. We need not
think of God as the proximate cause of the design of biological species
in order to be able to think of God’s intent and intelligence as being
manifested in the constitution of such species. This insight was best
conveyed by picturing God as extrinsically related to the world. But if
Christian orthodoxy is right, this picture is not correct.
Let me close this section by discussing a suggestion by Nancey
Murphy:
Before Darwin, Christians thought they were directly seeing, without

intervening theory, God’s intentions in nature. Now we know that
what appears to be design is not the direct manifestation of design (as
is pain behavior a direct manifestation of pain) but instead have to
recognize that it only appears to be a direct manifestation of design.
Only indirectly, via THEORETICAL (theological) knowledge, can we
still say that it is, in a different sense, the product of intention.36
What Murphy seems to be saying is that we are victims of a rare

phenomenon that philosophers call a ‘veridical illusion’.37 Suppose that
it seems to you like there is a yucca-tree at a certain location in the
room. However, what you see is really a mirror reflecting a yucca that
is located elsewhere in the room. But suppose that behind the mirror,
there actually is a yucca, at precisely the location in the room where
the yucca reflected in the mirror seems to you to stand. Then you are
the victim of a veridical illusion. The experience is veridical in the sense
that it correctly represents how things are. There really is a yucca at the
relevant location in the room. However, the experience is, obviously,
nevertheless illusory.y There are different ways of explaining the sense
in which it is illusory.38 Very roughly, we might say that the experience
is illusory in the sense that it does not really disclose how things are,
due to the fact that the experience is not related to the reality it repre-
sents in the appropriate way. It is the mirror image of a differentt yucca
which causes it to appear to you that there is a yucca at the appropriate
location.
Murphy’s above claim entails that we are the victims of a similar illu-
sion. According to Murphy, nature appears to be expressive of intent,
and nature is, in fact, the product of intention. However, since the
appearance that nature is the product of intention is not due to the fact
that nature is the product of intention, but due to some other fact, we
must conclude that our experiences of nature are, in this respect, illu-
sory.
y God, according to Murphy, has intentionally brought about the
existence of organisms by means of a process that produces organisms
that give a deceptive or illusoryy appearance of having been brought about
intentionally.
In my eyes, this is a bit strange. For an atheist, it is certainly reasonable
to claim that the fact that complex organisms appearr to be intended has
nothing to do with their actually beingg intended. From a theistic point
of view, however, the claim is much less reasonable. Murphy seems to
affirm the following two propositions:
(1) God intentionally brought about that complex organisms exist.

(2) Those organisms appearr to have been intentionally brought about.
She also claims, however, that (1) and (2) are causally or explanatorily unre-
lated. The fact that God intentionally brought about complex organisms
is not the reason why they appearr to have been intentionally brought
about, according to Murphy. She is, in other words, committed to
believing in a coincidence, a fluke. According to the thesis of this book,
however, (1) figures in the explanation of (2). The reason why organ-
isms look intentionally created is that they have been intentionally
created. If it is objected that biological organisms would have looked as
if they had been created even if they were produced by evolution alone,
my response is the above: maybe the possibility that evolution would
have occurred and produced the same result as it actually did even
though God had not intended this to happen is as remote as the possi-
bility that my body could have performed the movements appropriate
for playing Chopin’s G minor Ballade without my intendingg to play it.
If the latter metaphysical possibility does not undermine the expres-
siveness of my bodily movements, why should the former possibility
undermine the expressiveness of nature? If theism is true, evolution
wouldd not have occurred in the way it did if God had not intentionally
made this happen.
7.3 Are there too many inconsistencies

between (putative) perceptions of divine intent?
Another possible defeater of the belief that we can see divine intent
and intelligence expressed in nature, is the one indicated in the above
heading.
We have already dismissed the objection according to which our
‘Agent Detection Device’ (or, if we prefer, our capacity to recognize
expressions of mind) is too unreliable to ground knowledge. Since our
capacity to recognize expressions of mind is the basis of our know-
ledge of other human minds, we cannot question its general reliability
without severe ‘collateral damage’. However, it could be argued that
when we apply our capacity to recognize expressions of mind to natural
phenomena other than human behavior, then it produces inconsistent
output. Natural events like floods, plagues, earthquakes, solar eclipses,
and thunderstorms have often, throughout history, been taken to be
divinely intended. Today, however, rather few people take such events
as expressive of divine intent. Does not this indicate that our ability to
detect intentions and intentional design cannot be regarded as reliable
when applied to natural phenomena other than human behavior?
First, we must distinguish between S believingg that phenomenon P
is divinely intended, and P perceptually appearingg to S as intended. I
can infer, from the fact that Ellen did not come home at six, that she
intends to work late. So I believe that she intends to work late. But this
is not a case of directly perceiving her behavior as expressive of intent.
Likewise, S can believe that God has intended this and that. He can, for
instance, infer from the occurrence of a flood and some background

beliefs about God, that the flood was intended by God. This does not
mean that the event appears to him, perceptually, as intended.
So the diversity of beliefs about what is divinely intended does not
entail a similar diversity in how things appearr to subjects. What people
believe can be due to a lot of things, including inferential reasoning
from false background beliefs. Furthermore, as we saw above (6.4), chil-
dren do not tend to give intentional explanations for natural events.
This indicates that natural events usually do not appear to children as
expressive of intent.
Even if some natural phenomenon really appears different to
different people with respect to its expressive properties, we cannot
therefore conclude that the ability to recognize expressions of mind in
natural phenomena is too unreliable to ground knowledge. All percep-
tual abilities are fallible, and some degree of inconsistency in the
output of any perceptual capacity, including our capacity to perceive
ordinary physical objects and events, must be tolerated. (What really
happened in that car accident? Different eyewitnesses have ‘seen’
different things.)39
People also have different perceptual skills. Autistic persons, to take
an extreme example, can fail to perceive expressions of mental states
which most of us cannot miss. At the other end of the spectrum are
people who are extremely sensitive to others’ expressions of moods and
feelings. Moreover, background beliefs can prevent one from correctly
perceiving facts which one would otherwise be able to perceive. An
atheist might be less sensitive to appearances of intent in nature as a
result of her general beliefs about nature. Background beliefs can, on
the other hand, cause people to ‘see’ things that are not there.
It seems, however, that there is a class of natural structures such that
they, when presented to normal subjects, quite consistently appear
to them as if created. This class comprises complex biological organ-
isms. Biology, after all, is ‘the study of complicated things that give the
appearance of having been designed for a purpose’.40
7.4 Is the impossibility of empirical

falsification a problem?
When I judge that there is a cow before me on the basis of a percep-

tual experience, there are a number of circumstances that can make me
withdraw my judgment. For instance, if the thing that appears to be a
cow were to suddenly disappear into thin air, I would conclude that I
was the victim of some kind of perceptual illusion. Likewise, if I did not
feel the cow when reaching for it with my hands at close range, I would
no longer believe that what I was seeing was a cow.
The same is true also of judgments about other people’s mental states.
If I see what appears to be an expression of pain, but subsequently find
out that the person I saw was an actor in a play, I would consider my
judgment about that person’s mental state falsified. If I initially take
myself to see that Ruth is sad, but am then told by Ruth herself that she
is crying from joy because she has just won a million dollars, I would no
longer take myself to be seeing that Ruth is sad.
Are there similar ways of falsifying perceptual judgments about the
‘createdness’ of biological structures? Are there any possible circum-
stances which if they obtained could make me withdraw my percep-
tually based claim that people and animals have been created?
There is, of course, as I have acknowledged, the possibility that
somebody might come up with an argumentt that convinces me that
the whole idea of perceiving nature as created is untenable. But the
possibility that somebody might come up with such an argument does
not constitute a falsifying circumstance in the sense actualized by the
above examples. What we are looking for here is some kind of empirical
discovery that, if it were made, would falsify judgments about created-
ness. It is, however, hard to think of any such empirical discovery. I
have argued that not even the discovery that species have evolved from
inanimate matter during the course of millions of years constitutes a
falsifying circumstance.
It could be argued that the impossibility of empirical falsification
constitutes a problem for the proposal of this book. On closer reflec-
tion, however, we can see that this is not the case. The kinds of judg-
ments about natural structures which I have suggested could be reliably
delivered on the basis of perceptions of nature are not analogous to
perceptual judgments about rather specific mental properties such as
‘Karl is in pain’, or ‘Ruth is sad’. They are analogous to judgments such
as ‘Karl is minded’ and ‘Ruth is minded’.
Are there any possible empirical discoveries that could make me
withdraw the judgment that my colleague Arne is minded (that he is a
conscious agent)? Suppose I found out that he was a robot. That discovery
would not make me withdraw the judgment that he is minded. I would
instead conclude that some robots are minded. Even if I were to find out
that Arne’s head is filled with sawdust, I would not be prepared to admit
that he lacks a mind. I would rather conclude that Descartes must have
been right. Consciousness does not need a material substrate.
Are there any empirical discoveries that could make me withdraw the
judgment that the faces of Mount Rushmore are products of intent and
intelligence? Suppose we were to find out that Gutzon Borglum did not
carve the faces, but that they emerged slowly by a seemingly random
erosion process over the course of several years (suppose we came across
a videotape that showed the entire process). That would not convince
me that the faces are unintended. I would suspect some kind of fraud. If
the fraud hypothesis could be conclusively refuted, I would be open to
suggestions about the involvement of supernatural agents. I would not
be irrational in taking this attitude.
Everybody admits that my belief that the faces of Mount Rushmore
have been intentionally created is satisfactorily justified. I know
w that
the faces are intentionally created. My knowledge of this is, apparently,
compatible with the fact that no conceivable empirical discovery could
convince me (or any rational person) that the claim that they have been
intentionally created is falsified.41 So why should the empirical unfal-
sifiability of my claim about the createdness of biological organisms be
viewed as a problem?
8
Unapologetic Theology
We have found nothing that suggests that it would be doxastically irre-

sponsible for a well-educated, intellectually sophisticated person to take
herself to be able to perceive that biological structures have been created.
This allows us to draw the conclusion that, possibly, there exist people
who know w that biological nature is creation. Those people know this
because they see that biological structures are expressive of the intent
and intelligence of a creator, and because they take their experiences
seriously – that is, as revelatory of how things really are. Other people
also see that biological structures are (or from their view point seem to
be) expressive of intent and intelligence, but they take their experiences
to be illusory. Those people do not know that nature is creation, since
they do not believe that it is (or do not believe that their experiences
reveal how things really are1).
If you have Christian background beliefs, and if you accept the argu-
ment of this book, it should seem very plausible to you that some people
(including yourself) actually know that nature is creation on the basis of
experiences of nature. If you have atheistic background beliefs, on the
other hand, it does not matter if you accept the argument of this book.
It will still seem very implausible to you that the possibility argued for
is realized
d in the actual world. You will consider it to be a mere theoret-
ical possibility. Remember, though, that our inability to decide (from a
neutral standpoint) the issue between the theist and the atheist about
nature’s expressiveness does not entail relativism. There is a fact of the
matter concerning whose position is justified and whose is not. If nature
actually is expressive of the mind of a creator, then those who take their
experiences of intent and intelligence in nature at face value are justi-
fied in believing that nature is creation, and also that they can see that
nature is creation. The fact that there is no independentt way of proving
194
Unapologetic Theology 195
nature’s expressiveness – by, for example, philosophical argument from

non-question-begging premises – is irrelevant here. There may be no
way of proving the existence of ‘the external world’ or ‘other minds’
by philosophical argument from non-question-begging premises either.
Nevertheless, we who believe in the external world and other minds on
the basis of our perceptual experiences are surely justified in doing so.
In this chapter we will briefly reflect on the implications for theology
of the argument pursued. As a prelude to this reflection, I will try to
clarify my claim about our epistemic predicament with respect to the
question of nature’s createdness. A proper understanding of this predica-
ment (as portrayed in this book) will, I believe, significantly influence
how we conceive the debate between believer and nonbeliever.
There is a longstanding discussion about the rational defensibility
of theology2 as a discipline, a debate occasioned by modern and post-
modern critique of traditional Christian claims. This debate has some-
times been pursued in terms of the ‘public character’ of theology.
Very roughly, we may say that theologians with liberal or ‘revisionist’
orientations have argued that theological claims must be defended
on the basis of warrants and reasons ‘aimed at public intelligibility
and acceptance’.3 Other theologians, notably those of ‘postliberal’ or
‘postsecular’ orientation,4 have instead contended that it is legitimate
to argue for theological claims on the basis of premises that are not
necessarily accepted outside the bounds of a particular community and
which may not be such that they demand acceptance by ‘any intelli-
gent, reasonable, responsible human being’.5 Sometimes the debate has
been conceived as being about the extent to which the ‘standards’ or
‘criteria’ of rationality and truth are ‘universal’ (liberals/revisionists) or
‘tradition-dependent’ (postliberals).6
I will argue that the perspective on mind, perception and know-
ledge advocated in this book opens up a new way for theologians with
a broadly postliberal/postsecular orientation to respond to revisionist
critique – a way that does not involve the rejection of universal stand-
ards of rationality. Before we can see what such a response might look
like, we must make sure that we understand the epistemological conse-
quences of the book’s main thesis.
These consequences are best brought out by discussing some concrete
claims. I hereby claim that biological nature is creation and that I know
that it is. I know that nature is creation because (so I contend) I see that
it is (i.e., I see that biological structures are expressive of intent and
intelligence). And I know that I know that nature is creation because (so
I contend) I know, by reflecting on my own mental state, that I see that
nature is creation, and hence that I have a satisfactory reason for my

belief that nature is creation (see 4.5).
Some people will contend that I do not see that nature is creation.
They will say that the reason I really have for my claim that nature is
creation is a non-factive one, viz. that nature appears to me, visually,
as if created (or maybe that I just believe that it so appears to me). It is,
therefore, a rather unsatisfactory reason.
There is – if the argument of this book is sound – no neutral ground
from which the issue between me and those who reject my claims (here-
after ‘my critics’) can be settled. This is true unless there is some cogent
argument from general premises rational people should accept to the
conclusion that nature is not creation, or to the conclusion that the idea
of perceiving expressive properties in nature does not make sense, or to
the conclusion that the putative experiences are too contradictory to be
veridical, etc. If there is such an argument, then those people who believe
that my knowledge claims are unjustified can prove that they are in the
right. Doxastic responsibility requires that I display a rational sensitivity
to undercutting and rebutting defeaters. In the previous chapter, we
have scrutinized a number of potential defeaters, and found none that is
cogent. We have therefore found no reason to believe that the question of
whether my claims are justified can be settled in the way just suggested.
Furthermore, my critics cannot, if the perspective advocated in this
book is correct, require that I prove to them that I have the evidence
I claim to have by presenting an argument from premises other than
my experiences of nature. One important part of the ‘Open Mind’
view is the idea that perceptual experiences can make objective facts
directly available. To require that I – in order to be rationally entitled to
appeal to experiences that make a certain type of objective fact directly
available – must first be capable of establishing (on the basis of evidence
otherr than my experiences) that those experiences really make the rele-
vant type of facts available, is to reject the very idea that perceptual
experiences can make objective facts directly available (Chapter 4).
If experience E makes the fact that p directly available to a subject it
cannot be necessary that the subject – as a condition for knowing that
p – also has an argument for the veridicality of E. If this was required,
E itself would be insufficient for knowledge of p and would hence not
make knowledge of p directly available. The argument of the book
establishes (if it is cogent) that iff I in fact see that biological structures
are expressive of mind, then this is sufficient for making me rationally
entitled (justified) to claim that biological nature is creation,7 and also
to claim that I see that it is. That my claims are justified if the argument
of this book is cogentt does not, of course, entail that I or anyone else must
know w that this argument is cogent in order for my claims to be justified.
My claim about nature’s createdness is, as we have seen, based on my
perceptions, not on any conclusions drawn in this book.
I recognize, of course, that my ability to deliver judgments on the
basis of perceptual experiences is fallible. This is true not only of judg-
ments about expressive properties in nature, but also of judgments about
colors, shapes, and other visible properties as well. So I recognize that my
claims could be false. If they are false, they are also unjustified – since in
that case, I would have misconceived the nature of my evidence.
The objective fallibility of my claims does not come with a subjective
uncertainty. I feel quite certain that nature is creation. In fact, I find it
hard to understand how anyone, while looking at a concert pianist in
action, can fail to appreciate that the organism in question has been
intentionally created.
My claim to know that I see that nature has been created is compat-
ible with the fact that there could be a case that (from my subjective
perspective) is indistinguishable from the case I am actually in, but in
which it falselyy appears to me as if nature has been created. My claim is,
in other words, compatible with the possibility of a bad case, subjectively
indistinguishable from the good case. If you think that the possibility
of a bad case is incompatible with my claim that I now w (in the case I am
actually in) know that I see that nature is created, this is because you
assume that one must always be in a position to know what one’s evidence
is. The perspective advocated in this book entails, however, that this
assumption is false. If the assumption is false, then it is possible that if
I am in the good case, I am in a position to know thatt I am in the good
case (so I can know that I see that nature is created), while if I am in the
bad case I am not in a position to know that I am not in the good case.
Hence, if I am in the good case right now, my claim to know that I see
that nature is creation could be true.8
But is my claim that I see that nature is creation (and that I know
this) true? Again: there is, if the argument of this book is sound, no
neutral epistemic position (a position that we could occupy independ-
entlyy of whether the good or the bad case actually obtains) from which
this question can be answered. Of course, we could constructt such a
position by stipulating that our evidence consists only of the Highest
Common Factor between the good and the bad cases. In the present
context, this would mean stipulating that our evidence consists of non-
expressive facts about nature only. However, if we actually see expressive
facts instantiated in natural structures – i.e., if we actually have factive
evidence for a creator – then it is hard to see how rationality could

require that we ignore this evidence and instead try to reason our way
to the existence of a creator on the basis of much worse evidence.
To do this would be to make the same kind of mistake as Descartes. When
Descartes ignored that we seee physical objects and instead tried to reason
his way to knowledge of physical objects from propositions about mental
entities (ideas), he behaved less rationally than ordinary people normally
do. The philosophical tradition after Descartes has made the same kind
of mistake with respect to knowledge of other minds. Epistemologists
have usually ignored the fact that we can seee other people’s mental states
expressed in their behavior and instead tried to reason their way to know-
ledge of other minds from propositions about psychologically neutral
behavior. The lesson here is that one can fail to be maximally rational not
only by taking oneself to have strongerr evidence than one actually has, but
also by not availing oneself of good evidence that is actually available to
one. It is not obvious which of these mistakes is worse.
Does this mean that we cannot ensure, by our own autonomous
powers, that our epistemic conduct with respect to belief in a creator
is maximally rational? If the argument of this book is sound, then the
answer is Yes. Whether it is rational for us to believe in a creator or not
on the basis of our perceptions of nature depends on whether the good
or the bad case actually obtains. It depends, in other words, on whether
nature is the way it appears to be (i.e., created). Accepting this type of
dependence – at the very level of rationality – on ‘favors from the world’
is the price we have to pay if we are to avoid picturing ourselves as cut
off from the objective world in the characteristically Cartesian way.
Now we are ready to address the question of how the argument of this
book affects the debate about the ‘public character’ of theology. First,
we must admit that the kind of knowledge the possibility of which we
have discussed (knowledge that nature is creation) is not equivalent to
knowledge that the Christian God exists. It is not even knowledge that
the God of classical theism exists or even that monotheism is true. It
is, however, knowledge that strongly supports belief in the traditional
Christian – and Jewish, and Muslim – Creator-God. Furthermore, the
claim that nature is creation – as opposed to, say, a product merely of
blind chance – can itself be regarded as a Christian doctrine. So I have
claimed to know, on the basis of my perceptions of nature, that a trad-
itional Christian doctrine (or at least something that strongly supports
a traditional Christian doctrine) is true.
David Tracy, one of the leading proponents of revisionist approaches
to theology, has argued that theology must aspire to be public.
‘Theology, by the very nature of the kind of fundamental existential

questions it asks and because of the nature of the reality of God upon
which theology reflects, must develop public, not private, criteria and
discourse.’9
For Tracy, ‘publicness’ has to do with to whom the theologian speaks.
The theologian must, by the nature of the theological task, speak to
three publics: the academy, the church, and the wider society.10 To
‘speak’ to those publics means to argue (or at least aspire to do so) for
one’s claims in such a way that those publics can recognize one’s argu-
ments as reasonable. The most ‘public’ sub-discipline within theology
is fundamental theology. Tracy says about this discipline:
In terms of modes of argument, fundamental theologies will be

concerned principally to provide arguments that all reasonable
persons, whether ‘religiously involved’ or not, can recognize as
reasonable. It assumes, therefore, the most usual meaning of public
discourse: that discourse available (in principle) to all persons and
explicated by appeal to one’s experience, intelligence, rationality and
responsibility, and formulated in arguments where claims are stated
with appropriate warrants, backings and rebuttal procedures.11
Let us now see if the claim I made above to the effect that nature is
creation is supported by a warrant that qualifies as sufficiently ‘public’
in Tracy’s sense. Is my warrant (or alleged warrant) such that ‘all reason-
able persons ... can recognize it as reasonable’? My warrant for the
claim is a set of perceptual experiences. This means that the warrant
is not really the kind of thing Tracy refers to in the above quote, viz.
an argument. However, in order to make it easier to see how my claim
that nature is creation relates to the demands that Tracy places on the
warrants for theological claims, we can state my warrant for that claim
in the form of an argument, as follows:
(Premise 1) I see that a wide variety of biological structures n1 ... nn

have been created (are expressive of intent and intelligence).
From this it follows that
(Conclusion 1) Biological structures n1 ... nn have been created.
(Premise 2) If biological structures n1 ... nn have been created, then

probably all biological structures have.
Hence, (from [Conclusion 1] and [Premise 2])
(Conclusion 2) Biological nature is creation.
Is this argument such that ‘all reasonable persons ... can recognize [it]
as reasonable’?12 The answer to this question depends on two things.
It depends on whether the central conclusions drawn in this book are
correct, and it depends on whether we are in the good or the bad case
(i.e. whether nature is as it appears to be). What we are presently inves-
tigating is the consequences of the argument of this book, so hereafter I
will sometimes ignore the reservation ‘if the central conclusions drawn
in this book are correct’.
If we in fact are in the good case, then the argument above is sound (i.e.,
it is valid and its premises are true). In the good case, it is true that I see
that n1 ... nn have been created (Premise 1). (Premise 2) can perhaps be
questioned, but it certainly seems reasonable. The argument’s premises
are also, in the good case, such that every normal, adult human being
can know them to be true (or reasonable). Of course, every normal
adult cannot, strictly speaking, know that I see that n1 ... nn have been
created (Premise 1). However, according to the thesis advocated in this
book, every normal adult can (if we are in the good case) herself see that
natural structures have been created. So every normal adult can herself
confirm (Conclusion 1), which is the important thing. I do not know
what more could be expected by a ‘reasonable’ argument than that it is
sound and that its premises are such that every normal adult can know
that they are true.
There are obviously a lot of reasonable people who, for various reasons,
do not acceptt that (Premise 1) and (Conclusion 1) are true, and who
therefore will not recognize my argument as sound. But Tracy cannot
mean that in order for an argument to count as ‘publicly acceptable’,
it must build on premises that any (appropriately situated) reasonable
person mustt accept as true, on pain of irrationality. That would be to
put an unreasonable demand on ‘publicly acceptable’ arguments. Very
few arguments, if any, would then qualify as publicly acceptable. For
instance, the proposition that ball is red d could not figure as a premise
in a publicly acceptable argument, given that demand. A reasonable
person with good eyesight, appropriately situated in front of the rele-
vant ball, can rationally reject that it is red if he has some false back-
ground beliefs. Suppose, for instance, that somebody has tricked him
into believing that the light in the room distorts the colors of things,
with the result that he is disposed to refuse to take his experience of the
ball’s color at face value. In that case, he will not accept the premise that
ball is red, and will therefore not recognize an argument starting from
that premise as sound.
If the central conclusions of this book are correct, and if we are in
the good case, then any person who can see and who possesses mental
concepts such as ‘intent’ and ‘intelligence’ is capable of seeing (and
also in a position to see) that biological structures are expressive of
intent and intelligence, and therefore created. So they can recognize
that (Conclusion 1) of the above argument is true, and hence that the
argument is sound. The fact that some people, for various reasons,
dismiss their experiences as of ‘design’ in nature as mere appearance,
and thereby miss the opportunity to avail themselves of the kind of
perceptual evidence my above argument builds on, does not entail that
this evidence is not (publicly) available. The reason why some people
do not avail themselves of the evidence at their disposal may be that
somebody has convinced them that nature cannot be creation if evolu-
tion has occurred, or that the createdness of nature can only, if at all, be
known by ‘a long and laborious train of argument’, or that it can only
be known on the basis of biblical revelation, or whatever.
This means that if we are in the good case, then my above argument
for nature’s createdness qualifies as ‘public’, in Tracy’s sense. If we are in
the bad case, however, the story is different. Then the crucial premise of
the argument (that I see that n1 ... nn have been created) is false, as is
(Conclusion 1). This means that the argument is not sound, and normal
subjects are not in a position to know its crucial premise. (They are, in
that case, not in a position to know that the premise is false either.)
We have arrived at the conclusion that if the central contentions of
this book are correct, then the above argument in favor of a Christian
doctrine (that nature is creation) mayy be publicly acceptable, depending
on what the world is actually like. I, of course, claim that the argument
is publicly acceptable, since I claim that we see that natural structures
have been created (that we are in the good case). My critics claim that
I am wrong. And there is, as we have seen, probably no procedure by
which the issue between us can be rationally settled.
Tracy and other revisionists would probably not be happy with this
state of affairs. The reason why Tracy emphasizes the public character of
theology is that he wants to avoid a conception of theology according
to which it is only of interest to – only ‘speaks to’ – a particular, limited
community of believers. Instead, theology must express theistic belief
‘in ways that render it public not merely to ourselves or our particular
religious group’.13 Other revisionists agree with Tracy that theology
cannot succumb to the ‘sectarian temptation’14 and withdraw into a

circumscribed intellectual ghetto, a ‘reservation of the spirit’.15 As
Gordon Kaufman puts it: ‘Theology ... works largely with public, not
private or parochial, materials. It is not restricted ... to the language and
traditions of a particular esoteric community (the church) or to the
peculiar experience of unusual individuals.’16
The focus for Tracy and some other ‘revisionists’, such as Schubert
Ogden, is on ‘correlating’ Christian faith with the concerns, experi-
ences and sensibilities that characterize our contemporary situation.17
This crucially involves defending Christian truth-claims in a way that
is persuasive to the inhabitants of the culture of modernity. Tracy’s
concern that theological arguments should be public in the sense of
being such that ‘all reasonable persons ... can recognize them as reason-
able’ is intimately connected to his classically liberal ambition to display
Christian faith as a serious option for educated people today.18
Postliberals, on the other hand, do not view the task of theology
as primarily that of arguing for Christian claims in ways persuasive
to outsiders. The primary task is rather to describe and develop the
Christian tradition’s own perspective on things, its ‘internal logic’.19
This ‘unapologetic’ attitude to theology is, however, not dogmat-
ically adopted but itself often defended by reference to (allegedly)
Wittgensteinian views,20 or coherentist perspectives within epis-
temology,21 or the MacIntyrean view that (some of the) ‘standards of
rationality’ are internal to particular traditions embodied in social
communities.22 Postliberals, of course, deny that their position is sect-
arian and claim that a genuine dialogue requires that different traditions
are allowed to speak in their own voices. Postliberals also recognize that
an unapologetic concern for the distinctiveness of one’s own tradition
can be a good apologeticc strategy.
My warrant for nature’s createdness, which I above (somewhat
inappropriately) have stated as an argument from perceptual experi-
ences, is such that ‘all reasonable persons ... can recognize it as reason-
able’ (provided we are in the good case). It is not, however, an argument
that starts from premises one can accept while staying neutral on the
question of whether a creator exists. Neutrality on the latter question
requires that one does not accept that I, or anyone else, see that n1 ...
nn have been created. So to justify one’s belief in a creator by appeal
to one’s perceptions of expressive properties in nature (in the way my
above argument does) is not to justify that belief in a way that ‘outsiders’
will judge as satisfactory. It is still, however, to justify belief in a creator
in a way that is ‘publicly acceptable’ in Tracy’s sense, provided that we
are in the good case. All reasonable persons can, in the good case, recog-
nize the justification as satisfactory.
If Tracy wants to exclude my above argument for nature’s createdness
from the class of publicly acceptable justifications, he must state some
further condition for being publicly acceptable which my argument
does not satisfy. My argument is, if we are in the good case, sound, and
its premises can be known by any rational person with eyesight. What
further condition could Tracy require a publicly acceptable argument
to satisfy? He cannot, as we have seen, demand that such arguments
start from premises that any (appropriately situated) reasonable person
mustt accept.23 The only plausible further condition I can think of is the
following: for an argument/justification to be ‘publicly acceptable’, it
must be such that all reasonable persons can recognize it as reasonable
irrespective of whether the good or the bad case actually obtains.
An argument that we can recognize as reasonable irrespective of
whether the good or the bad case obtains must be an argument based on
premises that are the same in the good and the bad cases. Premises that
are the same in the good and the bad cases are such that the subject is
in a position to know them irrespective of whether the good or the bad
case obtains, and arguments starting from such premises may therefore
be such that they are (and can be recognized as) reasonable –irrespective
of whether the good or the bad case obtains. An example of a premise
that is the same in the good and the bad cases is the premise that it
subjectively appears to me as if natural structures are created. This is a
fact that I can know in both the good and the bad cases. If we could get
by with arguments built only on this kind of premise, we would always
be capable of ensuring, without depending on ‘favors from the world’,
that our beliefs about the world are justified.
We recognize the assumption that our perceptual evidence (the
premises from which our arguments about empirical states of affairs
start) is the same in the good and the bad case as the Highest Common
Factor-conception of perceptual evidence. This conception of percep-
tual evidence is part and parcel of the interiorization of the space of
reasons, the withdrawal of that space from the objective world. By
conceiving the space of reasons as interiorized, we can picture ourselves
as independent of ‘favors from the world’ at the level of rationality. So
we can picture ourselves as being in a position to know whether our
arguments are reasonable irrespective of what the objective world is
like. For instance, the best argument for the existence of a fireplace
before me that I can produce on the basis of the premise that it appears
to me, visually, as iff there is a fireplace before me is either reasonable in
both the good and the bad cases, or unreasonable (inadequate for know-
ledge) in both. If Tracy presumes that only these kinds of arguments are
publicly acceptable, he (somewhat ironically) presumes that the space
of reasons must be conceived as interiorized insofar as our standings
within this space lay claim to being publicly acceptable.
At this point, we begin to see that it is not really the requirement that
arguments must start from publicly available evidence that is incom-
patible with my above argument for nature’s createdness. My argument
satisfies this demand. What it does not satisfy is the logically independent
requirement to the effect that acceptable arguments can only appeal to
evidence that is the same in the good and the bad cases. Thatt require-
ment is not satisfied by my argument because the argument appeals to
factive perceptual evidence. Factive evidence is evidence which I do not
have in the bad case.
I have claimed that nature is creation. The warrant that I have
appealed to in support of this claim is that I see that natural structures
are created (expressive of intent and intelligence). This warrant will not
appear satisfactory to people who do not take nature to be expressive of
intent and intelligence. (That it nevertheless could be satisfactory has
been the aim of this book to show.) So justifying the Christian claim
that nature is creation by reference to the suggested warrant is not to
justify (or to try to justify) that claim by appeal to premises shared by
those who believe in a creator and those who do not. This type of justi-
fication, hence, does not purport to be persuasive to ‘outsiders’ – those
who await non-question-begging reasons to believe that a creator exists.
So the argument has a trait that postliberals find acceptable, but which
revisionists usually are very critical of.
If my above argument is in any case compatible with Tracy’s ‘public-
ness’ requirement, provided that an ‘interiorized’ conception of the space
of reasons is not presupposed, then the following thought lies close at
hand: maybe postliberals have been a bit too quick to dismiss the idea
that theological doctrines could, and sometimes should, be defended
by appeal to publicly available evidence. Maybe what they should ques-
tion is, instead, the presumption that evidence must be the same in the
good case and the bad case. To question the latter presumption means
to question the interiorized conception of the space of reasons.
Suppose that a ‘revisionist’ attacks my above argument for nature’s
createdness on the ground that it does not aim to defend that claim
on the basis of a warrant that ‘all reasonable persons ... can recognize as
reasonable’. In such a case the proper response (I suggest) is not to grant
that this accusation is essentially correct, and then proceed to argue (as
postliberals normally do) that theological claims need d not be supported

by that kind of warrant. The proper response, rather, is to point out (as
I have done above) that whether the relevant claim is supported by a
warrant recognizable as reasonable by all reasonable persons depends
on what the objective world is like in the relevant respects. Our rational
standing with respect to the claim that nature is creation (the extent to
which we are justified in believing that it is) depends on whether the
world does us the favor of being the way it appears to be. If it is objected
that it is unacceptable to rely on ‘favors from the world’ in this way,
the proper response is flat denial. What is really unacceptable is the
interiorization of the space of reasons – the fantasy that we can make
sure that our beliefs about the world are justified irrespective of what
the world is like.
The advantage of countering the revisionist critique by this kind of
move rather than by the kind of tue quoque arguments that postliberals
often use (‘the reasons you provide for yourr claims are as particularistic
and tradition-dependent as mine’) is that the former move is not open
to the accusations of relativism and fideism often leveled against post-
liberals.24 The warrant I claim to have in favor of the belief that nature
is creation is not adequate only relative to some tradition-internal
criterion for adequacy. It is a warrant that logically entails that natural
structures are created, and it can therefore not be rationally denied that
if I have this warrant, then the belief based on it is justified. It can, of
course, and will, be questioned whether I have that warrant or not. I
have attempted to show, however, that we cannot expect to be able to
settle the question of whether I have the relevant warrant or not on
the basis of premises that both I and my critics (those who are agnostic
about the existence of a creator) share.25 To have that expectation is to
presume that the space of reasons must be conceived as interiorized.26
If that presumption is rejected, accusations to the effect that my claim
about nature is unwarranted (unreasonable, unjustified) get no grip.
If one is interested in convincing unbelievers that a creator exists,
appealing to the kind of perceptual warrant I have appealed to is, of
course, useless. The fact that one’s warrant is apologetically ineffective
should not, however, be taken as a sign that it is inadequate as a warrant.
One can have a perfectly good warrant for p without possessing an argu-
ment that has the potential of convincing other people that p is true.
For instance, if I have seen a tiger at very close range and under excel-
lent observation conditions in the woods near Umeå, Sweden (where
no tigers previously have been seen), then I am of course justified in
believing that a tiger was around. If people do not believe me when I say
that there was a tiger around, I will probably not, however, be capable of
presenting a cogent argument from premises theyy accept to the conclu-
sion that there was a tiger around (unless the tiger left some traces that
I can show to doubters). This does not matter at all for myy epistemic
standing. My justification is that I saw the tiger, and that justification
is perfectly good.
I am of course aware that not many Christian doctrines can be justi-
fied by a perceptual warrant of the kind that I have suggested could
justify the doctrine that nature is creation. The strategy to counter the
revisionist critique I have envisaged can therefore seem to have very
limited application. I believe, however, that a rejection of the interior-
ized conception of the space of reasons will have indirectt ramifications
for the debate about the reasonability of many Christian truth claims.
A rejection of such interiorization will, for instance, almost certainly
have a significant impact on how we conceive the justification of testi-
monial beliefs. Since many Christian beliefs concern historical events,
testimony is a crucial category for theology. If we have resisted the inte-
riorization of the space of reasons and admitted that we are dependent
on ‘favors from the world’ at the level of rationality, we will, arguably,
have little reason to deny that whether our testimonial beliefs are justi-
fied or not depends, to a certain extent, on whether other people do us
the favor of being truthful (and knowledgeable) or not. A philosophy
of testimony based on a rejection of the interiorized conception of the
space of reasons will, I surmise, have very interesting implications for
biblical theology. This, however, is the topic of another book.27
Notes
1 Introduction
1. Calvin 1989, 51.
2. Hyslop 2005.
3. To claim that reference to God’s intentions is necessary in a complete
explanatory account of the existence and characteristics of biological
species does not commit one to subscribing to something like ‘intelligent
design theory’ (see, e.g., Dembski 1999). The view commonly known as
‘theistic evolution’ – that God uses the evolutionary process as his ‘instru-
ment’ for creating – entails that God’s intending to create biological species
is a necessary condition for the emergence of such species (see, e.g., Ward
2004). Theistic evolution represents, in my opinion, a much more viable
perspective on the relation between evolution and divine creation than
‘intelligent design theory’.
4. It might be objected that there is a significant difference between the rela-
tionship between the human mind and body, on the one hand, and God and
the world, on the other. From a philosophical point of view, we do not seem
to have much reason to believe that the human mind can exist independ-
ently of the body. God, however, is ontologically distinct from the world.
The world is not God’s body. However, as we will see in Chapter 6, this diffe-
rence (which I fully acknowledge) is irrelevant for the present issue.
5. Plantinga 1990, xvi.
6. Plantinga 1990, 268.
7. Taylor 1989, 374.
8. Taylor 1985, 219.
9. In some cases, that is. Obviously we sometimes infer things about other
people’s mental states.
10. Riddley 2003, 221–222.
11. Collingwood 1938, 285.
12. Augustine 1998, 453.
13. An artwork is the embodiment of an artist’s intention even though it is not
a part of the artist. To say that the world embodies God’s intentions does not
entail that the world is God’s body.
14. George Argyll, ‘What is Science?’ Good Words (April 1885): 236–245, 244.
Quoted in Darwin 1887, 316.
15. I say ‘merely’ because it is clear that the body’s design is partlyy a result of
blind, non-intentional processes.
16. Calvin 1989, 51.
17. Quine, 1960, 221.
18. Philosophers who claim that mental state-concepts do not refer to anything
real, and therefore could/should eventually be eliminated, are often called
‘eliminativists’.
207
208 Notes
19. By ‘physical’ properties I simply mean properties that are not intrinsically
related to any mental phenomena.
2 Bursting Descartes’ Bubble

1. Rowlands 2003, 3. Colin McGinn also uses the same term, but gives it a
narrower meaning. (McGinn 1989, 11–12.)
2. Putnam 1999, 43.
3. Putnam 1999, 45.
4. Taylor 2003, 162.
5. Taylor 2003, 169.
6. McDowell 1996a.
7. Since the world, according to an attractive view, is ‘everything that is the
case’, we may say that facts (whatt is the case) are the constituents of the
world. Objects are, according to some philosophers, constituents of facts.
McDowell, however, has a more subtle view of the relationship between
objects and facts, a view he expresses by saying that objects ‘figure in’ facts.
(McDowell 1999, 94.)
8. Willaschek 1999.
9. McCulloch 2002, 137.
10. I am aware that a critique of the Cartesian mind with a similar thrust to that
put forward by Wittgenstein, McDowell, and other analytical philosophers
is to be found in continental thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger.
I have chosen not to include that critique in this book. The purpose of the
book is not to muster the strongest possible defense of an anti- Cartesian
conception of mind, but rather to explore the implications of such a concep-
tion. It seemed justified, therefore, to buy manageability at the expense of
comprehensiveness by focusing on McDowell and the analytical critique,
while being well aware that there are important parallels in the other
tradition.
11. By this I mean individuation-dependent, t see McGinn 1989, 4–9.
12. McDowell 1996a, 26.
13. Taylor 2002, 106.
14. Putnam 1999.
15. McCulloch 2002; McCulloch 1995. McCulloch, however, allows that expe-
riences have non-conceptual content. (McCulloch 1996.)
16. See, for instance, Haldane 1993a; Haldane 1993b.
17. Braine 1992.
18. Baker 1995.
19. Williamson 2000.
20. It is, of course, impossible to provide a detailed and satisfactory defense
of the claims included in the OM view within the scope of just one book.
What I can do in the following chapters is just to try to liberate the reader
from captivity to the Cartesian picture and indicate the potential fruitful-
ness of the open mind paradigm.
21. Descartes 1967, vol. I, 239. Strictly speaking, only God is a substance in
this sense. Created substances are independent of everything exceptt God’s
concurrence.
Notes 209
22. Descartes 1967, vol. I, 238.

23. Kenny 1993, 67.
24. Descartes 1967, vol I, 222.
25. Kenny 1993, 69–70.
26. Descartes 1967, vol. II, 67–68.
27. Kenny 1993, 110.
28. Kenny 1993, 111.
29. Kenny 1993, 113. There are other interpretations, however, according to
which Descartes is a scholastic realist. See Pessin 2007.
30. Locke 2001, IV, i, 1.
31. Locke 2001, IV, iv, 3.
32. Locke 2001, II, xxiii, 29.
33. Hume 2010, 114 (I, iv, ii).
34. Bennett says, for instance, that ‘Locke puts the objective world, the world of
“real things”, beyond our reach on the other side of the veil of perception’.
(Bennett 1971, 69.)
35. Haldane 1993a.
36. See Haldane 1983, 234–235.
37. Kerr 2000, 504.
38. This interpretation of St Thomas is, however, contested. For an interpret-
ation of Aquinas as a representationalist, see Pasnau 1997. Kerr defends
something like Haldane’s interpretation in Kerr 2002, 28–32.
39. Lagerlund 2004, 2.3.
40. There are prominent exceptions, of course, such as John Haldane and
Richard Swinburne.
41. Butler 1998, 1–2.
42. McLaughlin and Bennett 2005, 1.
43. Bartlett 2008, 164.
44. There are, however, internalists who claim that behavior, solipsistically
specified, also figure into the determination of mental properties.
45. Kriegel 2006, 488. Externalism about mental content has, of course,
a longer history, even if we restrict ourselves to modern philosophy.
Heiddegger pictured Dasein – conscious being – as essentially being-in-the-
world. It has been argued that Sartre’s ‘radical reversal of idealism’ consti-
tutes an important externalist development (Rowlands 2003, 56). Some of
Wittgenstein’s ideas have externalist implications.
46. Frances 2007, 199.
47. Wikforss 2008, 158.
48. Putnam 1996.
49. Unfortunately for Putnam’s thought-experiment, this cannot be true if
there is no H2O on Twin-Earth. The human body consists of about 60 %
water. We will do like everybody else and ignore this irritating fact, since it
has no significance for the argument.
50. By ‘meaning’ I here mean ‘intension’. Exactly what meaning in the sense
of ‘intension’ is, is somewhat obscure. As Putnam puts it: ‘The canonical
explanation of the notions “intension” and “extension” is very much like
“in one sense ‘meaning’ means extension and in the other sense ‘meaning’
means meaning”.’ (Putnam 1996, 5.) A slightly more substantial suggestion
is that the intension of a term is the conceptt it expresses.
210 Notes
51. Putnam 1996, 13. This conclusion is overstated, as McGinn points out.
What Putnam’s argument shows, if it succeeds, is that some meanings – the
meanings of natural kind terms, like ‘water’ – ‘ain’t in the head’. (McGinn
1989, 31.)
52. A propositional attitude is an attitude (such as believing, g wishing,
g fearing,
g or
desiring)
g toward a proposition (such as that water is wet). t
53. Tyler Burge has presented famous thought-experiments that aim to establish
that the contents of a subject’s propositional attitudes are dependent on the
linguistic conventions in his speech-community (Burge 1979; Burge 1986).
Burge’s thought-experiments are usually considered to have more general
externalist implications than Putnam’s, and the kind of externalism they
aim to establish is often called ‘social externalism’. David Kaplan’s work
on indexical expressions is also commonly perceived as supporting content
externalism.
54. The externalist conclusions drawn from Putnam-style (and Burge-style)
thought-experiments are, of course, still disputed. One possible way to
avoid such conclusions is to make a sharp distinction between semantics
(the study of linguistic meaning) and cognitive studies (the study of the
mind) (see, for instance, Patterson 1990; McCulloch 1995, 191). Putnam’s
thought experiment has, according to proponents of this view, indeed
something to say about the workings of public language. It does not, however,
tell us anything about the contents of intentional mental states. This type
of response has, as McCulloch points out, the counter-intuitive implica-
tion that when we give verbal expression to our beliefs, we say something
different from what we believe (McCulloch 1995, 195).
Another strategy to resist the anti-Cartesian implications of the thought-
experiments is to think of mental states as consisting of two components
that are logically separable (so called ‘duplex’ or ‘dual component’ views).
Proponents of such views admit that Oscar and Toscar, when they both
think the verbalized thought ‘water quenches thirst’, are in different mental
states. It is then pointed out that those mental states nevertheless must
have something (mental) in common. For one thing, their beliefs about,
respectively, water and twater, dispose Oscar and Toscar to the same type
of behavior (solipsistically specified). If Oscar is thirsty, his belief that water
quenches thirst will (together with other beliefs) cause him to lift the glass
in front of him and drink its content. Likewise, if Toscar is thirsty, his
belief that twaterr quenches thirst will (together with other beliefs) cause
him to lift the glass in front of him and drink its contents. This can be
taken to suggest that there is an internal component of mental states which
accounts for their causal role in the subject’s cognitive economy, and an
external component which has to do with how the subject is related to the
environment. According to this type of view, ‘mental state’ can refer either
to the internal component, the mental state narrowlyy individuated, or to
the combination of the internal and the external components, the mental
state widelyy individuated (individuated by reference to the subject’s envir-
onment). This means that when Oscar and Toscar both think the verbal-
ized thought ‘water is wet’, they can be said to be in the same mental state
narrowly individuated, but in different mental states widely individuated
(Rowlands 2003, 109). If this ‘dual component’ strategy were to succeed, it
Notes 211
would allow us to conceive a partt of the mind (the internal component of

mental states) as self-standing in relation to the world outside the subject’s
skin. As Rowlands says: ‘The Cartesian idea of the mind as a self-contained
interiority is preserved: the bounds are simply redrawn. The Cartesian mind
is now made up of the internal components of mental states, and not of
entire mental states as was envisaged by orthodox cartesianism’ (Rowlands
2003, 109).
It does not seem necessary, however, to posit the existence of an internal
component in mental states, logically separable from an external compo-
nent, in order to explain how it can be the case that Oscar and Toscar have
something mental in common when they both think ‘water is wet’. The
common mental property may not be fundamental, but rather may hold of
both Oscar and Toscar in virtue of their wide mental states. The properties
being redd and being green have something in common. They are both colors.
But this does not entail that those properties must be understood as duplex,
i.e. as each being composed of two logically separable elements one of which
is being colored, and the other a property that, when added to being colored,
yields, for instance, being red. (What could the second property be? If it is
to have the required logical independence, it must be specifiable without
reference to the property of being red d itself.) Rather, the property of being a
colorr seems to hold of both being redd and being green without being a separ-
able component of each (Williamson 2000, 3). Likewise, the mental states of
Oscar and Toscar could have something mental in common without being
capable of being factorized into the common element (the narrow mental
state), and an independently specifiable external component.
Proponents of ‘duplex’ views must, as Rowlands points out, show that the
internal component of mental states can be identified independently of the
external component. Otherwise the two components cannot be logically
or conceptually separated (Rowlands 2003, 110). One suggestion is that the
internal component can be identified by reference to its content. The idea
is that the internal component has a content of its own – narrow contentt –
that does not depend on anything outside the subject. The most influential
theory of narrow content is probably the ‘mapping conception’ advocated
by Fodor and others (Fodor 1987). For a critique of this theory and narrow
content in general, see McCulloch 1995, 196–203. Another suggestion is
that the internal component may be identified by reference to its func-
tional role, solipsistically specified (see, for instance, Block 1986). There
is an extensive debate going on in connection with both these strategies.
Especially the notion of narrow content is highly controversial, and many
reject the very idea (Brown 2007, section 7). According to Rowlands, ‘pros-
pects for either strategy ... seem grim’ (Rowlands 2003, 122).
Even if it turns out to be possible to make a distinction between an
internal and an external component in mental states, this does not, by
itself, show that mental states have a ‘duplex’ nature. It may be possible
to distinguish between different races of human beings, but this need not
say anything important about human nature. As McCulloch points out,
‘making the distinction [between wide and narrow content] is not an argu-
mentt for Internalism’ (McCulloch 1995, 200).
55. McDowell 1998g, 286.
212 Notes
56. Baker 1995, 5.

57. Some identity theorists, such as Armstrong and Smart, held that all mental
states are brain states. Others, such as Place, contended that dispositional
states like beliefs and desires could be characterized behavioristically (Smart
2007, section 4).
58. Rowlands 2003, 20.
59. Baker 1995, 8–9.
60. Baker 1995, 10–11.
61. The ‘organ of thought’ view is, however, an even more inclusive view than
the Standard View, since it also includes dualist conceptions of the mind
such as Descartes’ original theory.
62. McGinn, for instance, argues that externalism is incompatible with any
identity theory (McGinn 1989, 103–104).
63. The relational nature of intentional mental states could, according to
Cynthia Macdonald, only be thought to prohibit token identity ‘if one
assumes that instancings of intentional mental types have no other, r physical
descriptions in terms of types whose natures are not essentially relational.
But there is no a priori reason to assume this’ (Macdonald 1990, 401). The
position of MacDonald does not entail a denial of content essentialism (if
the latter is understood as the claim that intentional mental types have their
content essentially). Even though the mental type ‘believing that water
is wet’ has its content essentially, it does not follow that any exemplifica-
tion of that type necessarilyy is an exemplification of that type (Macdonald
1990, 402; see also Davidson 1987, 451–453). It seems to me that the view of
Macdonald and Davidson entails that token-intentional states do not have
their content essentially (a claim that may be much less counter-intuitive
than the claim that mental types do not have their contents essentially,
see David 2002). For an argument against content essentialism, see Frances
2007.
64. Dretske 2003, 132.
65. What McDowell points to is ‘the possibility of mental representing without
representations’ (McDowell 1998g, 287). John Haldane has a similar view,
although he expresses it somewhat differently. He speaks of ‘mental repre-
sentations as mental acts’. (Haldane 1993b, 252.) It seems to me that clarity
is better served by following McDowell in speaking of mental representings
(McDowell 1998g, 286).
66. McDowell 1998g; McDowell 2009b, 274.
67. Putnam 1999, 169–170.
68. Haldane 1993b, 254.
69. Taylor 2003.
70. Such as Braine 1992.
71. According to Baker, a propositional attitude, such as a belief, ‘is a global
state of a whole person, not of any proper part of the person’ (Baker 1995,
153).
72. Haldane 1993b, 254.
73. For Baker’s argument, see Baker 1995, part II.
74. Baker 1995, 154.
75. Baker suggests that we replace the Standard View with a view she calls
‘Practical Realism’ (Baker 1995, 153). Practical Realism is the thesis that
Notes 213
‘whether a person S has a particular belief ... is determined by what S does,

says, and thinks, and what S would d do, say and think in various circum-
stances, where “what S would do” may itself be specified intentionally’
(154–155). So we need not reifyy propositional attitudes in order to regard
them as real; neither do we need to reduce intentional phenomena to
non-intentional.
76. Gazzaniga, Ivry, and Mangun 2002, 161.
77. Gazzaniga, Ivry, and Mangun 2002, 210.
78. McDowell 1996a, 70–71. DeVries, Triplett, and Sellars 2000, VIII, p. 248.
79. Rorty 1979, 157. McDowell does not like Rorty’s characterization, since
McDowell wants to allow that reasons can be causes. The right contrast to
the space of reasons is therefore, according to McDowell, the realm of law.
(McDowell 1996a, 71, footnote 2.)
80. DeVries, Triplett, and Sellars 2000, VIII, p. 248.
81. This is, as mentioned, compatible with the claim that a reason can be a
cause. To say that S believes that p because S has a good reason for believing
p is both to rationalize S’s belief and
d to explain it causally (or so it may be
construed).
82. This problem arises in the context of accounting for the possibility of misrep-
resentation (Fodor 1984). In order for a causal account of representation to
work, it must be capable of distinguishing between content-constituting
causal relations and causal relations that merely underpin misrepresenta-
tion. There are two main types of attempted solutions to this problem, viz.,
Fodor’s theory of asymmetric dependence (Fodor 1990) and teleological
theories (for example, Millikan 1984; Dretske 1995, Papineau 1987, chap. 4.)
For criticism of the project, see Godfrey-Smith 1989; Peacocke 1992.
83. Putnam 1999, 43–44.
84. Many sub-fields within biology are not paradigmaticc natural sciences,
since they use normative concepts such as ‘proper function’. It is not clear
whether such notions can be reduced to non-normative, non-teleological
ones. Physics is, of course, the paradigmatic natural science.
85. See Mikael Stenmark’s criticism of ontological scientism in Stenmark 2001.
86. McCulloch 1995, 120.
87. Changeux 2004, chap. 2.
88. That the items in question are representations only metaphorically speaking
does not mean that cognitive scientists should stop talking of them as
representations.
89. For a perspective on neuroscience that criticizes the identification of mental
states with brain states, see Bennett and Hacker 2003. This book is written
by a neuroscientist and a philosopher.
90. McDowell 1998g, 286.
91. Naturalistic solutions in terms of causal relations between brain-states and
objects in the environment (and the like) have, as mentioned, hitherto
proved unsuccessful.
92. McDowell 1998e, 264.
93. This formulation is from Kripke (1982, 107) but it captures what Wittgenstein
sees as the consequence of accepting that mental states are ‘like sign-posts’,
i.e. that they are representations in McDowell’s sense of the term.
94. For example, Kripke 1982.
214 Notes
95. McDowell 1998j. In Wahlberg 2009, section 1.5, I recount McDowell’s inter-
pretation of Wittgenstein and formulate, on its basis, an argument against
mental states as representations. Those readers looking for a straightforward
argument against the ‘organ of thought’ view should read that section.
96. McDowell 1998g, 287.
97. Fodor 1987, 97.
3 Perception and Concepts

1. Putnam 1999, 12.
2. Some philosophers conceive of sense-data as non-representational.
3. Some versions of disjunctivism claim that the right hand side of the disjunc-
tion can be given a positive characterization independently of any reference
to veridical seeing (‘positive disjunctivism’), while other versions deny it
(‘negative disjunctivism’).
4. According to Bertrand Russell sense-data are not exactly intra-mental
entities, but his view is not very representative for sense-data theories in
general.
5. Haldane uses the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ versions of represen-
tationalism primarily with reference to views about cognition rather than
perception. (Haldane 1998.)
6. Haldane 1998, 265.
7. Putnam 1999, 10.
8. Crane 2005, section 3.3. John Haldane points out that new versions of repre-
sentationalism also ‘have the consequence that mind is somewhat removed
from the world’ (Haldane 1998, 266).
9. McDowell 1998b, 393, footnote 45. It seems to me that McDowell is right,
and that all the main philosophical theories of perception except disjunc-
tivism are versions of the interface conception. The other main theories
are: sense-data theories, intentionalism, and adverbialism. Theories of the
‘adverbial’ type accept, like intentionalism and sense-data theories, the
‘common kind assumption’, which says that ‘whatever fundamental kind of
mental event occurs when one is veridically perceiving some scene can also
occur whether or not one is perceiving’ (Crane 2005, section 3.4). So percep-
tual experiences are, according to the assumption, logically self-standing
in relation to the objects perceived. This conception of experiences creates
a Cartesian gulf between experience and the world, which motivates the
classification of all theories that share the ‘common kind assumption’ as
versions of the interface conception.
10. The arguments from illusion and hallucination are really distinct, but the
distinction does not matter in this context.
11. This terminology is borrowed from Williamson 2000, 52.
12. A case C is subjectively indistinguishablee from the good case iff in C, the
subject is not in a position to know by introspection alone that she is not in
the good case.
13. McDowell 1998b, 386.
14. McDowell 1998b, 386.
15. Byrne and Logue 2008, 59.
Notes 215
16. I follow McDowell in my presentation of the argument from illusion/hallu-

cination (McDowell 1998b, 385–386). For other versions, see Robinson
1994, chapter 2; Smith 2002; Byrne and Logue 2008. There are versions of
the argument that only claim that the best explanation of the indistinguisha-
bility is that ‘what we embrace within the scope of our consciousness’ is the
same in the good and the bad case. I do not claim to have shown that these
versions do not succeed. See, however, Putnam 1999, 28–29 for a critique
of the concept of ‘explanation’ that figures in the context of such argu-
ments. Even if the best explanation turned out to be the HCF-conception,
it does not follow that this conception should be accepted. The issue must
be considered in a wider context. McDowell argues, as we will see, that
accepting the HCF-conception makes it unintelligible how our empirical
thoughts can have content. If McDowell is right, we may have to accept
a less than maximally elegant explanation of the fact that the good and
the bad case can be subjectively indistinguishable on pain of extinguishing
content.
17. McDowell 1998h, 240.
18. For this argument, see Putnam 1999, 130–132. See also Byrne and Logue
2008, 70–71. Delia Graff has argued that ‘contrary to widespread opinion,
phenomenal indiscriminability is transitive’ (Graff 2001). It is however
unclear, as Byrne points out, whether Graff’s claim is relevant in the present
context. The conclusion of her argument is that ‘looking the same as’ is
transitive, but she uses ‘looks’ in a sense ‘which carries no explicit epistemo-
logical implications, so that to hold that a person does or could know every-
thing about the way things look to her ... is to hold a substantive thesis’ (p.
910). It may, hence, be possible for two things to look differently (in Graff’s
sense of ‘looks’ without the subject being in a position to know w that they
look differently. So Graff’s argument does not seem to lend any support to
the idea that there can be entities whose indistinguishability (defined epis-
temically, in terms of the subject’s inability to knoww that they are different)
entails their identity.
19. To reject this view is not to claim that we have no ‘privileged access’ at
all to the contents of our minds. Privileged access does not entail total
transparency.
20. McDowell would prefer to say that the experience includes an objective fact
in which the tomato ‘figures’.
21. Natural scientists, such as cognitive scientists, neuropsychologists, etc.,
certainly use the concept of ‘awareness’. But they use it to refer to some-
thing that is to be explained, not something that explains. It would not be a
legitimate natural-scientific explanation, for example, to say that a certain
cell group lights up because the group is aware of the presence of a cow.
22. McDowell 1996a, 3.
23. This is denied by Glüer and Wikforss 2009a.
24. McDowell 1996a, xii.
25. McDowell 1996a, xii.
26. McDowell 1995, 888.
27. McDowell’s view on justification as necessarily consisting in relations
between contentful items has been criticized. See, for instance, Wright
1998. There are, of course, a lot of philosophers who depart from McDowell’s
216 Notes
view of justification by denying that justification has to do with having a

‘standing in the space of reasons’, for example epistemological externalists
(more about this in Chapter 4). McDowell does not, as far as I can see, expli-
citly argue against such views.
28. For alternative ways of construing concepts, see Margolis and Laurence
2006.
29. I am, of course, aware that we are treading on very controversial ground
here. Many naturalistically oriented philosophers without sympathy
for the Kantian framework within which McDowell moves would, for
instance, deny that the possession of one concept requires the possession
of others.
30. McDowell 1996a, 12.
33. Putnam 2002, 187.
34. McDowell does not claim to have an argument for the superiority of this
picture over its baldly naturalistic competitors: ‘I do not pretend to have
an argument that the bald naturalist programme cannot be executed. The
point is rather this: the line of thought I have just indicated undercuts the
only motivation I consider in my book for supposing the programme must
be feasible’ (McDowell 1996b, 238).
36. McDowell 1998k, 365
37. What I, following McDowell, refer to as the ‘dualism between concep-
tual scheme and the Given’ is the same dualism as the one that Davidson
famously rejects, i.e. the dualism between conceptual scheme and empirical
content. Davidson’s characterization of the dualism is, however, somewhat
confusing. Normally the term ‘content’ means ‘representational content’.
This is not what Davidson means. The empirical content that Davidson
has in mind is, instead, a raw input that lacks conceptual articulation. It
is therefore not something that could be the content of a thought. A less
confusing term for what Davidson calls empirical content is, as McDowell
suggests, ‘the Given’ (McDowell 1996a, 3–4).
38. DeVries, Triplett, and Sellars 2000, 243. Davidson’s attack on the third
dogma corresponds, according to McDowell, to Sellars’ attack on the Myth
of the Given. (McDowell 1996a, xvi.)
40. For criticism of the claim that the Given is a myth, see Schantz 2001; Alston
2002. For response to Alston’s criticism, see Rosenberg 2006.
41. E.g. Evans 1982; Peacocke 1992; Heck 2000.
42. McDowell 1996a, 7. McDowell’s criticism of non-conceptual content is to be
found in McDowell 1996a, Lecture III. For a view similar to McDowell’s, see
Brewer 1999, chapter 5.
43. Rorty 1979, 178.
44. Davidson 1986, 310.
45. McDowell 1996a, 26.
46. McDowell 1996a, 66.
47. McDowell 1998k, 365–366.
Notes 217
49. The problems pertaining to the positions between which the ‘oscillation’
takes place have usually not been clearly perceived. McDowell claims,
however, that the epistemological worries characteristic of modern phil-
osophy have often been ‘inept expressions of a deeper anxiety – an incho-
ately felt threat that a way of thinking we find ourselves falling into leaves
minds simply out of touch with the rest of reality’ (McDowell 1996a, xiii).
50. Bernstein 2002, 13.
52. It is important not to understand ‘receive’ in this context as implying that
experience is mediated by ‘emissaries’, such as sense-data, which ‘inform’
us about the world. Rather, the use of ‘receive’ is just a way to emphasize
the passive character of experience. Our receptivity is simply, in McDowell’s
model, the sensory aspect of our openness to the world.
53. McDowell 1996a, 10.
54. McDowell 1998k, 365.
55. McDowell 1996a, 29.
56. Having the concept ‘physical object’ does not, of course, entail that one
must be able to express the understanding of the concept in words. A five-
year-old child normally has the concept of a physical object, even though
she cannot explain what it is for something to be ‘physical’ (who can?).
57. The idea that experiences constitute ‘glimpses’ of objective reality is compat-
ible with a rejection of experiences as inner representations. ‘Glimpses’ of
reality can simply be cases of ‘openness’, by which the world itself is directly
manifested to us.
58. McDowell 1996a, 31.
59. McDowell’s view entails that ‘mere animals’ (and small children), who
lack conceptual capacities, do not have perceptual experiences in which a
world is presentedd to them. To experience something as, say, an independ-
ently existing, physical object (like we do) presupposes the possession of
concepts. However, this does not mean that animals and small children
lack a ‘proto-subjective’ perceptual sensitivityy to features of the environment
(McDowell 1996a, 119). Animals and small children ‘cope with an envir-
onment’ (a coping that cannot be described in terms of Cartesian automa-
tism). However, they do not ‘possess a world’ in the Gadamerian sense
(p. 118). McDowell’s view of animals’ perceptual abilities has received a lot
of criticism. See, for instance, Wright 2002; MacIntyre 1999, 60–61; Haldane
1996; Putnam 1999, 192, note 16; Gaskin 2006, chap. 4.
60. Thornton 2004, 217.
61. McDowell 1996a, 26.
62. McDowell 1996a, 27.
63. McDowell 1996a, 40.
64. McDowell 1996a, 40.
65. Many critics are dissatisfied with McDowell’s response to accusations of
idealism. See, for instance, Haddock 2008; Friedman 2002, 44–48. Richard
Gaskin argues that McDowell is committed to Kantian transcendental
idealism (Gaskin 2006, chap. 5 and 6). For a critique of Gaskin’s argument,
see Dodd 2007, 1116–1119. For a critical overview of the issue of idealism
in McDowell, see Dingli 2005, 150–156. For a defense of McDowell against
accusations of idealism, see Thornton 2004, chap. 6.
218 Notes
66. McDowell 1996a, 28; Thornton 2004, 244.

67. McDowell 1998i, 174–175.
68. Torrance 1998, 35.
69. Torrance 1998, 36.
70. Taylor 1975, 4.
71. McDowell 1998i, 174.
72. McDowell 1998i, 178.
73. Torrance 1998, 38.
74. Torrance 1998, 6.
75. Torrance 1998, 6.
76. See Strawson 1966 for a clear exposition of the argument of Kant’s tran-
scendental deduction.
77. McDowell 1998i, 178.
78. McDowell later seems to find it more suitable to call the story of mind
making nature a ‘transcendent’ rather than ‘transcendental’ story, see
McDowell 1998d, 446, footnote 23.
79. McDowell 1998i, 179.
80. McDowell 1996a, 42.
81. McDowell 1996a, 42.
82. McDowell 1996a, 44.
83. Torrance 1998, 40.
84. McDowell 1996a, 44.
85. Larmore 2002, 199.
86. Haddock 2008, 93.
87. McDowell 1996a, 35.
88. Something like this response is sketched in Thornton 2004, 233–244.
89. McDowell 1996a, 27.
90. How do objects enter the picture? McDowell says that ‘objects figure in
the world by figuring in facts, which are true thinkables [i.e., true Fregean
Thoughts]’ (McDowell 1999, 94). ‘Figure in’ does not, however, mean ‘to be
a constituent of’ (McDowell 1998h, 237; Fish and Macdonald 2007).
91. Julian Dodd has contended that McDowell, by running together two
different identity-theories, ends up holding an incoherent view (Dodd
1995). Dodd’s criticism is echoed in Suhm, Wagemann, and Wessels 1999.
(See also McDowell’s reply, McDowell 1999, 93–95.) Dodd’s criticism is,
in my view, satisfactorily answered in Fish and Macdonald 2007. (See
also Dodd’s reply, Dodd 2008, and Fish/Macdonald’s comeback in Fish
and Macdonald 2009.) Thornton discusses the issue in Thornton 2004,
233–244. Timothy Williamson also subscribes to the view that facts are
true propositions (Williamson 2000, 43).
92. Wright 1998, 402.
93. McDowell 1996a, 26.
94. McDowell 1996a, xv.
95. McDowell 1996a, 77.
96. McDowell 1996a, xix.
97. McDowell 1996a, 69.
98. McDowell 1996a, 85.
99. McDowell 1996a, 84.
100 McDowell 1996a, 97.
Notes 219
101. McDowell 1996a, 91.

102. McDowell 1996a, 92.
103. McDowell 1996a, 26.
4 Perceptual Evidence
1. Williamson 2000, 164.
2. John Haldane says, about the areas of theology and the philosophy of mind,
that ‘[this] conjunction of topics is now rarely encountered’ (Haldane 2004,
75). There are, of course, exceptions. Haldane himself is one example.
Fergus Kerr has also written interestingly about how Cartesian conceptions
of the mind have governed theological reasoning, see Kerr 1986; Kerr 2002,
chap. 2. A recent book draws on insights from contemporary philosophy of
mind (especially McDowell) in addressing the question of how humans can
know God (Macdonald 2009.) There are also authors who have approached
the philosophy of mind in the context of doing theological anthropology.
Many have, for instance, addressed various aspects of the ‘mind-body-
problem’ from a theological perspective, such as Corcoran 2006; Murphy
and Brown 2007; Moreland and Rae 2000; Swinburne 1997.
3. McDowell claims that sometimes the mental facts themselves can be
directly perceived. One can, for instance, ‘literally perceive, in another
person’s facial expression ... that he is in pain’ (McDowell 1998f, 305). In
other cases, what can be perceived are more plausibly construed as expres-
sions of mental states. In this summary, I give a somewhat simplified
account, where I focus on expressions.
4. McDowell 1998b, 388.
5. McDowell 1998a, 331–332.
6. Wikforss 2004, 279.
7. In a non-trivial sense of ‘inferential’.
8. There could, of course, also be many creators. The perceptual experiences
themselves do not force monotheism on us. When I hereafter say that
there is perceptual evidence for the existence of a ‘creator’ of natural struc-
tures, I intend this to be understood in the sense of the existential quanti-
fier (‘there exists at leastt one X such that X is creator’). Needless to say, the
perceptions themselves cannot tell us that the creator has the attributes of
the God of classical theism.
9. Dawkins 1986, 1.
10. There are, of course, other traditional ways of responding. What appears
to be a common denominator, however, is the assumption that knowledge
of the creator is not perceptuallyy, but only inferentially, available. The world
cannot be perceived as creation. So the fact that it is creation must be
reached by inference.
11. Provided that no other cause independently of the creator also brought it
about that complex life forms exist.
12. It is called Tonica Fugata 9.0, and is released by Capella Software. A free
demo version of the program can be downloaded from: http://www
.capella.de/Download_tonica.cfm.
13. McDowell 1998b, 390.
220 Notes
14. Alan Millar says that ‘the commonsense of McDowell’s thinking at this
point should not be overlooked. In our ordinary thinking about knowledge
and the possession of reasons we regularly treat ourselves as having reasons
to believe something because we have seen it to be so’ (Millar 2006, 21).
15. To be in a position to know that p is not the same thing as actually knowing
that p. Suppose I see that there are birds in the garden, but I am convinced
that my eyes do not work properly, so I (falsely) believe that I am the victim
of an illusion involving birds. Then I do not know w that there are birds in the
garden (since I do not believe there are any), even though the experience
puts me in a position to know this.
What, then, does it mean to be in a position to know that p? It means,
as I use the locution, that no obstacle blocks one’s path to knowing p. ‘If
one is in a position to know p, and one has done what one is in a position
to do to decide whether p is true, then one does know p. The fact is open
to one’s view, unhidden, even if one does not yet see it. Thus being in a
position to know ... is factive: if one is in a position to know p, then p is
true.’ (Williamson 2000, 95.)
16. When I talk about a belief being ‘justified’, ‘rational’ or ‘warranted’ (I use
these terms interchangeably), what I mean is just that the subject who has
the belief is rationally entitled
d to it. McDowell refers to the status of being
rationally entitled to a belief as having a satisfactory standing in the space
of reasons with respect to that belief. He is reluctant to use the more trad-
itional terms (justification, etc.), probably because what he aims to do is to
change our ways of thinking about what rational entitlement with respect
to perceptual beliefs consists in. I have, however, often chosen to ‘trans-
late’ the McDowellian jargon by using the traditional terms. (Sometimes
McDowell himself uses the term ‘justification’ to denote a satisfactory
standing within the space of reasons, see for instance McDowell 1998c,
427–428.) It is, however, important that the reader not read any specific
conception (definition, theory) of justification/rationality/warrant into
those terms as I use them – they should rather be viewed as very general
terms of epistemic appraisal.The practice of using ‘justified belief’ and
‘rational belief’ interchangeably is, as Stenmark points out, rather common
and, I believe, defensible (Stenmark 1995, 19). I am of course aware that
not everybody agrees with this practice. Plantinga, for instance, regards
‘justification’ and ‘rationality’ as different suggestions/theories about what
‘warrant’ consists in (‘that property – or better, quantity – enough of which
is what makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief’
[Plantinga 2000, xi]). Plantinga rightly points out that ‘justification’ has
its origin and home in the ‘deontological territory of duty and permission’
(Plantinga 1993, 14). The concept is, however, also used by philosophers
who have moved out of the deontological territory, and even by those who
have moved out of the internalist territory altogether, such as Goldman –
see, for instance, Goldman 1988. Despite the diversity of meanings given
to concepts such as ‘justification’ and ‘rationality’, few (at least within
the internalist tradition) would deny that they are terms that have to do
with the subject’s epistemic entitlement. It is this vague common core of
meaning that I want the reader to have in mind when she encounters the
relevant terms in this text.
Notes 221
17. That is, something she can become aware of without pursuing some empir-
ical investigations, but just by reflection (‘introspection’).
18. I am talking here about the version of the argument recounted in
Chapter 3.
19. For the distinction between ‘epistemological’ and ‘metaphysical’ disjunc-
tivism, see Byrne and Logue 2008.
20. Martin claims that disjunctivism should be considered the default view
(Martin 2004). For objections against this claim, see Byrne and Logue 2008,
72–78. The best direct argument against disjunctivism is the so-called
causal argument (see Robinson 1994; Smith 2008). The causal argument is,
however, usually not seen as threatening epistemological disjunctivism.
21. McDowell 1995, 888.
22. McDowell 2008, 394.
23. By ‘by itself’ I mean withoutt appeal to background knowledge concerning the
reliability of perceptual experiences (if background knowledge is appealed
to in the justification of perceptual beliefs, then the relevant justification
is inferential, and the experiences themselves do not make objective facts
available), or to some general epistemic principle, such as the principle that
perceptual experiences provide prima facie justification of perceptual beliefs
(see the next footnote [24] for the latter suggestion).
24. It could be argued that we do not need the idea of having an environmental
state of affairs made directly available to us through experience, in order to
explain how we can have knowledge of an objective world. Instead we can
conceive of perceptual experiences as supplying prima facie justifications
of judgments that express their content. For instance, by having a visual
experience of a fireplace, I am prima facie justified in judging that there is
a fireplace there. This justification, however, can be overridden by back-
ground knowledge – other things I know or justifiably believe. (For such a
view, see Alston 1991, 79.)
McDowell’s account also ascribes, as we will see below, an important role
to background knowledge in the justification of perceptual judgments/
beliefs, albeit a different role from that suggested by the prima facie justi-
fication-account. The latter view obviously does nothing to lay skeptical
worries to rest. It simply asserts that perceptual experiences are prima facie
justificatory. But this just begs the question against the skeptic without
explaining why the skeptic’s conception of our epistemic predicament is in
any way misconceived. It seems to be perfectly appropriate for the skeptic
to ask how the thesis that experiences supply prima facie justifications for
beliefs is itself justified.
25. McDowell 2008, 385.
26. McDowell 2008, 385.
27. McDowell 1995.
28. McDowell 2002, 102.
29. McDowell 1995, 877.
30. McDowell 1995, 878 (my italics).
31. McDowell 1995, 878.
32. McDowell 1995, 888.
33. This is crucial. The idea of ‘a sphere in which reason is in full autonomous
control’ is not the idea that rational subjects are infallible. It is merely the
222 Notes
idea that a rational subject is not dependent on ‘favors from the world’
in order to be (epistemically) rational. The difference between the former
and the latter idea may be illustrated by an analogy. At the beginning of
the group stage in the World Cup in football, a good team such as Spain
is in ‘full autonomous control’ of its destiny. The team is not dependent
on any ‘favors’ from other teams in order to qualify for the play-off. This,
of course, does not mean that the team is infallible – that it cannot make
mistakes. Compare this situation, where Spain has its destiny in its own
(fallible) hands, with a situation that can arise later on in the group play.
Then it may happen that Spain is no longer in ‘full autonomous control’
of its destiny. Its position in the group table may be such that the team is
dependent on ‘favors’ from other teams in order to qualify for the play-off.
Analogously, a rational subject may be fallible but yet in full autonomous
control of her epistemic rationality, in a similar sense to that in which
Spain is in full autonomous control of its destiny at the beginning of the
group stage.
34. McDowell 1995, 878.
35. The argument is from McDowell 1995.
36. McDowell 1995, 889–890.
37. Taylor 2003, 171.
38. McDowell 1995, 888.
39. The necessary dependence McDowell sees between our conceptual thinking
and the world it purports to be about does not entail that no distinction can
be drawn between our conceptual scheme and the world. What McDowell
objects to is just the idea that the two are totally independent.
40. McDowell 1995, 889.
41. Timothy Williamson rebuts what he takes to be the strongest argument
againstt factive perceptual evidence in Williamson 2000, chapter 8. See also
Wahlberg 2009, 120–127.
42. See Alston 2001, 89–91, for the kind of problems that arise if we demand
that a subject, in order to be justified in believing that p, must know (or
justifiedly believe) that her evidence for p adequately supports p.
43. ‘Unlike thirty years ago, there aren’t many people around today who
accept KK’ (Dretske 2004, 176). McDowell is among those who reject the
KK-principle (McDowell 1998c, 419, footnote 10).
44. This reasoning does not presuppose that the subject knows that she knows.
The proposition ‘there is a cow before me’ is very unlikely to be true if the
perceptual experience E is illusory and if E is my only reason to believe that
there is a cow before me. From the fact that there is a cow before me (which I
know, even if I do not know that I know it) there is hence a strong argument
to the conclusion that E is not illusory.
45. See McDowell 1998c, 419, footnote 10.
46. What about the (subjective) indistinguishability of the good and bad cases
(see 3.1)? It could be argued that the possibility of a bad case, subjectively
indistinguishable from the good case, entails that it is impossible for S to
know – when she is in the good case – that she is not in the bad case. This
would mean that it is impossible for S to know that she is seeingg (e.g.) a
cow, rather than being the victim of some visual illusion (which is what
being in the bad case means). This, however, is not true. The subjective
Notes 223
indistinguishability of the good and bad cases should not, as Williamson

argues (Williamson 2000, 8.2), be conceived as symmetrical, i.e., as going
‘both ways’. Everybody agrees that if S is in the bad case, she cannot know
that she is not in the good case. To accept the possibility of a bad case
(which we should) is to accept the possibility of a deceptive case such that
when the subject is in it, she is not in a position to know that the case is
deceptive. But the fact that S is unable to know – when she is in the bad
case – that she is not in the good case does not entail that when S is in the
good case, she is unable to know that she is not in the bad case. We have no
reason to accept the latter claim (accepting it, as Williamson argues, is
tantamount to surrendering to skepticism, Williamson 2000, 168). If we
do not accept that S in the good case is unable to know that she is not in
the bad case, then we can, of course, consistently accept that it is possible
for S – when she is in the good case – to know that she is in the good
case, i.e. that she is seeingg that p rather than being the victim of some
illusion.
47. Externalists need d not, of course, claim that seeing that p is a mental state.
McDowell and Williamson, however, belong among those who do.
Williamson argues extensively for the claim that ‘factive attitudes’ (such
as seeing that p, remembering that p, and more generally knowing that p) are
mental states. States like these cannot be factorized into mental and non-
mental components. He also argues, rightly in my view, that classifying
factive attitudes as mental states is the default position: ‘Factive attitudes
have so many similarities to the non-factive attitudes that we should
expect them to constitute mental states too’ (Williamson 2000, 22). ‘That
the mental includes knowing and other factive attitudes is built into the
natural understanding of the procedure by which the concept of the mental
is acquired’ (Williamson 2000, 22).
48. The fact that it appears to me as if there is a fireplace before me can figure
as a premise in an argument for the claim that there is a fireplace before me,
but such an argument requires an additional premise, viz. that appearances
of this type are usually (or at least often) reliable. Without something like
this additional premise (which is hard to obtain if our perceptual evidence
is always restricted to appearances), the appearance does not provide much
of a justification for my belief about a fireplace.
49. See Williamson, section 8.2, for an analysis of the epistemic asymmetry
between the good and the bad case.
50. McDowell 1995, 887.
51. McDowell 1995, 885.
52. Williamson has constructed an argument that shows that ‘Whatever
evidence is, one is not always in a position to know what one has of it’ (see
Williamson 2000, 174–178). A consequence of the argument, if it succeeds,
is that rationality is not transparent (more about the non-transparency of
rationality below).
53. The bracketed qualification of what it means ‘always [to be] in a position to
know what constitutes obeying the dictates of rationality’ will, from now
on, be implied.
54. McDowell 1995, 886. If Williamson is right, however, then we are not
always in a position to know phenomenal facts either. His anti-luminosity
224 Notes
argument (Williamson 2000, chapter 4, especially section 4.3) shows that

there are no luminous conditions, i.e., ‘conditions which are accessible to
the subject whenever they obtain’ (Williamson 2000, 178). If there are no
such conditions, then not even phenomenal conditions are such that when-
ever they obtain, the subject is in a position to know that they obtain.
55. McDowell 1995, 886.
56. McDowell 1995, 887.
57. McDowell 1995, 887.
58. McDowell 1995, 887, footnote 16. One way to respond to the practical
analogy would be to say that the concept of action does not pick out any sui
generis phenomenon. An ‘action’ is just a series of physical events, and folk-
psychological concepts such as this will prove to be superfluous when we are
‘limning the true and ultimate structure of reality’ (Quine 1960, 221). This
is why it is pointless to try to mark out a sphere within which the subject
has total control. A parallel move with respect to epistemic rationality is to
claim that epistemic concepts such as ‘justification’ and ‘knowledge’ can
be explicated in terms of the non-normative concepts and relations that
belong within the realm of law.
59. McDowell 1995, 888.
60. Alston 2001, 68.
61. Alston 2001, 93.
62. Pappas 2005.
63. BonJour 2001, 13–14. BonJour’s description of the ‘western epistemological
tradition’ can be questioned. Plantinga claims that ‘internalists in epistem-
ology are rarae aves in Western thought prior to Descartes. It is really exter-
nalism ... that has been the dominant tradition’ (Plantinga 1993, v).
64. McDowell 1995, 888.
65. Neta and Pritchard 2007, 384. That McDowell has this view, ascribed to him
by Neta and Pritchard, and hence must be classified as an epistemological
internalist, is made clear in the following passage: ‘I agree with [Elizabeth
Fricker] that we lose the point of invoking the space of reasons if we allow
someone to possess a justification even if it is outside his reflective reach’
(McDowell 1998c, 418). McDowell, of course, invokes the space of reasons,
so he is clearly committed to the claim that a subject’s reason must be
accessible to her by reflection alone.
66. Neta and Pritchard 2007.
67. John Greco is a victim of this misconception: ‘According to McDowell,
genuine perception gives one a “satisfactory standing in the space of reason”,
whereas mere illusion does not. In other words, genuine perception, but not
illusion, gives rise to positive epistemic status [i.e., provides justification for
the subject’s belief]. But on McDowell’s view, the difference between genuine
perception and mere illusion is not something that is knowable by intro-
spection [which, in this context, is equivalent to “reflection”] alone. Hence,
McDowell’s view entails EE [Epistemic externalism]’ (Greco 2004, 58).
Since the difference between a genuine perception and an illusion is not
knowable by introspection/reflection alone, and since this difference is, on
McDowell’s view, crucial for whether the belief that the subject forms on the
basis of an experience is justified or not, Greco concludes that what justifies
the subject’s belief is, on McDowell’s construal, something to which the
Notes 225
subject does not have access by introspection/reflection alone. So McDowell

is an epistemological externalist.
Greco may be right that in order for McDowell to qualify as an epistemo-
logical internalist, he (McDowell) must hold that a subject whose belief
is based on a factive reason must be able to know, by reflection alone, that
her reason is factive. But nothing prevents McDowell from claiming this.
The claim that the subject can know, by reflection alone, the nature of
her perceptual experience when she is in the good case is compatible with
the possibility of a bad case in which the subject is nott in a position to
know the nature of her perceptual experience (to know that it is illusory).
So McDowell can consistently claim that in the good case, the subject has
a factive reason for her belief that p, and that this reason (despite its consti-
tutive dependence on an ‘outer’ fact, and despite the possibility of a bad
case) is accessible to her by reflection alone. For an exposition of McDowell’s
position on this matter see Neta and Pritchard 2007.
68. What I am referring to here is positive epistemic support. The McDowellian
model we are working with requires, however, that S must be sensitive to
the rational force of evidence and considerations that speak againstt the
veridicality of the relevant experience. More about this below.
69. McDowell 1998c, 429.
70. McDowell 1998c, 430, footnote 25.
71. McDowell 1998c, 430.
72. Plantinga 2000.
73. Plantinga 2000, ix.
74. Plantinga 2000, 191.
75. This is a paraphrase of part of the passage by Plantinga quoted earlier (‘belief
in a creator’ is substituted for ‘theistic belief’).
77. See Williamson 2000, section 8.7.
78. Clifford 1901, 183.
79. I have not said that I endorse the doctrine either.
5 Perceiving Other Minds

1. Ward 1996, 152.
2. Dennis Diderot, Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works (Chicago: Open Court,
1916), 36–38. Quoted in Buckley 1987, 205. Diderot later changed his mind
and became an atheist.
3. McDowell 1998b, 382–383.
4. McDowell 1998b, 381.
5. There are other ways of formulating the problem. Hyslop puts it in terms of
the asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of others (Hyslop
1995, 7).
6. Hyslop 2005, sect. 2. A thorough critique of the argument is found in
Plantinga 1990.
7. Hyslop 1995, 41.
8. Hyslop 1995, 31.
226 Notes
9. Hyslop 2005, section 3.1.

10. Malcolm 1954, 538.
11. Plantinga 1990, 193–205.
12. Plantinga 1990, 252–253.
13. Plantinga 1990, 268.
14. Hyslop 2005, sect. 3.1.
15. Hyslop 1995, 29.
16. Pargetter 1984, 159.
17. Pargetter 1984, 159.
18. Hyslop 1995, 53.
19. Chalmers 1996, 246.
20. Chalmers 1996, 246.
21. Churchland 1988, 71.
22. Wikforss 2004, 284.
23. Plantinga 1990, 269.
24. Rudd 2003, 100.
25. Malcolm 1954, 544.
26. Hyslop distinguishes between Malcolm’s version of the criterial approach,
according to which criteria ‘establish with certainty’ that the relevant
mental state obtains, and approaches according to which criterial evidence
is ‘non-inductive evidence’ which means that it is ‘evidence which is neces-
sarily evidence’ (Hyslop 1995, chap. 5). I will focus on the latter, more prom-
ising, idea.
27. Saunders and Henze 1967, 111–112.
28. Shoemaker 1963, 4.
29. McDowell 1998b, 370.
30. See Bilgrami 1992, 321.
31. McDowell 1998b, 369.
32. Bilgrami 1992, 321.
33. McDowell does not accuse the criterial approach of claiming that experi-
encing the satisfaction of criteria is what constitutes knowing that another
person is (e.g.) in pain (McDowell 1998b, 371–372). McDowell’s point is
rather that if experiencing the satisfaction of ‘criteria’ is the best epistemic
position one can be in with respect to a knowledge-claim about somebody
else’s mental state, then it seems that such knowledge-claims can never be
acceptable (McDowell 1998b, 373).
34. Hyslop 1995, 88.
35. McDowell 1998b, 373.
36. McDowell 1998b, 373.
37. Robinson 1991, 60.
38. McDowell 1998b, 373.
39. It might be thought that the criterial approach belongs with an anti-realist
conception of meaning to be found in Wittgenstein’s later works, according
to which questions about the relation between the satisfaction of criteria and
the obtaining of mental facts lapse. However, McDowell has convincingly
argued that Wittgenstein was not an anti-realist and, furthermore, that the
adoption of an anti-realist framework does not help the criterial theorist to
avoid the epistemological problems McDowell points out (McDowell 1998b,
374–375).
Notes 227
40. Rudd 2003, 104.

41. Worth mentioning are the kind of arguments that purport to be ‘dissolutions’
rather than solutions of the other minds-problem, such as various private-
language positions, and Strawson’s argument (Strawson 1959, 105–106). The
gist of such arguments is, roughly, that the problem of other minds cannot
be coherently stated. This means, as Hyslop points out, that they can ‘all
be viewed as arguments justifying beliefs in other minds’ (Hyslop 1995, 3).
If the problem cannot be coherently stated, then surely we are justified in
believing in other minds. Hyslop scrutinizes systematically most proposed
‘dissolutions’, and finds that they fail to dissolve the problem (see Hyslop
1995, chap. 6–7 for critique of private-language arguments, and chap. 9 for
critique of Strawson’s argument). Plantinga too finds private-language and
Strawsonian objections unpersuasive, although his focus is mainly on such
arguments as objections against the analogical inference (see Plantinga
1990, 199–211). Both Plantinga and Hyslop review ‘attitudinal’ approaches,
and find them wanting (Hyslop 1995, chap. 8; Plantinga 1990, 232–244).
42. Hyslop 2005.
43. The problem of other minds concerns not only how we can know the
general proposition that other people have minds. Even if there were some
cogent argument that could establish this proposition, the question of how
we can know, in particular cases, that a person occupies a specific mental
state could still be problematic.
44. McDowell 1998f, 305.
45. McDowell 1998b, 386.
46. McDowell 1998b, 387.
47. This is what it means for behavior to be ‘intrinsically’ expressive, see
McDowell 1998b, 393, and footnote 47.
48. McDowell 1998b, 381.
49. McDowell 1998b, 385.
51. McDowell 1998b, 383.
52. McDowell 1998b, 383.
53. McDowell 1998b, 384.
54. McDowell 1998b, 384.
55. For B to be ‘intrinsicallyy about’ M is for B to have an intrinsic nature that
cannot be characterized without reference to its intentional directedness
at M.
56. The position defended here does not entail that all human behavior is
expressive of mind. Some behavior is certainly ‘mindless’ or unintentional
(such as tripping over a stone). However, even routine behavior performed
in a habitual manner is usually expressive of intention. The behavior of a
person who peels carrots without thinking about what he does is never-
theless the result of an intention to peel carrots (and the behavior is also
expressive of that intention), even if the intention is not, for the moment,
an object of the person’s conscious attention.
57. McDowell 1998a, 331–332.
58. McDowell 1996a, 125.
59. McDowell 1996a, 124.
60. McDowell 1998a, 333.
228 Notes
61. McDowell 1998a, 333.

62. McDowell 1998a, 333.
63. McDowell 1996a, 126.
64. McDowell 1996a, 126.
65. McDowell 1996a, 84.
66. McDowell’s view is, of course, compatible with a great deal of our know-
ledge of other people’s mental lives being inferential.
67. All ‘direct’ or non-inferential knowledge is not observational (take, for
instance, knowledge of basic mathematical or logical truths). However, in
the context of McDowell’s discussion of knowledge of other minds, ‘obser-
vational’ and ‘direct’ amount to the same thing.
68. Brandom 2002, 96.
69. McDowell 1998b, 392, footnote 44.
70. This claim is true of the McDowell of Mind and World. Recently, however,
McDowell has slightly changed his view about the relationship between
the contents of perceptual experiences and the judgments or beliefs that
are non-inferentially justified by those experiences. The content of an
experience capable of non-inferentially justifying (e.g.) the judgment that a
cardinal is present need not, McDowell now says, include a proposition in
which the concept of a cardinal figures (McDowell 2009a, 259). The contents
of experiences are, however, still correctly described as conceptual, and it
seems to me that McDowell’s new position preserves the essentials of the
old one.
71. Such as that the requirements of doxastic responsibility are not violated,
and that we believe what we report.
72. Wikforss 2004, 277.
73. For instance, Dretske 1995; Tye 1995. For an overview of this area, see Siegel
2005.
74. For instance, Siewert 1998; Siegel 2006.
75. Siegel 2006.
76. It is possible that McDowell would no longer claim that perceptual experi-
ences represent mental properties. His slight change of mind, mentioned
in footnote 70, has led him to say that ‘Some concepts that figure in [non-
inferential] knowledge afforded by an experience can be excluded from the
content of the experience itself ... but not all can. A natural stopping point,
for visual experiences, would be proper sensibles of sight and common
sensibles accessible to sight’ (McDowell 2009a, 260). This might be taken to
imply that mental properties are not included in the contents of experiences
(a view which does not, however, entail that knowledge of such properties
is inferential, according to McDowell’s new position). On the other hand,
McDowell includes among ‘common sensibles accessible to sight’ ‘postures
such as perching and modes of locomotion such as hopping and flying’ (p.
261). All these activities are naturally taken to be essentially mind-related,
at least in humans and other higher animals. It is hard to judge which
consequences, if any, McDowell’s new position on the contents of percep-
tual experiences has for his view of other-minds knowledge.
77. Wikforss 2004.
78. McDowell 2004, 296.
79. DeVries, Triplett, and Sellars 2000, 250 (my italics).
Notes 229
80. McDowell 1996c, 284 (my italics).

81. This means that observational and theoretical concepts must be acquired
together through a process that can only be described holistically. See
DeVries, Triplett, and Sellars 2000, 226, 248.
82. Wikforss 2004, 279.
6 Seeing Nature as Creation

1. Crick 1988, 138.
2. Wikforss 2004, 279.
4. What I argue for in this book is only the possibility of knowledge of a creator
(or creators), i.e., something like what Kant calls an ‘Author of the world’
(Kant 1929, A 629, p. 523). I do not argue for the possibility to know that the
God of classical theism exists (i.e., an omniscient, omnipotent, necessary, and
perfectly good being). Since the aim of the book is to explicate a traditional
Christian idea, however, I sometimes view matters from the perspective of
the Christian tradition. This is why I now and then (implicitly) identify the
creator with God. If the Christian tradition is right, the creator is indeed
identical with God, but I do not claim that our perceptions of nature can
establish this.
5. Brunner and Barth 1946, 75.
6. Wisnefske 1990, 53.
7. Wisnefske 1990, 51.
8. Barth 1957, 44.
9. Torrance 1998, 290.
10. Barr 1993, 18.
11. McGrath 2004, 83.
12. Wisnefske 1990, 78.
13. Barth 2004, 119.
14. Barth 2004, 120.
15. Barth 2004, 120–121.
16. Barth 2004, 121–122.
17. Zuckmayer and Barth 1982, 42.
18. Torrance 1998, 293–294.
19. Barr 1993, 138.
20. Barr 1993, 84.
21. Barr 1993, 87.
22. Barr 1993, 56.
23. Barr 1993, 69.
24. Fitzmyer 1993, 273; Ziesler 1989, 77; Dunn 1988, 56. There are, however,
diverging opinions, see Campbell 1999; Nygren 1972, 107–115. Nygren says:
‘Paulus har aldrig påstått, att den naturliga människan finner Gud genom
hans spår i naturen.’ [‘Paul has never claimed that the natural human being
finds God by his traces in nature’] (my translation) (p. 111).
25. Dunn 1988, 58.
26. Fitzmyer 1993, 280.
27. Young 2000, 703.
230 Notes
28. Bruce 1983, 84; Harrisville 1980, 35.

29. Cranfield 1975, 115.
30. Swart 2005, 405 (my italics).
31. Swart 2005, 406.
32. Summa Theologiae, I.1.2.2.
33. Summa contra Gentiles, II.ii. 3–4. Quoted in McGrath 2004, 71–72.
34. Calvin 1989, 57.
35. Calvin 1989, 51.
36. Calvin 1989, 52.
37. Calvin 1989, 52.
38. Adams 2001, 292.
39. Swart 2005, 406.
40. Calvin 1989, 51.
41. This does not, of course, mean that Aquinas’ version of natural theology is
misconceived or unchristian. It only means that Paul, in Romans, has some-
thing different in mind.
42. Vatican Council II, Constitution Dei Verbum, §3.
43. McGrath 2004, 73.
44. Confession Belgica, 1561, article 2. Quoted in McGrath 2004, 73.
45. John Wesley, A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation: Or a Compendium
of Natural Philosophy,
y Vol I (New York: N. Bangs and T. Mason, 1823), 313.
Quoted in Hendricks 1983.
46. Jonathan Edwards, The Images of Divine Things, ed. Perry Miller (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1948), 61. Quoted in McGrath 2007, 122.
47. Avihu Zakai says that ‘Edward’s theology of nature ... clearly has more
affinity with medieval theology ... than with the mechanistic conception
of nature which accorded God the role of a “cosmic legislator”’ (Zakai
2002, 35).
48. Taylor 1985, 223.
49. Funkenstein 1986, 116.
52. Sometimes, of course, we mean something less than that when we talk
about nature’s testimony of God. We mean that nature can be given a
theistic interpretation without containing any evidence for the validity of
that interpretation.
53. See McDowell 1996a, xi.
54. McDowell 1996a, 71.
55. But see Searle 1992. Searle can be accused of using ‘consciousness’ as a
mysterious deus ex machina in a way similar to the old dualists, with the
difference that Searle is not a dualist, and that he claims to be a natur-
alist. Consciousness, according to Searle, is a phenomenon that is caused
by brains, but which has unique irreducible properties, such as inten-
tionality and subjectivity. ‘It is an objective fact about the world that it
contains certain systems, viz. brains, with subjective mental states’ (Searle
1992, ix). Consciousness is nevertheless a completely natural phenomenon.
It ‘is as much a part of the natural biological order as any other biological
features such as photosynthesis, digestion, or mitosis’ (Searle 1992, 90). The
problem with Searle’s account, in my view, is that he treats consciousness
Notes 231
as a self-standing entity in much the same way as Descartes does, an entity

which ‘has’ properties like intentionality and subjectivity. Then he just adds
that it is a natural phenomenon, caused by brains.
56. A third alternative may be to refuse to engage with ontological questions
such as this by making an anti-realist move.
57. McDowell 1996a, 72.
58. McDowell 1996a, 72.
59. John Haldane has criticized McDowell for being too restrictive with
‘re-enchantment’: ‘Since McDowell himself wishes to reject the modern
conception of nature when it comes to our sensibility, he can hardly claim
that it is generally obligatory; and since that cannot be so, to say that the rest
of nature is reducible to the realm of law just begs the question.’ (Haldane
2003, 398). I am not sure that McDowell says that the ‘rest of nature’ is redu-
cible to the realm of law. He says, for instance, that ‘we have to suppose that
the world itself has an intelligible structure, matching the structure in the
space of logos possessed by accurate representations of it’ (McDowell 1998i,
178) and that the world consists of facts that are ‘essentially capable of being
embraced in thought’ (McDowell 1996a, 28). If the (‘merely natural’) world
consists of facts that have the essential property of being ‘intelligible’ or
‘capable of being embraced in thought’, then it seems to follow that the
(‘merely natural’) world has a property that is not reducible to natural-scien-
tific, realm of law-properties. It is clear, however, that McDowell rejects as
‘superstitious’ the idea that non-human natural phenomena can be mean-
ingful in the sense in which human gestures, sounds, and texts are. I have
not felt the need to attack McDowell’s stand in this respect, since it is pretty
obvious that it is not based on argument. He simply dismisses the idea as
‘crazy’. The whole point of this book, of course, is to show that the idea, at
least in a modest version, is not crazy.
60. Calvin 1989, 51. ‘The invisible and incomprehensible essence of God, to a
certain extent, made visible in his works’ (p. 50).
61. McDowell 1996a, 72.
62. Buckley 1987, 346.
63. Buckley 1987, 346.
64. Buckley 1987, 350.
65. Buckley 1987, 48.
66. Plantinga 1990, xvi.
67. Plantinga 1990, xi.
68. Plantinga 1990, 271.
69. Gregory of Nyssa, De hominis opificio, c. 11 (PG 34, 156 B). Quoted in Lubac
1998, 210.
70. Karl Rahner, Schriften zur Theologie 3 (Einsiedeln, 1956), 47–60. Quoted in
Lubac 1998, 209.
71. Duns Scotus, De ordinatione, prol., Pars 1, ‘De necessitate doctrinae revelatae’
(Opera omnia, vol. 1, 1950, 17, 21). Quoted in Lubac 1998, 211.
72. Wojtyla 1979, 282.
73. Calvin 1989, 38.
74. Zizioulas 1985, 27.
75. Pannenberg 1977, 44.
76. See (e.g.) McDowell 1998b, 391–392.
232 Notes
77. We do so rightly. The ‘problem of other minds’ is really the problem of how
to explain our knowledge of other minds. Nobody denies that we have such
knowledge.
78. There is, of course, also a conceptual problem about how our mental state-
concepts apply to God. This conceptual problem arises, however, because
it is assumed that God is infinite, transcendent, etc. A creator of nature
(‘designer’) need not be infinite or transcendent, so this conceptual problem
is not immediately relevant in the context of arguments for the existence
of a creator of nature. It can also be argued that the conceptual problem
about how mental states-concepts apply to God has been solved in terms of
analogical predication.
79. As Plantinga claims, see Plantinga 1990.
80. I take the contemporary ‘intelligent design’ movement to be promoting
versions of the traditional design argument.
81. Ratzsch 2003, 124.
82. Siegel 2006, 481.
83. The term ‘perceptual experience’ is neutral between veridical and illusory
experiences.
84. I am here talking about the McDowell of Mind and World. It is unclear
whether McDowell’s new position includes the claim that perceptual expe-
riences represent mental properties; see McDowell 2009a.
85. As we might remember from the summary in Chapter 4.1.2, my account
need not assume that biological organisms are designed d in the sense that God
has determined every detail of their characteristics. When people describe
natural structures as giving an appearance of having been designed, I will
construe this as a slightly misleading way of saying that those structures
appear to be products of mind, i.e., expressive of intent and intelligence.
People can characterize the content of their experiences in misleading
ways, and it is really a philosophical task to determine how the content
should best be characterized. Many philosophers have, for instance, argued
that the contents of our perceptual experiences only represent colors
and shapes, despite the fact that people say things like ‘I saw that he was
happy’.
86. Three years before his death, Darwin wrote: ‘My judgment often fluctu-
ates ... I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence
of God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not
always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state
of mind’ (Darwin 1958, 55).
87. Dawkins 1986, 1 (my italics).
88. Crick 1988, 138.
89. Hume 1990, 65 (my italics).
90. Dawkins’ use of the term ‘design’ is somewhat ambiguous. Sometimes
he uses it as a synonym for something like ‘organized complexity’, such
as when he says that ‘the difference [between the “complicated” things
of biology and the “simple” things of physics] is one of complex design’
(Dawkins 1986, 1), or that ‘our brains were designed to understand hunting
and gathering’ (p. 2). It seems clear, however, that when he talks about
‘being designed for a purpose’, then the notion of design he has in mind is
that of intentional, conscious, deliberate design. For instance, he says that
Notes 233
‘Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic force which Darwin

discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence
and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind’ (p. 5, my
italics) . So natural selection does not ‘design for a purpose’. Hence, when
something ‘appears to be designed for a purpose’, then – presumably –
it appears to be designed by something (somebody) who has purposes.
91. Taylor 1985, 219.
92. Taylor 1985, 219.
93. Since McDowell claims that one can sometimes ‘literally perceive’ that
somebody is in pain, he would probably say that the same is true for joy.
In that case, what an observer is in a position to perceive is the mental fact
itself. Nevertheless, there are obviously mental properties that cannot be
construed as directly perceivable. In cases where such mental properties
are expressed through behavior, it is relevant to say that what we see is the
expression, and not the mental fact.
94. Taylor 1985, 221.
95. Riddley 2003, 211.
96. Riddley 2003, 212.
97. Riddley 2003, 214.
98. Collingwood 1938, 285.
99. Riddley 2003, 221–222.
100. Kivy 1980, 14.
101. And that he at no point recalled a somber mood which he had previously
felt.
102. Riddley 2003, 217.
103. Riddley 2003, 218.
104. It could be argued that some types of artworks (such as certain handicraft
works, and icons) do not fit very well with the expression-theory’s under-
standing of art. In some cases, handicraft works are made by people who
have learnt a certain technique which they may apply rather mechanical-
ly. Or they may simply have learnt to faithfully reproduce an original. In
such cases, the ‘artist’ might have no idea of what the objects she produces
express. This, however, does not mean that the objects are not expressive.
They are expressive of (e.g.) the intention of the creator of the original, or
the inventor of the technique, or the founder of the particular handicraft-
tradition. There is always a mind (or minds) somewhere behind the design
of handicraft objects, even if the proximate cause of those objects may be a
totally uncreative (‘mindless’) reproducer.
105. If we want to consider the text as partt of human behavior, that is fine with
me. Then I will claim that elephants and other natural structures are part of
God’s creative behavior.
106. Of course, even if we admit that art is genuinely expressive of the artist’s
feelings, we do not have to deny that a necessary condition for being able
to recognize art as expressive is that one is able to respond emotionally to art.
See Riddley 2003, 220–221.
107. Csibra et al. 1999, 238.
108. Anybody can also, if the argument of this book is right, recognize complex
biological organisms as products of mind.
109. Csibra et al. 1999, abstract.
234 Notes
110. In a later article, Csibra’s and Gergely’s position seems to have changed
slightly, see Gergely and Csibra 2003.
111. Dembski 1999, chap. 5.
112. It seems, as we will see in 6.4, that we turn to nature very early. Small chil-
dren interpret natural structures as purposefully designed by an agent.
113. Dembski 1998.
114. I do not exclude the possibility that the project of inferring the existence of
a creator from the existence of complex biological organisms may eventu-
ally succeed. Its prospects look, however, extremely bleak at the moment.
It is important to note that the project of inferring a creator from biological
structures is different from that of inferring a creator from the apparent
‘fi
fine-tuning’ of the basic physical parameters of the universe. The latter pro-
ject is not affected by the discovery of evolution by natural selection and
more recent developments within evolutionary theory. The prospects of the
‘fi
fine-tuning’-project are hard to judge. The refl flections above concern, in
any case, the ‘biological’ project only.
115. These refl flections are inspired by an essay of Del Ratzsch on Thomas Reid
(Ratzsch 2003). It seems that Reid had an idea that is, in some respects,
similar to my suggestion that we can directly perceive biological structures
as expressive of intent and intelligence. Perception, for Reid, is a two-stage
process. We receive sensations, which are something like ‘raw feels’. The
sensations cause involuntary convictions about objective facts. ‘Reid’s po-
sition is’, according to Del Ratzsch, ‘that in certain experiential situations,
specifific sensory, phenomenological content triggers particular cognitive
states – de re beliefs, conceptions, etc. – which do not follow inferentially
from that content’ (p. 126). This means that to perceive that the ball is red,
according to Reid, is to be caused to believe that the ball is red by having
the appropriate sensation. There exists no cogent inference from sensations
to beliefs about the objective world. Rather, the connection between certain
sensations and certain beliefs or convictions is simply ‘built into our cogni-
tive nature’. If Reid is right then this would explain ‘why it is that, despite
the efforts of many of the best thinkers historically, attempts to construct
(or reconstruct) satisfactorily powerful inferences from, for example, sense
data to physical objects have been hard to come by’ (p. 126).
According to Reid/Ratzsch there are certain qualities or features in the
world which cause in us immediate, involuntary convictions about inten-
tional design. This indicates that we do not always discover intentional
design by means of inferences, but that in some cases we perceive certain
qualities or features as marks of design (to perceive that something is a
mark of design is, according to Reid’s account of perception, to be caused
to have a belief about design in the appropriate way). We have no reason to
distrust our cognitive nature in this respect, since our knowledge of other
minds depends on the fact that certain physical signs or marks tend to
cause beliefs about minds in us. If this was not the case, we could not know
other minds, since we have no direct access to mental facts about other
people. Reid writes: ‘Other minds we perceive only through the medium
of material objects, on which their signatures are impressed. It is through
this medium that we perceive ... wisdom, and every moral and intellec-
tual quality in other beings. The signs of those qualities are immediately
Notes 235
perceived by the senses; by them the qualities themselves are reflected to

our understanding’ (Reid 1863, 503).
116. Piaget 1997.
117. Leslie 1982; Spelke 1991; Baillargeon, Spelke, and Wasserman 1985.
118. Kelemen and DiYanni 2005, 19.
120. Evans 2000.
125. Kelemen 2004.
127. Kelemen’s own hypothesis is that the children’s ascriptions of intended
purposes to natural objects are ‘side-effects of a socially intelligent mind
that is naturally inclined to privilege intentional explanations and is, there-
fore, oriented toward explanations characterizing nature as an intentional-
ly designed artifact’ (Kelemen 2004, 296). This tendency is enhanced by
the artifact-saturated environments which humans live in. She and DiYanni
suggest that ‘the tendency to view an entity as “for” a purpose derives from
children’s early emerging ability to interpret agents’ behavior as goal-direct-
ed ... In particular, young children’s sensitivity to the way agents use objects
as means to achieve goals may provoke a rudimentary teleo-functional view
of entities as those goals shift from being construed as properties of agents’
minds to being construed as intrinsic properties or the instrumental objects
themselves’ (Kelemen and DiYanni 2005, 6).
128. If living things appearr to children as if they have been created, then it is not
strange if children hypothesize that also many non-living things (which
may not appearr as created) have been created.
129. Guthrie 1993, 111.
130. Guthrie 1993, 96.
131. Guthrie 1993, 98.
132. Atran, however, advocates a multidimensional approach to the explanation
of religion. He claims that religion is more than just anthropomorphism.
133. Atran 2002, 57.
134. Atran 2002, 267.
135. Atran 2002, 61.
136. Atran 2002, 59.
137. Atran 2002, 64. Atran’s supports his claim by reference to Csibra et al. 1999.
In a later paper, however, Gergely and Csibra are more hesitant to ascribe
psychological (mentalistic) reasoning to infants. ‘According to our alterna-
tive proposal, one-year-olds can represent, explain and predict goal-directed
actions by applying a non-mentalistic, reality-based action interpretation-
al system, the “teleological stance” ... by applying the teleological stance
young infants can interpret goal-directed actions withoutt attributing inten-
tional mental states to the actor’s mind’ (Gergely and Csibra 2003, 289). The
‘teleological stance’, however, is a precursor of the full-blown intentional
stance, and based on the same inferential principle (p. 287).
138. Atran 2002, 65.
236 Notes
139. The mentioned psychologists assume, for instance, that knowledge of other
minds is always inferential.
140. Barrett 2007, 67.
141. Barrett 2007, 67.
142. Barrett 2007, 69.
143. The invisibility of gods is irrelevant here. We detect ‘invisible’ agents all the
time, such as when we hear an intruder in the squeaking of a window. Atran
claims, as we remember, that ‘spontaneous attribution of agency to physically
unidentified
fi sources isn’t counterintuitive’ (Atran 2002, 65).
144. Is the thesis of this book compatible with the fact that there are religions
that do not posit a creator god? It surely is. Even for the adherents of such
religions, nature may perceptually appearr as expressive of mind. One can
deny that how things appear refl flect how things actually are. Atheists such
as Dawkins admit that nature appears to be expressive of mind, but believe
that it is not. Religions could, similarly, develop beliefs that contravene how
things perceptually appear. That some religions do this is obvious. Bud-
dhists, for instance, claim that reality ultimately is nothingness, despite the
fact that it perceptually appears to Buddhists as if material things exist. So
why could there not be religions that deny the existence of a creator despite
the fact that nature perceptually appears to be expressive of mind? Further-
more, as noted above, it might be possible for cultures to suppress even the
appearance of intent in nature. Compare: a person can develop in such a way
as to become insensitive to other people’s expressions of feelings. For such
a person, it might not appear as if Ruth is sad, although it appears that way
to everybody else.
7 Possible Defeaters
1. McDowell 1998c, 429.
2. McDowell 1998c, 429.
3. Plantinga 2000, 360.
4. I will assume that an intellectually sophisticated person can, without
doxastic irresponsibility, believe that God exists and has created the
universe. I will therefore not consider possible defeaters in the form of
arguments against the existence of God.
5. Van Inwagen 2003, 353.
6. McGrath 2009, 189.
7. Gould 1989, 101–102.
8. Conway Morris 2003a, 12.
9. Conway Morris 2003d, 334.
11. Conway Morris 2003a, chap. 10.
13. Conway Morris 2003b, 150.
15. Conway Morris 2003c, 8.
16. Van Inwagen 2003, 361. If God has guided evolution by causing mutations,
this would not negate the chance-character of mutations in the sense
Notes 237
of ‘chance’ that is relevant from the perspective of evolutionary theory.

Mutations are chance-events in the relevant sense because ‘they do not
occur in response to changes in the environmental perils or opportunities
that confront individuals or species’ (van Inwagen 2003, 360). Mutations
are, in other words, ‘causally independent’ of ‘the features of the organ-
ism’s environment that are relevant to its success in having descendents’ (p.
361). This is what it means to say that they are chance-events in the context
of evolutionary biology. To require that they be chance-events in a more
demanding sense would be to make a strong metaphysical claim.
17. Van Inwagen 2003, 359.
18. Van Inwagen 2003, 359.
19. Van Inwagen 2003, 360.
20. Ward 2004, 273.
21. Polkinghorne 2004, 258.
22. Ward 2004, 273.
23. The analogy between evolutionary explanations of biological features and
neurophysiological explanations of human limb movements is strength-
ened by the insight that Darwinian selectional processes probably have
important functions in the brain. See Edelman 2004, chap. 4. See also
Walter 2001, 228.
26. Ward 2004, 262.
27. If God did not intend d life to exist, then life could be said to be created by
God only in the sense in which it can be said that I ‘created’ a traffic acci-
dent by forgetting to apply the handbrake of my car when leaving it.
28. The closest ‘synthetic biologists’ have come to ‘building’ a cell is to trans-
plant an artificially designed chromosome into a recipient bacterial cell
in such a way that the artificial chromosome controls the bacterial cell.
See Gibson et al. 2010. A similar procedure for eukaryotic cells is beyond
the reach of current science. (Thanks to Jesper Kronhamn for sharing his
expertise on this subject.)
29. According to some theories of causal dependence, such as David Lewis’, the
truth of the above counterfactual is entailed by the claim that the emer-
gence of life is causally dependent on God’s intention. However, Lewis’
theory has received much criticism, so I do not want to presume that it is
true. This is why I argue that the counterfactual is entailed by theism.
30. Are there not obvious counterexamples to this claim? What about if I beget
a child? Then I have, without any exercise of immense intelligence, brought
it about that the property of being a complex organism is instantiated (by
my child). However, if theism is true, then my act of bringing about that a
child exists is causally dependent on God’s prior intelligent activity. So my
unintelligent act of bringing about that a certain child exists presupposes
that a prior act of immense intelligence has been performed, although not
by me.
31. Charles Kingsley, The Natural Theology of the Future (London: Macmillan,
1874), xxvii. Quoted in McGrath 2008, 268.
32. Of course it does not take more artistic talent.
33. Letter to Asa Gray, May 22, 1860. Quoted in Ruse 2004, 23.
238 Notes
34. The idea that God’s creation has a certain freedom or autonomy to ‘become
itself’ is, John Haught argues, actually entailed by the idea of a loving
creator. ‘Love, at the very minimum, allows others sufficient scope to
become themselves.’ This means that ‘chance is an inevitable part of any
universe held to be both distinct from and simultaneously loved by God’
(Haught 2004, 242).
35. Gilson 2002.
36. E-mail correspondence.
37. Johnston 2006, 271.
38. For one such way, see Johnston 2006, 271–274.
39. See Alston 1991, 234–235.
40. Dawkins 1986, 1.
41. What if it could be established that the faces were the result of a natural,
scientifically explicable process that could be replicated at any time in a
laboratory setting? The most reasonable reaction to this scenario is not to
conclude that the faces are not the product of intention. If there existed
a natural process that (without any involvement of human intelligence)
produces sculptures of the faces of several American presidents whenever
certain initial conditions are satisfied, then the most reasonable conclusion
would be that God is an American patriot.
8 Unapologetic Theology
1. People who do not believe that their experiences of intent and intelligence
in nature reveal how things really are could, of course, know that nature is
creation anyway, if they have evidence for nature’s createdness besides their
experiences of nature.
2. By ‘theology’ I here mean ‘theology proper’, i.e., a discipline that claims to
speak about God.
3. Lints 1993, 588.
4. ‘Postliberal theology’ names a highly differentiated movement in contem-
porary Anglo-American theology. The term, which famously appeared in
George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine (1984), was first associated with
the so-called Yale School. It can, however, be used in a much wider sense (as
I intend it here) so as to include theologians such as John Milbank, Graham
Ward, Catherine Pickstock, Peter Ochs, and Daniel Hardy. Paul DeHart has
said that ‘the best image for the ongoing influence of the originary Yale
thinkers is that of a river delta’ (DeHart 2006, 45). DeHart also claims that
the term ‘postliberal’ has largely disappeared from the contemporary debate
(p. 46). This judgment may, however, be premature. A recently published
book (viz. Cathey 2009) includes the term in its title. Another label for the
tradition-oriented, postmodern theology I have in mind above is ‘post-
secular theology’. Catherine Pickstock uses this term to group together
tendencies such as the original Yale school, Radical Orthodoxy, Scriptural
Reasoning, and Radical Traditions at Duke University (see DeHart 2006,
50). Arne Rasmusson also uses ‘postsecular’ in a similar sense (Rasmusson
2007, 151).
5. Tracy 1981b.
Notes 239
6. See, for instance, Placher 1989, chaps. 1, 10.

7. Provided that I have not violated the requirements of doxastic
responsibility.
8. See Chapter 4, footnote 46.
9. Tracy 1981a, ix.
10. Tracy 1981a, chap. 1.
11. Tracy 1981a, 57.
12. By ‘reasonable persons’ I mean (and I guess that Tracy means) people who
have the capacity for rational thinking, and who do their best to exercise
this capacity. So one can be a reasonable person even though one’s epistemic
behavior is not always maximally rational.
13. Tracy 1981b.
14. Gustafson 1985.
15. Tracy 1981b.
16. Kaufman 1995, 11.
17. Tracy 1996, 32–34.
18. Tracy has in his later thinking become increasingly ‘postmodern’. He criti-
cizes ‘modern rationality’ and modern theology’s tendency to emphasize
logos at the expense of theos (Tracy 1994). This shift (which he acknow-
ledges as a shift, [Holland 2002]) does not, however, seem to have affected
his attitude with respect to the importance of a ‘public’ theology. In the
new preface to Blessed Rage for Orderr, written in 1996, Tracy says: ‘The
fundamental arguments of this book remain, I believe, as necessary now
as then ... the need to develop a genuinely public theology – available, in
principle, to all intelligent, reasonable, responsible persons; the usefulness
of some form of a correlation method’ (Tracy 1996, xiii).
19. Placher 1989, 18.
20. See, for instance, Lindbeck 1984.
21. See, for instance, Marshall 2000; Thiemann 1985.
22. For instance, McClendon and Smith 1994, especially 174–179. Milbank’s
Theology and Social Theoryy is inspired by MacIntyrean ideas, although
Milbank criticizes MacIntyre for not being ‘sufficientlyy relativistic or histori-
cist’ (Milbank 1990, 327).
23. What about the condition that a publicly acceptable argument must start
from premises mostt (appropriately situated) reasonable persons would
accept? This suggestion is useless for two reasons. First, the concept ‘reason-
able person’ is not empirical but normative. This makes it unclear what a
claim to the effect that ‘most’ reasonable persons would accept a certain
premise really amounts to. Secondly, appeal to majority opinion has no
force in the context of a discussion about whether it is reasonable to accept a
certain premise or not, which is surely what is relevant here.
24. See, for instance, van Huyssteen 1999, 78.
25. Unless there is independent evidence that would make belief in nature’s
createdness doxastically irresponsible.
26. It could be argued that one can reject the interiorization of the space of
reasons, that is, admit that it is legitimate to appeal to factive perceptual
evidence, but restrict the legitimacy of this appeal to perceptual evidence
for certain (privileged) types of facts only. One could, for instance, argue
that it is legitimate to adduce that one sees that p as evidence for p, if p is a
240 Notes
fact about the physical properties of middle-sized objects, but deny that it is
legitimate if p is an (alleged) fact about the expressiveness of some natural
structure. The question, however, is how this restriction is to be motivated.
It cannot, for instance, be demanded that in order for a certain type of
fact to qualify as belonging to the privileged type, we must have evidence,
besides our perceptual experiences, for the existence of this type of fact.
If this is required in order for us to be entitled to take ourselves to see that
p – where p is a fact of the privileged type – then it is not the case that seeing
that p, by itself, makes knowledge of p available. Something else, besides the
experience, is also needed, viz. independent evidence for the existence of
facts of the p-type. But this contradicts the claim that perceptual experi-
ences can make objective facts directly available. So motivating the restric-
tion in this way is incompatible with rejecting the interiorization of the
space of reasons.
27. Forthcoming. The preliminary title is Revelation as Testimonyy.
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Index
Adams, Edward, 138 Belgic confession, 138

adverbialism, 214 n. 9 Bennett, Jonathan, 209 n. 34
‘Agent Detection Device’ (ADD), Bennett, M. R., 213 n. 89
168–170, 190 bildung,
g 59, 125
Alston, William, 216 n. 40, 221 n. 24, Blessed Rage for Order,
r 238 n. 4
222 n. 42 Block, Ned, 211 n. 54
anthropocentrism, 52, 167 Bonjour, Laurence, 88, 224 n. 63
anthropomorphism, 144, 167 7, 235 Braine, David, 18, 212 n. 70
anti-realism, 15 Brandom, Robert, 126
apophatic theology, 144 Brewer, Bill, 216 n. 42
Aquinas, St Thomas, 18, 21, 137–138, Brown, W. S., 219 n. 2
209 n. 38, 230 n. 41 Bruce, Frederick, 136
argument from analogy, 5, 6, 65, Brunner, Emil, 138
107–108 Buckley, Michael, 142–143
argument from illusion/ Burge, Tyler, 24, 210 nn. 53, 54
hallucination, 40–42, 64, 69, 73, Byrne, A., 215 nn. 16, 18,
106, 131, 132, 215 n. 16 221 nn. 19, 20
critique of, 41–42, 73–74
Argyll, Duke of, 6, 7, 10, 147
7, 148, 151 Calvin, John, 1, 7, 11, 137–138, 139,
Aristotle, 53 142, 144, 231 n. 60
Armstrong, David, 212 n. 57 Cartesian picture, 10, 11, 14–15,
art, 152–154, 157–159, 233 nn. 104, 16–177, 18, 19–21, 26, 28, 62–63,
106 74, 113, 208 n. 20
Atran, Scott, 168–169, 235 nn. 132, Cathey, Robert, 238 n. 4
137, 236 n. 143 Chalmers, David, 111
Augustine, St, 6, 139, 144, 185 Changeux, Jean Pierre, 213 n. 87
Churchland, Paul, 111
Baker, Lynn Rudder, 18, 26–27 7, 29, Clifford, W. K., 101
212 nn. 71, 73, 75 cognitive neuroscience, 30, 34,
’bald naturalism’, 46, 216 n. 34 215 n. 21
Barr, James, 134, 135–136 cognitive psychology, 30, 34,
Barth, Karl, 133–135, 138, 139 165–171, 215 n. 21
behavior coherentism, 49, 72
as expressive of mind, 64–66, 124, common kind assumption, 214 n. 9
131, 159–160, 227 n. 56 computer fugue, 70–71, 178–180,
as ‘intrinsically’ expressive, 64, 66, 185–186, 219 n. 12
68, 105, 122–124, 131, 154–155, concepts
156, 1577, 227 n. 47 as capacities, 43, 50–51, 216 n. 29,
‘mere’, 68, 106, 118, 120, 121 217 n. 56
as objectified, 122–123, 141–142 and normativity, 44, 46–47
‘physical’, 106 perception and, 43–52
psychologically neutral, 68, 69, ‘unboundedness of the conceptual’,
106, 122, 198 48–52
253
254 Index
conceptual scheme, see dualism Diderot, Denis, 104, 225 n. 2

’constitution’ theories, 26 Dingli, Sandra, 217 n. 65
content disenchantment of nature, 53–54, 58,
conceptual, 50–52, 57 7, 60, 228 nn. 123, 131, 140–142, 143
70, 76 disjunction problem, 32, 213 n. 82
dualism between conceptual disjunctivism, 38, 39, 42, 214 nn. 3,
scheme and, see dualism 9, 221 nn. 19, 20
essentialism, 212 n. 63 epistemological, 74, 221 n. 19
narrow, 210–211 n.54 DiYanni, C., 165, 1677, 235 n. 127
non-conceptual, 48, 208 n. 15, Dodd, Julian, 217 n. 65, 218 n. 91
216 n. 42 doxastic responsibility, 95–977,
Conway Morris, Simon, 175–176, 178 172–173, 196
Corcoran, Kevin, 219 n. 2 Dretske, Fred, 28, 213 n. 82, 222 n. 43,
Crane, Tim, 214 n. 9 228 n. 73
Cranfield, Charles, 137 dual component views, 210 n. 54
creation dualism
concept of, 2, 181, 237 n. 27 between conceptual scheme/
ex nihilo, 188 content/the Given/the world, 47 7,
creator, concept of, 2, 3–4, 219 n. 8, 49, 56, 80–81, 216 n. 37
7, 222 n. 39
229 n. 4, 232 n. 78 between norm and nature, 57–60,
Crick, Francis, 67
7, 131, 148, 149, 151, 170 132
criteria, 113–114 substance dualism, 19, 21, 140–141
as defeasible, 114–115 Dunn, James, 136, 229 n. 24
as indefeasible, 119, 150 Durkheim, Émile, 139
as non-inductive evidence, 114
relationship to symptoms, 114, Edelman, Gerald, 237 n. 23
150–151, 157–158 Edwards, Jonathan, 138, 230 n. 47
Csibra, G., 161, 234 n. 110, 235 n. 137 eliminativism, 8, 26, 141, 155,
170–171, 207 n. 18, 224 n. 58
Darwin, Charles, 170, 182–183, 188, epistemological externalism, 88–90,
232 n. 86 224 n. 67
Davidson, Donald, 44, 46, 47 7, 49, 71, ‘epistemological outlook’ or
72, 212 n. 63, 216 nn. 37, 38 ‘framework’, 106–107 7, 117–118,
Dawkins, Richard, 67 7, 148, 149, 151, 120–121, 132
170, 232 n. 90, 236 n. 144 esse est percipi, 42
DeHart, Paul, 238 n. 4 Evans, Gareth, 216 n. 41
Dembski, William, 201 n. 3 Evans, Margaret, 165
Descartes, René, 10, 13, 14, 19–20, evidence
21–22, 88, 140, 198, 208 n. 21, factive, 71–75, 93–94
209 n. 29, 212 n. 61, 224 n. 63, non-inductive, 114, 226 n. 26
231 n. 55 phenomenal, 73, 86
design evidentialist objection, 143
concept of, 677, 69–71, 174–175, evolution
232 n. 85, 232 n.90 as constrained, 175–176
inference, 164–165, 232 n. 80, 234 as convergent, 175–176
n. 114 Darwinian, 173–178
intelligent, see intelligent design indeterminacies in, 185
intuitions of, 165–166 as radically contingent, 175
malevolent, 184–185 theistic, 70, 174, 176–1777, 207 n. 3
Index 255
experience Fish, W., 218 nn. 90, 91

animal’s and children’s, 217 n. 59 Fitzmyer, Joseph, 136, 229 n. 24
as conceptual, 50–52, 57–61, 91 Fodor, Jerry, 36, 211 n. 54, 213 n. 82
as openness to the world, 17 7, 37–38, ‘folk psychology’, 168, 224 n. 58
40–41, 43, 45, 52, 60–61, 91, foundationalism, 94–95, 129
217 nn. 52, 57 Fricker, Elizabeth, 224 n. 65
as relational, 91 functional roles, 277, 211 n. 54
as tribunal, 44, 60 functionalism, 26–27 7, 111
explanations Funkenstein, Amos, 139
causal, 32, 166 fusiform gyrus, 30
evolutionary, 2, 177–178, 237 n. 23
intentional, 166, 177–178, Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 217 n. 59
235 n. 127 Gaskin, Richard, 217 nn. 59, 65
natural scientific, 3, 177–178, 237 Given, see Myth of the Given,
n. 23 see also dualism
of religion, 167–169 Glüer, K., 215 n. 23
teleo-functional, 165–167 7, God, concept of, 3, 133, 143, 145, 229
235 n. 127, 235 n. 137 n. 4, 232 n. 78
expression, 4, 64–65, 150–151 God and Other Minds, 3, 143
artistic, 152–154, 159, 233 n. 104 Godfrey-Smith, Peter, 213 n. 82
convention dependent, 159 Goldman, Alvin, 220 n. 16
linguistic, 156–157 Graff, Delia, 215 n. 18
symbolic, 139 Greco, John, 224 n. 67
expressive Gregory of Nyssa, 144
art, 152–154, 157–159, Guthrie, Stewart, 167–168, 169
233 nn. 104, 106
behavior, 8, 64 Hacker, P. M. S., 213 n. 89
objects, structures, 66–67 7, 105, Haddock, Adrian, 55, 56, 217 n. 65
151–165, 163–164 Haldane, John, 12, 18, 21, 28, 39, 208
properties, 5, 91–92, 149–150 n. 16, 209 nn. 38, 40, 212 n. 65,
extension, 209 n. 50 214 nn. 5, 8, 217 n. 59, 219 n. 2,
externalism about mental content, 17 7, 231 n. 59
19, 23–25, 26, 27–28, 37 7, 82–83, Hardy, Daniel, 238 n. 4
121, 209 n. 45, 210 n. 53, 212 n. Harrisville, Roy, 136
62, 223 n. 47 Haught, John, 238 n. 34
‘externalist revolution’, 23 Heck, Richard, 216 n. 41
social, 210 n. 53 Hegel, G. W. F., 55
see also epistemological Heidegger, Martin, 208 n. 10
externalism Highest Common Factor, 41, 64, 73,
74, 106, 118, 132, 1977, 203
face-perception area, 30 Hume, David, 20, 52–53, 54, 55,
facts 148, 149
as constituents of the world, 208 Hyslop, Alec, 2, 1077, 108, 109–110,
n. 7 111, 1177, 225 n. 5, 226 n. 26,
and objects, 208 n. 7, 218 n. 90 227 n. 41
as true propositions, 56–577,
218 n. 91 idea, 16, 19–20, 21
see also world ‘veil of ideas’, 20
fine-tuning, 146, 234 n. 114 ‘way of ideas’, 20
256 Index
idealism, 15, 33, 48–52, 55–56, 209 n. Kelemen, Deborah, 165–167 7,

45, 217 n. 65 235 n. 127
transcendental, 15, 54–56, Kenny, Anthony, 20
217 n. 65 Kerr, Fergus, 209 n. 38, 219 n. 2
identity theory y Kingsley, Charles, 182
brain/mind, 26–27 7, 212 nn. 57, 62 Kivy, Peter, 152–153
facts/true propositions, 56–57 7, 218 KK-principle, 81, 222 n. 43
n. 91 knowledge
mind/world, 18, 21 background knowledge, 66, 126,
illusion 128–130, 132
argument from, see argument from direct, 126, 228 n. 67
illusion of God, 133–139
veridical, 189 inferential, 65, 126, 228 n. 67
image of God, 171, 188 observational, 126–130, 228 n. 67
impression, 16, 21, 38, 39, 53 perceptual, 126–130
indistinguishability, subjective in a position to know, 220 n. 15
(phenomenal), 40–42, 214 n. 12, Kripke, Saul, 213 nn. 93, 94
215 n. 18, 222–223 n. 46
individuation-dependence, 23, 208 Laurence, S., 216 n. 28
n. 11 learning of perceptual skills,
inside/outside picture, 16 124–125, 128, 160–163
intelligent design theory, 112, Lessius, Leonard, 142–143
164–165, 207 n. 3, 232 n. 80 Lewis, David, 237 n. 29
intension, 209 n. 50 Lindbeck, George, 238 n. 4
intentionalism, 214 n. 9 Locke, John, 20, 21, 22, 140,
intentionality y 209 n. 34
problem of, 10, 34–36 Logue, H., 215 nn. 16, 18, 221 nn.
reduction of, 32–34, 36 19, 20
interface-model of perception, 38–40,
214 n. 9 Macdonald, Cynthia, 212 n. 63,
interiorization, see space of reasons 218 nn. 90, 91
internalism about mental content, Macdonald, Paul, 219 n. 2
18–19, 21–23, 82–83, 90, 209 n. MacIntyre, Alasdair, 202, 217 n. 59,
44, 211 n. 54 239 n. 22
arguments for, 210 n. 54 Malcolm, Norman, 108, 226 n. 26
introspection, 82–83, 88, 224 n. 67 Margolis, E., 216 n. 28
intuitions (Kantian), 45, 47 7, 49 Marshall, Bruce, 239 n. 21
intuitive theists, 166, 169 Martin, Michael G. F., 221 n. 20
matching problem, 14, 15
justification, epistemic, (concept of), McCulloch, Gregory, 12, 18, 33, 208
72, 215–216 n. 277, 220 n. 16 n. 15, 210–211 n. 54
McDowell, John
Kant, Immanuel, 16, 45–46, 49, on concepts, 44–45, 50, 217 n. 59
54–55, 218 n. 76 on ‘criteria’, 115–117 7, 226 nn. 33, 39
and disenchantment of nature, on disenchantment of nature, 52,
54–55 55, 58
on knowledge of God, 133, 229 n. 4 on experience as conceptual,
Kaplan, David, 210 n. 53 50–51, 57 7, 59, 60, 71–72, 217 n. 59,
Kaufman, Gordon, 202 228 nn. 70, 76
Index 257
McDowell, John – continued as a theoretical entity, 111–112

on experience as ‘openness to the transparency of, 42–43, 215 n. 19,
world’, 72–74 223 n. 54
on human behavior as expressive, Mind and World, 17, 18, 38, 43–61,
64–66, 157 228 n. 70, 232 n. 84
on idealism, 48–52, 55–56, mind/world identity theory,
217 n. 65 18, 21
on the ‘interiorization’ of the space misrepresentation, 213 n. 82
of reasons, 77–81 Moreland, J. P., 219 n. 2
on Kant, 45, 54–55 Müller-Lyer illusion, 147
on the Myth of the Given, 47–48 Murphy, Nancey, 188–189, 219 n. 2
and the OM view, 11–12, 17–18 Myth of the Given, 47–48, 49, 96,
on the ‘organ of thought’ view, 216 nn. 38, 40
34–36, 212 n. 65
on other minds, 118–123, 228 n. 76 natural theology, 3–4
on perception and learning, in the bible, 135–138
124–125 in the Christian tradition, 135–139,
on perceptual and theoretical 230 n. 41
knowledge, 126–130 critique of, 133–135, 142–143
on rationality/justification, 85–87 7, Hebrew, 136
96–977, 220 n. 16, 224 nn. 65, 67 inferential (classical) vs perceptual,
on re-enchantment of nature, 145–146
56–60, 141–142, 231 n. 59 naturalism, 123
on skepticism, 68–69, 75–77 7, 82, ‘bald’, 46, 123, 132, 216 n. 34
217 n. 49 ‘relaxed’, 60, 132
on the space of reasons/realm of naturalized platonism, 60
law, 31, 44, 59, 213 n. 79 Neta, R., 89, 224 n. 65, 225 n. 67
on spontaneity and receptivity, norm and nature, relationship
46–48, 50–51 between, 57–60, 132
on Wittgenstein, 122–123 Nygren, Anders, 229 n. 24
see also under other topics
McGinn, Colin, 208 nn. 1, 11, Ochs, Peter, 238 n. 4
210 n. 51, 212 n. 62 Ockham, William of, 21
McGrath, Alister, 134, 138 Ogden, Schubert, 202
Merleau-Ponty, 208 n. 10 Open Mind (OM) view, 11, 17–18, 26,
Mersenne, Marin, 142, 143 31, 37
7, 63, 74, 90–91
Milbank, John, 238 n. 4 ‘organ of thought’ view, see mind
Millar, Alan, 220 n.14 other minds
Millikan, Ruth, 213 n. 82 argument from analogy for,
mind 107–108
Cartesian picture of, see Cartesian conceptual problem of, 146
picture ‘criterial’ approach to,
as deus ex machina, 141, 230 n. 55 113–117 7, 226 nn. 26, 33, 39
interpenetration of mind and McDowell on, 118–124
world, 11, 17 7, 25–26, 42 problem of, 2, 68, 105, 106–107 7,
as an ‘organ of thought’, 19, 25–29, 146, 225 n. 5, 227 nn. 41, 43,
34–36, 37 7, 91, 212 n. 61, 214 n. 95 232 n. 77
as a system of world-involving scientific inference to, 105,
capacities, 28–29, 36 108–113
258 Index
Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 144 universal norms of, 101, 103, 195,

Papineau, David, 213 n. 82 204–205
Pargetter, Robert, 109, 111 see also justification
Pasnau, Robert, 209 n. 38 Ratzsch, Del, 147 7, 234 n. 115
Patterson, Sarah, 210 n. 54 realm of law, 31–32, 45–46, 58–59,
Paul, St, 1, 11, 67
7, 131, 136–138, 139, 123, 140, 213 n. 79, 231 n. 59
229 n. 24, 230 n. 41 see also space of reasons
Peacocke, Christopher, 213 n. 82, receptivity (Kantian), 45
216 n. 41 relationship to spontaneity,
person, concept of, 144–145 46–52
Piaget, Jean, 165, 167 reduction
Pickstock, Catherine, 238 n. 4 of intentionality, 32–34, 177–178
Place, U. T., 212 n. 57 of normative notions, 46
Plantinga, Alvin, 3, 98–99, 108, 112, re-enchantment of nature, 59–60,
143, 173, 220 n. 16, 224 n. 63, 141, 231 n. 59
227 n. 41, 232 n. 79 Reid, Thomas, 234 n. 115
Plato, 53 reliable process theory, 88
Polkinghorne, John, 177 representation without
practical realism, 212–213 n. 75 representations, 28, 212 n. 65
Pritchard, D., 89, 224 n. 65, 225 n. 67 representationalism
privileged access, 215 n. 19 ‘new’ and ‘old’ versions of,
propositional attitudes, 8, 210 n. 52, 39–40, 214 nn. 5, 8
212–213 n. 71 representations, 13, 26, 34–36, 60, 91,
Putnam, Hilary, 12, 16, 18, 23, 24–25, 214 n. 95
28, 33, 38, 40, 43, 209 nn. 49, 50, Riddley, Aaron, 6, 152–153,
210 nn. 51, 53, 54, 215 nn. 16, 18, 233 n. 106
217 n. 59 Robinson, Howard, 215 n. 16,
221 n. 20
Quine, W. V., 8, 16, 224 n. 58 Robinson, Paul, 116
Romans 1:20, 1, 67 7, 131, 136–138,
radical traditions, 238 n. 4 230 n. 41
Rae, S. B., 219 n. 2 Rorty, Richard, 31, 44, 46, 47 7, 49, 71,
Rahner, Karl, 144 72, 213 n. 79
Rasmusson, Arne, 238 n. 4 Rosenberg, Jay, 216 n. 40
rationality, epistemic Rowlands, Mark, 210 n. 54
and control, 74, 79, 84, 86–87 7, Rudd, Anthony, 117
101–103, 221–222 n. 33 Russell, Bertrand, 214 n. 4
and decision procedures,
101–103 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 209 n. 45
as dependent on ‘favors from the Schantz, R., 216 n. 40
world’, 78–79, 84–85, 89, 100, Schjött, P. O., 137
198, 205 scientific revolution, 53, 58, 140
and luck, 84–87 7, 89 scientism, 32–34, 213 n. 85
as a method, 100–101 Scotus, Duns, 144
relationship to truth, 98–100 Scriptural reasoning, 238 n. 4
self-sufficiency at the level of, 80, Searle, John, 230 n. 55
89–90 second nature, 59, 125
transparency of, 86, 90, 102–103, Sellars, Wilfrid, 31, 44, 46, 47
7, 49, 129,
223 n. 52 216 n. 38, 229 n. 81
Index 259
sense data, 16, 43, 45, 214 nn. 2, 4, 9 postliberal, 195, 202, 204–205, 238
sensibility (Kantian), 45 n. 4
‘side-ways on’ perspective, 56 postsecular, 195, 238 n. 4
Siegel, Susanna, 127–128, 147 7, 228 public character of, 195, 199, 201,
n. 74 238 n. 4
Siewert, Charles, 228 n. 74 revisionist, 195, 198–199, 201–205
skepticism Theology and Social Theory,y 239 n. 22
about a creator, 68–69, 183 Thiemann, Ronald, 239 n. 21
about the external world, 81–82 Thornton, Tim, 217 n. 65, 218 nn.
about other minds, 68, 105 (see also 88, 91
145 –146), 155, 183 token-identity theories, 26, 212 n. 63
responses to, 68–69, 75–77 7, 94, Torrance, T. F., 54, 55, 134, 135
121–123, 221 n. 24 Tracy, David, 198–199, 201–202, 204,
Smart, John J., 212 n. 57 239 n. 18
Smith, Arthur, 215 n. 16, 221 n. 20 transcendental idealism, see idealism
soul, 10, 14, 19 transparency
space of reasons, 31–33, 36, 59, 213 n. of the mental, see mind
79, 224 n. 65 of rationality, see rationality
interiorization of, 77–81, 85–86, Twin-Earth thought experiment,
90, 97
7, 99, 102, 203, 205, 206, 24–25, 209 n. 49, 210 n. 51
239–240 n. 26 critique of, 210 n. 54
sui generis character of, 45–46 two books tradition, 138
see also realm of law Tye, Michael, 228 n. 73
spontaneity (Kantian), 45, 57 7, 59 type-identity theories, 26–27
relationship to receptivity, 46–52
Standard View, 26–27 7, 212 n. 61 understanding (Kantian), 45
Stenmark, Mikael, 213 n. 85,
220 n. 16 Van Huyssteen, Wentzel, 239 n. 24
Strawson, Peter, 54, 218 n. 76, Van Inwagen, Peter, 174, 176,
227 n. 41 236 n. 16
substance dualism, see dualism Vatican II, 138
Summa contra Gentiles, 137
supersensible, 55 Wahlberg, Mats, 214 n. 95, 222 n. 41
supervenience, 22 Walter, Henrik, 237 n. 23
Swart, Gerhard, 137 7, 138 Ward, Graham, 238 n. 4
Swinburne, Richard, 209 n. 40, Ward, Keith, 104, 176–1777, 181, 207 n. 3
219 n. 2 warrant, see justification
symptoms vs criteria, see criteria Wesley, John, 138
Wikforss, Åsa, 23, 112, 128, 129–130,
Taylor, Charles, 12, 16, 17
7, 18, 28, 215 n. 23
150, 151 Williamson, Timothy, 12, 18, 62,
testimony, 206 68–69, 121, 218 n. 91, 220 n. 15,
theology, 62, 144, 238 n. 2 222 n. 41, 223 nn. 46, 47, 49,
apophatic, 144 52, 54
and correlation, 202, 238 n. 4 Wisnefske, Ned, 133, 134
fundamental, 199 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 17 7, 35,
liberal, 195 107–108, 113, 118, 122–123, 213
and philosophy of mind, 62, n. 93, 214 n. 95, 226 n. 39
219 n. 2 Wojtyla, Karol, 144
260 Index
world Wright, Crispin, 56–57

7, 215 n. 27
7,
as coalescing with the space of 217 n. 59
reasons, 87
7, 90, 99
disenchantment of, Yale school, 238 n. 4
see disenchantment Young, Richard, 136
emigration of structure from, 52–56
as God’s body, 164, 207 Zakai, Avihu,
as made up of facts, 56–57
7, 60, 208 n. 7 230 n. 47
relationship God/the world, 164, Ziesler, John, 229 n. 24
188, 207 Zizioulas, John, 144
as thinkable, 52, 56–57 Zuckmayer, Carl, 135

Mats Wahlberg (Auth.) - Reshaping Natural Theology - Seeing Nature As Creation-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2012)

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Reshaping Natural Theology

ISBN 978-1-349-35223-4 ISBN 978-0-230-39314-1 (eBook)

2 Bursting Descartes’ Bubble 13

3 Perception and Concepts 37

5 Perceiving Other Minds 104

6 Seeing Nature as Creation 131

7 Possible Defeaters 172

Many people have contributed to making this book possible. Arne

Is nature creation, or merely the product of blind, non-intentional proc-

behavior of my neighbor to the existence of a mind behind that

fact that a complete, non-intentional, natural scientific explanation of that

vision of things in some work of art’.7 A state of mind, such as a feeling

when it is embodied in such a way as to be made manifest. And

What do we see when we look at the face of a person who is in pain?

capable of being the subject of expressive properties? This seems rather

In the course of that conversation I said to Mr. Darwin, with reference

and upon The Earthworms, and various other observations he made

neurophysiological explanation of (e.g.) my mother’s behavior could

or that nature is creation. The properties mentioned are not expressive

A related difficulty that my proposal encounters is the following.

Cartesian picture. McDowell argues, furthermore, that the Cartesian

The main philosophical resource that I will draw on is the work of

2.1 John McDowell and the Open Mind

To perceive is, according to a natural understanding, to ‘let the world in’.

This means that perceptual experiences, according to this view, are

‘aboutness’-relation unintelligible. According to the Cartesian picture,

I argued that our difficulty in seeing how our minds can be in

perspectives, and this is why we can ‘entertain the nightmare of being

(1) Mental states with representational content are constitutively

what a subject thinks’.12 If it is to be intelligible how perception can

of representations in an ‘organ of thought’. The corresponding features of

2.2 Internalism vs externalism

Descartes has drawn a picture of the mind/world relationship the main

is obscure. Sometimes he seems to use them as synonyms.27 Sometimes

Hume comes to similar conclusions with respect to self-containedness:

For philosophy informs us, that everything, which appears to

So we are screened off from the world by a ‘veil-of-ideas’ or ‘veil-of

second, logical sense in which the mind is self-standing or self-contained,

What is it in virtue of which I am, at this moment, thinking a thought

properties on which my mental states supervene are, according to most

is widely perceived to have overthrown traditional theories ... of

Externalism about mental content is the view expressed by claim (1)

logical (constitutive, internal) relation between the fact that S is a father

2.3 An organ of thought or a system of

The externalist revolution within contemporary philosophy repre-

representational content) have an identity that is determined by the

constitutive of the OM view) is that the mind is a system of capacities

2.4 An objection from science

The OM view claims, as we know, that thinking is not to be conceived

birds represents it incorrectly.y ‘Incorrectly’ is a normative notion. To

in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, g we are

To give an ‘empirical description’ of something is, according to Sellars,

placing it within the space of reasons by considering two different ways

Presently, there seems to be little reason to believe that the reduc-

the task of trying to show that the referential directedness of our

2.5 Dissolving a problem

who connect intrinsically non-representational items (strings of letters

if I close my eyes and visualize, say, my wife’s face, it seems wildly

McDowell’s thought (his visualization) is what it is in virtue of being

(1) Mental states with representational content are constitutively

(3) Perceptual experience is a direct openness to the world that ‘enables

3.1 The interface model of perception

When reflecting on his own philosophical development, Hilary Putnam