Intersubjectivity and Receptive Experience

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND RECEPTIVE EXPERIENCE

Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance

ABSTRACT: Wilfrid Sellars’s iconic exposé of the ‘myth of the given’ taught us thatexperience must present the world to us as normatively laden, in the sense that thecontents of experience must license inferences, rule out and justify various beliefs, andrationalize actions. Somehow our beliefs must be governed by the objects as theypresent themselves to us. Often this requirement is cashed out using language thatattributes agent-like properties to objects: we are described as ‘accountable to’ objects,while objects ‘hold us’ to standards, and so forth. But such language is either deeplyanti-naturalistic or trades on a set of metaphors in need of a literal translation. We offeran explanation of how the material features of the world, as received in experience, canrationally constrain our beliefs and practices—one that makes no recourse to thisimagery. In particular, we examine the structure of ostensive practices (that is, practicesof directing one another’s attention to objects and features of the world) and thedistinctive role they play in making us jointly beholden to how things actually are.

1. INTRODUCTION

A crucial payoff of Wilfrid Sellars’s iconic exposé of the ‘myth of the given’ isthis: experience must present the world to us as normatively laden, in thesense that the contents of experience must license inferences, rule out andjustify various beliefs, rationalize actions and so forth. Otherwise the contentsof receptivity will not rationally constrain actions or beliefs, but merely bully

Rebecca Kukla is Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar in the KennedyInstitute of Ethics at Georgetown University. Her research ranges over social epistemology,philosophy of language, philosophy of medicine, and eighteenth century philosophy. Her booksinclude ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons, with Mark Lance (HarvardUniversity Press, 2009) and Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers’ Bodies (Rowman &Littlefield, 2005).

Mark Lance is Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Justice and Peace at GeorgetownUniversity. He works in philosophy of language, metaphysics and epistemology, philosophicallogic, foundations of mathematics, meta-ethics, and political philosophy issues related to socialmovements.

The Southern Journal of PhilosophyVolume 52, Issue 1March 2014

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 52, Issue 1 (2014), 22–42.ISSN 0038-4283, online ISSN 2041-6962. DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12047

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them through causal force, or leave them unconstrained and “spinning in thevoid.”1 Somehow or other our beliefs must be governed by things as they presentthemselves to us. Sellars puts the point this way: our beliefs based directly onperception must be “so to speak, evoked or wrung from the perceiver by theobject perceived.”2 We agree, but this ‘so to speak’ is a pretty substantialdodge. It is our project in this paper to find a way of making sense of thisrequirement—objects must in some sense wring beliefs out of perceivers—that does not invoke a completely implausible and deeply anti-naturalisticmetaphysics.

Typically, philosophers who accept Sellars’s requirement resort to talkingin a funny way: they make it sound as though objects themselves must somehowfunction as quasi-normative agents who can constrain the space of reasons byissuing verdicts, exerting authority, holding us to standards, rebelling againstus, and so forth. For example, John Haugeland speaks of the “normativeauthority of objects,”3 and, employing scare quotes carefully, writes that“objects themselves, unlike any beliefs or statements allegedly about them,can ‘talk back’ ” (Haugeland, 348). And more floridly:

Figuratively, we can think of the phenomena as gaining the power to resist by‘locking arms’ against the skills, with the constitutive standards providing their gripor their ability to lock together. . . . A complex practice can stick its neck outempirically, by giving constituted phenomena this power to resist or refute it (ibid.,338).

Similarly, John McDowell asserts the “centrality to [his] thinking . . . of [his]insistence that experience mediates an authority that objects themselves have overempirical thought.”4

Surely such language of exerting authority, talking back, resisting, andrefuting is metaphorical when applied to worldly objects. Only people—inthe broadest sense—are agents. Metaphors of worldly agency are used toavoid the Davidsonian conclusion that “nothing can count as a reason forholding a belief except another belief,”5 which seems to leave receptiveencounters with the world out of the space of reasons altogether. Davidsoninsists that his is the only non-metaphorical option. For instance, he writes:

1 J. H. McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 67.2 W. Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, ed. R. Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1997), §16.3 J. Haugeland, “Truth and Rule-Following,” in Having Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1997), 338.4 J. McDowell, response in Reading McDowell (New York: Routledge 2002), 305; our

emphasis.5 D. Davidson, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” in Truth And Interpretation:

Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore (Blackwell 1986), 310.

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND RECEPTIVE EXPERIENCE 23

Quine tells us that science tells us that ‘our only source of information about theexternal world is through the impact of light rays and molecules upon our sensorysurfaces.’ What worries me is how to read the words ‘source’ and ‘information.’Certainly it is true that events and objects in the external world cause us to believethings about the external world, and much, if not all, of the causality takes a routethrough the sense organs. The notion of information, however, applies in a non-metaphorical way only to the engendered beliefs, so ‘source’ has to be read simplyas ‘cause’ and ‘information’ as ‘true belief’ or ‘knowledge’ (Davidson, 311–12).

Like those who use the metaphors in question, we resist the Davidsonianconclusion. But a metaphor is not a counter-argument or a theoreticalalternative.

And so we face a dilemma: if, as Davidson thinks, events and objectsimpact us merely causally, then it is mysterious how the deliverances ofreceptivity could rationally constrain what we do, say, or think. If, on theother hand, we try to earn this rational constraint by understanding objects asliterally issuing verdicts, locking arms, exerting authority, and otherwise car-rying on in an agent-like manner, then we end up stuck with an insane formof anti-naturalism. Attributing normative properties directly to objects them-selves requires us to violate a naturalistic picture of the material world, in away that just refraining from engaging in a reductionist project does not.

In this paper we suggest a third path. First, we show how objects canconstrain and have normative significance within our practices even if theyhave no ‘authority’ or other agent-like attributes. We then point out howexperiencing is something we do with our bodies; it is a form of agentialcomportment towards the world rather than something that just happens tous. (This is not a new thought, of course.) We argue that experiencing is notonly an embodied activity but often a social, intersubjective activity. We thenconsider what sort of special social practice this needs to be if it is to enableour receptive experience to be beholden to how things actually are. Inparticular, we focus on ostensive practices—that is, practices of directing oneanother’s attention to objects and features of the world—and their role inenabling perception.

2. INSTITUTING NORMATIVE SIGNIFICANCE

There is a straightforward sense in which the normative significance ofworldly objects and events is neither difficult to earn nor magical. As voicesfrom several corners of philosophy routinely remind us, the normative prac-tices that people engage in are material, embodied practices. From explicitabstract rule-following to physically skilled coping, every normative practiceis something we do with our bodies. But what our bodies do is manipulate and

24 REBECCA KUKLA AND MARK LANCE

negotiate the material world. Hence our normative practices are world-involving; material things and features play integral roles in the pragmaticstructure of these practices and therefore take on normative significance fromwithin the practice. There is no reason, however, why the normative rolesthey play should be at all agent-like. Objects can have normative significancewithout having normative authority.

Consider the norms of food preparation. Food preparation is governedby norms of cultural and family tradition, aesthetic norms, norms that markclass and social status, pragmatic norms of health, efficiency, cleanliness,and much more. All of these are norms enacted by social agents; it is peoplewho prepare food and people who hold themselves and one another to allof these norms. In this sense, they are social norms. And yet, it makes nosense to try to understand any of these normative practices except withreference to the material properties of various ingredients—how they taste,how hard it is to cut them, whether they need to be peeled or shelled orcooked, and so forth. The material properties of ingredients constrain thenormative practices that involve them. It is just a mistake to broil tunasteaks dry, because tuna does not have enough fat to make this preparationpalatable—it is not merely because of some historically contingent socialtradition that we broil tuna steaks over a liquid such as water, wine, or oil.Likewise it is just a mistake to use five-day-old tuna for sashimi, because itwill poison you. At a more intimately embodied level, imagine trying tomove your fingers in the way one does when shelling peas, without pea-pods being present. The skill is not one of moving hands through airspacewhile contingently sometimes doing so in the presence of a pea-pod, butrather a skill of responding to the mass, volume, inertia, and structuralresilience of the pea-pod.

As food preparation norms—including those that are overtly social—develop and become richer, they do so in immediate reciprocal relation to thematerial properties of the objects they involve. So for example, a culture (orfamily) can have a tradition wherein the elderly ladies shell the peas, but itcannot have one in which the very young children slaughter and butcher thepigs. This is a matter of the brute skills, strength, and danger involved in bothtasks, as well as subtler facts about who has time, patience, and attention toperform a task well. Hence the properties of peas and pigs have normativesignificance that constrains normative practice. Once the tradition of the oldladies shelling the peas is established, the properties of peas will be woven intohow this practice can develop. The practice will take on a certain rhythm andtiming that works well with, say, catching up on village gossip or makingcertain kinds of collective decisions. It will allow certain kinds of eye contactand conversation and not others, and so forth. In this context, it makes


perfect sense to say that the barrel of peas to be shelled governs the kind ofconversation that will take place during the shelling. This is not because thebarrel of peas ‘tells us’ anything, but because the physical properties of peasand pea-barrels are woven integrally into the conversational practices of theelderly ladies of the village. On the one hand, the role of the peas in thepractices is fixed by the peas themselves to the extent that their normativesignificance is not subject to renegotiation by social or individual fiat. Therecould not have been a tradition of getting the village gossip and decision-making done while pig-slaughtering. On the other hand, it is contextuallyspecific; there is no reason at all to say that it is somehow an internal featureof pea-barrels that they hold old ladies to having such conversations.

And we need not get so fancy. Consider rain, and the multiple normativesignificances it can have in the context of various practices and goals. Whenit begins to rain, this can make it a bad idea to choose the zoo over themuseum today; it can make it appropriate to take an umbrella and inap-propriate to test-drive those new $400 shoes; it can make it time to harvestthe grapes; it can officially signal the end of a baseball game; it can makeit time to move the fire into the cave, and so forth. Again, the materialfeatures of rain constrain what sorts of world-involving normative practicescan be developed in relation to it, and once these are developed, rain hasconcrete normative significance from inside these practices. The rain neednot ‘tell us’ anything or ‘hold us’ to anything. We are the ones who institute,maintain, and practice the norms of vinification, baseball, fashion, and soforth. But we cannot do this except as embodied beings who engage withrain and its absence; within such engagements, rain has specific normativemeanings and consequences.

If we accept that normative practices can imbue objects with non-arbitrarynormative significance in virtue of involving them, we can then see thatour epistemic, receptive confrontations with the world are themselves suchpractices.

These are embodied practices of disclosing, whose normative upshot is recep-tive knowledge of facts about or features of worldly objects; disclosing theworld is something we do. We use the term ‘disclosing’ and its cognates—borrowing and re-purposing somewhat from Heidegger—to refer to practicesof finding or discovering how things are through a receptive encounter.(By this we mean ‘things’ in the broadest possible sense. One might recep-tively discover things with no clear perceptual correlates, such as waves ofcivic unrest, or even that something is not there—that a regular customer ismissing, for example. This is part of why we use the term ‘disclosing’ asopposed to ‘perceiving,’ which might imply a more traditional roster ofperceptual qualities.)


Of course, all other epistemic practices—inference, experimentation,etc.—are also things we do. We are especially interested in receptive knowledgefor the purposes of this paper, for a few reasons. First, our original questionwas how objects could ‘govern’ our beliefs and actions as they show up inexperience. Second, receptive disclosure, by definition, requires that the part ofthe world disclosed be directly involved in our coming to know about it. Third,and crucially, since receptivity has long been associated with passivity—anassociation we fight hard to break throughout this paper—the claim thatreceptive disclosure is an agential activity may be less intuitively palatable thanthat other forms of acquiring knowledge are such activities.

The point is clearest in cases where disclosing is difficult, and perhapsmediated by the use of technology. When a doctor checks to “see” whether asuspicious mass is a malignant tumor, for instance, she may use a variety oftechniques for interacting with the world, such as manual palpation, MRIscreening, and so forth. Each of these techniques requires her to exercisenormatively contoured skills, which she may exercise successfully or unsuc-cessfully. Her body is engaged interactively with the object she wishes todisclose, and she is responsive to the normatively rich social context thatframes her looking. Within these practices, material features of objects takeon normative significance as indicators of how things are and of what skillsshould be exercised next.

But fancy cases involving rarified skills and technology just make vivid amuch more general point. Making features of the world receptively availableis an activity—or rather, indefinitely many activities. We discover how thingsare through a skillful and sometimes openly reflective process of adjusting ourbodies to them and interacting with them, from the smallest eye adjustmentsupwards. The point is twofold: (1) objects in the world need not have theirown authority, nor need they ‘hold us’ to any particular norms or beliefs, inorder for them to have specific epistemic significance for us. (2) Our skillful,normatively structured interactions with these objects are still receptive: it isfound features of objects that are not up to us, and that we know about in partbecause of our direct empirical interactions with them, that take on norma-tive significance. Furthermore, that significance is also not up to us once it issituated within disclosive and other normative practices.

Thus disclosing is something we do and disclosedness is something weaccomplish. And receptivity should not be equated with passivity—my encoun-ter with objects is receptive, not to the extent that I play a passive role in thisencounter, but instead to the extent that I find or discover them to be acertain way in a direct encounter with them. Indeed, when it comes toobject-involving practices, it seems to us that it is conceptually foolhardy toeven try to sort them into their passive and active components. As we saw in


the case of pea-shelling, it is distorting to think of such practices as anaggregate of voluntary activities and passive encounters with objects. Just asthe activity of pea-shelling is not one of waving one’s fingers around volun-tarily plus bumping into peas, the practice of seeing a tumor on an MRI orhearing a heart murmur through a stethoscope is not an aggregate of doinga bunch of stuff with my body plus images and sounds bumping into my senseorgans. In all these cases, the practice is world-responsive from the ground up,and also essentially agential.

Tumor-spotting and pea-shelling are both normatively structured, world-involving activities, although the first has an essentially epistemic goal and thesecond has a gustatory goal instead. Just as pea-pods constrain shelling prac-tices, receptively encountered objects of any sort constrain disclosive practicessimply by having the material features they have. What makes some but notall epistemic events receptive disclosures is not a special passivity, but that theyinvolve and are suitably constrained by a direct encounter with the part of theworld they disclose.

In one sense, the point we are making here is one that has already beenpushed hard by McDowell, who has insisted, following Kant, that the deliv-erances of receptivity always engage our spontaneous faculties, so that thereis no such thing as a purely passive yet epistemically significant encounterwith the world in experience.6 However, McDowell never situates hisdisclosive moments within a larger context of ongoing embodied social prac-tice; they are moments that engage our spontaneous conceptual faculties, butnot, as he describes it, our practical skills. Rhetorically speaking, McDowell’sencounters with the world in experience show up as oddly isolated, self-standing moments of subject-world confrontation (albeit moments that areconditioned by a history of second-nature habituation and practical skilldevelopment). If we cast disclosedness as a moment of confrontation betweena subject (who has both spontaneous and receptive faculties) and an object,then normative constraints imposed by this confrontation would have tooriginate either from the subject’s spontaneous activities at that moment(which leads to an unacceptably voluntarist constructivism) or the object itself(which leads to an unacceptable attribution of agency or inherent normative

6 For instance, “Even the most immediately observational concepts are partly constituted bytheir role in something that is indeed appropriately conceived in terms of spontaneity. So wecannot simply insulate the passive involvement of conceptual capacities in experience from thepotentially unnerving effects of the freedom implied by the idea of spontaneity. . . . The troubleabout the Myth of the Given . . . shows up again here, in connection with impingements onspontaneity by the so-called deliverances of sensibility. If those impingements are conceived asoutside the scope of spontaneity, outside the domain of responsible freedom, then the best theycan yield is that we cannot be blamed for believing whatever they lead us to believe, not that weare justified in believing it.” (McDowell, Mind and World, 13).


authority to the object). Mixing the two together, as McDowell sometimesseems to do, does not help—components of arbitrary spontaneity and inher-ent normativity are just as philosophically unacceptable once they are com-bined together as they are separately, unless we have a mitigating story aboutspecific ways they constrain and enable one another, and this McDowell hasnever offered. In contrast, once we see encounters with objects as situatedwithin established material, world-involving normative practices, we can seethe practices themselves as the source of the normative significance of theobjects they involve.7

3. INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND NORMATIVE COMMITMENT

We have insisted that worldly objects (other than people, broadly construed)constrain and have normative significance for our practices, but are notagents, or even quasi-agents. As such, they cannot enter into any kind ofsecond-person transactions with us. They cannot give us orders, demandanything of us, or hold us to anything, but insofar as we are already commit-ted to a practice—pea-shelling, reading MRIs, etc.—the constraints thatobjects place on those practices are not up to us, but are rather based in thematerial character of the things themselves.

If we allow ourselves to indulge in existentialist, individualist fancy, wemight get caught up in the following vertiginous worry:

Sure, once I am committed to a practice, objects impose constraints on that practice.But whether I commit to a practice in the first place is up to me. I can opt out of anygiven practice. I need not shell peas, or care about whether there is a tumor revealedby an MRI. And in that case, the world constrains me only because I let it. Since itis central to our picture that objects demand nothing of me, they also cannotdemand that I engage in practices that involve them, and so ultimately it is optionalwhether and how they constrain me.

This does not look like the robust kind of accountability to how things are thatwe sought. John Haugeland, at his most Sartrean, embraces this kind ofindividualist voluntarism:

7 Here and since the beginning, we have felt free to talk about receptive encounters withobjects. A good Kantian may well object that this misses the deep problem—by the time thesensible manifold can show up to me as synthesized into objects, we are already taking things ashaving a conceptually articulate structure and hence as already planted within the space ofreasons. McDowell, for one, is often concerned with the earlier problem of how sensibility canbe received as organized in this way in the first place. For the most part, we are just notattempting to solve this ground-level problem here. We are concerned with the more generalproblem of how the things we receive in experience grip our practices without having inherentor arbitrarily imposed normativity.


The governing or normative ‘authority’ of an existential commitment comes fromnowhere other than itself, and it is brought to bear in no way other than its ownexercise—that is, by self-discipline and resolute persistence. A committed individualholds him or herself to the commitment by living in a resilient, determined way.Thus, its authority is sui generis in a stronger sense than just ‘of its own genus’: it is ofits own genesis, self-generated.8

But this strikes us as fundamentally wrong.9 Generally speaking, we cannotsimply opt out of our normative commitments through an exercise of will. Noamount of self-discipline or resolute persistence can alter the fact that the wallis disclosed to me as solid, that the cell under the microscope shows up ashaving divided, and so forth. But we do not think that the anti-voluntaristicpoint is restricted to disclosive practices. In this section, we back away fromdisclosive practices temporarily, and consider the broader question of how wecome to be legitimately committed to normative practices, other thanthrough a sheer act of self-generated individual commitment.

In a sense the answer to how we are held non-voluntaristically to ourcommitments to various norms is fairly obvious: the world can demandnothing of us and holds us to nothing, but our normative practices are,generally speaking, intersubjective and collaborative, and other people withwhom we engage in practices are indeed agents who hold us to all sorts ofthings. Add to this the fact that, as we explored above, our practices aretypically essentially object-involving, and we earn the result that other peopleensure that worldly objects and events have specific normative significancesfor us that we cannot simply choose to ignore.10 It is in fact quite odd thatHaugeland feels the need to insist that “a committed individual holds him orherself to the commitment by living in a resilient, determined way,” for thereare plenty of other people around to hold us to our commitments. Philoso-phers have discussed at length how agents enforce norms, holding one anotherto the standard demanded by those norms, rewarding and punishing oneanother for following or violating norms of rationality, etiquette, food prepa-ration, etc. But we, like Haugeland, are interested not just in how we come tobe subjected to norms but how we come to be committed to them—that is, howwe each come to have the kind of stake in the norm that makes the normative

8 Haugeland, “Truth and Rule-Following,” 341.9 As indeed it did to Haugeland himself, when the quotation was read back to him in 2009.10 One should not conflate this sort of normative inescapability with brute causal conse-

quences of rejecting a normative practice. The Shakers rejected the practice of biologicalreproduction. Conversion aside, if they stick to that they will cease to exist. But this dire causalconsequence of their rejection of a normative practice does not prove that the rejection itself wasimpossible, since it clearly was possible. I can adhere to or reject various norms in ways thatradically increase my chance of imminent demise, but the poor consequences of my choices donot somehow show that I actually had different normative commitments than I seemed to.


significance of the objects involved in its practice matter to us. And the pointis that we hold one another to these commitments, and not just to thenormative standards to which one becomes committed.

Once we focus our attention on how we hold one another to our normativecommitments in the course of our world-involving, intersubjective practices,we start to uncover a wide variety of types and strengths of holding. Considertwo extremes:

At one end of the spectrum, we have games; here there is little or nointersubjective holding of one another to commitment to the norms. Indeed,we might define a (mere) game as a practice such that participation in itsnormative structure is voluntary. If I decide to play chess with you, then I ambound by—and you can and will hold me to—the rules of chess. I do not getto move the bishop horizontally if I am playing chess. But it is completely upto me whether or not to play chess, and if I decide not to, then the rules ofchess have literally no grip on my practices. It is not a norm for me at all todefend my queen if I am not playing chess. It is in the nature of games thatcommitment to playing them is optional, whereas what is allowed withinthem is intersubjectively constrained.11

At the other extreme, and leaving aside epistemic practices for the timebeing, are commitments to practices that a community treats as completelynon-negotiable, as part and parcel with standing as an agent within thatcommunity. This may be a theoretical limit that is approached but never fullymet, but we can imagine some close cases: a very religious society may takecommitment to the norms of that religion as completely non-optional, in thesense that there is really no way to function as a recognizable member of thatsociety unless one acknowledges the force of those norms. Or a society withrigid gender roles may enforce commitment to gender norms. In other soci-eties, these religious norms may have no grip at all and the gender norms maybe different, but within a community, commitment to these norms may bealmost completely mandatory. In such a community, it is just not up to anindividual whether or not to take a particular baked treat as having someritual significance, for instance, or whether or not to take a particular necktieas masculine.

Remember, our point here is not about following the norms. It is in thenature of norms that they are able to be transgressed—it is always pos-sible for an individual to desecrate a sacred ritual object, or to wear

11 Commitment to an actual game may not be quite so optional—the high school’s starquarterback may be pressured into remaining on the team and playing out the season; mypartner may be annoyed with me if I do not finish the chess game—but this is just to say thatin such cases these are not functioning as ‘pure’ games.


gender-transgressive clothing. The point is, rather, that in doing so, she willindeed be transgressing: engaging in behavior that violates a norm whose forceshe and others recognize, and hence mis-using an object with normativesignificance—perhaps to make a strategic point, and perhaps just by mistake.And this is so because she is embedded in a community that is bound togetherby its members’ abilities to hold one another to commitments, to demand andrequest of one another that they recognize and participate in various norma-tive practices, and so forth. Assuming that no set of religious practices isgrounded in true facts about the world and no set of gender norms is fullyfixed by immutable biological facts, these bodies of norms are not onlytypically culturally relative but also ontologically optional, in the sense thatthe world does not determine that these must be the norms. But this does notmake commitment to them optional for individuals, who are called upon torecognize their force even if they transgress them.

Between these two extremes lies a wide and rich range of intersubjective,world-involving norms, commitment to which is neither optional nor man-datory. For example, while playing any particular game may be optional, itmay be difficult for adolescent boys in our culture to relinquish or refuse acommitment to the general importance of sports and athletic success. Plentyof boys avoid athletic competition, but failing to be committed to the value ofathletics and the norms that go along with this is a far more difficult socialachievement. Likewise, girls in our culture may resist norms of feminineself-care (polishing one’s nails, shopping for clothes as a social activity,shaving one’s legs, etc.), but resisting the grip of these norms is far moredifficult, because we have wide, varied, and strong practices in place by whichwe hold one another to commitment to these norms.

Practices exhibit wide variety not just in how optional our participation inthem is, but in what it takes to enter or exit them. Think about what isinvolved in entering or exiting a tight-knit group of friends, bound together bya complex web of mutual obligations, responsibilities, and values. One cannotsimply choose to enter or extricate oneself from such a web in an act of will;one can join the group, but only through a complicated intersubjectiveprocess through which members of the group become emotionally and prac-tically intertwined and involved in the project of caring about one another’swell-being in complex ways. The exit conditions are not straightforwardeither: among real friends, simply violating the norms of friendship does notautomatically excommunicate you from the group or release you from yourcommitment to recognizing the grip of its norms.

Furthermore, there is a rich diversity of performances that we use to drawone another into bodies of norms, hold one another to them, and release eachother from them. For example, consider what happens when two people enter


into a romantic relationship. Any such relationship develops its own, internalset of normative commitments and practices. Many of these commitmentswill grant new normative significance to various objects; for instance, someobjects now become ours, rather than just mine. Particular places and eventswill have a distinctive normative significance for us. Perhaps my apartmentbecomes one that you now are entitled to access in new ways. And in all sortsof ways, we will hold one another to the commitments that afford objects thisnew significance. I cannot legitimately demand that you take up these com-mitments; at no point can you be obligated to enter into or stay in such arelationship with me. But just as much, I do not merely state facts about mydesire for you to take up these commitments and hope that you completelyvoluntarily choose to buy into a set of joint practices. Rather, we suggest,invite, and perhaps even implore one another to do so.

Precisely because games lie at one end of the voluntaristic spectrum, we aresuspicious of the philosophical habit of treating games as paradigmaticexamples of normative practices that can be used to exhibit the structure andontology of normative force and commitment more generally.12 The textureand diversity that we have explored in the last few paragraphs does not showup in cases where participation in a body of norms is purely voluntary. If webegin with games, the existentialist vertigo we described near the start of thissection may seem inevitable. On our account, games are helpful examples forsome specific purposes but definitely cannot be used as theoretical tools withwhich to explain full-blooded normative responsiveness and commitment inall its many shades.

This is an opportune moment to take stock of where we are in our largerargument. In the first section of the paper, we claimed to have shown thatobjects can impose normative constraints on our receptive, disclosive prac-tices without being agent-like. But as long as those constraints have theirorigin or ground in some kind of voluntaristic or optional choice on the partof perceiving agents, we will not have found the kind of objective constraintwe need. In this section, we argued that commitment to norms is not,typically, simply ‘up to me,’ but is instead socially compelled and constrainedin various interestingly different ways. But when we return to the norms ofdisclosure, we need to find a stronger kind of non-optionality of normativecommitment than those we have explored in this section. Epistemic normsare still norms, and hence not unavoidable in the way the law of gravity or theprinciple of natural selection is unavoidable. Yet it still cannot be ‘up to us’

12 Several of the essays in Haugeland’s Having Thought and Wittgenstein’s PhilosophicalInvestigations (rev. 4th ed., ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, Wiley-Blackwell 2009) areexcellent examples.


what the proper epistemic norms are, because if it were, then it would beimportantly up to us how the world is, and when our perception of it iscorrect—and that is a kind of anti-realist social constructivism that we do nottake seriously here. In the next section, we try to articulate a sense in whichdisclosive practices, and more generally epistemic practices, have the special,stronger sort of objectivity that they need.

4. INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND RECEPTIVE EXPERIENCE

As we have seen, once I am embedded in a practice and committedto its norms, the normative significance of various features of the materialworld is no longer simply ‘up to’ me. To be embedded in the practiceof pea-shelling (in a particular village) is to be subject to constraintspartly constituted by the material features of peas. Furthermore, we haveargued that whether I am embedded in a practice and committed to itsnorms is also not typically simply up to me. Other people can hold me notonly to norms that I voluntarily embrace but also to participation invarious institutionalized normative systems. And again, from within thesenormative systems, the significance of various worldly objects is not up tome.

But our guiding interest in this paper is in epistemic norms, and in particu-larly with norms of disclosure. We want to understand how receptive experi-ence can present the world in a way that constrains belief, licenses inference,and so forth. And an important difference between practices of perceivingand practices of pea-shelling seems to be this: as long as pea-shelling practicesare working smoothly—their participants can coordinate their behavior andachieve their practical goals using them—then there is no further sense inwhich the practices could be wrong. Another group that shells peas differ-ently, but effectively, simply has different practices. There is no inherentconflict between the two sets of practices; a tolerant ‘shell and let shell’ policyleaves no residual normative tension.

In contrast, epistemic practices are only successful if they get the worldright, in a sense that is independent of the practices themselves. The properresponse to noticing that the Japanese stand a different distance in conver-sation than do the English is to resolve to follow the relevant norm in therelevant context, not to assume that one or the other must be the correctnorm of conversational distance. But if the Japanese think that a given rangeof empirical data confirm theory T, and the English think it does not, onesimply does not just get to say, “well, then, T is true in Japan, and false inEngland.” The norms of confirmation are not contextually bound in the waythat the norms of shelling or dressing are—this is one sense in which they are


distinctively non-optional. This difference inherently constitutes a disagree-ment or conflict over how the world is.

If a group’s or species’ practices for representing and responding to objectsas they are presented in experience are disclosive epistemic practices, then thefollowing scenario must be possible: these practices work smoothly and allowfor successful coordinated activity, yet they get the world wrong, and in thatsense are failed practices. What makes the results right is not that they alloweffective and socially acceptable functioning, but that they disclose the worldproperly. There is no reason that there cannot be systematic practices ofmisrepresenting or misperceiving objects that are adaptive as far as effectivecoordination and action go. When the risk of false positives greatly outweighsthe risk of false negatives, or vice versa, it can be efficient for us tomisperceive. McKay and Dennett catalogue some of these in their article,“The Evolution of Misbelief.”13 They cite empirical evidence to suggest thatmen systematically perceive women as more sexually interested in them thanthey are, and that we all perceive our own babies as cuter than they are, withevolutionary advantages in both cases. These and the other examples theygive are empirically contentious, as they point out, but our point is a concep-tual one: there is no a priori reason to assume that true beliefs and accurateperceptions are always the most efficient.

But this means that no story about norms of efficiency, including socialefficiency, will give us an account of the norms of truth. A disclosive practicecan be wrong quite independently of its instrumental functionality. You canshell peas wrong within a pea-shelling practice, and what counts as wrong willbe partly determined by the material features of peas. But as long as you arecoping with the peas successfully, by material and social standards, you aredoing it right. On the other hand, you can misperceive peas even when yourmaterial and social pea-coping is going smoothly.

Hence our epistemic practices, including our receptive perceptual prac-tices, have a special normative structure. When we hold one another to them,we are holding one another to a commitment to getting the world right,where the standard of correctness is how things really are. And this involvesholding one another to a standard that is itself outside any social standards ofacceptability or efficiency. Unlike McDowell or Haugeland, we are notwilling to assert that objects ‘hold’ us to standards of correctness or that we are‘accountable’ to objects. We are in the first instance accountable to otherpeople and it is other people who hold us to things (although we can perhapsderivatively be accountable to ourselves). So our task is to understand how we

13 Ryan McKay and Daniel Dennett, “The Evolution of Misbelief,” Behavioral and BrainSciences 32 (2009), 493–561.


can engage in collaborative social practices in which we hold one another not justto coping appropriately with objects, but to getting them right. We also needto understand the normative role that the objects themselves play in thosepractices.

Here is one helpful way of thinking about the difference between the twokinds of practices. Pea-shelling and similar activities are engineering practices. Insuch cases, the standard of correctness for the practice is internal to thepractice itself; if we manage to cope successfully with objects and with oneanother by engaging in such a practice, then that practice is a success. Surelythere are creatures that engage only in engineering practices. Squirrels findand hoard nuts, and however they do it, as long as they manage to have thenuts they want when they want them, their practice is a success. We can alsoimagine creatures that still only engage in engineering practices, but whosepractices are highly sophisticated, involving a great deal of coordination andjoint action. These super-squirrels are exceptionally adept social and materialengineers but have no beliefs or stance on how things are at all.14 They mightdevelop a complicated system of differentiated labor for collecting, storing,shelling, and distributing nuts, say. In doing so, they will have to coordinatetheir responsiveness to objects. That is, they will need to have practices thatenable them to get other squirrels to engage with the same objects they areengaging with; super-squirrel A must be able to do something that getssuper-squirrel B to deliver a certain nut to her, or whatever. But, crucially, itdoes not make sense to ask of the super-squirrels whether they are getting thenuts in the correct way. As long as they succeed in coordinating and carryingout their task, there is nothing more to ask.

We can even posit that our engineering super-squirrels use things we wouldbe tempted to call representations, whether internal or external, in order tocoordinate and cope; they might mark the location of the nuts in a way thatenabled other squirrels to find them. But whether such representationswere accurate would be, by hypothesis, a meaningless question to ask aboutthem. All we could ask is whether they contributed to the practice runningsmoothly. It is only once values of truth and disclosure come into the picturethat we can sensibly ask whether a representation represents its referenceaccurately.15

It would be easy, at this point, to confuse the question we are askingwith an epistemological question that we do not pretend to answer here.

14 Our super-squirrels, by stipulation, are mere engineers. We have no special advice for youif what you are trying to do is to figure out whether your pet is a super-squirrel or an actualtruth-seeking epistemic squirrel.

15 And hence we might not want to call the squirrels’ marks representations at all; whatmakes something count as a representation is a thorny nest beyond the scope of this paper.


An epistemologist might ask: if everything is working smoothly, how can wetell if we are getting objects right or wrong? How do we know whether oursocial practices of disclosure and justification are in fact the appropriatepractices for getting the world right? But we are trying to get at a pragmaticrather than an epistemological question here. We want to know: what sort ofsocial practice involves us holding one another to getting objects right ratherthan merely coping with them effectively, and how can objects play a role insuch a practice? How one would check whether that practice is successful isa different matter. If one mistakenly thinks that we are trying to answer theepistemological question, then the problem as we have set it out here canseem insoluble: after all, the actual norms we are committed to are the onlynorms we have for telling how things are. If our practices are workingsmoothly for telling how things are, from a material and social point of view,then it seems that we have all that we can have. How could we distinguishbetween practices that merely aim to get things right and those that succeed?

But once one notices that we are asking a pragmatic question, we can seethat there are all sorts of relevant structural differences between intra-contextual engineering practices and inter-contextual epistemic practices. Forinstance, if we are engaged in epistemic projects, then we are committed totaking any other sets of practices that yield contrary results as in conflict withours, and those that follow them as disagreeing with us. We must take anyoneelse who is engaged in epistemic practices as committed to beliefs that arecommensurable with our own; there is an essential sense in which, even if theydo things differently and come to different conclusions, we are engaged in thesame project, and one another’s findings must be hashed out in the samespace of reasons. None of this is true for norms of pea-shelling or dressing.And we are likewise committed, in the epistemic case, to acknowledging thatour own standards of appropriateness are not the measure of the correctnessof the practice; rather, the measure is how the world is. As Haugelandeloquently argued in “Truth and Rule Following,” a distinctive mark ofepistemic practices is that they are always at risk of failing no matter howinternally successful and socially entrenched they are. There is no amount ofpractical and social success that adds up to a guarantee that we are disclosingobjects as they really are.16 When we hold one another to participation in anepistemic practice and commitment to its norms, we hold one another toan openness to discovering that a practice that is functional and socially

16 In developing this point, Haugeland makes liberal use of exactly the language we reject;he says that our epistemic practices are accountable to objects, that it is ‘up to the objects’ andnot to us whether we get them right, and so forth. We have reached the point in this paperwhere we can make Haugeland’s point without relying on the metaphors we were trying toeliminate.


acceptable still is not right, because it does not capture objects properly.These commitments make a pragmatic difference, even if we cannot thrustourselves outside our own functional practices in order to check them.

It would also be easy to make the mistake of giving a descriptive pragmaticanalysis of the wrong sort. As we argued above, epistemic practices are specialin that social practices that yield conflicting results necessarily count as com-petitors to one another. When we try to discern how things really are, we areseeking an answer whose correctness is essentially inter-contextual ratherthan relative to a practice. But this does not mean we cannot tolerate disagree-ment over how things really are. We might be completely insouciant aboutthe fact that the inhabitants of some village use sheep entrails to predict thefuture and perceive the faces of their dead ancestors in the trees; we need nothold them to defending their practices or admitting we are right in rejectingthem. This might be because we do not take them as having made a claimabout the world at all; we could just treat them as if they are engaging in anodd ritual dance. But even if we do take them as claim-makers, our belief thatthey are using corrupt epistemic practices may not practically trouble us.None of this undercuts the normative fact that, if they are making claims, theyare in a state of conflict or disagreement with us, whether or not we know itor practically acknowledge it. Their practices are objectively in tension withours, in a way that the different pea-shelling practices one village over are not.To whatever extent we acknowledge them as making a claim with objectivepurport, we also have to acknowledge this tension.

Conversely, we are often intolerant of social practices that are not inobjective tension with our own in this way. We may be far from insouciantabout the fact that some group has different gendered dress codes than we do,shells the peas differently, or whatever, and we may try to hold members ofthat group to defending or relinquishing these practices. But this does notmean that there is any objective conflict between the practices. Our desire toeliminate a difference does not automatically add up to a commitment to thatdifference constituting an incoherence. So, whatever we say about the specialstructure of disclosive practices, it cannot come to some variant on the ideathat we try to impose them on everyone rather than just on in-group members.

Ostension is the act of drawing someone’s attention to an object or itsfeatures. It is in the first instance a social practice; although I can perhapsostend something to myself, this is at best a derivative form of ostension. It isalso a normative social practice. An ostension is no mere causal interventionthat has as a result your looking at something. Rather, when I ostend I call onyou to take up a form of engagement with an object. At the same time,ostension is essentially a disclosive practice that is governed by norms of truth.When I point your attention towards something—a rabbit in the bush, an


unusual dark spot on an MRI—I am not merely coordinating our actions. Itis part of the normative structure of my act that I am trying to bring you tosee what is really there, how things really are.

Ostension seeks to produce an epistemic commitment with the specialinter-contextual structure we discussed above. The proper upshot ofostension is perception. I cannot take myself to perceive X (say, a chestnut),while at the same time allowing that if someone else perceives that object assome other incompatible thing (a walnut perhaps), or denies there is an objectthere at all, that his perception and mine are both correct. Hence we cannotanalyze what it is for an ostension to be successful without reference to thereal character of that which is ostended.

If I attempt to ostend something that is not really there, or to direct yourattention to some feature of an object that it does not actually have, then myostension is unsuccessful, and this is so even if you do not notice this and wecoordinate our behavior successfully. I might point and say to you: “Check itout! A giant spider!” and you might see some patch that you take to be aspider in light of my call. If we then run away to avoid it, our behavior mightbe perfectly coordinated. But if I were actually pointing at a scorpion, myostension still fails, qua ostension. Again, this is not itself an epistemologicalpoint; it is not like we have some clear standards for telling, from the ostensivepractice and its results, whether someone has disclosed the object correctly.Rather, it is part of the normative structure of the ostension that it onlysucceeds if it results in direct receptive attention that gets the world right.

Ostending is much more than just pointing, of course. We can ostend withspeech acts—from “lo, a rabbit!” all the way to subtle cases such as “remem-ber last time Sarah and Andrea were fighting? Well, look at Sarah’s facialexpression now—look familiar?” Ostension can be a complex act involvingall sorts of bodily manipulation. A doctor who wants to ostend a tumor for herstudent might guide the finger of a student to a particular point in theabdomen of the patient and say, “press this hard and note how it feels!” orgive him salient background information that allows the student to gain moreby way of his own observational engagement: “remember the sort of tumorthat was discussed in class yesterday as you look at this image.”

In practices of ostension we call on one another to have a receptiveencounter with an object or feature in the world. Not all epistemic coordi-nation works this way; we can dispute about a claim, cite evidence, etc.,without this receptive component. But ostension is a world-involving socialpractice in a direct sense that not all social epistemic practices are. Considerfurther the teacher ostending a tumor for a medical student. In order for thestudent to achieve the epistemic state the teacher calls upon him to have, hemust perceive the tumor for himself. Alternatively, he might come to believe


that the doctor is right about the presence of the tumor on the basis of indirectevidence. Perhaps he knows that this doctor has an excellent track record forspotting tumors, and is convinced that her vision is probably correct. This canbe a completely legitimate epistemic move, but it is not receptive disclosure.Importantly, for our purposes, ostension requires that the tumor itself guidethe student’s epistemic state. For this to be so, the student has to come to seeas the doctor can, with her help perhaps, but for himself.

Ostension brings about such receptive encounters when it is successful.17

Sometimes it does so by drawing on perceptual capacities that the targetalready has, and merely directing his attention. In other cases, the ostensivepractice helps to develop receptive perceptual capacities that were not yetfully formed in the target; through the ostension, he not only comes to seewhat he did not before, but he comes to be able to see what he could notbefore. Think of Sellars’s necktie salesman, John, who learns to see that anecktie is green as his colleagues take him outside and show him how the tiechanges its apparent hue.18 Sometimes, we collaborate with one another in ajoint process of ostension, coming to see things differently or make newdiscriminations together by shaping one another’s practices of attending. Imight for instance discuss a new painting with a fellow artist in a way thatallows both of us to see features of it that we could not see on our own.19 Thisjoint practice can involve physical manipulation of objects, changing ourposition relative to them, talking, imagining, having some coffee and thenlooking again, and much more. Ostension is an intersubjective activity thatresults in receptive disclosure, but practices of attending and directing atten-tion are by no means necessarily passive; they can be as active—and asobject-involving—as pea-shelling or anything else.

Thus, through a wide variety of practices of directing one another’s atten-tion, we can hold one another to engaging in practices of disclosure that areobject-involving, and more specifically we can hold one another to lettingobjects have a normative significance for our practice that cannot be cashedout in terms of significances internal to an engineering practice. Remember,

17 Our concern is with the pragmatic role that ostension plays in our collaborative disclosivepractices. Ostension is successful, for our purposes, when it results in the target of the ostensionperceiving (rather than misperceiving) the thing ostended. There are plenty of famousWittgenstein-flavored worries about how to settle the reference of ostension. We are not tryingto respond to those worries. We are interested in the social structure of ostension, however ‘thething ostended’ gets settled.

18 Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, §§14–15.19 We are grateful to an anonymous referee for drawing our attention to Arnold Isenberg,

“Critical Communication,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 58, No. 4 ( Jul. 1949), 330–44. In thispaper, Isenberg emphasizes this sort of ostensive call in the case of art, and develops it into anaccount of the proper function of art criticism.


even when a super-squirrel does something designed to get another super-squirrel to respond to a particular object, the only standard of super-squirrelsuccess is smooth and functional coordinated activity. But when we ostend,we hold the target of our ostension to a standard of correctness that applies toall epistemic agents—one that applies even if we do not know about it andeven if our actual perceptions are systematically wrong. Objects cannot tell uswhen we have them right, nor hold us accountable to getting them right.Rather, we hold one another to practices of disclosure in which ‘how’ theobject is, independent of these practices, is the proper measure of theirsuccess. Accordingly, in the context of ostension, we take differences in uptakeas normative tensions between commensurable epistemic states with objectivepurport.

We promised that in this section we would articulate the sense in whichepistemic norms, including norms of disclosure, are ‘non-optional’ in a waythat pea-shelling norms are not. There is a sense in which the epistemic normsare perfectly ‘optional.’ Ants, squirrels, and even super-squirrels have elabo-rate shared engineering practices but presumably no epistemic practices—they are not capable of making claims with objective purport. Nor can theobjects themselves literally make claims on us or hold us to any particularstandard; that was the jumping-off point for this paper. We are, however,finally in a position to claim two other kinds of non-optionality for epistemicnorms.

First, any community of creatures that is engaged in any kind of epistemicactivity—any community that cares about how things really are, unlike super-squirrels—must take their epistemic norms to be inter-contextually valid. Theright norms are the ones that get the world right, and any incompatibility isa challenge. Second, any creatures that share any epistemic practices—that is,a community whose collaborative practices include practices of checking howthe world is, making claims to one another with objective purport, disputingwith one another, etc.—will have to share ostensive practices. Receptiveencounters have to form a part of our epistemic activities, if these activities areto have any friction from the empirical world at all. This point is well known,but what is less noticed is that we need to be able to coordinate with oneanother, to establish that that there is the thing we are both talking about. If wehad no norms in place for coordinating our encounters, we would be unableto anchor our claims to be talking and arguing about the same things. Weneed to be able to coordinate our epistemic practices just like we need to be ableto coordinate our other concrete, object-involving practices. Ostension is thebasic tool with which we carry out this coordination. Although we of courseeach have all sorts of receptive experience all on our own, ostension is centralto our sharing a common empirical world that we can explore and dispute


about together. The material features of our world take on normative signifi-cance in the context of such joint exploration and disputation. By participat-ing together in these practices, we hold one another accountable for epistemicresponsiveness to our surroundings.20

20 This paper has benefitted from comments and discussion from audiences at theInternational Society for Phenomenological Studies meeting in Pacific Grove, CA in 2009, andthe Sellars Centenary Conference and Workshop in Dublin, Ireland in 2012. John McDowellprovided invaluable feedback on an earlier version of the paper. Three anonymous refereesgave us exceptionally helpful comments on the penultimate draft.


Intersubjectivity and Receptive Experience

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