John McDowell’s Mind and World argues that our thinking is genuinely in rational contact with an independent reality, without needing a mysterious “Given” or collapsing into a self-contained web of beliefs. The core idea is that experience itself is already conceptually structured, so the world exerts rational, not merely causal, constraint on our judgments.​

The problem McDowell targets

McDowell starts from a familiar modern worry: either

• beliefs are justified only by other beliefs (coherentism), so the world seems to drop out of justification, or

• experience is a non-conceptual “Given” that causes beliefs, but then it cannot rationally justify them.
  He thinks this oscillation between coherentism and the Myth of the Given stems from a bad picture in which “mind” (the space of reasons) and “nature” (the realm of law) are sharply separated.​

Experience as conceptual and world-involving

Against the Myth of the Given, McDowell insists that perceptual experience is not a brute sensory impact but is already an exercise of conceptual capacities. When you see a red cube, your experience has the very same conceptual content that can stand as a reason for the belief “there is a red cube there,” so experience itself belongs to the “space of reasons.”​

Re-enchanting nature and “second nature”

To make this view intelligible, McDowell criticizes a “disenchanted” conception of nature that restricts nature to what can be described in the vocabulary of natural science. He proposes instead that human rational capacities—our ability to live in the space of reasons—are a kind of “second nature” acquired through upbringing and education, yet still fully part of nature.​

Mind–world relation without dualism

On McDowell’s picture, the world does not sit outside the conceptual sphere as a mute cause; rather, when a perceptual judgment is true, it is directly answerable to how things are. Experience is thus a rational openness to reality: the same conceptual capacities that figure in judgment also structure what we are passively presented with, so there is no gap needing to be bridged by a non-conceptual Given.​

Why this matters

This framework aims to preserve common-sense realism—there really is an objective world we know—while avoiding both empiricist foundationalism and pure coherentism. It also provides a model for thinking about agency: just as perception can be a rationally structured openness to the world, action can be seen as the expression of our rational capacities in the natural world, rather than as something ghostly added onto mere bodily movements.​

Perplexity