The Question of Idealism in McDowell

At various points, and in different writings, John McDowell recognizes that he is liable to be regarded as a kind of idealist. Thus in Mind and World he imagines someone asking him: 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? (1994: 40) And in similar vein, in the Woodbridge Lectures, he anticipates a critic making the following challenge: [O]ur attempt to make sense of conceptual activity as having objective purport degenerates into an " idealistic " fraud; the so-called reality toward which we see our so-called conceptual activity as directed is a mere projection of the activity. (1998a: 470) In this paper I want to argue that McDowell's distinctive view of the relation between thought and reality is only defensible if we adopt a form of idealism which is similar in character to the one which he anticipates in such remarks as these, although it arises in a slightly different place.