I shall begin by summarizing some of the most prominent features of John McDowell's Mind and World, a task made easier by his introduction to the paperback edition of that book, from which I shall borrow heavily.

McDowell's central notion is that of “answerability to the world.” He says that

Before going on, let me note that McDowell here does something that critics of the correspondence theory of truth have always complained about: he treats perceptual judgments as a model for all judgments. To say that “This is red” is “directed towards the world” or “answerable to the world” is intuitively plausible. But such phrases seem less applicable if one's paradigm of a belief is “We ought to love one another,” or “There are many transfinite cardinals,” or “Proust was only an effete petit bourgeois.”