A theme common to Chapters 1–3 is this: McDowell's approach to rulegoverned practice, to moral judgements and to grasp of meaning within a language has been to emphasize the impossibility of adopting a useful philosophical stance “outside” the area of judgement in question. There is no prospect of a fruitful analysis that starts outside a region of conceptual judgement and attempts, for example, to ground those judgements using a description of the world couched in independent concepts. To put the point less metaphorically, McDowell rejects any form of philosophical analysis that consists of providing a reduction of one set of concepts into another that is supposedly less philosophically perplexing.

In this chapter I shall examine another instance of this general theme. McDowell gives an account of singular or object-dependent thought that rejects the contemporary neo-Russellian assumption that such thoughts contain both conceptual elements and extra-conceptual worldly objects. Such an account describes thoughts simultaneously from within and without. Instead, he sketches a neo-Fregean account that describes such thoughts from within the perspective of Fregean sense. This will underpin the key claim that McDowell makes in Mind and World: that there is no outer boundary to the conceptual order. So even perceptual experience, which, in contrast with the beliefs those experiences give rise to, might seem to be a point of contact with an extra-conceptual world, is really, according to McDowell, always already conceptualized.