In this final chapter, I shall examine McDowell's influential book Mind and World (1994), which is based on his John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1991. I shall first describe some of the main themes of the book and its overall organization before returning to one of the questions that has been implicit in much of the discussion in previous chapters: can McDowell articulate an account of the world or nature that neither is wholly independent of rational subjects nor falls into a form of idealism?

In Section I, I shall set out the central account of experience in Mind and World. This starts with a key lesson that McDowell derives from Kant. Experience is always already conceptualized. It lies within the space of reasons. McDowell combines this claim with the idea, discussed in Chapter 5, that experience is a form of openness to the world. The claim that experience has to be thought of as always conceptually structured is defended against an intuitive phenomenological objection. The objection is based on the thought that experience is typically more finely grained than the concepts a subject possesses. But McDowell suggests that experience itself can equip a subject with concepts: demonstrative concepts such as “that colour!” Finally, I outline the transcendental role that experience plays for McDowell's discussion of intentionality in general.

Section II sets out the resistance McDowell predicts there will be to his account of the nature and role of experience. He focuses on the view of nature that arose as a result of the success of natural scientific method.