However, in defending this quietistic perspective McDowell has engaged with the work of leading contemporaries in such a way as to therapeutically dissolve what he takes to be philosophical error, while defending major positions and interpretations from major figures in philosophical history, and developing original and distinctive theses about language, mind and value.
[13] McDowell delivered the John Locke Lectures in Philosophy at Oxford University in 1991 (these became his book Mind and World.
[17] McDowell's earliest published work was in ancient philosophy, most notably including a translation of and commentary on Plato's Theaetetus.
In the 1970s he was active in the Davidsonian project of providing a semantic theory for natural language, co-editing (with Gareth Evans) a volume of essays entitled Truth and Meaning.
In these early exchanges and in the parallel debate over the proper understanding of Wittgenstein's remarks on rule-following, some of McDowell's characteristic intellectual stances were formed: to borrow a Wittgensteinian expression, the defence of a realism without empiricism, an emphasis on the human limits of our aspiration to objectivity, the idea that meaning and mind can be directly manifested in the action, particularly linguistic action, of other people, and a distinctive disjunctive theory of perceptual experience.
The proponent of the argument then says that the two states of mind in these contrasting cases share something important in common, and to characterise this we need to introduce an idea like that of "sense data."
McDowell strongly resists this argument: he does not deny that there is something psychologically in common between the subject who really sees the cat and the one that fails to do so.
But that psychological commonality has no bearing on the status of the judger's state of mind from the point of view of assessing whether she is in a position to acquire knowledge.
McDowell defends, in addition to a general externalism about the mental, a specific thesis about the understanding of demonstrative expressions as involving so-called "singular" or "Russellian" thoughts about particular objects that reflects the influence on his views of Gareth Evans.
McDowell developed the view that has come to be known as secondary property realism, or sensibility or moral sense theory.
McDowell, following Thomas Nagel, holds that the virtuous agent's perception of the circumstances (i.e. her belief) justifies both the action and the desire.
The test for the reality of a property is whether it is used in judgements for which there are developed standards of rational argument and whether they are needed to explain aspects of our experience that are otherwise inexplicable.
Characterising the place of values in our worldview is not, in McDowell's view, to downgrade them as less real than talk of quarks or the Higgs boson.
He contrasts this with his own "naturalistic" perspective in which the distinctive capacities of mind are a cultural achievement of our "second nature", an idea that he adapts from Gadamer.
This denial of nonconceptual content has provoked considerable discussion because other philosophers have claimed that scientific accounts of our mental lives (particularly in the cognitive sciences) need this idea.
Hegel, Karl Marx, John Cook Wilson,[20] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philippa Foot,[21] Elizabeth Anscombe,[22] P. F. Strawson, Iris Murdoch,[23] David Wiggins, and, especially in the case of his later work, Wilfrid Sellars.