McDowell’s view is that if infants and animals did have conscious experience, they would be confronted with private objects in Wittgenstein’s sense — bits of unstructured sensory Given. It is argued that since we are obliged to accord conscious experience to infants and animals, McDowell is in effect saddled with supposing that they confront Kantian things-in-themselves, objects which are noumenal with respect to the conceptual. This fits with his location of the world at the level of sense rather than reference in the Fregean semantic hierarchy. On McDowell’s metaphysical picture, objects — the inhabitants of the realm of reference — are banished from the world to a noumenal penumbra. To unpick ourselves from this nominalistic entanglement, we need to follow Frege in locating concepts/properties at the level of reference. McDowell’s hostility to doing so, which seems to be based on a fear of an excessive platonism, must be set aside.
Keywords: consciousness, privacy, Wittgenstein, the Given, Kant, things-in-themselves, world, sense, reference, platonism