Two Versions of the Conceptual Content of Experience (original) (raw)

John McDowell on experience: Open to the sceptic?

Metaphilosophy, 1998

The aim of this paper is to show that John McDowell's approach to perception in terms of "openness" remains problematically vulnerable to the threat of scepticism. The leading thought of the openness view is that objects, events and others in the world, and no substitute, just are what is disclosed in perceptual experience. An account which aims to defend this thought must show, therefore, that the content of perceptual experience does not "fall short" of its objects. We shall describe how McDowell defends the openness view with reference to the disjunctive analysis of appearances (sections II and III); argue that his defence includes features which are both inconsistent with and unnecessary for the openness view (section IV); and show how those features call into question the success of McDowell's route of response to sceptical arguments (section V). Finally, we sketch an alternative approach to openness and conclude that the explosive effect of letting loose the conception of experience advanced by the openness view has yet to be felt in the English-speaking world (section VI).

Having a Sensible World in View: McDowell and Sellars on Perceptual Experience

Philosophical Books, 2010

's recent collection of essays, Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars is a penetrating work that builds upon insights from Kant, Hegel, and Sellars in order to articulate "an idealism that does not diverge from common-sense realism," a view according to which "thought and the world must be understood together" (p. 143). 1 The essays not only provide important critical interpretations of the views of the three mentioned philosophers, conducted by means of analyses characterized by a depth and originality that have already made them indispensable reading for anyone interested in those thinkers. They simultaneously do so in a way that provides substantial support for McDowell's own wide-ranging philosophical outlook, which will be familiar to most readers from his deservedly influential book, Mind and World (Harvard, 1994). McDowell argues that the insights from Kant, Hegel, and Sellars should enable us to see that certain perennial philosophical difficulties concerning how thought is related to empirical reality are in fact based on mistaken, noncompulsory views about the nature of intentionality in general, and about the relationship between free human rationality and passive sensory intake from the world in particular. In what follows I first highlight some central issues that reappear throughout the essays, and then I raise some questions concerning issues both internal to McDowell's account and in relation to the ways in which his views clash with those of Sellars in particular. But here at the outset let me say that the work required to 'think one's way into' McDowell's essays certainly repays the effort. I The title of the first essay, "Sellars on Perceptual Experience," introduces a general topic that frequently reappears throughout the volume not only in relation to Sellars but as a way for McDowell to articulate his own views and

A Critique of Mcdowell’s Demonstrative Thought in the Cognitive Process of Perception

The recent trend in epistemology is the consideration about the possibility of non-conceptual content in the cognitive process of perception. This has ever been generating serious polemics amongphilosophers of perception on the true nature and character of the content of our perceptual experienceat perception. Two groups eventually emerged: the non-conceptualists and the conceptualists. The non-conceptualists on one hand advocate that mental representations of the world do not necessarily presuppose concepts by means of which the content of these representations can be specified, hence, cognizers can have mental representation of the world that are non-conceptual. They argue that creatures without conceptual capacity can be in a content-bearing state even though they lack concept, memory or linguistic ability. The conceptualists on the other hand claim that non-conceptual content neither exists nor is representationally significant to perception because they are mere qualitative content of sensation i.e. purely sensory content. For them, cognizers can only have mental representations of the world if they possess adequate concepts by means of which they can specify what they represent else their experience is unavoidable conceptual. John McDowell (1994), a leading conceptualist, therefore introduced the concept “demonstrative thought” to counter non-conceptuality. For him, no perceptual experience is indescribable or indemonstrable: a demonstrative concept like “that shade” is also a demonstrable concept. This paper adopts the philosophical conceptual analytic tool to argue that the introduction of demonstrative concepts by McDowell does not in any way hinder the possibility of non-conceptual content in perception.

[Synthese 2015] The Given in Perceptual Experience

How are we to account for the epistemic contribution of our perceptual experiences to the reasonableness of our perceptual beliefs? It is well known that a conception heavily influenced by Cartesian thinking has it that experiences do not enable the experiencing subject to have direct epistemic contact with the external world; rather, they are regarded as openness to a kind of private inner realm that is interposed between the subject and the world. It turns out that if one wants to insist that perceptual experiences provide epistemic reasons for perceptual beliefs about the external world as we pre-reflectively take it to be, then one should find a way of avoiding Cartesianism. Here are the two main aims of this paper: firstly, identify the premise that is doing the heavy-lifting work in the Cartesian thinking; and, secondly, formulate an adequate way of denying that premise. The adequacy I claim for my formulation of a way of denying the premise will roughly amount to this: the way I offer is not as susceptible to Cartesian traps as other apparently available ways of denying the premise are.

The Content and Phenomenology of Perceptual Experience

2013

The paper’s main target is strong and reductive “representationalism”. What we claim is that even though this position looks very appealing in so far as it does not postulate intrinsic and irreducible experiential properties, the attempt it pursues of accounting for the phenomenology of experience in terms of representational content runs the risk of providing either an inadequate phenomenological account or an inadequate account of the content of the experience.