McDowell motivates a disjunctive conception of experience in the context of other-minds skepticism, but his conception of other minds has been less frequently discussed. In this paper, I focus on McDowell’s perceptual account of others that emphasizes the primitivity of others’ bodily expressivity and his defense of a common-sense understanding of others. And I suggest that Husserl’s subtle analysis of bodily expressivity not only bears fundamental similarities with McDowell’s but also helps to demonstrate the sense in which McDowell’s emphasis on (...) bodily expressivity can remove some of the grounds for other minds skepticism. I argue that the other’s behavioral manifestation is first and foremost perceived in a salient Gestalt and social perception is inherently infused with a constitutive propensity with which we normally take the other as human person in the first place. In this light, I show that Husserl’s account can better elucidate human expressivity and its intrinsic features, thereby helping to remove some of the props of other-minds skepticism. As a result, I believe it proves fruitful to juxtapose McDowell’s and Husserl’s account of bodily expressivity, so as to alternate the Cartesian picture of other-minds that engenders skeptic anxiety and to secure a common-sense understanding of other people. (shrink)

Epistemological disjunctivism (ED) has been thought to solve the conditionality problem for epistemic externalism. This problem arises from externalists’ characterization of our epistemic standings as conditional on the obtaining of worldly facts which we lack any reflective access to. ED is meant to avoid the conditionality problem by explicating subjects’ perceptual knowledge in paradigmatic cases of perceptual knowledge via their possession of perceptual reasons that are both factive and reflectively accessible. I argue that ED’s account of reflectively accessible factive perceptual (...) reasons is also prey to the conditionality problem. After that, I submit that Stroud’s influential formulation of the conditionality problem relies on a methodological requirement that is potentially dissociable from ED. So, it is possible to put ED in the service of a more modest anti-skeptical strategy. I close by suggesting that this modest anti-skeptical strategy successfully undercuts the underdetermination-based skeptical paradox. Nevertheless, it does not have substantial advantages over some forms of epistemic externalism. (shrink)

According to epistemological disjunctivism (ED), in paradigmatic cases of perceptual knowledge, a subject, S, has perceptual knowledge that p in virtue of being in possession of reasons for her belief that p which are both factive and reflectively accessible to S. It has been argued that ED is better placed than both knowledge internalism and knowledge externalism to undercut underdetermination-based skepticism. I identify several principles that must be true if ED is to be uniquely placed to attain this goal. After (...) that, I use those principles to formulate a diachronic skeptical argument. This argument yields the counterintuitive conclusion that understanding a global skeptical hypothesis is all it takes for a rational subject to lose all her perceptual knowledge of the world. Next, I show that a popular Austinian move must reject one or another of the principles that underlie ED. I close by delineating a novel strategy that can block the diachronic skeptical argument while preserving all the principles. The key idea is that perceptual knowledge is grounded in primitive, perceptual and recognitional abilities. This view sheds new light on some puzzling features of global skepticism that have been noted by Descartes and Hume, among others. (shrink)