Hubert Dreyfus has defended a novel view of agency, most notably in his debate with John McDowell. Dreyfus argues that expert actions are primarily unreflective and do not involve conceptual activity. In unreflective action, embodied know-how plays the role reflection and conceptuality play in the actions of novices. Dreyfus employs two arguments to support his conclusion: the argument from speed and the phenomenological argument. I argue that Dreyfus's argumentative strategies are not successful, since he relies on a dubious assumption about (...) concepts and reflection. I suggest that Dreyfus is committed to a minimal view of conceptuality in action. (shrink)

This paper addresses a number of closely related questions concerning Kant's model of intentionality, and his conceptions of unity and of magnitude [Gröβe]. These questions are important because they shed light on three issues which are central to the Critical system, and which connect directly to the recent analytic literature on perception: the issues are conceptualism, the status of the imagination, and perceptual atomism. In Section 1, I provide a sketch of the exegetical and philosophical problems raised by Kant's views (...) on these issues. I then develop, in Section 2, a detailed analysis of Kant's theory of perception as elaborated in both the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment; I show how this analysis provides a preliminary framework for resolving the difficulties raised in Section 1. In Section 3, I extend my analysis of Kant's position by considering a specific test case: the Axioms of Intuition. I contend that one way to make sense of Kant's argument is by juxtaposing it with Russell's response to Bradley's regress; I focus in particular on the concept of ‘unity’. Finally, I offer, in Section 4, a philosophical assessment of the position attributed to Kant in Sections 2 and 3. I argue that, while Kant's account has significant strengths, a number of key areas remain underdeveloped; I suggest that the phenomenological tradition may be read as attempting to fill precisely those gaps. (shrink)

Robert Brandom’s notion of historical rationality seeks to supplement his inferentialism thesis by providing an account for the validity of conceptual contents. This account, in the shape of a historical process, involves the same self-integration of Brandom’s earlier inferentialism and is similarly restricted by reciprocal recognition of others. This article argues that in applying the synchronic social model of normative discourse to the diachronic axis of engaging the past, Brandom premises a false analogy between present community and past tradition, which (...) obscures the important differences between the two axes. This is explored by looking closely at how Brandom’s own engagements with the past exemplify his historical rationality. Taking its cue from Brandom’s critics, the article shows that Brandom’s own discourse with tradition is not, and cannot be, dialogical and, in accordance, that historical rationality is not, and cannot be, governed by the same social structure of inferentialism. The article concludes with the implications of such a claim on Brandom’s thesis as a whole and on the role of tradition in the process of normative change, in light of it. (shrink)

Two essential Kantian insights are the significance for rationality of the capacity for criticism and the limits of cognition, discovered when criticism is pursued methodically, that are due to the perspectival character of the human standpoint. After a period of disparagement, these Kantian insights have been sympathetically construed and are now discussed within contemporary analytic philosophy. However, if Kant’s assumption of a single, immutable, human framework is jettisoned, then the rationality of historical succession is called into question. Moreover, if the (...) revolutionary character of framework transitions is acknowledged, then reason is historicized and even its character as reason is threatened. I argue that Menachem Fisch’s approach to criticism and rationality offers an escape from this post-Kantian predicament that acknowledges revolutionary framework transitions and that draws upon the dialogical traditions of Jewish thought, and I also argue that Fisch’s approach should be seen as thematizing, to use the terms of Kant’s aesthetics and of Fichte’s account of natural right, the reflecting rather than determining status of critical judgement, which involves second-personal address. (shrink)

Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content. . ???aop.label???. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2013.804645.

Friedman’s perspective on scientific change is a sophisticated attempt to combine Kantian transcendental philosophy and the Kuhnian historiographical model. In this article, I will argue that Friedman’s account, despite its virtues, fails to achieve the philosophical goals that it self-consciously sets, namely to unproblematically combine the revolutionary perspective of scientific development and the neo-Kantian philosophical framework. As I attempt to show, the impossibility of putting together these two aspects stems from the incompatibility between Friedman’s neo-Kantian conception of the role of (...) philosophy and the role of the notion of incommensurability, and the framework of transcendental idealism and the radical character of scientific revolutions. Hence, I suggest that pace Friedman and pace Kuhn’s own self-understanding, the Kuhnian theory of scientific revolutions cannot be seen as ‘Kantianism with moveable categories’ and consequently we should either abandon the notion of radical scientific revolution or place the Kuhnian account into another, non-Kantian philosophical framework. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the thesis that emotions are conceptual phenomena. It is assumed that the capacity to acquire a language and thereby the capacity to possess concepts in an exacting sense fundamentally changes the human mind and, ultimately, the human being as a whole, including in relation to its physical condition. Although emotions do not presuppose language, the capacity to use and understand a language can nonetheless change their content. In recent discussions on affective intentionality, emotions are conceived (...) primarily as modes of qualitative awareness of something. In an emotion, one is connected sufficiently to a section of the world that one can feel this relation. With regard to the question of whether emotions are conceptual phenomena, a distinction between a conceptuality thesis and a propositionality thesis is made. In essence, the considerations speak in favour of the conceptual character of emotions without viewing them as linguistically or propositionally structured phenomena. Three understandings of the view that emotions are conceptual are elucidated. The view is defended that registering the content of emotions presupposes concepts, though these emotions are not therefore made up of concepts. Bei diesem Beitrag handelt es sich um eine nur geringfügig veränderte deutsche Fassung des ursprünglich in englischer Sprache erschienenen Textes Demmerling (2021). Dem Verlag Routledge ist für die Genehmigung eines Abdrucks in deutscher Sprache zu danken. (shrink)

In this essay, I deal with the problem of the attribution of psychological predicates to non-human animals. The first section illustrates three research topics where it has become scientifically legitimate to explain the conduct of non-human animals by means of the attribution of psychological predicates. The second section discusses several philosophical objections to the legitimacy of such attributions provided by central thinkers from the last decades. I try to show that these objections —which are related among other questions to the (...) holism of the mental, the indeterminacy of the attributions, and the strangeness of animal concepts— can be alleviated. In the third section, I propose to adopt a literalist view of the attributions in the sense articulated by Figdor. At the same time, I argue that one must draw limits to the conceptual change forwarded by her literalist view, taking into account holistic considerations and the fact that the psychological concepts must retain their core notes. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs and defends a Sellarsian approach to “sensation” that allows us to avoid mythological conceptions of it. Part I reconstructs and isolates Sellars’s argument for “sensation,” situating his adverbial interpretation of the notion within his broader theory of perception. Part II positions Sellars’s views vis-à-vis current conversations on adverbalism. In particular, it focuses on the Many Property Problem, which is traditionally considered the main obstacle to adverbialism. After reconstructing Sellars’s response to this problem, I demonstrate that his position (...) is compatible with some current strategies to solving it and can be developed along similar lines. Finally, part III addresses how a Sellarsian adverbial approach productively accounts for the phenomenal properties of experience often understood to fall under the notion of “sensation”. The paper therefore shows how isolating Sellars’s argument can yield a non-problematic conception of sensation. Indeed, the argument on which I focus offers a form of direct realism compatible with recent forms of “new adverbialism”. Although my view remains Sellarsian, to defend it I maintain that some Sellarsian claims about sensation should be resisted as not logically entailed by his argument. (shrink)

This paper explores Sellars’ and Hegel’s treatment of ‘sensation’ – a notion that plays a central role in the reflections of both authors but which has garnered little scholarly attention. To disentangle the issues surrounding the notion and elaborate its role, function, and fate in their thought, I begin with a methodological question: what kind of philosophical argument leads Sellars and Hegel to introduce the concept of ‘sensation’ into their systems? Distinguishing between their two argumentative approaches, I maintain that Hegel (...) offers what I broadly label a ‘transcendental’ argument for ‘sensation,’ which he presents in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and in the corresponding Lectures, whereas Sellars introduces the notion of sensation for what I term empirically ‘explanatory’ reasons. Next, I closely analyze Hegel’s and Sellars’ theories of sensation to produce a textually supported and conceptually coherent reading of their views on the notion. To clarify my methodological distinction and its stakes in Hegel’s and Sellars’ I will reference Lewis’ notion of the given. (shrink)

This monograph proposes a new way of implementing interaction in logic. It also provides an elementary introduction to Constructive Type Theory. The authors equally emphasize basic ideas and finer technical details. In addition, many worked out exercises and examples will help readers to better understand the concepts under discussion. One of the chief ideas animating this study is that the dialogical understanding of definitional equality and its execution provide both a simple and a direct way of implementing the CTT approach (...) within a game-theoretical conception of meaning. In addition, the importance of the play level over the strategy level is stressed, binding together the matter of execution with that of equality and the finitary perspective on games constituting meaning. According to this perspective the emergence of concepts are not only games of giving and asking for reasons, they are also games that include moves establishing how it is that the reasons brought forward accomplish their explicative task. Thus, immanent reasoning games are dialogical games of Why and How. (shrink)

In a recent article Sachs suggests that the concept of somatic intentionality is the key to understanding how the conceptual order is externally constrained by something outside itself which is nonetheless fully intentional in nature. Sachs claims that his proposal fares better than Sellars’ view on the issue of how our experience can so much as be about objective reality. In this paper, I shall argue that this is not the case because Sellars’ view is in crucial respects misdescribed. Sachs (...) suggests that Sellars’ view is problematic because 1) conceptual intentionality cannot objectively constrain the conceptual order due to its essential discursive form, and 2) a non-intentional consciousness cannot provide an objective worldly constraint on conceptual intentionality because it is not world-directed. However neither of these points succeeds in capturing Sellars’ actual position. Further I will suggest the deepest problem which phenomenological views of a Merleau-Pontyan stripe face in the.. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to properly situate and contrast McDowell’s and Sellars’ views on intuitional content and relate them to their corresponding views on the myth of the Given. Although McDowell’s and Sellars’ views on what McDowell calls ‘intuitional’ content seem at first strikingly similar, at a deeper level they are radically different. It will be suggested that this divergence is intimately related to their different understanding of what the myth of the Given consists in and how it (...) should be best avoided. It will also be argued that certain McDowell-inspired objections against the viability of the Sellarsian concept of the Categorial Given actually misconstrue the place of this notion in Sellars’ system. If the myth of the Categorial Given can be considered as a genuine version of the Myth then McDowell’s account of intuitional content does indeed fall prey to it. I shall further argue that a McDowell-inspired objection against Sellars to the effect that his account of proper sensibles compromises the openness of intuitional content to the world ultimately fails, and, finally, I shall suggest that Sellars’ views on proper sensibles and intuitional content provide a more promising account of the way our thought and experience can be rationally open to the world itself than McDowell’s position. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the incisive counter-arguments against Gaṅgeśa’s defense of non-conceptual perception offered by the Dvaita Vedānta scholar Vyāsatīrtha in his Destructive Dance of Dialectic. The details of Vyāsatīrtha’s arguments have gone largely unnoticed by subsequent Navya Nyāya thinkers, as well as by contemporary scholars engaged in a debate over the role of non-conceptual perception in Nyāya epistemology. Vyāsatīrtha thoroughly undercuts the inductive evidence supporting Gaṅgeśa’s main inferential proof of non-conceptual perception, and shows that Gaṅgeśa has no basis for thinking (...) that non-conceptual perception has any necessary causal role in generating concept-laden perceptual awareness. He further raises a number of internal inconsistencies and undesirable consequences for Gaṅgeśa’s claim that non-conceptual states are introspectively invisible. His own causal theory of perception is more parsimonious than the Nyāya account, and is equally compatible with direct realism. I conclude by noting several striking parallels between Vyāsatīrtha’s views and the conceptualism of John McDowell, while also suggesting that Vyāsatīrtha's own conceptualism is not unduly constrained by some of McDowell’s limiting assumptions about concepts and perceptual contents. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is a conflict between two theses held by John McDowell, namely i) the claim that we are under a standing obligation to revise our beliefs if reflection demands it; and ii) the view that veridical experience is a mode of direct access to the world. Since puts no bounds on what would constitute reasonable doubt, it invites skeptical concerns which overthrow. Conversely, since says that there are some experiences which we are entitled to trust, it (...) undermines the prescriptive scope of. Drawing on C. S. Peirce's distinction between genuine and contrived doubt, I maintain that critical revisions of beliefs should be triggered only by unwanted disruptions of habits, thereby restoring unity between McDowell's two theses. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe guiding question of this comparative study is the relation between transcendental theory and common-sense realism: how to understand their compatibility, but also possible tensions between the two. This question concerns, in a broader sense, the relation between philosophy and natural life, or more precisely, what philosophy possibly can and cannot do for natural life. In the following discussion, I first introduce the idealism-realism controversy in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. I then move on to McDowell’s theory and look into a significant (...) convergence between the two philosophies, namely, their insistence on the “unboundedness” of subjectivity, and I clarify how this shared viewpoint makes their proposals compatible with common-sense realism. In a third section, I elaborate the relation between a transcendental and a natural stance by turning to Husserl’s method of phenomenological reduction. In the end, by attending to the anti-naturalism of Husserl and McDowell, I wish to shed s... (shrink)

Additive theories of rationality, as I use the term, are theories that hold that an account of our capacity to reflect on perceptually-given reasons for belief and desire-based reasons for action can begin with an account of what it is to perceive and desire, in terms that do not presuppose any connection to the capacity to reflect on reasons, and then can add an account of the capacity for rational reflection, conceived as an independent capacity to ‘monitor’ and ‘regulate’ our (...) believing-on-the-basis-of-perception and our acting-on-the-basis-of-desire. I show that a number of recent discussions of human rationality are committed to an additive approach, and I raise two difficulties for this approach, each analogous to a classic problem for Cartesian dualism. The interaction problem concerns how capacities conceived as intrinsically independent of the power of reason can interact with this power in what is intuitively the right way. The unity problem concerns how an additive theorist can explain a rational subject's entitlement to conceive of the animal whose perceptual and desiderative life he or she oversees as ‘I’ rather than ‘it’. I argue that these difficulties motivate a general skepticism about the additive approach, and I sketch an alternative, ‘transformative’ framework in which to think about the cognitive and practical capacities of a rational animal. (shrink)

I defend a pragmatist reinterpretation of Sellars’s famous manifest-scientific distinction. I claim that in order to do justice to this important distinction we must first recognize, despite what philosophers—including, arguably, Sellars—often make of it, that the distinction does not draw an epistemological or metaphysical boundary between different kinds of objects and events, but a pragmatic boundary between different ways in which we interact with objects and events. Put differently, I argue that the manifest-scientific distinction, in my view, can be best (...) understood, not as a metaphysical distinction between apparent and real objects and events, or an epistemological distinction between perceptible and imperceptible objects and events, but rather as a distinction, which is not necessarily rigid over time, between distinct ways in which we collectively deal, in practice, with objects and events. (shrink)

The concept of second nature promises to provide an explanation of how nature and reason can be reconciled. But the concept is laden with ambiguity. On the one hand, second nature is understood as that which binds together all cognitive activities. On the other hand, second nature is conceived of as a kind of nature that can be changed by cognitive activities. The paper tries to investigate this ambiguity by distinguishing a Kantian conception of second nature from a Hegelian conception. (...) It argues that the idea of a transformation from a being of first nature into a being of second nature that stands at the heart of the Kantian conception is mistaken. The Hegelian conception demonstrates that the transformation in question takes place within second nature itself. Thus, the Hegelian conception allows us to understand the way in which second nature is not structurally isomorphic with first nature: It is a process of ongoing selftransformation that is not primarily determined by how the world is, but rather by commitments out of which human beings are bound to the open future. (shrink)

This essay contributes to our understanding of the relation between the philosophies of Hegel and Sellars. While most treatments of this relation have focused on metaphysics or epistemology, I focus on ethics, and in particular on the formulation of moral agency. I argue that Hegel and Sellars arrive at a similar metaphilosophical rejection of individual moral agency in favor of conceptions of moral agency as the outcome of social mediation. To demonstrate this, I trace how Hegel and Sellars offer parallel (...) resolutions of the ‘Kantian paradox’: the apparent problem that, in Kantian ethics, moral agents must both freely self-legislate the moral law unto themselves and stand in a dutiful relation to the moral law as a necessary function of practical reason. Drawing Hegel and Sellars together in this way casts new light on Sellars’s understudied ethical theory and further evidences the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s moral philosophy. (shrink)

Abstract Both parties in the active philosophical debate concerning the conceptual character of perception trace their roots back to Kant's account of sensible intuition in the Critique of Pure Reason. This striking fact can be attributed to Kant's tendency both to assert and to deny the involvement of our conceptual capacities in sensible intuition. He appears to waver between these two positions in different passages, and can thus seem thoroughly confused on this issue. But this is not, in fact, the (...) case, for, as I will argue, the appearance of contradiction in his account stems from the failure of some commentators to pay sufficient attention to Kant's developmental approach to philosophy. Although he begins by asserting the independence of intuition, Kant proceeds from this nonconceptualist starting point to reveal a deeper connection between intuitions and concepts. On this reading, Kant's seemingly conflicting claims are actually the result of a careful and deliberate strategy for gradually convincing his readers of the conceptual nature of perception. (shrink)

This article – which includes a complete translation of Mūlamadhyamakakārikā chapter 2 together with Candrakīrti’s commentary thereon – argues that notwithstanding the many different and often arcane interpretations that have been offered of Nāgārjuna’s arguments against motion, there is really just one straightforward kind of argument on offer in this vexed chapter. It is further argued that this basic argument can be understood as a philosophically interesting one if it is kept in mind that the argument essentially has to do (...) with whether a personal level of description will admit of an exhaustively impersonal explanation. (shrink)

Em seu ensaio Avoiding the Myth of the Given, McDowell traz uma nova caraterização do conteúdo da experiência perceptual e do modo que tal conteúdo torna possível ao sujeito conhecer. Esta nova caraterização tem sido acusada de gerar uma “ansiedade pluralista”. Escopo deste artigo é reconstruir os problemas que, segundo Corti, surgem a partir da virada argumentativa do filósofo, assim como avaliar se McDowell tem à disposição recursos conceituais para esquivar-se às críticas. Para isso, contamos com a seguinte estrutura de (...) texto: 1. reconstruiremos em detalhe a posição revisada de McDowell acerca da experiência perceptual tal como ela foi exposta em AMG; 2. reconstruiremos o argumento de Corti acerca da possibilidade de que a nova posição de McDowell implique no surgimento de uma “ansiedade pluralista”; 3. discutiremos se é possível fornecer uma interpretação da posição de McDowell que ofereça uma saída para tal ansiedade. (shrink)

Abstract: Any normative inferentialist view confronts a set of challenges in the form of how to account for the sort of ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary that is involved, paradigmatically, in our noninferential perceptual responses and knowledge claims. This chapter lays out that challenge, and then argues that Sellars’ original multilayered account of such noninferential responses in the context of his normative inferentialist semantics and epistemology shows how the inferentialist can plausibly handle those sorts of cases without stretching the notion of (...) inference beyond its standard uses. Finally, it is suggested that for Sellars there were deeply naturalistic motivations for his own normative inferentialism, though the latter raises further questions as to whether this really represents, as Sellars thought, a genuinely scientific naturalist outlook on meaning and conceptual cognition. (shrink)

O'Shea concludes that Sellars's attempts to preserve the core truths in Kant's theory of experience and to integrate them with an overall scientific naturalist outlook can and should survive the rejection of several central components of Sellars's proposed adaptation of Kant's transcendental idealism: ABSTRACT: "Sellars’ career-long engagement with Kant’s philosophy involved both readings of Kant and appropriations of Kant that are nuanced, original, and related in complex ways to Sellars’ own philosophical views. In some ways similar to Strawson’s classic reading, (...) Sellars defended Kant’s theory of experience and his analysis of human knowledge as essentially correct. This includes various views on the nature of conceptual cognition, the thinking self, practical reason, perceptual experience, and the lawfulness of nature. On the other hand, and again like Strawson, Sellars regarded Kant’s transcendental idealism as involving a strong ontological commitment to unknowable but thinkable (and non-spatiotemporal) ‘things in themselves’. However, whereas Strawson regarded such a position as deeply incoherent, Sellars argues that Kant’s theological conception of things in themselves can coherently be replaced with a scientific realist conception of things in themselves as theoretically postulated imperceptible processes, which play a structurally similar role for Sellars in grounding the Kantian-phenomenal ‘appearances’ in the ‘manifest image’ of the world. Sellars’ highly complex but sophisticated reading of Kant on sensibility and intuition, when combined with Sellars’ own idiosyncratic views on sensory qualia, render it even more difficult to come to terms with Sellars’ engagements with Kant’s idealism. This chapter attempts to provide a concise presentation and evaluation of certain central themes in Sellars’ complex philosophical dialogue with Kant.". (shrink)

Talk at University of Turin, 'Kant, oltre Kant, May 5th 2023. --- -/- It is useful, while keeping in mind a holistic approach, to concentrate on a common theme in Kant’s text, which it will turn out is the quintessential element of his novel ‘way of thinking’, as he himself put it in preface of the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. This common theme is the idea of synthesis, which is what holds together, and is the entryway (...) to, all the other familiar aspects of Kant’s thought: his concept of self-consciousness or how mind is involved in cognition, his ideas about the role of the imagination, his theory of knowledge and his metaphysics of experience, and not unimportantly, its relation to what is probably the most Kantian element here: the categories of the understanding as the first principles of knowledge. But the meaning of synthesis and its role in its various facets, though frequently the subject of discussion in papers and monographs alike, is hardly understood in contemporary Kant scholarship. Most readings of the text of the Deduction, the part in which Kant elucidates his concept of synthesis, exhibit a shallow, mechanical understanding of it. -/- A compounding factor is that synthesis can’t really be understood independently of the other aforementioned elements of Kant’s thought. Grasping the meaning of synthesis implies coming to grips with his concept of self-consciousness and the way both self-consciousness and the categories are intricately and intimately involved. Most interpretations consider these aspects too much as if they were indeed separable faculties or entities that serve separable functions, undercutting an important feature of Kant’s metaphysics: the possibility of a priori unified cognition, for which an indivisible self-legislating subject is responsible. Rather, they are expressions of various aspects of a singular function of the mind as the ground of possible unified knowledge. -/- One striking example of such a superficial reading of the text is the way the relation between figurative synthesis and intellectual synthesis—or in the case of the A-Deduction the threefold synthesis—is standardly interpreted, as if the two are independent or quasi-independent functions of different faculties of the mind, the imagination and the understanding. In this paper, I focus on the relation between figurative and intellectual synthesis, while arguing that failing to understand this properly, indeed the relation between the imagination and the understanding, leads to a vicious regress in the explanation of the ground of knowledge, for which a priori synthesis is specifically designed. In other words, failing to see the intimate relation between the imagination and the understanding, the very identity that lies at their root, risks losing sight of the primary aim of Kant’s thought: the possibility of a priori unified knowledge. (shrink)

Abstract: On one formulation, epistemological disjunctivism is the view that our perceptual beliefs constitute knowledge when they are based on reasons that provide them with factive support. Some would argue that it is impossible to understand how perceptual knowledge is possible unless we assume that we have such reasons to support our perceptual beliefs. Some would argue that it is impossible to understand how perceptual experience could furnish us with these reasons unless we assume that the traditional view of experience (...) is mistaken. For reasons explained here, I think that the epistemological argument for metaphysical disjunctivism rests on mistaken assumptions about reasons and their rational role. Neither disjunctivist view is needed to understand how perceptual knowledge is possible. (shrink)

In this chapter, I put forward and sustain an articulation of the notion of bodily skill based on ecological psychology, and I show how it is relevant for the debate between Dreyfus and McDowell about skillful coping and also for the debate about whether know-how is reducible or not to propositional knowledge. The right metaphor to understand bodily skills is not the computer metaphor but the radio metaphor. These skills result from a process of organism attunement to its environment.

This essay attempts to extend the exercise in normative pragmatics undertaken by Robert Brandom to include consideration of the logical relations between the practices of making of claims involving the use of the first-person-singular pronoun (‘I-talk’) and the making of claims involving the second-person-singular pronoun (‘You-talk’). The first part of the essay makes the case that the implicit response found in Brandom’s work affirms the pragmatic independence of I-talk from You-talk, such that it is possible to conceive of a discursive (...) practice involving people using the first person-singular pronoun but not the second-person. The second part argues this response is mistaken, as there are reasons internal to Brandom’s own project that require pragmatic interdependence of I-talk and You-talk. The upshot of this exercise is normative pragmatics is thus that there can be no ‘I’ without a ‘You’. (shrink)

Overview of Wilfrid Sellars's philosophy.

In this paper, I argue that the ‘social meanings’ associated with sociolinguistic variation put pressure on the standard philosophical conception of language, according to which the foremost thing we do with words is exchange information. Drawing on parallels with the explanatory challenge posed by slurs and pejoratives, I argue that the best way to understand social meanings is to think of them in speech act theoretic terms. I develop a distinctive form of pluralism about the performances realized by means of (...) sociolinguistic variants, and I claim that engagement with such performances is an utterly pervasive feature of our linguistic activity. (shrink)

In this article I respond to Sacha Golob's critique of my stance on Kantian nonconceptualism, objectivity, and animal perception of spatial particulars.

In this paper, I discuss the debate on Kant and nonconceptual content. Inspired by Kant’s account of the intimate relation between intuition and concepts, McDowell (1996) has forcefully argued that the relation between sensible content and concepts is such that sensible content does not severally contribute to cognition but always only in conjunction with concepts. This view is known as conceptualism. Recently, Kantians Robert Hanna and Lucy Allais, among others, have brought against this view the charge that it neglects the (...) possibility of the existence of essentially nonconceptual content that is not conceptualised or subject to conceptualisation. Their critique of McDowell amounts to nonconceptualism. However, both views, conceptualist and nonconceptualist, share the assumption that intuition is synthesised content in Kant’s sense. My interest is not in the validity of the philosophical positions of conceptualism or nonconceptualism per se. I am particularly interested in the extent to which the views that McDowell and Hanna and Allais respectively advance are true to Kant, or can validly be seen as Kantian positions. I argue that although McDowell is right that intuition is only epistemically relevant in conjunction with concepts, Hanna and Allais are right with regard to the existence of essentially nonconceptual content (intuitions) independently of the functions of the understanding, but that they are wrong with regard to non-conceptualised intuition being synthesised content in Kant’s sense. Kantian conceptualists (Bowman 2011; Griffith 2012; Gomes 2014) have responded to the recent nonconceptualist offensive, with reference to A89ff./B122ff. (§13)—which, confusingly, the nonconceptualists also cite as evidence for their contrary reading—by arguing that the nonconceptualist view conflicts with the central goal of the Transcendental Deduction, namely, to argue that all intuitions are subject to the categories. I contend that the conceptualist reading of A89ff./B122ff. is unfounded, but also that the nonconceptualists are wrong to believe that intuitions as such refer strictly to objects independently of the functions of the understanding, and that they are mistaken about the relation between figurative synthesis and intellectual synthesis. I argue that Kant is a conceptualist, albeit not in the sense that standard conceptualists assume. Perceptual knowledge is always judgemental, though without this resulting in the standard conceptualist claim that, necessarily, all intuitions or all perceptions per se stand under the categories (strong conceptualism). I endorse the nonconceptualist view that, for Kant, perception per se, i.e. any mere or ‘blind’ intuition of objects (i.e. objects as indeterminate appearances) short of perceptual knowledge, does not necessarily stand under the categories. Perception is not yet perceptual knowledge. In this context, I point out the common failure in the literature on the Transcendental Deduction, both of the conceptualist and nonconceptualist stripe, to take account of the modal nature of Kant’s argument for the relation between intuition and concept insofar as cognition should arise from it. (shrink)

John McDowell articulated a radical criticism of normative inferentialism against Robert Brandom’s expressivist account of conceptual contents. One of his main concerns consists in vindicating a notion of intentionality that could not be reduced to the deontic relations that are established by discursive practitioners. Noticeably, large part of this discussion is focused on empirical knowledge and observational judgments. McDowell argues that there is no role for inference in the application of observational concepts, except the paradoxical one of justifying the content (...) of an observational judgment in terms of itself. This paper examines the semantical consequences of the analysis of the content of empirical judgments in terms of their inferential role. These, it is suggested, are distinct from the epistemological paradoxes that McDowell charges the inferentialist approach with. (shrink)

This thesis brings together two concerns. The first is the nature of inference—what it is to infer—where inference is understood as a distinctive kind of conscious and self-conscious occurrence. The second concern is the possibility of doxastic agency. To be capable of doxastic agency is to be such that one is capable of directly exercising agency over one’s beliefs. It is to be capable of exercising agency over one’s beliefs in a way which does not amount to mere self-manipulation. Subjects (...) who can exercise doxastic agency can settle questions for themselves. A challenge to the possibility of doxastic agency stems from the fact that we cannot believe or come to believe “at will”, where this in turn seems to be so because belief “aims at truth”. It must be explained how we are capable of doxastic agency despite that we cannot believe or come to believe at will. On the orthodox ‘causalist’ conception of inference for an inference to occur is for one act of acceptance to cause another in some specifiable “right way”. This conception of inference prevents its advocates from adequately seeing how reasoning could be a means to exercise doxastic agency, as it is natural to think it is. Suppose, for instance, that one reasons and concludes by inferring where one’s inference yields belief in what one infers. Such an inference cannot be performed at will. We cannot infer at will when inference yields belief any more than we can believe or come to believe at will. When it comes to understanding the extent to which one could be exercising agency in such a case the causalist conception of inference suggests that we must look to the causal history of one’s concluding act of acceptance, the nature of the act’s being determined by the way in which it is caused. What results is a picture on which such reasoning as a whole cannot be action. We are at best capable of actions of a kind which lead causally to belief fixation through “mental ballistics”. The causalist account of inference, I argue, is in fact either inadequate or unmotivated. It either fails to accommodate the self-consciousness of inference or is not best placed to play the very explanatory role which it is put forward to play. On the alternative I develop when one infers one’s inference is the conscious event which is one’s act of accepting that which one is inferring. The act’s being an inference is determined, not by the way it is caused, but by the self-knowledge which it constitutively involves. This corrected understanding of inference renders the move from the challenge to the possibility of doxastic agency to the above ballistics picture no longer tempting. It also yields an account of how we are capable of exercising doxastic agency by reasoning despite being unable to believe or come to believe at will. In order to see how such reasoning could amount to the exercise of doxastic agency it needs to be conceived of appropriately. I suggest that paradigm reasoning which potentially amounts the exercise of doxastic agency ought to be conceived of as primarily epistemic agency—agency the aim of which is knowledge. With inference conceived as suggested, I argue, it can be seen how to engage in such reasoning can just be to successfully exercise such agency. (shrink)

In this chapter, I expound Hegel’s critique of Kant, which he first and most elaborately presented in his early essay Faith and Knowledge (1802), by focusing on the criticism that Hegel levelled against Kant’s (supposedly) arbitrary subjectivism about the categories. This relates to the restriction thesis of Kant’s transcendental idealism: categorially governed empirical knowledge only applies to appearances, not to things in themselves, and so does not reach objective reality, according to Hegel. Hegel claims that this restriction of knowledge to (...) appearances is unwarranted merely on the basis of Kant’s own principle of transcendental apperception, and just stems from Kant’s empiricist bias. He argues that Kant’s principle of apperception as the foundational principle of knowledge is in fact incompatible with his empiricism. Hegel rightly appraises the centrality of transcendental apperception for the constitution of objectivity. But he is wrong about its incompatibility with Kant’s empirical realism. By virtue of a misapprehension of the formal distinction between the accompanying ‘I think’, i.e. the analytical principle of apperception, and what Hegel calls “the true ‘I’” of the original-synthetic unity of apperception, Hegel unjustifiably prises apart the productive imagination, which is supposedly this “true ‘I’”, and the understanding, which is supposedly just a derivative, subjective form of the productive imagination; the latter, according to Hegel, is Reason or Being itself, and is the truly objective. This deflationary reading of the understanding, which hypostatises the imagination as the supreme principle, rests on a distortion of key elements of Kant’s theory of apperception. In this chapter, I show that Hegel’s charge of inconsistency against Kant, namely, Hegel’s claim that the principle of apperception as the highest principle of cognition does not comport with Kant’s restriction thesis, is the direct consequence of a psychological misreading of Kant’s subjectivism. (shrink)

This paper lays out two recent accounts of Hegel’s practical philosophy in order to present a challenge. According to Robert Stern and Mark Alznauer, Hegel attempts to ground our ethical practices in ontological norms. I argue that we cannot ground our ethical practices in this way. However, I also contend that Stern’s and Alznauer’s conception of reality as both conceptual and normative can still play a useful role in practical philosophy, namely, to help defuse a sceptical worry about a threat (...) to ethics. (shrink)

There is today much debate about the contents of perceptual experience relative to our capacity to make them figure in judgments. There is considerably less interest, however, in how we subsume perceptual contents in judgments, that is, what judging about a perception is like for us. For Kant and Husserl, this second question is as important as the first. Whereas Kant tries to answer it in the schematism section of the first Critique, Husserl addresses it at length in Experience and (...) Judgment. This paper draws new attention to this ‘forgotten’ transcendental problem by comparing both accounts of it. I will first discuss Kantian conceptualism in section two and schematization in section three. In section four I then turn to the Husserlian notion of type, which is today often juxtaposed to Kant’s schema. After rejecting one commonly held view that they are functionally identical, I turn to Husserl’s work on active synthesis, where I distinguish three different acts of judgment and their respective contents. (shrink)

“Dialectic” has been a matter of growing interest in contemporary philosophy. The present article analyzes dialectical methods and positions them by reference to two paradigmatic texts of German idealism and analytic philosophy, i.e. J.G. Fichte’s Science of Knowing (1804) and J. McDowell’s Mind and World. Both dialectical approaches will be interpreted with regard to their contribution in the debate on reductionism and anti-reductionism: both Fichte and McDowell claim that philosophical positions and logical terms stand in a dualistic relationship to one (...) another, on the one hand, but are separated by a gulf, on the other. I will argue that for McDowell dialectic seems to be an alternative to one-sided reductionisms as well as to normal anti-reductionistic holism. Furthermore, for Fichte dialectic is an adequate method for describing the relationship of reductionism and anti-reductionism itself. Both see in dialectic a technique for bridging the gulf between binary opposite terms of logic as well as mutually exclusive positions, such as mind and world, subject and object, or idealism and realism. (shrink)

I argue that, for Kant, there is a point at which the notions of self-consciousness and self-limitation become one. I proceed by spelling out a logical progression of forms of self-consciousness in Kant’s philosophy, where at each stage we locate the limits of the capacity in question and ask what it takes to know those limits. After briefly sketching a notion of self-consciousness available even to the animal, we look at whether there could be a notion of self-consciousness available to (...) the capacity of human sensibility. At this stage I argue that Kant and Heidegger (or Heidegger’s Kant) share a conception of what it is to be self-limiting through self-consciousness. I then critically examine this conception, and, specifically, the way in which it fails to account for the most essential form of self-limitation in Kant’s critical philosophy—namely, the form of self-limitation which rejects spatial and temporal articulation. The conclusion we reach is that Kant’s theory of transcendental self-consciousness is a theory of the activity of thinking as determining itself (including its limits) non-spatially and non-temporally. (shrink)

Provides a certain conception of the target of a theory of intentionality in terms of five properties (aboutness, non-existence, aspectuality, generality, and semantic normativity) and provides a guided tour of how different styles of theories of intentionality can meet up these requirements.

Jaspers’s binary distinction between understanding and explanation has given way first to a proliferation of explanatory levels and now, in John Campbell’s recent work, to a conception of explanation with no distinct levels of explanation and no inbuilt rationality requirement. I argue that there is still a role for understanding in psychiatry and that is to demystify the assumption that the states it concerns are mental. This role can be fulfilled by placing rationality at the heart of understanding without a (...) commitment to the attempt to use rationality to shed light on interpretation and mindedness as though from outside those notions. Delusions still present a significant challenge to philosophical attempts at understanding, but this merely reflects the genuine clinical difficulties such states present. (shrink)

A defense of the idea that knowledge is first in the sense that there is nothing prior to knowledge that puts reasons or evidence in your possession. Includes a critical discussion of the idea that perception or perceptual experience might provide reasons and a defense of a knowledge-first approach to justified belief.

Whereas Charles Peirce’s pragmatist account of truth has been much discussed, his theory of perception still offers a rich mine of insights. Peirce presented a ‘two-ply’ view of perception, which combines an entirely precognitive ‘percept’ with a ‘perceptual judgment’ that is located in the space of reasons. Having previously argued that Peirce outdoes Robert Brandom in achieving a hyper-inferentialism (“Making it Explicit and Clear”, APQ, 2008), I now wish to examine his philosophy in the light of inferentialism’s ‘original fount’ – (...) Wilfrid Sellars. Does Peirce’s percept commit him to the Myth of the Given? I argue that it does not, because although the percept is understood as nonepistemic, it is not understood to justify the perceptual judgment. Rather, the perceptual judgement indexes the percept. I explain this original view, then argue that Peirce and Sellars actually have a great deal in common in their rare diachronically mediated yet at the same time direct perceptual realism, and the ‘critical commonsensist’ epistemology to which it gives rise. (shrink)