The problem of amodal perception is the problem of how we represent features of perceived objects that are occluded or otherwise hidden from us. Bence Nanay (2010) has recently proposed that we amodally perceive an object's occluded features by imaginatively projecting them into the relevant regions of visual egocentric space. In this paper, I argue that amodal perception is not a single, unitary capacity. Drawing appropriate distinctions reveals amodal perception to be characterized not only by mental imagery, as Nanay suggests, (...) but also by genuinely visual representations as well as beliefs. I conclude with some brief remarks on the role of object-directed bodily action in conferring a sense of unseen presence on an object's occluded features. (shrink)

It has been widely assumed that we do not perceive dispositional properties. I argue that there are two ways of interpreting this assumption. On the first, extensional, interpretation whether we perceive dispositions depends on a complex set of metaphysical commitments. But if we interpret the claim in the second, intensional, way, then we have no reason to suppose that we do not perceive dispositional properties. The two most important and influential arguments to the contrary fail.

It has become typical to read Kant and Merleau-Ponty as offering competing approaches to perceptual experience. Kant is interpreted as an ‘intellectualist’ who regards perception as conceptual ‘all the way out’, while Merleau-Ponty is seen as Kant’s challenger, who argues that perception involves non-conceptual, embodied ‘coping’. In this paper, however, I argue that a closer examination of their views of perception, especially with respect to the notion of ‘schematism’, reveals a great deal of historical and philosophical continuity between them. By (...) analyzing Kant’s theory of schematism, the interpretation of it by the Neo-Kantian Pierre Lachièze-Rey, and Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body schema, we find that aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception are better understood as a development of Kant’s theory of perception. (shrink)

The principal aim of my thesis is to provide a unified theory of imagining, that is, a theory which aspires to capture the common nature of all central forms of imagining and to distinguish them from all paradigm instances of non-imaginative phenomena. The theory which I intend to put forward is a version of what I call the Agency Account of imagining and, accordingly, treats imaginings as mental actions of a certain kind. More precisely, it maintains that imaginings are mental (...) actions that aim at the formation of episodic representations, the content of which is directly determined by what we want them to represent. My defence of this version of the Agency Account happens in two stages. On the one hand, I try to show that it is both extensionally adequate and explanatorily illuminating with respect to those mental states or projects which are clear instances of either imaginative or non- imaginative phenomena. And on the other hand, I seek to demonstrate that the most plausible alternative to the Agency Account - namely the Cognitive Account according to which it is distinctive of imaginings that they are non-cognitive phenomena and thus to be contrasted with perceptions, judgements, and so on - is bound to fail as a unified theory of imagining. The dissertation contains five main parts. In the first, I specify in more detail what a unified account of imagining has to achieve and, in particular, which phenomena it is supposed to capture. The second part presents the Cognitive Account, thereby focussing on Brian O'Shaughnessy's sophisticated version of it while the third part is reserved for the evaluation and rejection of the Cognitive Account. In the fourth part, I develop my version of the Agency Account of imagining. And the fifth and last part is concerned with the accommodation of potential counterexamples to it. (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)

In a famous passage (A68/B93), Kant writes that “the understanding can make no other use of […] concepts than that of judging by means of them.” Kant's thought is often called the thesis of the priority of judgments over concepts. We find a similar sounding priority thesis in Frege: “it is one of the most important differences between my mode of interpretation and the Boolean mode […] that I do not proceed from concepts, but from judgments.” Many interpreters have thought (...) that Frege's priority principle is close to (or at least derivable from) Kant's. I argue that it is not. Nevertheless, there was a gradual historical development that began with Kant's priority thesis and culminated in Frege's new logic. (shrink)

Chess is sometimes referred to as a ‘mind-sport’. Yet, in obvious ways, chess is very unlike physical sports such as tennis and soccer; it doesn't require the levels of fitness and athleticism necessary for such sports. Nor does it involve the sensory-governed, skilled behaviour required in activities such as juggling or snooker. Nevertheless, I suggest, chess is closer than it may at first seem to some of these sporting activities. In particular, there are interesting connections between the way that we (...) use our perceptual imagination in sports, and also in chess. The same distinction between calculation and natural instinct applies in chess as it does in many physical sports. (shrink)

Human beings have the ability to ‘augment’ reality by superimposing mental imagery on the visually perceived scene. For example, when deciding how to arrange furniture in a new home, one might project the image of an armchair into an empty corner or the image of a painting onto a wall. The experience of noticing a constellation in the sky at night is also perceptual-imaginative amalgam: it involves both seeing the stars in the constellation and imagining the lines that connect them (...) at the same time. I here refer to such hybrid experiences – involving both a bottom-up, externally generated component and a top-down, internally generated component – as make-perceive (Briscoe 2008, 2011). My discussion in this paper has two parts. In the first part, I show that make-perceive enables human beings to solve certain problems and pursue certain projects more effectively than bottom-up perceiving or top-down visualization alone. To this end, the skillful use of projected mental imagery is surveyed in a variety of contexts, including action planning, the interpretation of static mechanical diagrams, and non-instrumental navigation. In the second part, I address the question of whether make-perceive may help to account for the “phenomenal presence” of occluded or otherwise hidden features of perceived objects. I argue that phenomenal presence is not well explained by the hypothesis that hidden features are represented using projected mental images. In defending this position, I point to important phenomenological and functional differences between the way hidden object features are represented respectively in mental imagery and amodal completion. (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)

I respond to objections from three rigorous readers challenging me to detail in what sense Sellars is a transcendental philosopher, as well as to defend the claim that ‘picturing’ is crucial to his account of intentionality. This further involves defending the tenability of transcendental phenomenalism and arguing against scepticism about picturing. Finally, this involves the question of whether the results of transcendental analyses undermine the legitimacy of the Manifest Image, and, consequently, to say what knowledge about phenomena can mean in (...) the succession of conceptual frameworks. (shrink)

The aim of this research is to explore what relations self-affection bears to the intuitions of inner sense. I propose that self-affection makes some contribution to formal intuitions and empirical consciousness by arguing that the functions of self-affection consist respectively in conceptualising and conscious-making. I begin by examining Kant’s concept of inner sense and point out that inner sense as a receptive faculty depends on self-affection. In so doing, I emphasise that self-affection includes both a pure and an empirical aspect (...) which corresponds to Kant’s distinction between the transcendental synthesis of imagination and the empirical synthesis of apprehension. Then, I focus on the pure aspect and argue that the conceptualising function involved in the pure self-affection is decisive for the generation of formal intuition. In particular, I explain why the formal intuition of time depends on the intuition of space and how it is constituted by drawing a line. After that, I turn to analysing the empirical aspect of self-affection and show that by virtue of the empirical synthesis of apprehension one is aware of both the empirical contents of representations and the mental actions performed on them, whereby I suggest that this empirical conscious-making function can be understood as an act of distinguishing from a mereological point of view. (shrink)

We can distinguish two senses of the Given, the nonconceptual and the non-doxastic. The idea of the nonconceptual Given is the target of Sellars’s severe attack on the Myth of the Given, which paves the way for McDowell’s conceptualism, while the idea of the non-doxastic Given is largely neglected. The main target of the present paper is the non-doxastic Given. I first reject the idea of the nonconceptual Given by debunking the false assumption that there is a systematic relation between (...) the conceptual and the nonconceptual. I then propose a constitutive understanding of experience and concept, which at once challenges the idea of the non-doxastic Given. Unlike the more familiar Davidsonian challenge, which questions the transition from the non-doxastic to the doxastic, the constitutive understanding implies that the idea of the non-doxastic Given endangers the very possibility of having thought about the world. I urge an exorcism of the Myth of the Given by proposing doxasticism, the view that experience is essentially a doxastic attitude towards that which is experienced. (shrink)

The aim of the Schematism chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason is to solve the problem posed by the “inhomogeneity” of intuitions and categories: the sensible properties of objects represented in intuition are of a different kind than the properties represented by categories. Kant's solution is to introduce what he calls “transcendental schemata,” which mediate the subsumption of objects under categories. I reconstruct Kant's solution in terms of two substantive premises, which I call Subsumption Sufficiency (i.e., that subsuming an (...) object under a transcendental schema is sufficient to subsume it under the corresponding category) and Real Possibility (i.e., that it is really possible to subsume objects under each of the transcendental schemata). These two principles, together with a trivial modal one (the Subsumption-Possibility Link), entail that it is possible to subsume objects under categories; in other words, the argument of the Schematism is valid. The main work of the paper consists in reconstructing Kant's arguments for, and explanations of, these premises. I argue that they hinge on Kant's claim that transcendental schemata are “time-determinations,” which I interpret to mean: rules for reflexively representing the temporal relations among our own representational states. On the basis of this reading, I reconstruct Kant's argument for Subsumption Sufficiency, category by category. I also explain why Real Possibility follows almost immediately. Granting Kant the argument up to this point in the Critique, the argument of the Schematism is sound. (shrink)

This paper describes an attempt to repurpose Kant’s a priori psychology as the architectural blueprint for a machine learning system. First, it describes the conditions that must be satisfied for the agent to achieve unity of experience: the intuitions must be connected, via binary relations, so as to satisfy various unity conditions. Second, it shows how the categories are derived within this model: the categories are pure unary predicates that are derived from the pure binary relations. Third, I describe how (...) Kant’s cognitive architecture has been implemented in a computer system (the Apperception Engine) and show in detail what it is like for the system to construct a unified experience from a sequence of raw sensory input. (shrink)

What is the relationship between perception and mental imagery? I aim to eliminate an answer that I call perceptualism about mental imagery. Strong perceptualism, defended by Bence Nanay, predictive processing theorists, and several others, claims that imagery is a kind of perceptual state. Weak perceptualism, defended by M. G. F. Martin and Matthew Soteriou, claims that mental imagery is a representation of a perceptual state, a view sometimes called The Dependency Thesis. Strong perceptualism is to be rejected since it misclassifies (...) imagery disorders and abnormalities as perceptual disorders and abnormalities. Weak Perceptualism is to be rejected since it gets wrong the aim and accuracy conditions of a whole class of mental imagery–projected mental imagery–and relies on an impoverished concept of perceptual states, ignoring certain of their structural features. Whatever the relationship between perception and imagery, the perceptualist has it wrong. (shrink)

Alva Noë understands what he calls “perceptual presence” as the experience of whole, voluminous objects being ‘right there’, present for us in their entirety, even though not each and every part of them impinges directly on our senses at any given time. How is it possible that we perceptually experience voluminous objects as voluminous directly and apparently effortlessly, with no need of inferring their three-dimensionality from experience of the part of them that is directly stimulating our sense organs? For Noë, (...) this is the ‘problem of perceptual presence’. In this paper, I integrate Noë’s view by articulating a different view of what perceptual presence at a more basic level amounts to. This new account of perceptual presence which, I believe, can clarify and make an enactive account of presence richer. The view I suggest revolves around the idea, developed especially by Merleau-Ponty and Kelly, that perceptual experience is in an important sense indeterminate. Indeterminacy, I argue, is key if we want to understand perceptual presence and the ‘problem’ Noë solves. (shrink)

What triggers the execution of actions? What happens in that moment when an action is triggered? What mental state is there at the moment of action-execution that was not there a second before? My aim is to highlight the importance of a thus far largely ignored kind of mental state in the discussion of these old and much-debated questions: motor imagery. While there have been a fair amount of research in psychology and neuroscience on motor imagery in the last 30 (...) years or so, it is only recently that we start to understand the important role motor imagery plays in action initiation. And if, as these findings suggest, motor imagery plays an important role in action initiation, we can make progress not only in understanding action initiation in general but also in understanding what goes wrong in akratic actions and in relapse actions. Finally, this new picture of action-initiation also has far-reaching consequences for the relation between motivation and causation in naturalistic action-explanations. (shrink)

Kant’s account of the sublime makes frequent appeals to infinity, appeals which have been extensively criticised by commentators such as Budd and Crowther. This paper examines the costs and benefits of reconstructing the account in finitist terms. On the one hand, drawing on a detailed comparison of the first and third Critiques, I argue that the underlying logic of Kant’s position is essentially finitist. I defend the approach against longstanding objections, as well as addressing recent infinitist work by Moore and (...) Smith. On the other hand, however, I argue that finitism faces distinctive problems of its own: whilst the resultant theory is a coherent and interesting one, it is unclear in what sense it remains an analysis of the sublime. I illustrate the worry by juxtaposing the finitist reading with analytical cubism. -/- . (shrink)

If the image of the future has already been colonized by the inevitability of a planetary automation or by the Singularity, is it at all possible to re-introduce alienness in machine thinking beyond a master pattern that knows it all? As contemporary forms of artificial intelligence such as neural nets experiment with predictive learning generating counter-factual models for what has not yet been thought, they have also become productive of machine percepts and concepts. These are not of an optical nature, (...) but are exclusively algorithmic. However, as opposed to the master pattern of the Singularity aiming to debunk logic from thinking, this article argues that the growth of the automated network is never given: the indeterminacy of fallibility in the trial-and-error efforts to predict what has not yet been programmed – known – constantly defies the master pattern from within the system. This article draws on Octavia E. Butler’s farsighted story of Mary in Mind of My Mind as an example of the alien formation of an intuitive patterning, and of alien image-models ready to take over the transcendental schema of the Patternist. (shrink)

A leading theoretical framework for naturalistic explanation of mind holds that we explain the mind by positing progressively "stupider" capacities ("homunculi") until the mind is "discharged" by means of capacities that are not intelligent at all. The so-called homuncular fallacy involves violating this procedure by positing the same capacities at subpersonal levels. I argue that the homuncular fallacy is not a fallacy, and that modern-day homunculi are idle posits. I propose an alternative view of what naturalism requires that reflects how (...) the cognitive sciences are actually integrating mind and matter. (shrink)

On one reading of Kant’s account of our original representations of space and time, they are, in part, products of the understanding or imagination. On another, they are brute, sensible givens, entirely independent of the understanding. In this article, while I agree with the latter interpretation, I argue for a version of it that does more justice to the insights of the former than others currently available. I claim that Kant’s Transcendental Deduction turns on the representations of space and time (...) as determinate, enduring particulars, whose unity is both given and a product of synthesis. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to examine Sellars’s envisaged stereoscopic fusion between the manifest and the scientific image in regard to the central issue of the being of the normative. I shall propose that the best way to make sense of the notion of the Sellarsian ‘stereoscopic fusion’ is to hold both that (a) the core function of normative discourse is to point toward something that does not exist, but ought to exist, namely a regulative ideal and (b) that (...) the raison d’être of normatively infused items is for them to be materially realized at the level of non-normative objects and processes. On this view, the effected elimination (denormativization) of the normative level itself in the Sellarsian ‘synoptic vision’ can be best understood in terms of the concrete realization of what I call ‘generalized absorbed skillful coping,’ that is, our ability for absorbed skillful coping within our—and indeed, in any possible—environment. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that attention to Kant's philosophy of mathematics sheds light on the doctrine that there are two stems of the cognitive capacity, which are distinct, but equally necessary for cognition. Specifically, I argue for the following four claims: The distinctive structure of outer sensible intuitions must be understood in terms of the concept of magnitude. The act of sensibly representing a magnitude involves a special act of spontaneity Kant ascribes to a capacity he (...) calls the productive imagination. Contrary to what is assumed by many commentators, it is not the case that the Two Stems Doctrine implies that a representation is either sensible or spontaneity-dependent, but not both. Outer sensible intuitions are both sensible and spontaneity-dependent – they are sensible because they exhibit the kind of structure Kant takes to be distinctive of outer sensible intuitions, and they depend on spontaneity because they are cases of sensibly representing a magnitude. (shrink)

John McDowell’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). 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, noncom- pulsory 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 this critical notice 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. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is threefold: First, I shall first attempt to criticize Zahavi's notion of the “experiential self” as the latter is presented and developed in his book Self and Other (201...

I criticize recent nonconceptualist readings of Kant’s account of perception on the grounds that the strategy of the Deduction requires that understanding be involved in the synthesis of imagination responsible for the intentionality of perceptual experience. I offer an interpretation of the role of understanding in perceptual experience as the consciousness of normativity in the association of one’s representations. This leads to a reading of Kant which is conceptualist, but in a way which accommodates considerations favoring nonconceptualism, in particular the (...) primitive character of perceptual experience relative to thought and judgment. (shrink)

I give an argument against nonconceptualist readings of Kants claim that intuitions and concepts constitute two distinct kinds of representation than is assumed by proponents of nonconceptualist readings. I present such an interpretation and outline the alternative reading of the Deduction that results.

This paper defends a dynamic model of the way in which perception is integrated with action, a model I refer to as ‘the navigational account’. According to this account, employing vision and other forms of distance perception, a creature acquires information about its surroundings via the senses, information that enables it to select and navigate routes through its environment, so as to attain objects that satisfy its needs. This form of perceptually guided activity should be distinguished from other kinds of (...) semi-automatic responses to visual stimuli that do not necessarily involve conscious experiences. It essentially involves inner states, which involve both the awareness of phenomenal qualities, and also a representational component. The navigational account is compared here with the enactive approach to perception, which opposes the view that perceptual experiences are inner states. This paper argues that a full account of perception raises a number of different questions. One central explanatory project concerns questions about the kinds of processes that currently enable a creature to identify and respond appropriately to distant objects: the answer, it is argued, lies in acknowledging the role of conscious inner representations in guiding navigational behaviour through complex environments. The fact that perception and action are interdependent does not conflict with the claim that inner representational states comprise an essential stage in visual processing. (shrink)

Recent proponents of the ‘theory theory’ of mind often trace its roots back to Wilfrid Sellars’ famous ‘myth of Jones’ in his 1956 article, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’. Sellars developed an account of the intersubjective basis of our knowledge of the inner mental states of both self and others, an account which included the claim that such knowledge is in some sense theoretical knowledge. This paper examines the nature of this claim in Sellars’ original account and its relationship (...) to more recent debates concerning ‘theory of mind’, in particular the theory theory. A close look reveals that Sellars’ original view embodied several distinctions that would enable more recent theory theorists to accommodate certain phenomenological objections that have been raised against that outlook. At the heart of the philosophical issue is an overlooked complexity involved in Sellars’ account of the ‘theory/observation’ distinction, involving a conception of the distinction that is both independently plausible and a key to the issue in dispute. (shrink)

Argues inter alia that Kant and Hegel identified necessary conditions for the possibility of singular cognitive reference that incorporate avant la lettre Evans’ (1975) analysis of identity and predication, that Kant’s and Hegel’s semantics of singular cognitive reference are crucial to McDowell’s account of singular thoughts, and that McDowell has neglected (to the detriment of his own view) these conditions and their central roles in Kant’s and in Hegel’s theories of knowledge. > Reprinted in: J. Lindgaard, ed., John McDowell: Experience, (...) Norm and Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008d), 124–151. (shrink)

The essays in this volume concern the points of intersection between analytic philosophy and the philosophy of the exact sciences. More precisely, it concern connections between knowledge in mathematics and the exact sciences, on the one hand, and the conceptual foundations of knowledge in general. Its guiding idea is that, in contemporary philosophy of science, there are profound problems of theoretical interpretation-- problems that transcend both the methodological concerns of general philosophy of science, and the technical concerns of philosophers of (...) particular sciences. A fruitful approach to these problems combines the study of scientific detail with the kind of conceptual analysis that is characteristic of the modern analytic tradition. Such an approach is shared by these contributors: some primarily known as analytic philosophers, some as philosophers of science, but all deeply aware that the problems of analysis and interpretation link these fields together. (shrink)

In this paper, first, I will focus on the divergent interpretations of two leading Sellars’ scholars, Willem deVries and James O’Shea, as regards Sellars’ view on the being of the normative. It will be suggested that this conflict between deVries’ and O’Shea’s viewpoints can be resolved by the provision of an account of what I shall call ‘ready-tohand’ normativity, which incorporates the insights of both deVries’ and O’Shea’s interpretive perspectives, while at the same time going beyond them. It shall be (...) further argued that the resulting ‘phenomenologically’ informed view of normativity, pointing as it does towards its ideal integration not only with practical action but also with perceptual experience, in the form of what I shall call ‘kinaesthetic’ normativity, can potentially pose problems to Sellars’ own view on the matter, and, in particular, to the way normativity can allegedly be ‘stereoscopically fused’ with the ultimate ontology of the ideal scientific image. However, I shall argue that these problems are not unsurpassable: although the possibility of a specifically ‘kinaesthetic’ form of normativity seems to have eluded Sellars’ grasp, his views about the way in which the productive imagination is implicated in perceptual experience, do indeed provide the conceptual resources that make possible the stereoscopic fusion of this kind of normativity with the ontology of the ideal scientific image. (shrink)

Computational imagination (CI) conceives imagination as an agent’s simulated sensorimotor interaction with the environment in the absence of sensory feedback, predicting consequences based on this interaction (Marques and Holland in Neurocomputing 72:743–759, 2009). Its bedrock is the simulation hypothesis whereby imagination resembles seeing or doing something in reality as both involve similar neural structures in the brain (Hesslow in Trends Cogn Sci 6(6):242–247, 2002). This paper raises two-forked doubts: (1) neural-level equivalence is escalated to make phenomenological equivalence. Even at an (...) abstract level, many imagined and real actions turn out to be dissimilar. More so, some imagined actions have no corresponding real actions and vice versa, even though neural regions involved in imaginings and real action-perception are the same (Sect. 1). (2) At the implementation level, the hypothesis presents a mutually exclusive view of imagination and perception whereby imagination functions in the absence of the sensory feedback and is action based. Both these issues are contested here: Neither imagination functions in the absence of perception nor all forms of imaginings are action based; it is, rather, about conceiving possibilities which emerge during the perceptual stage itself (Sect. 2). For the modal aspect to arise, it is submitted that an integrative framework is required which Kant can provide for whom imagination is an indispensable part of perception. Kant’s views on concept-formation are presented here to illustrate this aspect (Sect. 3). The Paper is concluded with emphasizing the relevance of Kant’s views to the problems identified in the two sections. (shrink)

Imagination is widely thought to come in two varieties: perception-like and belief-like imagination. What precisely sets them apart, however, is not settled. More needs to be said about the features that make one variety perception-like and the other belief-like. One common, although typically implicit, view is that they mimic their counterparts along the conceptuality dimension: while the content of belief-like imagination is fully conceptual, the content of perception-like imagination is fully non-conceptual. Such a view, however, is not sufficiently motivated in (...) the literature. I will show that there are good reasons to reject it and I will argue that both varieties of imagination involve fully conceptual contents. I will suggest an alternative way to draw the distinction between perception-like and belief-like imagination along the conceptuality dimension, according to which only perception-like imagination requires observational concepts. (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)

Abstract: The intent of this paper is to indicate a development in Sellars' writings which points in another direction than the interpretations offered by Brandom, McDowell, and A. D. Smith. Brandom and McDowell have long claimed to preserve central insights of Sellars's theory of perception; however, they disagree over what exactly these insights are. A. D. Smith has launched a critique of Sellars in chapter 2 of his book The Problem of Perception which is so penetrating that it would tear (...) Sellars' philosophy of perception apart if it were adequate. However, I try to show firstly that Brandom's and McDowell's interpretations are unsatisfying when Sellars' late writings are taking into consideration. And secondly that we can give another interpretation of Sellars that is not vulnerable to some of the problems of which Smith accuses Sellars. (shrink)

In this paper I try to defend McDowell’s empiricism from a certain objection made by Davidson, Stroud and Glüer. The objection states that experiences cannot be reasons because they are—as McDowell conceives them—inert. I argue that, even though there is something correct in the objection, that is not sufficient for rejecting the epistemological character that McDowell attributes to experiences. My strategy consists basically in showing that experiences involve a constitutive attitude of acceptance of their contents.

this essay argues that John McDowell's argument that sensations are a useless 'fifth wheel' in Wilfrid Sellars' philosophy of experience fails.