The thesis identifies two strands in Rorty’s philosophy. One is an orientation towards practice in opposition to the traditional philosophical emphasis on theoretical knowledge. The other is Rorty’s anti-representationalist conception of knowledge. Rorty argues that these strands are mutually supporting, while the author argues they are incompatible. The nominal aim of Rorty’s anti-representationalism is to overcome many traditional dualisms of theoretical philosophy, such as subject and object, mind and world, and theory and practice. The thesis argues that anti-representationalism does not (...) and cannot achieve this aim, since what is required to overcome these dualisms is the recognition of the practical basis of knowledge, with which anti-representationalism is incompatible. The author agrees with much of Rorty’s critique of foundationalist epistemology, but argues in opposition to Rorty that anti-representationalism does not follow necessarily from this critique. Where Rorty locates the error of traditional epistemology in the very notion that knowledge and language can represent the world, the author argues that this idea is benign. The fundamental problem is the desire to anchor our conceptual scheme to an external structure independently of human practice — but this idea can be rejected without abandoning the notion of representation. The thesis also looks to explain why Rorty takes anti-representationalism to follow naturally from a rejection of foundationalism. The motivation is located in Rorty’s fundamental metaphysical orientation, which is naturalistic. Anti-representationalism is the product of the wish to promote a naturalistic worldview without succumbing to scientism. In this way Rorty hopes to unite the manifest and scientific images of man. The author argues that this cannot be done from within a naturalistic metaphysics. (shrink)

This article is a contribution to discussions about the prospects for a viable conceptualism, i.e., a viable view that represents our modes of awareness as conceptual all the way down. The article challenges the assumption, made by friends as well as foes of conceptualism, that a conceptualist stance necessarily commits us to denying animals minds. Its main argument starts from the conceptualist doctrine defended in the writings of John McDowell. Although critics are wrong to represent McDowell as implying that animals (...) are mindless brutes, it is difficult to see what is wrong with this critical unless we depart from McDowell's technical terminology and introduce a notion of a concept flexible enough to apply to the lives of some non-rational animals. The article closes with a discussion of observations that speak for attributing concepts, flexibly understood, to dogs. (shrink)

Increasingly prominent in the recent literature on the philosophy of perception, Intentionalism holds that sensory experience is inherently intentional, where to be intentional is to be about, or directed on, something. This article explores Intentionalism's prospects as a viable ontological and epistemological alternative to the traditional trinity of theories of sensory experience: the Sense-Datum Theory, the Adverbial Theory, and the Theory of Appearing.

This book is a defence of the philosophy of common sense in the spirit of Thomas Reid and G.E. Moore, drawing on the work of Aristotle, evolutionary biology and psychology, and historical studies on the origins of early modern philosophy. It defines and explores common sense beliefs, and defends them from challenges from prominent philosophers.

Constructivism undermines realism by arguing that experience is mediated by concepts, and that there is no direct way to examine those aspects of objects that belong to them independently of our conceptualizations; perception is theory-laden. To defend realism one has to show first that perception relates us directly with the world without any intermediary conceptual framework. The result of this direct link is the nonconceptual content of experience. Second, one has to show that part of the nonconceptual content extracted from (...) the environment correctly represents features of mind independent objects. With regard to the first condition, I have argued elsewhere that a part of visual processing, which I call “perception,” is theory-neutral and nonconceptual. In this paper, facing the second demand, I argue that a part of the nonconceptual content of perception presents properties that are the properties of mind independent objects. I claim first that nonconceptual content is the appropriate level of analysis of the issue of realism since it avoids the main problems besetting various types of analysis of the issue at the level of beliefs about the world. Then I claim that a subset of the nonconceptual content presents features of objects in the environment as they really are. (shrink)

In this paper I present a transcendental argument based on the findings of cognitive psychology and neurophysiology which invites two conclusions: First and foremost, that a pre-condition of visual perception itself is precisely what the Aristotelian and other commonsense realists maintain, namely, the independent existence of a featured, or pre-packaged world; second, this finding, combined with other reflections, suggests that, contra McDowell and other neo-Kantians, human beings have access to things as they are in the world via non-projective perception. These (...) two conclusions taken together form the basis of Aristotelian metaphysical realism and a refutation of the neo-Kantian two-factor approach to perception. (shrink)

In specifying the sensory evidence for perceptual belief, thinkers have either chosen a common perceptual idiom or have invented one of their own as a starting-point for their enquiries. It is becoming clearer that the choice harbours crucial, often disputable, assumptions. I compare two sorts of constructions, a variety of propositional ones and an objectual one, and I argue that the objectual idiom is indispensable in order to explain how a perceptual belief can arise out of what is not already (...) a belief. This has implications not only for the question of how belief is generated from perceptual evidence, but also for various other controversies. I discuss two of these implications: the character of inferences from evidence, and basic belief. (shrink)