Conceptualism, Perceptual Content, and Sensible Qualities The Case of McDowell and Sellars
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 Published On May 21, 2022

Central to Wilfrid Sellars’ account of human cognition from the 1950’s onwards was a clear distinction, expressed in varying terminology in his different works, “between conceptual and nonconceptual representations” (as he put it in his 1968 book, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes). His account of nonconceptual sensory representation, however, was one of those things that sharply divided subsequent philosophers who were influenced by Sellars. Those who came to be known as the ‘left-wing’ Sellarsians, such as Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell, have regarded Sellars’ appeals to nonconceptual sensory representations as part of a wider retrograde package of scientistic views from which Sellars’ more enduring insights concerning the myth of the given and the logical space of reasons can, and ought, to be saved. In particular John McDowell’s account of sensory experience, which he builds upon a new treatment of Sellars’ views on the topic, has taken a subtle new turn in his most recent collection of essays, Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (2009; hereafter ‘HWV’). In this paper I want to focus on McDowell’s revised understanding of the content of perceptual experience in terms of what he now calls intuitions, or the Kantian intuitional content of experience. As on McDowell’s previous view in Mind and World, such Kantian intuitions are still understood to have a content that is entirely conceptual in nature, but on the new view intuitional content is given in experience is conceptual but non-propositional form. What I want to explore here is the nature of this new distinction, and consider some questions it seems to me to raise; and I want to consider how the new view stands in relation to the account of perceptual experience in Sellars, who continues to serve as part hero and part foil in the development of McDowell’s revised position.

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