I think spiders do experience things, and I think it's probably so different from my own experience that if we could upload the spider's thoughts and download them into my brain, my mind would just detect inexplicable noise. — frank
The supposed illusory nature of certain experiences is trivial. Consider that we are aware that they are illusions. We are aware of this becasue they are evaluated by the whole web of belief, and not segregated and separated as "experiences". The "Need" McDowel sees to "distinguish the experience" suggests a profound misapprehension of Davidson's much more subtle argument. — Banno
It might help if you would sketch the argument that you take McDowell to be misapprehending — Pierre-Normand
Indeed, it is problematic to attribute beliefs to the spider at all, since beliefs sit within the broader framework of of triangulation, interpretation, and hence occur at a level that it utterly foreign to the spider. — Banno
instead, mental descriptions are interpreted within the broader context of social practices and linguistic frameworks. — Banno
Why? I'm not making McDowell's argument. If you think he has a case, then you can make it. — Banno
The "Need" McDowel sees to "distinguish the experience" suggests a profound misapprehension of Davidson's much more subtle argument. — Banno
We ought be careful not to think of seeing the cat on the mat as happening in isolation, especially since this is what Davidson says does not happen. That what we see is interpreted as cat and mat is not seperate to the belief - in a sense it is the belief, caused by the physics and physiology of the situation. The physics and physiology cause the belief that the cat is on the mat; the "experience" doesn't "contribute to the justification" that you see the cat, since there is no justification. You see the cat. The experience is not isolated from the beliefs.
So thinking of LE as a belief about your experience would not fit Davidson's account. Part of what is going on here is an ambiguity in introducing the term "experience". A better way to say this would be that the physics and physiology cause the belief; dropping the word "experience". — Banno
How are basic empirical judgments primarily justified? You might judge that the cat is on the mat because you looked and saw that it is. What happened when you looked? On McDowell's view, the conceptual elements that make up this perceptual content—along with your self-conception as a being with sense perception, the Kantian 'I think'—are passively drawn upon in experience. This allows you to judge that the cat is on the mat based on it visually appearing to you that it is. — Pierre-Normand
On Davidson's view, the presence of the cat on the mat causes you to acquire the belief that the cat is on the mat. New perceptual beliefs might trigger revisions of prior beliefs, in line with his coherentism. However, Davidson would describe illusory or misleading perceptions as cases where the world causes us to form a false belief. The experience is still the causation of a belief, regardless of its truth. — Pierre-Normand
This experience, on McDowell's view, provides her with a reason to believe that the cat is on the mat because in having this experience, the fact of the cat being on the mat is made manifest to her. — Pierre-Normand
If on McDowell's view my acquisition of language including the categories of *cat* and *mat* along with my self-conception as a being with sense perception enables me to judge or believe there is a cat on the mat when I see one, what would allow a dog to believe it sees a cat on the mat? — Janus
Seeing that the cat is on the mat is not a reason to think the cat is on the mat so much as believing that the cat is on the mat... — Banno
I'd say seeing it presents it, unlike the belief which one can maintain or change regardless of the whereabouts of the cat. You won't keep on seeing the cat on the mat when it hops up on the chair. The visual experience is then the cat on the chair. This suggests that seeing is different from believing, and that seeing can be used as a reason for believing that the cat is on the mat (or on the chair). — jkop
Sellars rejected the "Myth of the Given," the idea that our knowledge rests on a foundation of non-conceptual experiences. He argued that all awareness involves the application of concepts. But he also recognized that we can have non-inferential knowledge—knowledge that isn't inferred from other beliefs.
When we see the cat on the mat, we don't infer that it's there from other beliefs. Our knowledge is direct and immediate. But it's still conceptual... . — Pierre-Normand
While Davidson acknowledges that beliefs are caused by the world, he doesn't give experience itself a rational role in justification. — Pierre-Normand
This also highlights why Davidson's purely causal account is insufficient. While Davidson acknowledges that beliefs are caused by the world, he doesn't give experience itself a rational role in justification. For McDowell, following Sellars, experience is not just a causal intermediary; it's a non-inferential but conceptually structured encounter with the world that provides reasons for our beliefs — Pierre-Normand
Each view develops its own model of conceptual understanding as a Sellarsian “space of reasons”: Davidsonian radical interpretation, McDowell's second-nature acculturation as rational animals, Brandom's game of giving and asking for reasons, or Haugeland's account of constitutive skills, standards, and commitments. Each then tries to show how performances within this space of reasons are genuinely constrained externally, by objects, experience, or the world. Their critics, myself included, respond that only the semblance of constraint has been demonstrated: we are left with a “frictionless spinning in a void,” a second nature disconnected from any explicable relation to first nature, a self-contained game of intralinguistic moves in which perception and action always remain “external,” or a self-binding commitment with no greater normative authority and force than New Year's resolutions.
Common to these accounts is an understanding of us as thinking and knowing subjects (whether as individuals or as discursive communities) who “have” conceptions of things in the form of mental representations or intralinguistic dis-cursive commitments. “Objects” “stand against” these conceptions as external normative constraints upon what we (should) think, say, and do, via their experiential or causal impingements upon us from “outside.” In each case, their externality to the conceptual or epistemic domain (ascribed in order to provide the needed constraint or “friction”) blocks any effective engagement with epistemic justification or conceptual understanding. My account begins differently. We are not subjects confronting external objects but organisms living in active interchange with an environment. An organism is not a self-contained entity but a dynamic pattern of interaction with its surroundings (which include other conspecific organisms). The boundary that separates the organism proper from its surrounding environment is not the border of an entity but a component of a larger pattern of interaction that is the organism/environment complex.
Given a sufficiently convergent cognitive biology, we might suppose that aliens would likely find themselves perplexed by many of the same kinds of problems that inform our traditional and contemporary philosophical debates. In particular, we can presume that ‘humanoid’ aliens would be profoundly stumped by themselves, and that they would possess a philosophical tradition organized around ‘hard problems’ falling out of their inability to square their scientificself-understanding with their traditional and/or intuitive self-understanding. As speculative as any such consideration of ‘alien philosophy’ must be, it provides a striking, and perhaps important, way to recontextualize contemporary human debates regarding cognition and consciousness.
Do we experience the cat or the concept?
, there are all sorts of neurological disorders whose affects seem largely contained to concept recollection or word recall. Yet such disorders are not the same thing as being deaf or blind. As far as can be ascertained, it seems possible for the visual field to be largely unaffected (e.g. people can draw what they see, and navigate the world) even as a person losses the ability to attach concepts (e.g. "what a thing is and is used for") to what they experience. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I think the most obvious reason to suppose that man has the capacity for picking out plants from rocks, a branch above from the sky, or a tiger from the jungle background, is that these things exist, and that it is very important for us to recognize them directly in sensation. So, while "what is experienced" might be, in some sense, the interaction of the sense organ and ambient environment (that latter of which mediates through its interactions with the objects sensed), this does not preclude a strong "sense realism," since this sort of mediation is hardly unique in physical interactions. Indeed, all physical interactions might be said to involve some sort of mediation, yet "everything is received in the manner of the receiver," does not presuppose "everything is received as representation." — Count Timothy von Icarus
So, my response will not satisfy Janus's worry that Davidson and McDowell's rejection of the duality of empirical content and conceptual scheme since it will appear to him that the world of the dog and the human world and incommensurable just in the way that Davidson purports to deny. But my rejoinder to this would be simply to assert that the dog, owing to it not being rational, is blind to the aspects of the world that our rational abilities disclose (including affordances for reasoning practically and theoretically)while, on the other hand, our different animal nature makes it simply hard to grasp affordances of the specifically canine form of life. — Pierre-Normand
When a dog sees a cat, they grasp affordances (e.g. something to cuddle with, to bark at, to keep a safe distance from, etc.). — Pierre-Normand
Your criticism worries me more than McDowell's.
...those affections feed into our thinking in ways we cannot hope to understand
— Janus
But we do increasingly understand how the stuff around us works on our neural system... so I'm not convinced of this. — Banno
So, I don't see that McDowell has solved a puzzle that Davidson failed to solve. It's Sellar's problem of integrating the space of causes with the space of reasons, and I see little reason to think that it can be achieved. I think it's just a fact about our limitations, and about our inability to transcend dualism in thought. — Janus
Marcus's central thesis is that reasons are causes, but they are not reducible to the kind of law-governed causes that operate in the physical world. They belong to a distinct category of 'rational causation' where causes are not related to effects in a nomological manner. Elizabeth Anscombe, Jennifer Hornsby and Michael Thompson also have helped me see how human actions and intentions are both causal and rational (and conceptual) but not thereby nomological. — Pierre-Normand
What you say raises an interesting issue. On the one hand it seems obvious that a rational argument can either convince or fail to convince. In the cases where it convinces, we might say the argument caused a conviction to be adopted. The question is then why does a rationally valid and sound argument not convince? It might be that, even if the argument is perfectly valid, the presuppositions it is based on are not accepted by the person who fails to be convinced. If we are being honest and unbiased, and we understand what counts as a valid argument we are not free to choose whether or not we accept it as valid, but we might reject it nonetheless because we fail to accept its grounding assumptions. Are we really free to accept or reject grounding assumptions? Of course we are in principle, just as in principle we might say we are free to like or dislike ice cream. — Janus
Joseph Rouse entered into the debate involving Davidson, Brandom and McDowell, concluding that while McDowell was right to accuse Davidson’s approach of treating conceptual thought as a “frictionless spinning in a void”, McDowell’s attempt to ground conceptually-mediated perception in the nature of objects of the world ends up in the same quagmire. — Joshs
This also seems pertinent: the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines 'nomological' thus:
"relating to or expressing basic physical laws or rules of reasoning". — Janus
Roise does seem to charge McDowell with too often or too closely assimilating the intelligibility of the order of first nature (i.e. our pre-conceptual animal nature as opposed to our linguistically informed and acculturated second-nature) with the realm of laws (physics, chemistry, etc.) And I am sympathetic to this criticism.
I've had Rouse's book 'How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism' sitting on my shelves for many years and haven't read it yet just because there only are twenty-four hours in a day. But I greatly enjoyed the book ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons that he co-authored with Rebecca Kukla. — Pierre-Normand
I loved your post Frank, It left me thinking about your example. It resonated with what I read years ago when I read House of Leaves. Navidson's house represents our limitation of understanding; the universe is actually like Navidson's house. At times, we all feel like Johnny Truant and struggle to make sense of things. — Alonsoaceves
I would not say that, when we like ice cream, we are free not to like it, anymore than, when we are sensitive to good reasons, we are free to disregard them. But in those cases, I follow Susan Wolf who, in Freedom Within Reason, argues that free will (or rational autonomy) doesn't consist in the ability to freely choose between a reasonable and an unreasonable option but rather in having acquired rational abilities through becoming (mainly by means of upbringing and acculturation) asymmetrically sensitive to good reasons. — Pierre-Normand
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