McDowell and experience: self-determination and answerability to the world

Abstract

This thesis critically examines John McDowell’s account of experience and perceptual judgment. McDowell’s principal thesis in Mind and World was that experience needs to be conceived as comprising conceptual content in order to assuage certain characteristic anxieties in modern philosophy in relation to empirical thought. McDowell’s notion of experience with a manifold of passively actualized propositional content became central to achieving that end. McDowell’s recently revised account of experience, now divested of propositional content, accordingly warrants an examination of the new form of conceptually shaped experience that he offers, and of the necessity of positing experience with conceptual content, in order to avoid the Myth of the Given. I identify three central features that come to inform McDowell’s account of experience with conceptual content, which in turn constitute the divisions of Chapters in this thesis: 1. Rational Entitlement; 2. Objectivity; 3. Self-Determining Capacities. In this context, I elucidate the particular models of conceptual intelligibility that are offered by McDowell in order to substantiate his stipulation of conceptual capacities as they are to be understood as operative in experience. Charles Travis presents an account of experience and perceptual judgment which contributes to McDowell’s critical rethink of his proposal in Mind and World that conceptually shaped experience has propositional content. I contend that, with McDowell no longer able to draw upon the more robust models of how to conceive of experience as conceptually shaped, and in light of certain aspects of Travis’s account of perceptual judgment, such a cumulative methodology places McDowell’s account of experience as conceptually shaped in serious difficulty – such that it may warrant a reconsideration of those higher-order concerns, specifically the Myth of the Given, that motivate and inform his treatment of experience and perceptual judgment.