AAP2010 Abstracts


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Title Mr.
First Name Huei-Ying (Tony)
Surname Cheng
Institution National Cheng-Chi University, Taiwan
Title of Paper The Rational and the Conceptual: Two Strands in Mind and World and Beyond
Select a Stream Philosophy of Mind
Abstract In recent works, John McDowell (2007, 2008) has modified his view of the content of experience by abandoning two assumptions in Mind and World and other earlier writings. One of the assumptions is that experiential content is propositional. Although now denying this, McDowell nevertheless insists that the content of experience is “conceptual in form.” Now given one is sympathetic with McDowell’s general spirit, one either finds earlier or later McDowell more plausible than the other. Either way, it is natural to hold that the changes are drastic, for McDowell formulates and explicates the differences at length quite explicitly. At this occasion, I am going to suggest the other way around. I venture to argue, pace McDowell’s own take on the matter, that we can trace the spirit of his later view back to his earlier writings, so the changes are not as drastic as they appear to be. I single out two strands, the rational and the conceptual, and offer grounds in favor of the rational, contra McDowell’s intention to give the two strands the same weight. McDowell relates Sellars’s attack on the Myth of the Given to Davidson’s objection to scheme-content dualism and Kant’s concept-intuition talk, but what he really needs, I submit, is the rational strand descended from Sellars’s thinking. I argue that McDowell was implicitly aware of this, although he insisted on the co-extensiveness of the rational and the conceptual in print. In recognizing the continuity between earlier and later McDowell, we can have a better appreciation of his later view. In due course, I suggest how McDowell can adjust his view on the distinction between environment and world, and what are implied by this distinction for the nature of language, experience, and scientific practice.