How can Empirical Thought be Possible? —The McDowell-Travis Debate

• Main Authors: Shuang, Yu, 雙 羽
• Other Authors: Chiu, Chi-Chun
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/bkpuec

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 哲學研究所 === 106 === This thesis engages in the debate regarding the possibilities of perception. McDowell (1996) argues that perceptual experience, which full-fledged rational animals enjoy, is with the passive involvement of capacities that belong to human rationality. According to McDowell, because experiences represent the world to each individual as being a certain way, if we conceive experience as actualizations of conceptual capacities, we would need to credit experiences with propositional content. For example, in perceptual experience, one sees that things are thus and so. It becomes the content of a judgment if he takes the experience at face value. Later McDowell (2008) modifies his early idea and assumes that experiences have intuitional content. Intuitional content is unarticulated but still conceptual. By discursive capacity, one carves visual intuition into a perceptual judgment. Travis (2013) argues that perceptual experiences are silence and he also argued that conceptual capacities can only be exercised when one is responding to their perceptual experience. According to Travis, visual experience merely brings our surroundings into view and affords us sorts of awareness of them. Perception makes surroundings rationally bear on what the perceiver is to think. More specifically, one with expertise is able to respond to given perceptual experience and tell that things are thus and so. This thesis examines the McDowell-Travis debate on the possibility of empirical thought by borrowing Conant’s distinction between the Cartesian problematic and Kantian problematic, concluding that the two philosophers, in fact, deal with the Kantian problematic. After presenting and comparing the theories of McDowell and Travis on the nature of perceptual judgment, I will argue that Travis’ theory is superior to McDowell’s for the following reasons. McDowell does not pay sufficient attention to the concept of surroundings (environment) or to the idea of the non-conceptual. I will also argue perception’s task is to connect the non-conceptual and the conceptual.