Openness to the layout of reality : John McDowell & Nelson Goodman on perceptual experience

• Main Author: Weaver, Bryan R.
• Published: University of Reading 2011
• Subjects: 153.7
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.558769

In this thesis, I argue that earlier Kantian conceptualism, the combined view of the structure and content of perceptual experience that John McDowell recommends in his writings that culminate in Mind and World, is ostensibly similar to Kantian structurism, the combined view of the structure and content of perceptual experience that Nelson Goodman recommends throughout his writings. Whereas McDowell thinks that Kantian conceptualism puts us in a position to conceive experience as openness to the layout of reality, Goodman thinks that Kantian structurism leaves us in the position of having to conceive experience as confinement to ways of describing whatever is described. I argue that Goodman's view implies an objection to McDowell' s earlier view of the structure of experience. I combine Goodman's objection with Donald Davidson's objection to McDowell's earlier view of the content of experience to form the Goodman-Davidson objection, an objection to McDowell's earlier view of the structure and content of experience. I argue that later Kantian conceptualism, a new view of the structure and content of perceptual experience that McDowell recommends in his writings after Mind and World, is less vulnerable to the Goodman-Davidson objection, and I reinforce this by arguing that McDowell's later Kantian conceptualism is Rot vulnerable to familiar objections to earlier Kantian conceptualism by Michael Friedman and Christopher Peacocke. I argue that later Kantian conceptualism is underwritten by a different view of the relation between the conceptual and the propositional than earlier Kantian conceptualism. I argue that McDowell's later Kantian conceptualism earns the right to reject the confinement imagery of Goodman and Davidson, but it does not entitle McDowell to the openness imagery of Mind and World.