Comment on John McDowell's ‘The Disjunctive Conception of Experience as Material for a Transcendental Argument’

Abstract

Abstract In his contribution to the present volume, John McDowell proposes a distinctive kind of ‘transcendental’ argument for the disjunctive conception of experience, and renews his claim that the latter can be deployed to defuse certain kinds of sceptical doubt, responding obiter to the misgivings advanced in Wright (2002) about its credentials for the latter task. This chapter queries the putative ‘transcendental’ authority of disjunctivism, and reinforces the misgivings. It is argued that the root of sceptical doubt has less to do with a ‘highest common factor’ conception of the commonality between perceptions and illusions than with the possibility of phenomenological matching; and that scepticism can take a direct realist conception of sense experience in its stride once proper heed is given to the gap between direct awareness of a situation and the possession of warrant to believe that it obtains.

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