McDowell’s Conceptualist Therapy for Skepticism

In Mind and World, McDowell conceives of the content of perceptual experiences as conceptual. This picture is supposed to provide a therapy for skepticism, by showing that empirical thinking is objectively and normatively constrained. The paper offers a reconstruction of McDowell’s view and shows that the therapy fails. This claim is based on three arguments: 1) the identity conception of truth he exploits is unable to sustain the idea that perception-judgment transitions are normally truth conducing; 2) it could be plausible only from an externalist point of view that is in tension with the view of normativity that motivates conceptualism; 3) the identity conception of truth is incompatible with McDowell’s recent version of conceptualism in terms of ‘non-propositional intuitive contents’. In the last few years, a picture of perceptual experience as a source of reasons has emerged in the philosophical scene. This view interprets the epistemic status of perception in terms of its role in the justification of doxastic states. Some of its defenders claim that, if an account on these lines were not attained, the epistemic character of perceptual experience would be threatened, leading to a form of skepticism about the external world. In this paper I shall focus on the conceptualist defense of this claim and, in particular, on McDowell’s accounts of it: the picture he provides in Mind and World, where concepts are conceived as constituents of facts, and his most recent proposal, where concepts are conceived as actualized in non-propositional intuitive contents (McDowell 2007, 2008a). I am going to argue for the following claim: the conceptualist picture of perceptual content as identical to facts does not provide a way out for skepticism about the possibility of knowledge. Since this sort of skepticism is one of the motivations for Davidson’s coherentism —one of the targets of McDowell’s main argument— conceptualism fails on this count. If I am right, this paves the way for a picture that takes beliefs as the minimal units of justification. Furthermore, if one shows that the hypothesis that perceptual content is conceptually structured doesn’t improve the coherentist view, one can argue that the content of perception is non-conceptual. Before we reach these conclusions, it is necessary to make some methodological remarks. European Journal of Philosophy ]]]:]] ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 1–30 r 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. ijn _0 04 52 51 7, v er si on 1 2 Fe b 20 10 Author manuscript, published in "European Journal of Philosophy 19, 1 (2011) 1-30" DOI : 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2009.00383.x