Perceptual Experience Quote from Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism by Richard Rorty

"Sellars and Davidson can be read as saying that Aristotle's slogan, constantly cited by the empiricists, "Nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the senses," was a wildly misleading way of describing the relation between the objects of knowledge and our knowledge of them. McDowell, however, though agreeing that this slogan was misleading, thinks that we are now in danger of tossing the baby out with the bath. We need to recapture the insight which motivated the empiricists. He disagrees with Brandom's implicit suggestion that we simply forget about sense-impressions, and other putative mental contents which cannot be identified with judgments. The controversy between McDowell and Brandom is exciting wide interest among Anglophone philosophers because it is forcing them to ask whether we still have any use for the notion of "perceptual experience." Brandom thinks that this notion was never of much use, and that its place can be taken by that of "non-inferential judgments caused by changes in the physiological condition of sense-organs." McDowell thinks that such a replacement would deprive us of an important empiricist insight—one which Locke and Aristotle shared, though both formulated it very badly indeed. Brandom carries through on Sellars's criticism of "the Myth of the Given" by showing how the notion of "accurate representation of objective reality" can be constructed out of material provided by our grasp of the notion of "making correct inferential connections between assertions." He carries through on the "linguistic turn" by showing that if we understand how organisms came to use a logical and semantical vocabulary, we do not need to give any further explanation of how they came to have minds. For to possess beliefs and desires, on Brandom's view, is simply to play a language game which deploys such a vocabulary. McDowell demurs from Brandom's conclusions while accepting many of his premises. He does not agree that we can reconstruct the notion of representation out of that of inference, and thinks that Brandom's "inferentialist" account of concepts does not work. For McDowell, it is equally important to accept Sellars's point that something without conceptual structure cannot justify a belief and to insist, pace Sellars, that mental events which are not judgments can justify beliefs. So he pumps new life into the notion of "perceptual experience" by arguing that such experience is conceptually structured, but is nonetheless distinct from the belief which may result from it. McDowell's book is daring and original. Reading it side by side with Brandom's permits one to grasp the present situation in Anglophone philosophy of mind and language. One way of describing that situation is to say that whereas Sellars and Davidson use Kantian arguments to overcome the Humean dogmas retained by Russell and Ayer, Brandom and McDowell supplement Kantian arguments with Hegelian ones. Most Anglophone philosophers still do not take Hegel seriously, but the rise of what Brandom and McDowell refer to as their "Pittsburgh School of neo-Hegelians" may force them to. For this school holds that analytic philosophy still needs to pass over from its Kantian to its Hegelian moment."

— Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism by Richard Rorty
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