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Full Idea
McDowell has claimed that one cannot make sense of representation that plays a role in epistemology unless one takes the representation to be propositional, and thus capable of yielding reasons.
Gist of Idea
Representation must be propositional if it can give reasons and be epistemological
Source
report of John McDowell (Mind and World [1994]) by Tyler Burge - Philosophy of Mind: 1950-2000 p.456
Book Ref
Burge,Tyler: 'Foundations of the Mind' [OUP 2007], p.456
A Reaction
A transcendental argument leads back to a somewhat implausible conclusion. I suspect that McDowell has a slightly inflated (Kantian) notion of the purity of the 'space of reasons'. Do philosophers just imagine their problems?
| 8128 | Representation must be propositional if it can give reasons and be epistemological [McDowell, by Burge] |
| 19092 | There is no pure Given, but it is cultured, rather than entirely relative [McDowell, by Macbeth] |
| 8253 | Sense impressions already have conceptual content [McDowell] |
| 8254 | Forming concepts by abstraction from the Given is private definition, which the Private Lang. Arg. attacks [McDowell] |
| 8251 | The logical space of reasons is a natural phenomenon, and it is the realm of freedom [McDowell] |