McDowell's Conceptualist Therapy for Skepticism
Résumé
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'.
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