Gray Reichl

The aim of our paper is to examine John McDowell’s theory of perceptual experience with reference to its inheritance of the early Wittgenstein. We begin by showing that several fundamental tenets of McDowell’s account emerge from an encounter with the Tractatus, most notably the requirement that there be an isomorphism between thought and the world in our claims to perceptual knowledge. We argue that those passages from the early Wittgenstein McDowell exploits already contain an internal criticism of an essential element of the latter’s account, namely, his distinction between perceptual apprehension and perceptual judgment. We show how this distinction in McDowell must be understood as an extension of the Fregean distinction between the force and content of a judgment, and how Wittgenstein’s critique of Frege in the Tractatus is equally applicable to McDowell’s account of perceptual judgment. Following Wittgenstein’s lead, we show how McDowell’s commitment to the force/content distinction threatens to undermine his claim that perceptual experiences non-inferentially justify the judgments in which they figure. To do justice to the idea of perception as a capacity for knowledge, we conclude by proposing an alternative view in which perception alone is capable of constituting a judgment so as to the way things are.