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1014Might There Be External Reasons?In J. E. J. Altham & Ross Harrison (eds.), World, Mind and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, Cambridge University Press. 1995.
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1013Tyler Burge on disjunctivismPhilosophical Explorations 13 (3): 243-255. 2010.In Burge 2005, Tyler Burge reads disjunctivism as the denial that there are explanatorily relevant states in common between veridical perceptions and corresponding illusions. He rejects the position as plainly inconsistent with what is known about perception. I describe a disjunctive approach to perceptual experience that is immune to Burge's attack. The main positive moral concerns how to think about fallibility.
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822What myth?Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 50 (4). 2007.In previous work I urged that the perceptual experience we rational animals enjoy is informed by capacities that belong to our rationality, and - in passing - that something similar holds for our intentional action. In his Presidential Address, Hubert Dreyfus argued that I thereby embraced a myth, "the Myth of the Mental". According to Dreyfus, I cannot accommodate the phenomenology of unreflective bodily coping, and its importance as a background for the conceptual capacities exercised in refle…Read more
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718Mind and WorldHarvard University Press. 1994.Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and ...
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647The disjunctive conception of experience as material for a transcendental argumentIn Fiona Macpherson & Adrian Haddock (eds.), Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, Oxford University Press. pp. 376-389. 2006.
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605Perceptual Experience: Both Relational and ContentfulEuropean Journal of Philosophy 21 (1): 144-157. 2013.
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572Wittgensteinian “quietism”Common Knowledge 15 (3): 365-372. 2009.In his Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein describes, and represents himself as pursuing, a way of doing philosophy without putting forward philosophical theses. I exemplify his approach with a sketch of his treatment of rule following. I focus in particular on the simple case of following a signpost, conceived as an expression of a rule for getting to a destination. Wittgenstein uncovers a threat that we will find it mysterious how one could learn from a signpost which way to go, and he d…Read more
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436Response to DreyfusInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 50 (4). 2007.In previous work I urged that the perceptual experience we rational animals enjoy is informed by capacities that belong to our rationality, and - in passing - that something similar holds for our intentional action. In his Presidential Address, Hubert Dreyfus argued that I thereby embraced a myth, "the Myth of the Mental". According to Dreyfus, I cannot accommodate the phenomenology of unreflective bodily coping, and its importance as a background for the conceptual capacities exercised in refle…Read more
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432Meaning and intentionality in Wittgenstein's later philosophyMidwest Studies in Philosophy 17 (1): 40-52. 1992.
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419Having the world in view: essays on Kant, Hegel, and SellarsHarvard University Press. 2009.In this new book, John McDowell builds on his much discussed Mind and World—one of the most highly regarded books in contemporary philosophy.
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305Mind and WorldPhilosophical Books 38 (3): 169-181. 1994.How do rational minds make contact with the world? The empiricist tradition sees a gap between mind and world, and takes sensory experience, fallible as it is, to provide our only bridge across that gap. In its crudest form, for example, the traditional idea is that our minds consult an inner realm of sensory experience, which provides us with evidence about the nature of external reality. Notoriously, however, it turns out to be far from clear that there is any viable conception of experience w…Read more
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254The true modesty of an identity conception of truth: A note in response to Pascal Engel (2001)International Journal of Philosophical Studies 13 (1). 2005.This Article does not have an abstract
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251Knowledge and the internal revisitedPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (1): 97-105. 2002.In “Knowledge and the Social Articulation of the Space of Reasons,” Robert Brandom reads my “Knowledge and the Internal” as sketching a position that, when properly elaborated, opens into his own social-perspectival conception of knowledge . But this depends on taking me to hold that there cannot be justification for a belief sufficient to exclude the possibility that the belief is false. And that is exactly what I argued against in “Knowledge and the Internal.” Seeing that P constitutes falseho…Read more
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241Truth and meaning: essays in semantics (edited book)Clarendon Press. 1976.Truth and Meaning is a classic collection of original essays on fundamental questions in the philosophy of language.
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241Reality and Colours: Comment on StroudPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (2): 395-400. 2004.Any brief comment on Barry Stroud’s fine book risks bringing some of its virtues into relief precisely by lacking them. The book’s epigraph is a passage from Wittgenstein advising philosophers to take their time. Stroud never papers over difficulties, and he allows himself to be sketchy only when it does not matter for the main line of his argument. Anyone without space constraints should take him as a model. Pleading space constraints, I shall sketch two reservations.
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205A Note on the Significance of the Surface InquiryInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 4 (3-4): 317-321. 2014.
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193Meaning, knowledge, and realityHarvard University Press. 1998.This is the second volume of John McDowell's selected papers.
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191Response to Stephen HoulgateThe Owl of Minerva 41 (1/2): 27-38. 2009.I argue that Stephen Houlgate misstates an element in the Kantian background to my reading of “Lordship and Bondage” (§2). He misreads my remarks about the need to see Hegel’s moves there in the context of the progression towards absolute knowing (§3), and, partly consequently, he fails to engage with the motivation for my reading (§4). And he does not understand the way my reading exploits the concept of allegory (§5).