Experience and the world's own language
Subtitle: a critique of John McDowell's empiricism
By: Richard Gaskin.
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Oxford; New York : Oxford University Press
Language: eng
Number of pages: 251
Subjects: McDowell, John Henry.
Description: "John McDowell's 'minimal empiricism' is one of the most influential and widely discussed doctrines in contemporary philosophy. Richard Gaskin subjects it to careful examination and criticism. The doctrine is undermined, he argues, by inadequacies in the way McDowell conceives what he styles the 'order of justification' connecting world, experience, and judgement.

McDowell's conception of the roles played by causation and nature in this order is threatened with vacuity; further, the requirements of self-consciousness and verbal articulacy which he places on subjects participating in the justificatory relation between experience and judgement not only precipitate an undesirable Cartesianism, but also have the implausible consequence that infants and non-human animals are excluded from the 'order of justification' and so are deprived of experience of the world."

"Gaskin goes on to show how to correct the mistake, and thereby presents his own version of empiricism. First we must follow Frege in his location of concepts at the level of reference, but then we must go beyond Frege and locate not only concepts but also propositions at that level; and this in turn requires us to take seriously an idea which McDowell mentions only to reject, that of objects as speaking to us 'in the world's own language'. Even so, if empiricism is to have any chance of success it must be still more minimal in its pretensions than McDowell allows: in particular, it must abandon the individualistic and intellectualistic construction which McDowell places on the 'order of justification'."--Jacket.
Table of contents: title: Minimal empiricism and the order of justification; title: Minimal empiricism : introductory; title: Minimal empiricism : some initial difficulties; title: McDowell's empiricism : overview and prospective; title: The simple model of empirical content; title: The order of justification; title: From the complex to the simple model of empirical content; title: Experience and causation; title: Causation and the complex model of empirical content; title: The threat of Anomalous Monism; title: Causation in the space of reasons; title: Nature and supernature; title: Rampant and naturalized platonisms; title: Realmoflaw causation and the myth of the given; title: Experience and judgement; title: McDowell's transcendental argument; title: Judgement and freedom; title: Knowledge and the opportunity to know; title: Knowledge and infallibility; title: Ayer on perceptual error; title: Experience and selfconsciousness; title: The highest common factor conception of experience; title: McDowell's individualism; title: Externalism and the individual; title: Externalism and the order of justification; title: The mental lives of infants and animals; title: Two species of mentality; title: Mentality and the transcendental argument; title: Objections to McDowell's account; title: Conceptual consciousness and the Private Language Argument; title: Not a something, but not a nothing either; title: Feeling pain and feeling a pain; title: Mentality and conceptual sophistication; title: Two species of mentality revisited; title: Mentality and propositional content; title: Diagnosis and treatment; title: The ailment : Kantian transcendental idealism; title: Sense, reference, and concepts; title: Propositions and states of affairs; title: Concepts and nominalism; title: Wittgenstein and ultrarealism; title: Ultrarealism and universals; title: The world's own language; title: Combining objects and concepts at the level of reference; title: Locating propositions at the level of reference; title: The problem of falsity; title: Truth and intrinsicism; title: Der Mensch spricht nicht allein; title: Epilogue: the unity of the proposition.