The Sellarsian dilemma and McDowell’s solution to it.

The Sellarsian dilemma is a dilemma for the doctrine of cognitive givenness: if the awareness of the given is not representational, then it will not give the subject cognitive access to the given, but if the awareness of the given does represent the given fact, then one will in turn need a reason to...

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Publicado en:Synthese Vol. 205; no. 5; pp. 1 - 17
Autor principal: Langsam, Harold
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature May2025
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: The Sellarsian dilemma and McDowell’s solution to it.
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        au: Langsam, Harold
        affil: https://ror.org/0153tk833 Corcoran Department of Philosophy, University of Virginia, PO Box 400780, 22904-4780, Charlottesville, VA, USA
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        Awareness
        Experience
        John McDowell
        Laurence BonJour
        Psychology and Cognitive Sciences Psychology
        Sellarsian dilemma
        The given
      ab: The Sellarsian dilemma is a dilemma for the doctrine of cognitive givenness: if the awareness of the given is not representational, then it will not give the subject cognitive access to the given, but if the awareness of the given does represent the given fact, then one will in turn need a reason to think the representation is true, and the regress of justification will not come to an end; the representation in effect gets in the way of the subject having cognitive access to the given. I argue that once we properly understand the underlying argument for the dilemma, we realize that existing solutions to the dilemma are inadequate in that they fail to engage with this argument. I then explain how McDowell’s account of perceptual representation in “Avoiding the Myth of the Given” (2008) provides a way to solve the dilemma by moving between its horns. In brief, on McDowell’s view, the representational content of the awareness of the given is not propositional but intuitional: it does not represent a given fact, but only a given object, and it represents it merely as this object (it does not represent its properties, so there is no question of the representation having a truth value). Nevertheless, since a given object appears in experience by means of its given instantiated properties, the intuitional representation will give the subject cognitive access both to the given object and its given instantiated properties.
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