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Is The Content Of Experience Conceptual?

Posted on:2012-01-20Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:W DengFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155330335465474Subject:Foreign philosophy
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W. V. Quine revised empiricism in his essay "two dogmas of empiricism" and acquired empiricism without dogma. But in Davidson's view, the dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content is the third dogma of empiricism which must be rejected. And he thinks that empiricism itself is abandoned once we rejected the dualism. McDowell thinks there is a danger of falling into an interminable oscillation between the myth of the given and Davidson's coherentism. We must insist a minimal empiricism in order to dismount from the seesaw. His core claim is that the content of experiences is conceptual per se. On the one hand, an understanding background is necessary to the content of experience. And this background belongs to a network of conceptual capacities which is governing our thinking and embodied the understanding of the world. On the other hand, we conceive experience as awareness of a reality independent of experience, because of what appear in experience is one aspect of a richer reality.The dilemma derives from a deep difficult root that our concepts of nature and spontaneity could not cohere with each other. Different from a bald naturalism and Davidson's coherentism, McDowell propose a position which not only insists the fundamental distinction between the logical space of law and the logical space of reason, but also openour idea of nature beyond the realm of law so as to get a concept of spontaneity cohere with nature through reinterpreting Aristotle's the second nature.Against the argument, Dreyfus refutes McDowell with the phenomenological description of embodied coping. After considering with McDowell's responses, I will give my own views.
Keywords/Search Tags:Perception, Conceptual Content, Conceptual Capacity, Spontaneity, Nature, Embodied Coping
PDF Full Text Request
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