Donald Davidson's epistemology leaves us with frictionless spinning in a void

Odradek

Odradek

Acknowledge my clever John McDowell reference.

ACKNOWLEDGE IT

Obā-san

i dont know who any of these people are

Odradek

naney said:

i dont know who any of these people are

Now the shoe is on the other foot

Section42L

Gravity Falls is worth knowing.

The other people, I dunno whether they are.

Tachyon

i know Donald Davidson was a major analytic philosopher.  He came up with the principle of charity, yes?

i remember you bringing up John McDowell before but i can't remember what the context was, and know nothing about him.

Obā-san

i know of the gravity falls, i watched a bunch of episodes, but not up to the triangle man

i have

so many shoes

i have... 5 pairs? 6?

Tachyon

Value theory.  The context was value theory.

Odradek

McDowell’s argument is deceptively simple. In pre-Galilean thought, the Medieval philosophers enchanted the natural world with “spooky” ingredients of meaning and telic determination. With the advent of the new science and the epistemological turn to a theory of representational perception beginning with Descartes, a certain picture of experience emerged. We now had the perceiving subject on one side and the disenchanted world on the other, and experience was now construed as both an externally caused effect on our sensibility and an occurrence having epistemological relevance for empirical belief. But how can this be? It appears that there is an incommensurability between the normative space of reasons (spontaneity) and the scientific domain of blind causal relations (nature). How can experience be a passive receptivity while also having rational relations to belief? But for McDowell, this is a wrong picture productive of a pseudo-problem; he wants to exorcise the picture and dissolve the pseudo-problem.

The philosophical response to this pseudo-problem yielded two successive, misguided dilemmas. The first is reflected in the oscillation between coherentism and the Myth of the Given. The former acknowledges an irreducible dichotomy between the rational relations of spontaneity and the causal relations of nature (no justification, only exculpation) and opts for what McDowell characterizes as a frictionless system of normative relations among beliefs (only beliefs justify beliefs), thereby avoiding the problem but at the cost of no objective, external constraints—a disconnect between mind and world. The latter construes experience as a foundational given that it has a non-conceptualized content in virtue of which it can somehow warrant empirical belief, thereby again avoiding the puzzle, but now, for McDowell, we have a desideratum that cannot be satisfied. This situation can (and has) given rise to a second dilemma as embodied in the competing options of “bald naturalism” and “rampant Platonism”. The former either dispenses with spontaneity talk entirely (eliminativism) or pursues a reduction/redescription of such folklore talk in terms of purely scientific discourse, a hopeless project. The latter posits an ontologically transcendent, sui generisspace of reasons separable from nature, but at the unacceptable price of supernaturalism. We are in a muddle.