John McDowell - The Disjunctive Conception of Experience as Material for a Transcendental Argument

John McDowell's chapter is from the 2008 book "Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge". In it, he argues that the disjunctive conception of experience -- which claims that real perception and being under an illusion are fundamentally different cognitive states -- can be used as an ingredient in an anti-skeptical transcendental argument.
The basic idea is this. The external world skepticism needs the idea that experience seems to be (in McDowell's preferred phrase: purports to be) about an external world. But this is only intelligible if we believe that in the best situations, we are in direct touch with the external world -- which is what the disjunctive conception claims. However, the disjunctive conception takes away the reasons that we have to take skepticism seriously. Thus, skepticism undermines itself.
Victor Gijsbers teaches philosophy at Leiden University in the Netherlands. This video is part of an ongoing look at various philosophical papers: • Philosophical Papers

[@Brewmaster757]

Thank you! I would love more McDowell content. One of the best living philosophers.

[@Phi792]

Fantastic explanation! I read Pritchard's 'McDowellian Neo-Mooreanism' and McDowell's 'Defeasibility, Criteria, and Knowledge' (both working with Disjunctivism), but struggled to understand why they were supposed to work as anti-sceptical arguments. Especially your explanation of the philosophically relevant kind of sceptical argument helped me get the idea behind epistemic disjunctivism.

[@acorpuscallosum6947]

Earned a sub. McDowell is a hero.

[@scotimages]

For pragmatists like me we short cut this argument by simply saying that radical skepticism about the external world needs some form of justification beyond conjecture. For the radical skeptic such evidence or justification cannot exist if the world does not exist.
Much more substantive problems arise in the philosophy of science when we argue about the existence of 'invisibles' as the energy required to break a chemical bond.
Ultimately we have no escape from narrative content concerning our understanding.

[@davidbradley9519]

Thank you for these videos. Very much appreciated

[@tempusfugit3635]

really cool that you shared this! i used to work on transcendental arguments, fitting attitude theories of value, and generalizing disjunctivism to most if not all of our evaluative attitudes.
small nit on your reconstruction - i think of TA's as more of a burden-shifting move... it's not like we have to accept the disjunctive conception of experience to make sense of how perceptual experiences could purport to involve the mind-independent world; it's just that the skeptic hasn't yet provided an equally plausible account of how this could be. in the absence of that, we should just stick to naive realism / disjunctivism.
but, the common factor people will just accept that challenge and say "see! that's why we need a real _theory_ of mind/meaning/perception" and the disjunctivist is like, cool story bro.

[@VictorGijsbers]

Thanks! I totally agree with your burden shifting interpretation of the article; if that didn't come out in the video, your reply is a useful corrective. :-) Did you publish on these topics?

[@tempusfugit3635]

@@VictorGijsbers thanks! Your explanation was good, i just had to say that for myself lol. Never published; questions lost their grip!

[@lukedmoss]

Some phrasing I disagree with along the way but with the overall movement of the argument I agree. Even if radical skepticism were True, it would still be the case that we experience the world and objects "as if" and we can justify our existence by means of action similar in spirit to a performatism critique of postmodernism. Our experience of conscious isolation can be understood as an evolutionary decoupling via cognitive development of self/other dichotomy, and recognize that in either skepticism or realism there are underlying generative dynamics that give rise to said constructions of reality.

[@StatelessLiberty]

I find this idea of disjunctivism very counterintuitive and I’m not sure how well it addresses the problem. An experience generated by the computer controlling my mind and an experience of a real object seem the same to me, so the difference between these two is not consciously accessible to me, and so can’t be a reason for believing one thing or another. Maybe there’s a sense in which the real object is accessible but this is only a causal accessibility, the object causes some effect on me. The chain of causation is different in each case but leads to the same experience, so the difference between these causal chains isn’t consciously accessible either. But then it seems strange to say I do or don’t have knowledge on the basis of something that is essentially hidden. It makes knowledge part of the noumenal realm which seems to be a contradiction in terms.

[@nicholasrandazzo3510]

The trouble I think is that you are thinking of an epistemically externalist theory in an internalistic manner. The disjunctivist would agree with you that it may not be detectable that your evidence is the same, but nonetheless it is.

[@StatelessLiberty]

​@@nicholasrandazzo3510 It seems to be redefining "knowledge" into an uninteresting concept where whether we have knowledge could only be judged by a god's eye view. The core of the skeptical worry is that from our point of view we can't tell the difference between being a brain in a vat and not being a brain in a vat, and so what makes us think that the latter is more likely? You can entirely drop the word "know" and the worry is still there.

[@nicholasrandazzo3510]

@@StatelessLiberty This is a fair point, and that is why people say externalists do not seem to "know that they know." I disagree that you can drop the word know and the worry will still be there. There are plenty of abductivist responses to skepticism that seem to demonstrate at the very least that such explanations are unlikely.

[@jamesb46]

Why not just argue from the fact that these fantastical scenarios involve such advanced coordinations of circumstances that they have an incredibly low intrinsic probability. You would then need really good evidence to believe that you actually are a brain in a vat, to overcome that incredibly low prior probability.
I mean, do you have any idea how difficult it would be to actually engineer a machine that would simulate reality? Half of the time the traffic lights don’t even work! lol