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In the Light of Experience

M I N D A S S O C IAT IO N O C C A SIO NA L SE R I E S
This series consists of carefully selected volumes of significant original papers

on predefined themes, normally growing out of a conference supported by a Mind
Association Major Conference Grant. The Association nominates an editor or editors
for each collection, and may cooperate with other bodies in promoting conferences
or other scholarly activities in connection with the preparation of particular volumes.
Director, Mind Association: Julian Dodd

Publications Officer: Sarah Sawyer
Recently published in the series

Perceptual Ephemera
Edited by Thomas Crowther and Clare Mac Cumhaill
Common Sense in the Scottish Enlightenment
Edited by C. B. Bow
Art and Belief
Edited by Ema Sullivan-Bissett, Helen Bradley, and Paul Noordhof
The Actual and the Possible
Edited by Mark Sinclair
Thinking about the Emotions
Edited by Alix Cohen and Robert Stern
Art, Mind, and Narrative
Edited by Julian Dodd
The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft
Edited by Sandrine Bergès and Alan Coffee
The Epistemic Life of Groups
Edited by Michael S. Brady and Miranda Fricker
Reality Making
Edited by Mark Jago
The Metaphysics of Relations
Edited by Anna Marmodoro and David Yates
In the Light of
Experience
New Essays on Perception
and Reasons
edited by
Johan Gersel, Rasmus Thybo Jensen,
Morten S. Thaning, and Søren Overgaard
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© the several contributors 2018
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017958154
ISBN 978–0–19–880963–0
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CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Johan Gersel and Rasmus Thybo Jensen
The Travis–McDowell Debate 15
Johan Gersel
Part I. The Myth of the Given

1. Travis on Frege, Kant, and the Given: Comments on
‘Unlocking the Outer World’ 23
John McDowell
2. The Move, the Divide, the Myth, and its Dogma 36
Charles Travis
3. What is the Myth of the Given? 77
Johan Gersel
4. Empiricism and Normative Constraint 101
Hannah Ginsborg
Part II. The Epistemology of Empirical Knowledge

5. Do Perceptions Justify Beliefs? The Argument from “Looks” Talk 141
Christopher Gauker
6. Fallibility for Infallibilists 161
Jason Leddington
Part III. The Nature of Experience

7. Perception and the Vagaries of Experience 189
Alan Millar
8. World in Mind: Extending Phenomenal Character
and Resisting Skepticism 213
Heather Logue
vi c ontents
Part IV. The Object of Experience

9. Objects and the Explanation of Perception 237
Bill Brewer
10. Are Perceptual Reasons the Objects of Perception? 256
J.J. Cunningham
Index 281
Acknowledgements
The papers you find in this anthology grew out of a workshop that was held in
Copenhagen, October 2013. Our goal was to create a philosophical atmosphere that
was focused on jointly getting to the bottom of a series of shared questions, rather than
providing a stage from which to present individual views. This means that we spent
more time discussing than listening, and that questions skipped, backtracked, and
otherwise jumped back and forth between the issues that were discussed over the
two days. To our joy, we found that our contributors even kept their individual discus-
sions going long after the workshop was over. This anthology is truly a joint effort,
as there is hardly a paper that hasn’t been altered and improved due to the helpful
comments from other participants. We owe an enormous thanks to all of our contribu-
tors for their willingness to contribute in this way, in spite of the time-consuming
nature of the approach. We think it tremendously improved the papers in the anthol-
ogy and that it exemplifies the essence of philosophical collaboration.
We owe further thanks to every participant at the workshop itself. You all contrib-
uted significantly to the spirit of the workshop and the content of the debate. We would
especially like to thank Hagit Benbaji, Susanna Siegel, and Rowland Stout who acted
as respondents at the workshop. We also owe Susanna Siegel and Rowland Stout, as
well as Sebastian Rödl, thanks for giving talks at the public conference “Reasons
and Experience” that we held in combination with the workshop.
Organizing a workshop, a conference and an anthology takes a serious amount of
work behind the scenes. If it hadn’t been for the organizational skills of Signe Bang
Holm, the end result would have been considerably more chaotic. Likewise, none of
this would have been possible without the funding we received from The Danish
Research Council, The Mind Association, University of Copenhagen, and Copenhagen
Business School. Two anonymous Oxford University Press referees have also been
working hard behind the scenes. We would like to express our gratitude for the enor-
mous amount of work you put into reviewing the book manuscript and for providing
such helpful critical comments and valuable suggestions.
Lastly, we would like to thank the readers of this book for giving us your time and
attention. We hope you learn as much from reading the anthology as we have done
from editing it.
The Editors
Copenhagen,
October 2016
Contributors
Bill Brewer, King’s College London

J.J. Cunningham, Oxford University
Christopher Gauker, University of Salzburg
Johan Gersel, University of Vienna
Hannah Ginsborg, University of California, Berkeley
Jason Leddington, Bucknell University
Heather Logue, University of Leeds
John McDowell, University of Pittsburgh
Alan Millar, University of Stirling
Charles Travis, King’s College London/University of Porto
Introduction
Johan Gersel and Rasmus Thybo Jensen
Empirical thought is made true or false by how the world is. Through experience subjects
are brought into contact with the empirical world. Hence, the following premise
seems as solid a starting point for philosophical enquiry as any: Perceptual experience
provides reasons for empirical thought. Though not uncontested1 most philosophers
agree that this premise must be true, understood some way or another. Experiences
provide reasons for empirical thought by making our surroundings accessible to us in
some epistemically salient way. The compelling nature of this premise allows one to
ask questions on the form: what must experience/thought/reasons/the world be like
if perceptual experience is to provide reasons for empirical thought? If anything
unites the papers in this anthology it is their outset in a question of roughly this
form. However, the seeming unity in outset is shattered once we look closer at how the
individual authors understand the notions of ‘experience’, ‘reason’, ‘the world’, and
‘accessible’. With different understandings of the key notions, the shared agreement
that perceptual experience must provide reasons disintegrates to a plethora of different
philosophical theories and opinions. Our goal with this introduction is to provide
what can at best be a minimal roadmap, which traces the various agreements and
differences in views.
A fruitful starting point is McDowell’s interpretation of the shared premise, as many
of the papers in this anthology situate themselves as responses to, or elaborations of,
McDowell’s views. The first notion to look at is ‘perceptual experience’. To McDowell
experience is an essentially passive mental occurrence.2 It is thus not simply a species
of belief that is especially tied to perceptual phenomenology or held in some peculiar
way. Experience is a non-doxastic passive mental state attributable to the subject.3
Next in line is the notion of ‘provides’. One way of being the provider of something is
by being the very thing provided. Milk provides nutrition because milk is nutritious.
Another way of being a provider, which we may call mere providing, is by making that
1
Davidson (1986) famously rejects this. 2
McDowell (1996) p. 10.
3
On this point McDowell’s view is in contrast with the view expounded by Ginsborg in Paper 4 of this
anthology.
2 Johan Gersel and Rasmus Thybo Jensen
which does the actual providing available. The milkman is a mere provider of nutrition
by making the milk available; the milkman need not be nutritious himself. Equivalently,
experience may be the provider of reasons by figuring as a reason itself or merely by
making available other entities that are reasons or by granting these entities their status
as reasons. We take McDowell to endorse the former position where the experience
itself figures as the reason.4 There are two famous versions of the latter view. On the
first, it is the perceived worldly entities (particulars, states of affairs, facts) themselves
that are reasons. Experience merely makes these entities accessible to us.5 On the
second version it is our perceptual beliefs that figure as reasons and these acquire their
positive epistemic status or justificatory significance through a suitable connection to
experience.6 All of these three views are compatible with explanations of one’s reasons
for belief along the lines of: I believe that P because I saw that P. On what we take to be
McDowell’s understanding, it is my state of seeing, the experience itself, that constitutes
the reason. On the world-based view it is the mind-independent entity itself that is my
reason, only this reason is made accessible to me through my state of seeing. Finally, the
reference to my state of seeing that P can be seen as expressing my belief, or knowledge,
that I see that P, in which case my reason is my belief about my perceptual state, rather
than the experiential state itself.7 While all three versions are thus compatible with
speaking of experience as providing reasons, we still take McDowell to favour the first
view where experience figures as a reason itself.
With these terminological clarifications in hand, we are now in a position to present
McDowell’s more particular version of the shared premise, which he calls ‘Minimal
Empiricism’. Minimal Empiricism claims that passive experiential occurrences or
states must themselves figure as reasons for thought.8 The central motivation for
Minimal Empiricism is the intuition that our thinking must be rationally constrained
by how things are in the world if it is to be recognizable as thinking that aims at getting
right how things are in the world. And what else but our experiences could possibly
4
While this interpretation is controversial, see McDowell (1996) p. 162 where he talks of himself as
‘crediting experiences with rational relations to judgement and belief ’ and later (p. 168) where he criti-
cizes Peacocke on the grounds that his view makes it difficult to see ‘how experiences . . . could constitute a
believer’s reasons’. Later (2009a, p. 268) he also states that judgements are ‘displayed as rational in light of
the experiences themselves, not just in light of beliefs about experiences’. All these quotes suggest a closer
connection between the experience and one’s reason than a role as mere provider.
5
The view that one’s experiential reasons are worldly facts is held by Dancy (2000). McDowell rejects
the attribution of this view to him in McDowell (2006, p. 134).
6
Gauker thinks that this latter solution is all we need to accept in order to have suitable empirical con-
straint on thought. Ginsborg’s version is close to this in that she thinks experiential reasons are a form of
belief. However, given her identification of experience with a form of belief it is a bit odd to say experience
grants the belief its status; rather, it’s the belief ’s status as an experiential belief normatively constrained by
reality which grants it a special epistemic status.
7
The view put forward by Millar in his contribution is not captured by these three interpretations of the
idea that experience provides reasons. Millar takes the fact that I see that P and not my belief that I see that
P to be my basic experiential reason and regards my seeing that P as belief-involving and as constituting
my knowledge that P.
8
McDowell (1996) p. xii.
introduction 3
deliver such an external constraint on our thinking? Because what is at stake with
Minimal Empiricism is the very possibility of recognizing our thinking as having
empirical content, McDowell also sometimes refers to it as Transcendental Empiricism
(McDowell 2009b, p. 246). While Minimal Empiricism is indeed a version of our shared
premise its more specific formulation of the premise is in no way accepted by all
participants in this anthology.9
McDowell goes on to ask a question on the form: what must experience be like if
passive experiential states are to, themselves, figure as reasons for thought? He draws
two major conclusions. First of all, experiences must possess conceptual content.10 If
they didn’t they could not figure as reasons for thought at all. This conceptualism has
been widely contested, and in light of our current discussion we can already see one
easy point of contention. One may reject the part of Minimal Empiricism, which states
that the experiences themselves must figure as the reasons. Instead one could cast
experiences in the role of mere providers of reasons that aren’t reasons themselves. This
allows one to acknowledge that the very elements that figure as the reasons themselves,
for example a perceptual belief, are conceptual. One can, thus, acknowledge McDowell’s
claim that the space of reasons is the space of the conceptual11 and acknowledge our
initial premise that experience provides reasons for belief, all the while one denies that
experiences are conceptual. However, the cost of doing so is that one denies Minimal
Empiricism.12 Alternatively, one can accept Minimal Empiricism, but question that
there is any sound argument from the claim that experiences are reasons, to the claim
that they must be conceptual. McDowell claims that any theory which extends rational
relations outside the bounds of the conceptual is a version of the Myth of the Given;
however, one might question that there is anything mythical about such positions.13
McDowell’s second major conclusion is that experiences must be understood as
world-involving if they are to provide adequate reasons for empirical thought.14 If what
we experience falls short of the very reality about which we think, then according to
McDowell, experience cannot figure as an adequate reason for belief. McDowell’s line
of reasoning goes something along the following lines: Knowledge-yielding reasons
for belief cannot fall short of ensuring the truth of what one believes.15 Therefore,
9
Clear adherents are McDowell, Gersel, and probably also Logue. Clear opponents are Gauker,
Ginsborg, and Millar. Travis and Brewer are difficult to position. Their main concern is that what we are
given in experience isn’t conceptually structured. However, it is difficult to discern whether they think that
our experiencing what is given or merely that which is experienced constitutes our reason. Importantly,
Travis, Brewer, Gauker, Ginsborg, and Millar all accept something like our shared starting premise in its
unspecific form.
10
See especially lecture two of McDowell (1996). 11
12
This line of response is taken by Gauker. Ginsborg is a bit trickier insofar as she equates experience
with a form of perceptual belief. She accepts the conceptual nature of experiential reasons, but denies their
passive nature.
13
This is roughly the response adopted by Travis in this anthology and Brewer (2011). Gersel defends
and elaborates McDowell’s appeal to the Myth of the Given.
14
15
See McDowell (1998a, 1998b). In his contribution, Gauker voices worries about such a requirement.
if experiences are to figure as knowledge-yielding reasons for belief about external

reality, then what we encounter in experience must be this external reality itself. Presented
this way McDowell’s arguments lead him from requiring truth-ensuring reasons to
the acknowledgement of epistemological disjunctivism. Once one requires that reasons
be truth-ensuring then one cannot avoid scepticism without attributing different
justificatory status to hallucinations and perceptions. Hallucinations do not ensure
the truth of the empirical beliefs based upon them. Hence, if perception is to provide
truth-ensuring reasons it must provide reasons with a justificatory force different from
that of subjectively indistinguishable hallucinations. Now, if our reasons must have this
truth-ensuring character and experiences themselves must figure as the reason, then it
is natural to think that we cannot be in the same metaphysical type of experiential state
when we perceive as when we hallucinate. Hence, beyond his obvious epistemological
disjunctivism, McDowell might be viewed as committed to metaphysical disjunctiv-
ism as well. This view claims that we cannot metaphysically account for hallucinations
and perceptions in terms of a single shared type of mental state, which simply differs in
its external relations to reality. Instead, perceptions are metaphysically considered as
some form of relational state in which the world figures as an inherent Relatum. However,
it isn’t clear that McDowell needs to go this far. He could restrict his characterizations
of experiences as relational, or world-involving, to explanations in which we are
concerned with the justificatory role of experience, and remain neutral as to how this
relates to experiences when they are considered purely metaphysically, that is, inde-
pendently of their role in epistemic explanation.16 However, we do not think this is indeed
McDowell’s strategy and the feasibility of this approach has been questioned by both
Brewer (2011) and Travis (this anthology), who explicitly endorse both metaphysical and
epistemological disjunctivism.17 An argumentative strategy different from McDowell’s,
but with largely the same consequence, is to start one’s argument from the premise of
metaphysical disjunctivism. One could then take the possibility of truth-ensuring
reasons (and thus epistemological disjunctivism) to simply be a positive upshot of one’s
independently motivated metaphysical theory, rather than consider such truth-ensuring
a requirement on the adequacy of reasons.18
Both metaphysical and epistemological disjunctivism leave the notion of phe-
nomenology in a somewhat awkward position. Traditionally, people have tried to
motivate the similarity in status, epistemological or metaphysical, between perception
and hallucination in terms of their indistinguishability to the involved subject. This has
often gone through some argument to the effect that shared phenomenology accounts
for both the indistinguishability and metaphysical or epistemological sameness.
16
Another way to avoid metaphysical disjunctivism, but not one congenial to McDowell, is once again
to reject that experiences themselves must figure as reasons for belief. This is the strategy that Millar
explores in this anthology.
17
See Haddock and Macpherson (2008) for a discussion of the relation between McDowell’s epistemo-
logical disjunctivism and metaphysical disjunctivism.
18
This seems more in line with Brewer’s (2011) later style of argument.
introduction 5
Epistemological and metaphysical disjunctivism thus seem to sever the envisaged

connection between phenomenology and epistemic and/or metaphysical status. While
McDowell indeed acknowledges that his arguments take no basis in phenomenology,19
others have found this severance problematic. What has been called phenomenal dis-
junctivism (Haddock and Macpherson 2008) is thus a third branch of disjunctivism
which claims that the phenomenology can differ between subjectively indistinguishable
experiences. While McDowell takes no stand on this form of disjunctivism, others
have investigated whether his view has consequences in this regard.20
At this stage it may seem that whatever unity there is among the views found in this
anthology, it is at a level of abstraction with little philosophical bite. It seems like little
to no agreement is left once we elaborate in more detail on the concepts involved in the
shared premise that experience provides reasons for thought. This conclusion would,
however, be too quick. A dominant view within mainstream epistemology is some
form of externalism of justification where all that is required for X to justify S’s thought
is that S’s thought is based on X and that this makes S’s thought reliably true. If one
holds this view, very little of interest can be deduced from the shared premise that
experience must provide reasons for thought. All it would entail was that some reliable
connection, which involved experience, must exist between a series of a subject’s
thoughts and the world those thoughts concern. The reason such a fruitful debate
exists between the authors of this anthology is that they all acknowledge some form of
internalist restriction on rampant epistemological externalism. Somehow, in some
way, the subject must be able to access or appreciate the connection furnished between
experience and the world about which she thinks. Once again, how one spells out this
internalist requirement will differ between the authors. At a minimal level one might
simply require that the subject must be conscious of that which figures as her reasons.
A stronger requirement endorsed by McDowell is that the subject must be able to
appreciate her reasons as such, whatever that may require more precisely.21 Thus even
though the precise role experience plays in providing reason differs between authors,
and while the specific versions of disjunctivism endorsed, if any, also differ, there is
still a core agreement that the subject’s consciousness should play a crucial role in our
characterization of her epistemic position. This puts the current anthology somewhat
off-centre on the current epistemological scene. To us one of the most interesting
things about the papers included here is precisely the way they contribute to the quest
for the holy grail of epistemology (Pritchard 2009, p. 472): some form of non-sceptic
internalist theory of empirical knowledge.
There is of course much more agreement between individual authors in the book
than what may be stipulated within the group of authors as a whole. As the reader will
find, each of the individual authors in this book engages with at least one, but most
19
In discussion at the workshop that led to this anthology.
20
Logue’s paper is concerned with the relation between epistemological and phenomenal disjunctivism.
21
Gersel attempts to spell out McDowell’s and other competing notions of internalism in more detail.
often several, of the other authors. This engagement is most often based on the significant
background of agreement that helps make philosophical discussion fruitful and con-
structive, rather than stubborn and destructive. We hope you will read these papers with
the same constructive spirit in mind. The following section will present the included
papers in more detail and try to highlight the individual debates rather than focusing
on the overall picture.
The Papers of the Anthology

While the papers have connections and ties that crisscross the whole anthology, some
of them are more directly engaged with the same issues. Our division into four separate
topics should therefore be seen more as a hint to their focus than as an expression of
a sharp segregation.
1. The Myth of the Given

The first four papers all explicitly engage with the Myth of the Given. This notion origin-
ates with Sellars (1956/1997), but has figured as one of the central driving premises in
McDowell’s thinking on experiential reasons. Again borrowing from Sellars, McDowell
(1996) employs the notion of the space of reasons. The space of reasons is the logical
space in which we account for the occurrence and propriety of certain mental states in
light of what reasons the subject has for being in those states. The Myth of the Given
consists in the extension of the space of reasons beyond its legitimate bounds. Mythical
theories are those which argue that certain types of entities can figure as a subject’s
reasons even though those entities are of such a kind that they are unsuitable to fulfil this
role. The core of McDowell’s thinking on experiential reasons starts from the claim that
any theory which extends a subject’s reasons beyond what is conceptually given to the
subject is a form of the Myth of the Given. In slogan form: the space of reasons is the
space of concepts.22 This idea in combination with Minimal Empiricism leads him to
the conclusion that experiences must possess conceptual content, as experiences must
be able to figure as reasons for a subject’s thinking.
Earlier Travis (2013a) has argued against the view that experiences have content. Yet
given his adherence to the idea that experience must provide the subject with reasons,
and perhaps even to Minimal Empiricism as a specific interpretation of this idea,
Travis has felt obliged to explain how his theory does not succumb to the Myth in spite
of McDowell’s arguments to the opposite conclusion (Travis 2013b, 2013c). Travis’s
arguments have typically had two prongs. On the one hand he has attempted to show
that if experiences were conceptual then they couldn’t provide adequate reasons for
thought. The second prong has been to elucidate the constraints implied by the danger
22
introduction 7
of the Myth and argue that his theory doesn’t transgress against these. McDowell’s
present paper is a response to Travis (2013c). He argues that Travis is wrong to think
that once we consider experiences to be conceptual then we lose access to the reality
that makes our judgement true.
Travis’s paper in this anthology continues their debate. The first line of attack remains
constant insofar as he still considers conceptually laden experiences to be unable to
present adequate reasons for thought. However, his second line of attack has altered.
Instead of accepting the idea of the Myth of the Given, Travis now expresses that he
is unable to feel the pull of McDowell’s account of the Myth of the Given. He tries
to expose various false premises, which he envisages may have led McDowell to accept
the constraint on the space of reasons which is elaborated via the idea of the Myth
of the Given.
Gersel’s contribution can be seen as an attempt to supply the elucidation of the
Myth of the Given which Travis claims is lacking. The goal of that paper is to clarify
why the claim that reasons are connected to the possibility of self-conscious scrutiny
has the consequence that the space of reasons is limited to the space of the conceptual.
The paper thus attempts to sharpen the disagreement between Travis and McDowell
by locating an argument that could defend the actuality of the Myth, while eschewing
the false premises that Travis thinks drive the argument. McDowell’s and Gersel’s
papers can thus in unison be seen as an attempt at answering respectively the first
and the second prong of attack present in Travis’s contribution.
Ginsborg’s paper engages with the Myth of the Given at one step’s remove. For
McDowell the insight of Davidson’s dictum that only a belief can justify a belief is that
only items with conceptual content can play a justificatory role. Ginsborg agrees but
finds the further insight that only a committal, and thereby active mental state, can
serve as a reason. This, however, brings her into conflict with Minimal Empiricism as
envisaged by McDowell. The purpose of Minimal Empiricism was to ensure a rational
yet passive constraint on our thinking. Ginsborg’s view of the nature of reasons forces
her to reject that experiences understood as passive can play such a rational role.
However, Ginsborg argues, this does not rule out that experiences can still play a
rational role because we can and should regard experience as itself belief-involving.
This move brings her position dangerously close to Davidsonian coherentism, with
its total dismissal of Minimal Empiricism—a position she, with McDowell, takes to be
untenable. Her solution is to separate two elements that are put together in McDowell’s
understanding of Minimal Empiricism, namely the idea that our thinking must be
normatively constrained by the world and the idea that our thinking must be rationally
answerable to experience.
McDowell accounts for the normative relation between world and belief via the
rational, normative relation between experience and belief. Ginsborg also takes
experience to stand in a rational relation to beliefs, only she conceives of experience
as belief-like. What clearly distinguishes Ginsborg’s position from Davidson’s is her
account of experience in terms of a normative, but non-rational relation between the
object of experience and the concept-application involved in experience. Our seeing

that a cube is green intrinsically involves recognition of the appropriateness of this
very perceptual, yet committal response to the cube. However, the appropriateness in
question is conceived as more primitive than the rational appropriateness of a judge-
ment in light of certain reasons. Here Ginsborg introduces a notion of judgement and
conceptual capacities that is less demanding than the one McDowell works with. The
object is experienced as calling for a certain concept application, but such sensitivity to
norms does not require that one has been initiated into the space of reasons through
language acquisition. Importantly, the idea of an object calling for a certain concept
application is not claimed to be intelligible independently of the child’s actual ability to
apply such non-linguistic concepts. For this reason, Ginsborg argues, her account does
not succumb to the Myth of the Given.
The first four papers can be seen as aligned in roughly the following way. McDowell,
Gersel, and Ginsborg agree that the space of reasons is exhausted by the space of the
conceptual. Ginsborg and Travis agree that given how experiences are conceived by
McDowell, as passive and conceptual, they cannot provide reasons for belief. However,
Travis has a problem with the conceptual nature attributed to experiential reasons,
whereas Ginsborg objects to their passivity. As Minimal Empiricism is the idea of a
passive constraint on thought, this means that Travis23 can share the view with McDowell
and Gersel that Minimal Empiricism must be understood as a requirement for experi-
ential reasons. Ginsborg is forced to reject such a view, but argues that a normative, yet
non-rational, guidance of experience by the world suffices for possession of empirical
concepts. However, Travis will have to reject the conceptual nature of experience and
thus his position is challenged by McDowell’s claim that all such views are versions of
the Myth of the Given.
2. The Epistemology of Empirical Knowledge

The following two papers still explore the general themes discussed by the first four
papers, only they are more narrowly focused on epistemic issues. Gauker’s contribu-
tion aligns with Ginsborg in questioning the idea that experiences distinct from
doxastic states can serve as reasons for beliefs. However, rather than argue that the
activity involved in belief-formation is a virtue not a vice, he suggests that belief-like
states can possess exactly the kind of involuntary and passive nature that McDowell’s
Minimal Empiricism requires.
The more specific target of Gauker’s paper is an argument that attempts to show that
experiences can justify beliefs on the ground that sentences of the form ‘A looks F’ can be
used to justify claims of the form ‘A is F’. Arguably, if such an argument is to succeed
sentences of the form ‘A looks F’ must report the content of experience. Gauker presents
23
On the assumption that Travis thinks it is the experience of the worldly entity, which is a reason for
thought, rather than merely the worldly entity. As mentioned, it is unclear what Travis’s view on this issue is.
introduction 9
what he takes to be an exhaustive argument to the effect that if ‘A looks F’ reports the
content of experience then, on any relevant conception of a justificatory link, such
sentences are unable to justify the claim ‘A is F’. As Gauker notes, his paper targets a
notion of experiential reasons that takes such reasons to be non-conclusive. This leaves
us with an interesting question as to whether similar arguments will be effective against
someone who argues that experiences can provide truth-ensuring warrant for judge-
ments, which is precisely what McDowell claims.
Leddington’s starting point is the basic intuition of infallibilist epistemology:
Knowledge-yielding reasons must be truth-ensuring. His paper challenges the infal-
libilist to explain how their view of truth-ensuring experiential reasons is compatible
with the undeniable fact that we are at times misled in our pursuit of perceptual
knowledge. McDowell explains the possibility of error in terms of the fallible nature
of our perceptual capacities for knowledge. Thus, we may exercise our perceptual
capacity to the best of our ability and yet be in a position where it merely seems to us
that we perceive, that is, where it only seems to us that we are in a position to know on
the basis of experience. Leddington argues that such a view is untenable. In a first step,
he argues that allowing for both non-defective and defective exercises of a perceptual
capacity for knowledge commits us to the idea that, even under optimal conditions,
such a capacity may fail. In a second step, he argues that such a conception of our
fallibility itself gives us a concrete reason to rationally doubt, on any given occasion,
that we in fact perceive. As a consequence, we can never be in possession of the kind
of self-conscious, conclusive reason that both he and McDowell thinks is needed for
knowledge. This is not the end of infallibilism according to Leddington. In Millar’s
work he finds a different conception of fallibility that takes every exercise of a knowledge-
yielding capacity to be successful. On such a view, our fallibility is explained in terms
of seeming cases of exercising such a perfect capacity rather than in terms of defective
exercises of an imperfect capacity.
Leddington takes his argument to leave open what exactly constitutes our perceptual
reasons, whether it is, for instance, our experiences as particulars, facts about experi-
ences, or the perceived object. Furthermore, his conclusion stays neutral between two
different conceptions of where we should place our infallible capacities for perceptual
knowledge. On McDowell’s conception these capacities are perceptual capacities
distinct from judgemental capacities, whereas Millar places them at the level of judge-
ment. Leddington favours Millar’s view but emphasizes that the understanding of
the fallibility of infallible capacities he presents is, on this point, compatible with
McDowell’s view.
3. The Nature of Experience

The following two papers discuss the nature of experience itself. Their primary con-
cern is thus within philosophy of mind. However, both Millar and Logue regard it as a
constraint on any account of the nature of experience that it must allow us to see
how our reasons for perceptual judgements can be such as to ensure the truth of our
perceptual judgements.
Millar questions whether an acceptance of epistemological disjunctivism should
lead us to embrace metaphysical disjunctivism in the form of a relational view of
experiences. Millar’s general strategy is to show that we can preserve what he takes to
be the real insight of relational views within a sophisticated non-relational view. The
real insight of relationalism is that both an adequate account of perceptual reasons and
of perceptually based demonstrative thought must appeal to relational mental items.
Millar argues that the main arguments, to the effect that a non-relational view can-
not account for perceptual, demonstrative thought, only succeed if the non-relational
view implies that the primary object of perception could not be a mind-independent,
physical object, an implication no sophisticated non-relationalist need accept. The
positive account of perceptual, demonstrative thought sketched by Millar is inspired
by Evans’ account in The Varieties of Reference. Millar proposes that we should understand
the perceptual awareness involved in perceptual discrimination as constitutively
dependent, not only on the sensory experience as such, but also on certain behavioural
dispositions that relate us to the mind-independent object itself.
In the last part of his paper, Millar discusses McDowell’s Minimal Empiricism. He
accepts that we need to regard our thinking as answerable to experience if we are to
regard it as possessing empirical content. McDowell thinks this demand can only be
fulfilled if it is experience understood as a passive, non-judgemental state or occurrence
that constitutes our reason. Millar urges that it is sufficient that our empirical beliefs
are answerable to what we know perceptually. If I possess the right recognitional
capacity I can perceptually know that a seen bird is a magpie. A distinct recogni
tional capacity also applied to the bird allows me to know that the bird is seen by me
(see also Millar 2011). It is the fact that I see that the bird is a magpie that constitutes
my reason for the belief that the bird is a magpie. Here Millar departs from Minimal
Empiricism on two points. First, it is the fact that I see that P which constitutes my
reason, not the experience as such. Second, my seeing that P is understood as constitu-
tively involving my belief that P. On the second point Millar is in agreement with
Ginsborg; on the first point Millar and Ginsborg diverge, since Ginsborg takes it to be
the experience as such, understood as a doxastic state, that justifies.
Logue’s paper also concerns the consequences that epistemological disjunctivism has
for our theory of experience. She presents her version of metaphysical disjunctivism in
order to develop a new and improved version of epistemological disjunctivism.
A question facing the epistemic disjunctivist is to explain why experiences that are
subjectively indistinguishable can provide different reasons for a subject. Millar’s
account allows him to evade this question because he denies that experience as such
constitutes our reasons. A more common response is to argue that the epistemic role of
an experience is not determined by phenomenal character. There are two typical sug-
gestions: either it is said that it is the content that differs between hallucinations and
perceptions; or it is said that the one state is a direct conscious relation to reality
introduction 11
whereas the other is not. Logue goes against this trend in wanting to defend disjunctivism,
all the while claiming that the rational contribution of an experience is constituted
by its phenomenal character. Her suggestion is to reject that phenomenal character is
what explains the subjective indistinguishability between perceptions, illusions, and
hallucinations. She argues that phenomenal character is constituted by a relation
between the perceiver and her environment. An immediate consequence of this view
is that hallucinations do not possess any phenomenal character. Cases of illusions are
characterized by Logue as cases where the subject perceives the real property of the
object but the object appears differently from how it is.
To explain the indistinguishability in question, Logue appeals to the idea that hallu-
cinations and illusions present defective contexts for our capacity for self-knowledge.
Inspired by Evans she adopts an outward-looking model for self-knowledge according
to which I gain knowledge of the phenomenal character of my experience by attending to
the perceived object. Because there is no such object in the case of hallucinations, such
cases present a defective context for our capacity for self-knowledge. The defectiveness
of the context provides part of the explanation for how we can be fooled into believ-
ing that the hallucinatory experience does have a phenomenal character. In cases of
illusions, we are said to be blocked from attending to the real property of the object
and this again provides an unfriendly context for the exercise of our outward-looking
capacity for self-knowledge. The general strategy here is similar to McDowell’s. Just
because an exercise of a capacity for knowledge can, under non-favourable circum-
stances, mislead one into thinking one is in a position to know, we should not conclude
that such a capacity for knowledge cannot, under any circumstances, provide us with
knowledge. This strategy commits Logue to an explanation of our fallibility that goes
against the one favoured by Leddington and Millar.
On Logue’s view it is the phenomenal character of experience qua mental state that
grounds our perceptual judgements, though we only gain knowledge about such char-
acters by attending to the world. Here we find an interesting parallel between Logue’s and
Millar’s views. They both take perceptual knowledge about the world to be explanatorily
prior to our access to the reasons that ground such knowledge; something they both
claim is compatible with a reasonable internalism concerning justification. On Millar’s
view, perceptual knowledge is even possible without the capacity to access perceptual
reasons, which makes his view come out as clearly at odds with what Cunningham in
his contribution calls ‘the Reasons Priority Thesis’.
4. The Object of Experience

The two previous papers considered the rational roles of different types of experiential
states and investigated how our obligation to account for these differences restricted a
feasible theory of experience. Another way of elucidating the nature of experiential
reasons is by considering what limits are placed on the objects of experience when they
must be such that perception of such objects can provide reasons for thought.
Brewer defends the view that there exist natural continuants. These are mind-
independent objects that are naturally unified over time in such a way that no two
natural continuants share precisely the same location at any time. He defends this
view by arguing that, if we are to understand our experiences as bringing us into con-
tact with a mind-independent reality then we are committed to the view that we
encounter natural continuants in experience. According to Brewer it is only if we view
our experiences as encounters with natural continuants that we can make sense of our
experiential conditions as jointly determined by our spatio-temporal route and by
what is there anyway, present to be viewed independently of whatever location we may
be at. Brewer’s claim is that only if we can provide such a simple theory of our percep-
tual condition can we understand ourselves as encountering the mind-independent
reality in perception. Brewer’s defence of this position is tied to his endorsement of
naïve realism, according to which experiences do not possess content of any kind.
Rather, like Travis, his view is that the experiences involved in perception are a simple
conscious relation between a subject and the entities present in his surroundings.
In the final paper of the anthology, Cunningham argues against what he calls the
truth-maker theory of reasons, a view he tentatively ascribes to Brewer. The truth-maker
theory of reasons argues that the concrete entities, which make our empirical judge-
ments true, can also count as our reasons for those judgements. It seems a reasonable
claim that we can perceive those entities. Hence, our perceptual reasons can be the
truth-makers of our judgements. Given their commitment to a relational conception
of experience and the idea that one’s experiential reasons are the perceived entities
missing in hallucinatory cases, truth-maker theorists are committed to both meta-
physical and epistemological disjunctivism. Cunningham’s argument is built on the
idea that reasons must be capable of being identical to the explanantia of rationalising
explanations. In effect Cunningham is arguing that we should identify what Ginsborg
separates as reasons1 and reasons2. Reasons1 are reasons understood as considerations
that favour certain beliefs. Reasons2 are reasons ascribed to the subject from a third
person point of view in order to make her behaviour rationally intelligible. Cunningham
considers particulars (objects, properties, and events) and states of affairs as entities
that could be truth-makers for our beliefs. Each of these connects with a version of the
truth-maker theory of reasons. He then argues that neither particulars nor states of
affairs are capable of playing the required rationalizing explanatory role. The only
alternative candidate left for the role as both reason and rationalizing explanans,
Cunningham argues, is the category of true propositions.
Comparing Brewer’s and Cunningham’s arguments we may say the following:
Brewer’s argument starts from a presumption of naïve realism and argues that if we are
to understand the nature of experience in the light of a simple theory of perception,
then we must conceive of the objects we encounter in experience as natural continu-
ants. Cunningham argues that, if all we are given in experience are entities such as
Brewer’s natural continuants, then what is given in experience cannot be identified
with our experiential reasons.
introduction 13
A Brief Overview
The following questions highlight some of the important fault lines throughout
the papers of this anthology: Do experiences themselves figure as reasons or are
they mere providers of reasons? Are experiential reasons belief-independent? Do
our experiential reasons consist in facts, states of affairs, or particulars? Do they
consist in mind-dependent or mind-independent entities? Should we conceive of
experiences as having content? Should we conceive of the experiences involved in per-
ceptions as relational? Should we conceive of experiential reasons as truth-ensuring?
Assuming that such reasons are truth-ensuring, how should we account for our
fallibility? Depending on which question we ask, different divisions amongst the
authors will show up.
Most, if not all, of the papers in this anthology favour the idea that experience
must be capable of providing the subject with reasons. However, Gauker, Millar, and
Ginsborg explicitly oppose the idea that experiences understood as belief-independent
states or occurrences can as such figure as reasons. Gauker suggests that beliefs caused
by experience may act as entry-level justifiers, whereas Ginsborg takes experiences to
be intrinsically belief-involving. Millar departs from Gauker and Ginsborg in taking
the relevant notion of reasons to be reasons understood as facts (‘I see that P’) and not
as mental states or occurrences. Cunningham argues in favour of Millar’s general con-
ception of reasons. Millar, however, is in line with Gauker, Ginsborg, and Logue in
thinking that perceptual reasons are mind-dependent entities, whereas Travis and
Brewer seem to regard the mind-independent objects of experience as reasons.
Cunningham puts pressure on the idea that we can account for perceptual reasons
without ascribing content to experience, while Millar thinks there is a serious question
of whether we need ascribe any content to experience in order to give such an account.
Travis and Brewer give a negative answer to this question whereas McDowell and Gersel
maintain that we need to attribute conceptual content to experience. Travis, Brewer,
and Logue all share an explicit commitment to both epistemological and metaphysical
disjunctivism. Millar agrees that our perceptual reasons must be truth-ensuring but
argues that the crucial disjunctive move in our explanation of perceptual knowledge
should be located at the level of judgement not at the level of experience. This view is
also favoured by Leddington, who argues for Millar’s conception of our perceptual
fallibility opposing the views of McDowell and Logue.
On the grand philosophical scene most of the contributions to this anthology are in
wide agreement as to how we should approach an investigation of experiential reasons.
Some internalist notion of reasons and some kind of disjunctivist inclinations shape
or form a central part of most of the arguments. However, once the details are in focus
the appearance of unity is shattered. There may be many views on perception and
rationality that have had no say at all in this anthology. However, its explicit goal is to
present and further a debate within the general philosophical approach exemplified by
the contributions.
We hope that you, the reader, will find the book as interesting and illuminating as we
have found the editing and writing of this book.24
References
Brewer, Bill. 2011. Perception and its Objects. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dancy, Jonathan. 2000. Practical Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, Donald. 1986. “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge”. In Truth and
Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, edited by Ernest LePore,
pp. 307–19. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Haddock, Alan and Fiona Macpherson. 2008. “Introduction: Varieties of Disjunctivism”. In
Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, edited by Alan Haddock and Fiona Macpherson,
pp. 1–24. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McDowell, John. 1996. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McDowell, John. 1998a. “Knowledge by Hearsay”. In Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, pp. 413–43.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McDowell, John. 1998b. “Knowledge and the Internal”. In Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality,
pp. 395–413. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McDowell, John. 2006. “Response to Dancy”. In McDowell and his Critics, edited by Cynthia
McDonald and Graham McDonald. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
McDowell, John. 2009a. “Avoiding the Myth of the Given”. In Having the World in View: Essays
on Kant, Hegel and Sellars, pp. 256–72. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McDowell, John. 2009b. “Experiencing the World”. In The Engaged Intellect, pp. 243–56.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Millar, Alan. 2011. “Knowledge and Reasons for Belief ”. In Reasons for Belief, edited by Andrew
Reisner and Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen, pp. 223–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pritchard, Duncan. 2009. “Wright Contra McDowell on Perceptual Knowledge and Scepticism”.
Synthese 171: 467–79.
Sellars, Wilfred. 1956/1997. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Travis, Charles. 2013a. “The Silence of the Senses”. In Perception: Essays after Frege, pp. 23–58.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Travis, Charles. 2013b. “Reason’s Reach”. In Perception: Essays after Frege, pp. 118–43. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Travis, Charles. 2013c. “Unlocking the Outer World”. In Perception: Essays after Frege, pp. 223–58.
24
Acknowledgement: We would like to thank Hagit Benbaji, Joe Cunningham, Christopher Gauker,
Alan Millar, and Hannah Ginsborg for their written feedback on prior versions of this introduction. Thanks
also to the two Oxford University Press referees for their critical comments and constructive advice.
The Travis–McDowell Debate

Johan Gersel
The included papers by John McDowell and Charles Travis deserve a separate
introduction. They are the latest instalments in an ongoing debate that has stretched
across a series of exchanges (the main texts are Travis (2013a), Travis (2013b),
McDowell (2009), Travis (2013c)). The present paper is meant as an aid to the reader
unfamiliar with these earlier exchanges or to the reader merely in need of a reminder
of the discussion. The outset of the debate is McDowell’s view which, as mentioned,
holds that experience must be conceived both as possessing conceptual content and as
a passive element of cognition, separate from the active judgements one might form on
the basis of undergoing some experience. McDowell’s motivation for endorsing this
view is his conviction that only if the passive element in our cognition, ‘experience’ in
McDowell’s terminology, is conceptual can we make sense of how it provides a rational
constraint on our thinking. Travis’s debate with McDowell consists of two lines of argu
ment. The first line is developed in ‘The Silences of the Senses’, where he argues against
McDowell and other representationalists that the passivity of experience is incompat
ible with its possession of representational content. The second line not only defends
the view that experiences can provide reasons for thought without having content, but
also argues, based on interpretations of Frege, that only if experience provides us with
acquaintance with the non-conceptual can it provide the proper constraint on thought.
This second line of argument is developed in his ‘Reason’s Reach’ and ‘Unlocking the
Outer World’. I want to briefly present both arguments and McDowell’s response.
In ‘The Silence of the Senses’ Travis argues that whichever way experience provides
reasons for thought it must be in terms of how things look to the subject of the experience
(2013a, p. 34). However, according to Travis, we can only sensibly talk of ‘looks’ in two
ways. On the one hand, there is how things look. This is an objective feature that vari
ous things have under various conditions. In this sense, a wax lemon looks like a lemon
under most conditions. A blue shirt in this lighting may look exactly like a white shirt
looks under certain different lighting conditions. Looks in this sense are objective and
independent of any activity of subjects. They are fully determined by features of the
visual appearances that things possess in certain circumstances (ibid. p. 35). Hence, if
experience is conceived as awareness of how things look in this sense, then experience
16 Johan Gersel
can indeed be conceived as a form of passive awareness of our surroundings. However,

this sense of ‘looks’ is unsuited to provide any determinate representational content for
the experience. Representational content presents the world as being a certain deter
minate way. For the representation to be true, correct, or veridical is just for the world
to be in that determinate way. However, on the sense of ‘looks’ under consideration
there is no determinate way the world should be for it to be as it looks. For given how
things look, one could equally well be aware of a lemon, a wax-lemon, or a strangely
shaped orange under weird lighting conditions, or any number of different objects. An
encounter with either of these would be compatible with the world looking as it does.
A myriad of things has what are objectively similar looks under various conditions,
and a particular look gives no priority to one of the scenarios in which it obtains. Hence,
while the first sense of ‘looks’ may be something we are passively aware of, it is not
something which can suffice to determine any representational content (ibid. p. 37).
Things are opposite for the second sense of ‘looks’. ‘Looks’ in this sense are ways in
which people take things to be, or should or would take things to be if they went by
their visual appearance alone. It is in this sense that we can say: ‘it looks to me as if Pia
will sink the put’; meaning I think that she will sink it given how things look to me.
Likewise, we can say of someone else that it looks to him as if P, most often in order
to explain why he judged that P (he based his judgement on his experience) when we
know that P is in fact not the case (ibid. p. 40). This second sense of ‘looks’ certainly
suffices to settle a way the world must be in order for it to be as it looks. Pia must sink
the put, and P must be true. However, that something looks like this to someone isn’t
a passive element of cognition anymore. Rather, it is an active judgement in which
someone takes the world to be a certain way in light of his experiences, or at the very
least a claim that one ought to judge so if one went on how things looked alone. Travis
argues that these two notions of ‘looks’ are the only ones available, and concludes that
McDowell’s view of experience as both passive and representational is incoherent
(ibid. p. 47).
His rejection of conceptualism about experience leaves Travis a supposed victim of
the Myth of the Given as it is developed by McDowell. McDowell famously claims that
only if experiences present us with conceptually structured generalities, things being
some way, can experience provide reasons for the perceptual judgements in which
we judge things to be those very ways (McDowell 1996). To McDowell (2009, p. 264)
experience counts as conceptual as long as it presents the world as being in some
general way it could be judged to be. Travis (2013c, p. 237) has a more liberal notion
of the conceptual according to which we should consider something to fall within the
conceptual as long as it presents things as being a way at all. The key difference is that
McDowell’s definition leaves logical room for non-conceptual representational con
tent, whereas Travis’s does not.1 However, as long as Travis maintains the generality of
1
Importantly, McDowell doesn’t think we can suffice with attributing non-conceptual content to
experience, but he acknowledges a distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual content. On the
other hand, when Travis objects to attributing conceptual content to experience he means this to target any
representational view of experience.
The Travis–M c Dowell Debate 17
all representation and the utter particularity of what is given in experience their
disagreement is genuine in spite of the slight difference in terminology. Both McDowell
and Travis agree that we must hold onto the idea that experiences figure as a reason
for thought, that is, to Minimal Empiricism.2 If McDowell (1996) is right, Minimal
Empiricism entails that experience must have conceptual content. Yet, according to
Travis, experience cannot be conceptual for there is no particular way in which experi
ence presents the world as being. Only subjects can take the world to be in some way
and that is not something passive, but rather an active commitment. Experience
merely acquaints us with things being as they are; it presents us with what Travis, in his
contribution to this anthology, calls ‘the unfolding of the historical’. Travis responds
to the challenge of explaining how the non-conceptual can provide reasons for thought
in ‘Reason’s Reach’. However, his argument has a peculiar structure. Rather than
showing us how an encounter with something non-conceptual can provide a reason for
thought, he argues that if anything that is given in experience can provide a reason
for thought at all, then it must be possible that something non-conceptual can provide
reasons. He follows Frege (Travis 2013b, p. 123) in drawing a line between particular
things, like the setting of the sun, and generalities, like that the sun has set. To Frege,
and Travis, the former, a particular, is a thing that can be perceived, whereas the latter,
a way that things can be, is not something that can be perceived at all, and thus not
something we can be given through perception. Hence, if anything that is given to us in
perception forms a reason for thought, then something non-conceptual must be able
to figure as a reason.3 For general ways that things can be are not perceivable at all.
Travis goes on to suggest that McDowell’s mistake is in restricting the sum of reason
giving relations to those of logical relations which merely hold between the general
ways that things can be (ibid. p. 141). One lacuna in Travis’s argument is that we are
given very little in the way of a positive story as to how these non-logical reason-giving
relations function. We are hardly told anything as to how the particular unfolding of
reality we encounter in experience can provide reasons for our conceptual judgement
that the world is a certain general way. Travis simply informs us that part of what it is to
be a thinker is to have the expertise required to recognize that the surroundings one
experiences instance a particular generality, say that the sun is setting (ibid. p. 128).
In ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, McDowell concedes some points to Travis. In
this paper McDowell attempts to insert a wedge between experiential content and
judgemental content, which to some degree accommodates Travis’s argument in ‘the
Silence of the Senses’. McDowell (2009, p. 267) claims that things are only presented as
so in judgements with propositional content. In contrast, experience presents us with
conceptuality-structured intuitional contents, from which we carve out the conceptual
2
As mentioned in the introduction, there is a worry as to whether Travis views the experience as the
reason or merely as the provider of the reason. I read Minimal Empiricism as requiring that the experience
figures as the reasons itself.
3
Notice that one may worry here whether Travis is guilty of misreading McDowell. Travis seems to
focus on what is given in experience as a reason. To McDowell, by contrast, it is the episode of having it
given, the experience itself, which plays the role of the reason.
18 Johan Gersel
contents which are then employed in the judgements that we choose to form upon its
basis. The crucial element in his response to Travis is that McDowell maintains that,
unlike propositional content, intuitional content brings the very mind-independent
objects of reality into view. Unlike judgements where we represent the world as being
such that these objects are in some specific way, in intuition, we are presented with
the ways things are (ibid. p. 268). One might question why intuitional content should
be said to be conceptual at all, given its significant difference from the content of
judgements. However, McDowell maintains this point by arguing that the very unity
present in intuitions is a function of the very same capacity that gives unity to our
thoughts: ‘The unity of intuitional content reflects an operation of the same unifying func
tion that is operative in the unity of judgement, in that case actively exercised’ (McDowell
2009, p. 264). McDowell’s second concession to Travis is the acknowledgement that
recognitional abilities may at times enable us to rationally and non-inferentially form
a judgement whose content isn’t present in the experience upon which it is based
(ibid. p. 259). This seems to go some way towards acknowledging Travis’s (rather slim)
picture of how we recognize particular occurrences as falling under some general
way things can be. However, McDowell is adamant that we cannot rest content with
Travis’s picture of how “experience provides reasons for thought without falling
prey to the Myth of the Given (ibid. p. 269). While we may rationally form perceptual
judgements whose contents extend beyond the content of the experiences upon which
they are based, this extension cannot amount to a leap from experiencing something
entirely non-conceptual to the formation of a conceptual judgement. Thus, McDowell
maintains the charge that Travis’s theory is a form of the Myth of the Given.4
Travis’s ‘Unlocking the Outer World’ forms the last instalment of their debate prior
to this book. In this paper Travis challenges the idea that the function of the under
standing is to unify in any significant sense. According to Travis (2013c, p. 223), we
should follow Frege rather than Kant and question that unification is required for
experience and judgement. According to Frege judgements are the basic elements of
thought rather than something unified out of concepts. Instead, any talk of concepts is
by way of abstracting from or decomposing the inherently unified structure of thought
(ibid. 252). Likewise, no unification is required at the level of experience. If unification
was required for the objects of experience to come into view, then Travis questions that
those experienced objects could be mind-independent (ibid. p. 230). Hence, according
to Travis, when McDowell claims that the same unifying function is at play in both
judgement and experience, his argument in favour of the conceptual nature of intu
itions fails at two stages. He is wrong in assuming that unification is required for, or
even compatible with, acquaintance with mind-independent objects and, secondly,
wrong in assuming that unification forms a central element in judgement. McDowell’s
contribution to this anthology is a response to this critique. Travis’s contribution tries
4
For an extended discussion of this issue see Gersel, Jensen, and Thaning (2017).
The Travis–M c Dowell Debate 19
once and for all to provide a principled argument as to why the requirements McDowell
imposes on experiential reasons cannot be an acceptable demand.
References
Gersel, J., Jensen, R.T., & Thaning, M.S. 2017. “McDowell’s New Conceptualism and the
Difference Between Chickens, Colours and Cardinals”. Philosophical Explorations 20 (1):
88–105.
McDowell, J. 1996. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McDowell, J. 2009. “Avoiding the Myth of the Given”. In Having the World in View—Essays on
Kant, Hegel and Sellars, pp. 256–72. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Travis, C. 2013a. “The Silence of the Senses”. In Perception—Essays after Frege, pp. 23–58.
Travis, C. 2013b. “Reason’s Reach”. In Perception—Essays after Frege, pp. 118–43. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Travis, C. 2013c. “Unlocking the Outer World”. In Perception—Essays after Frege, pp. 223–58.
PA RT I
The Myth of the Given
1
Travis on Frege, Kant,
and the Given
Comments on ‘Unlocking the Outer World’1
John McDowell
I The Given
1. I will begin with another attempt to explain what I mean by saying Travis’s approach
to perception falls into the Myth of the Given.
It is a thought of Travis’s own that what perception does for us at least includes mak-
ing objects—for instance pigs or bitterns—available to us for being brought under
concepts, in a not quite Fregean sense of ‘concepts’: making objects available for being
judged to be this or that way, where being a certain way is a Sinn whose associated
Bedeutung is a concept in Frege’s sense. I say ‘at least includes’, because Travis thinks
making objects available to be brought under concepts is a special case of something
more fundamental: making items that are non-conceptual, in a sense in which objects
are not the primary case of the non-conceptual, available for being brought under
items that are conceptual in a corresponding sense. I will say something later (§§7, 8)
about Travis’s idiosyncratic account of the non-conceptual, but until then I will stay
with the supposed special case.
Bringing objects under concepts, in the relevant sense of ‘concepts’, is exercising
capacities that are distinctive to us as rational animals. So making objects available to
be brought under concepts cannot be something perception does for creatures that do
not have such capacities.
Of course perception does something for perceivers that do not have conceptual
capacities in the relevant sense: something generically the same as what it does for us.
Such creatures are not locked in an inner world just by lacking conceptual capacities in
the relevant sense, as Frege might seem to imply in Travis’s master passage (quoted at 233;
1
Travis (2013b).
24 John M c Dowell
I will come back to the passage in §6). Items in the outer world are perceptually given
to such creatures no less than to us.
But the idea that there is a myth to be avoided, in connection with this way of
organizing an account of perceptual knowledge, is the idea that when objects are
perceptually given to us for being brought under concepts, that is perceptual givenness
in a specific form. The specific form is constitutive of a distinctive species of the way of
being related to objects that consists in a perceiver’s having them perceptually given to
it; it is not that here a relation describable in those terms has instances that are distin-
guished only in that one of the relata is a rational subject. We can be safe from myth in
supposing that objects are perceptually given to rational subjects, but only if we
conceive that case of having things perceptually given to a perceiver as itself an act of
capacities that belong to the faculty we exercise when we bring objects under concepts:
a faculty that is distinctive to us as rational subjects.
In a paper Travis cites (McDowell 2009), I spell out that idea in terms of an at least
roughly Kantian conception of episodes or states of perceptual, for instance visual,
awareness of objects as we rational subjects enjoy it: what Kant calls ‘Anschauungen’,
‘intuitions’. In a visual intuition of an object, the understanding—the faculty of con-
cepts—unifies visual presentations of visually sensible ways the object is, into an aware-
ness of the object in which it is presented as being those ways. That is a partial
interpretation of the remark Travis calls ‘The Slogan’ (224), in which Kant says the same
function is responsible for the unity of both judgments and intuitions (Kant 1929,
A79–80/B105–6).2 (I will come to Travis’s objection to this talk of unifying later: §6.)
Now Travis refuses to acknowledge what I said we must acknowledge if we are to
avoid the Myth of the Given: that the relation of perceptual givenness has a special
form, in the sense I have explained, when objects are perceptually given to rational
subjects. On Travis’s account, capacities that are distinctive to us as rational animals
are in act only in our responses to the things to which we stand in the relation of having
them perceptually given to us; operations of such capacities do not enter into the con-
stitution of the relation itself.
2. Of course what I have said so far does not show there is a myth that Travis does not
avoid. But there is at least a case to answer. And so far from answering it, Travis is
oblivious to it.
About what he calls ‘the fundamental problem of perception’—‘how perception can
make the world bear for us on the thing to think’—Travis writes (242), in a passage
I shall modify, in a way that does not change the substance but makes the passage fit my
policy of confining myself, for the moment, to bringing objects under concepts:
There is the world, populated by such things as pigs . . . And there are the things for us to think:
[e.g.] that a pig is snuffling. [A pig may be visible], but that that pig is snuffling is, logically,
conceptually, a very different sort of thing. So how can sensitivity to the first sort of thing [e.g.
2
Travis cites the remark as an epigraph, 223.
Travis on Frege, Kant, and the Given 25
pigs], in whatever form it is granted, reveal to us how we are to stand towards things of the
second sort [e.g. facts about pigs]? A good question. But now McDowell thinks that there is a
certain sort of condition on any adequate answer to that question; it must avoid ‘The Myth of
the Given’.
This comes early in Travis’s discussion of my warning against the Given. And it starts
us off on the wrong foot. The point of the warning goes missing in Travis’s implication
that the form in which sensitivity to such things as pigs is granted does not matter. The
point of the warning is precisely that it does matter what the form of our sensitivity to
objects is; avoiding the Myth of the Given, in our conception of that form, is a condi-
tion for it to be intelligible that our perceptual sensitivity to objects makes them
available to us to be brought under concepts. My thought is not what Travis implies:
that there is no interesting question about the form of our sensitivity to objects, but
there is an independent pitfall that we need to avoid when we say how that sensitivity,
whatever form it has, contributes to our ability to achieve knowledge by bringing
objects under concepts.
In the discussion that follows that passage, Travis speculates about what might
persuade me (or anyone) to say what I do about intuitions. But my ground for it, which
I sketched in §1, makes no appearance in his discussion.
3. On my account an intuition of an object unifies presentations of some ways the
object is into an awareness of the object. In presenting an object as being those ways,
the intuition puts its subject in a position to make knowledgeable judgments in which
she would bring the object under concepts of being those ways. Those judgments
would do no more than articulate, perhaps with a loss of specificity, content that is
already there in the intuition.
But that does not exhaust the knowledgeable judgments that perceptual awareness of
objects contributes to our being able to make. Perceptual awareness of objects makes
them available to be brought also under concepts whose content is not already con-
tained in the intuitions that constitute the awareness. The content of visual intuitions
pertains, as I said (§1), to visually sensible ways for things to be. Visually sensible ways
for things to be are ways for things to be that are proper sensibles of vision or common
sensibles accessible to vision. But visual awareness of an object can put one in a position
to bring it under concepts of ways for things to be that are not visually sensible. For
instance, some people are sometimes in a position to judge knowledgeably, thanks to
visual awareness of a bird, that it is a greater bittern, and (being) a greater bittern is not a
visually sensible way for something to be. In such a judgment, the subject brings to bear
on what she sees a conceptual capacity that is not in act in her visual intuition of it.
So on my account there are two different ways in which perceptual awareness of an
object can put a subject in a position to bring the object under concepts: one in which
the resulting judgments articulate content already contained in the perceptual aware-
ness, and one in which the judgments involve bringing to bear on the object capacities
that are not in act in the awareness itself.
26 John M c Dowell
Now Travis focuses exclusively on the first of these. He writes (246):
McDowell insists (rightly) that perception must provide us with something we have the capacity
to respond to, rationally, knowledgeably, in taking it to be so (judging, seeing) that such-and-
such. This requires, he insists, that our rational capacities . . . must be at work in perception’s
providing us with what it does for us (thus) to respond to. There is a clue to why he insists this
in one description above of the work thus done [he has quoted me talking of accompanying
parts of the content of an intuition with the ‘I think’ so as to make a corresponding judgment]:
perception must provide us with something bearing content (a viewing) to which one might
attach an ‘I think’, and would thus obtain a judgement. Nothing less would allow for know-
ledgeable judgement. This gap between what perception must supply and the response thus
permitted corresponds exactly to the gap between representing things as being some particular
way—as might be done without endorsing their so being—and representing things to be that
way. So, if perception must supply the above, that is to say that the most that could be supplied
by our ability to respond to what we see (and so on) is what fills the space between representing-
as and representing-to-be—in one vocabulary, the attaching of a force.
From this he concludes (247) that according to me, ‘those capacities by which we are
able to take the world to bear on what to think . . . are only able to operate on things
shaped like a thought’; that is (248), that I ‘confine our rational capacities, or their work
in our responses, within the conceptual’. Against that, appealing to the authority of
Frege, he urges that ‘this robs us of rational capacities überhaupt’. If we are to be entitled
to credit ourselves with capacities for thought at all, we must suppose they include cap-
acities that can operate on objects, which are not shaped like thoughts: more generally,
Travis thinks, on the non-conceptual.
Travis thinks this shows there can be no case for him to answer in my accusation
that he falls into a myth. But the argument passes me by.
The gap Travis considers in the passage I quoted is between the content of an
intuition—which is one interpretation for ‘what perception supplies’ as that phrase
might be used in formulating my account—and a judgment that articulates some of
that content. Such judgments are related to perceptual awareness of objects in the first
of the two ways I distinguished.
Even if we confine ourselves to such judgments, it is wrong to say that what is supplied
by our abilities to respond to what we perceive is the attaching of a force. There is a sense in
which intuitions contain thoughts. But in the sense in which intuitions contain thoughts,
they do not merely offer the thoughts for our consideration, as things that may or may
not be so. They present the thoughts as how things are. The gap between intuitions and
judgments is the difference between presenting things as being various ways—which does
not leave open that they may not be those ways, something that might be true of some
cases of ‘representing-as’—and representing them to be those ways.
But anyway, Travis ignores the fact that my account also includes the second way for
judgments to be related to perceptual awareness of objects. One would not know this
from what he says, but the example he uses to introduce his argument against me—
Uncle Willard and the stuffed bittern (245–6)—is, apart from the picturesque detail, a
good match, even to the point of turning on an ornithological classification, for an
example I use in ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’ to introduce the idea of judgments
related to perception in the second way.
With judgments related to perception in the second way, the idea of a gap between
what perception supplies and a permitted judgmental response takes a different shape.
In the case of judgments of the second kind, we can speak of a gap between having an
object present to one in an intuition—another interpretation for ‘what perception
supplies’—and a judgmental response whose content is not already contained in the
intuition. Here it is especially clear that our responsive capacities operate not on things
shaped like thoughts but on objects themselves.
As I have just said, focusing on the second kind of judgment makes especially clear
that on my account, no less than on Travis’s, perception supplies awareness of objects
for us to bring under concepts. But it is objects that concepts are applied to in judg-
ments of the first kind also. Even if a judgment does no more than articulate some of
the content already contained in an intuition of an object, the judgment brings the
object—the object itself—under a concept. There is nothing in my picture, not even
the part Travis exclusively focuses on, to warrant his claim that I represent our capaci-
ties for thought as operating only on thought-shaped items, and incapable of operating
on objects themselves.
Travis’s speculation about why I say what I do about intuitions (his ‘clue’) turns on
misconstruing the significance of attributing content to intuitions. That intuitions
have content is an implication of the claim that capacities of the sort that are exercised
in judgment are in act in intuitions. That claim provides for our perceptual awareness
of objects to have the distinctive form it must have if we are to avoid the Myth of the
Given. There is no implication that it is contents, not objects, on which our rational
capacities operate when we make judgments that are knowledgeable by virtue of being
suitably warranted by perceptual experience.
Travis thinks there cannot be anything sound in my accusation that he falls into a
myth, because he thinks my basis for the accusation commits me to the consequence
that we cannot bring our rational capacities to bear on the non-conceptual. I agree that
that would be unacceptable. But as I have explained, he is wrong about my view.
His failure to engage with the point about the Given can be characterized, in terms
of imagery that might fit his paper ‘Reason’s Reach’ (Travis 2013a), like this. I claim
that it is only in acts of its own distinctive capacities—conceptual capacities in a certain
sense—that reason reaches the non-conceptual. As I explain in my response to
‘Reason’s Reach’ (McDowell 2008), Travis argues there, as he does again in ‘Unlocking
the Outer World’, against a claim I do not make: that reason cannot reach the non-
conceptual at all.
II Kant
4. Travis mostly holds back from committing himself to any interpretation of Kant.
Mostly he exploits suggestions about what Kant may have held, ‘merely to identify
some ideas to avoid’ (228).
28 John M c Dowell
But he does in his own voice attribute to Kant a concern with a problem, ‘Kant’s
Problem’, which is not ‘the fundamental question of perception’ (how does perception
enable the world to bear rationally on what we are to think and do?), but one that arises
because (224)
[f]or the world to bear on the truth of things we think, there must be, Kant thinks, a certain
match, or agreement, between the most general shapes of those things and the most general
shape of what we think about—what we represent as being thus and so.
‘Kant’s Problem’ is to provide for this supposedly required match or agreement. And
Travis entertains the idea that Kant’s Slogan—the thesis that the same function pro-
vides unity to both judgments and intuitions—is meant to encapsulate a solution to
‘Kant’s Problem’, to the effect that both terms of the supposedly required match are
shaped by the same intellectual capacity.
On a common-sense view, what we think about, what we represent as being thus
and so, is objects, for instance a chipmunk, which we represent as for instance scurry-
ing along the garden path. So the idea Travis contemplates attributing to Kant would
imply that such things as chipmunks are shaped by our rational capacities, or else that
the common-sense view is wrong, and what we think about is not such things as chip-
munks but the unities of Vorstellungen that the Slogan says are effected in intuitions by
the same function that effects the unity of judgments.
Of course Travis dismisses such ideas as hopeless, and I have no objection to that.
But by organizing his discussion of Kant around the supposed ‘Problem’, he contrives
not to register this fact: the correspondence of form that the Slogan puts in place is
between judgments and intuitions, instances of perceptual awareness of objects, not
the objects (for instance chipmunks) that intuitions make available to us so that we can
think about them. The result is that the point of the Slogan goes missing. The Slogan
has nothing to do with ‘Kant’s Problem’. It addresses the question Travis distinguishes
from ‘Kant’s Problem’ and describes as the fundamental question of perception. It
shows how we can accommodate the thought that since our perceptual awareness of
objects makes them available to us to be brought under concepts, the awareness itself
must have a special form. The special form consists in the fact that the faculty we exer-
cise in judgments is in act in our intuitions themselves.
What about the problem Travis thinks is Kant’s? Travis’s thought here reflects how
he understands Kant’s interest in the synthetic a priori. He writes (224):
For there to be [the supposedly required] match is, inter alia, for certain very general proposi-
tions to be true. That they are true is, for Kant, a substantial matter, needing proof. Absent
proof, it is doubtful whether our seeming judgments are really that, or merely masqueraders;
still more doubtful whether anything, so anything experienced, really could bear rationally for
us on what the thing to think would be.
But Travis’s understanding here is off-key, in a way that is intelligible in the light of the
fact that he does not understand the point of the Slogan.
Kant is concerned with the form our perceptual awareness of objects must have for it
to make objects available to us to be brought under concepts. His concern is motivated
by an idea on these lines: that objects are perceptually available to us to think about is a
condition for the activity we conceive as thinking to be correctly so conceived. If the
perceptual availability to us of objects were an illusion, it would be an illusion that, in
doing what we take to be thinking, we are making moves that owe their correctness or
incorrectness to something outside our subjectivity. This is like Travis’s account of
‘Kant’s Problem’ in one respect: Kant sets a condition for our thought to be responsible
to the world, as it must be if it is to be thought at all. But contrary to Travis’s account of
‘Kant’s Problem’, the condition Kant sets does not require a match in shape between
what we think and what we think about.
That perception makes objects available to us to think about—a condition for what
we conceive as our thinking to be thinking at all—is made intelligible in a general way
by the thought expressed in Kant’s Slogan: our understanding is in act in intuitions
themselves.
But the Slogan implies that intuitions have forms that correspond to the forms of
judgments. (Intuitions, not what intuitions make available to us to think about. We are
not in the territory of ‘Kant’s Problem’.) Kant thinks we can exploit knowledge about
the forms of judgments to derive a table of corresponding forms of intuitions. And for
each form of intuitions, we can formulate a way things must be in the world for it to be
possible that intuitions having that form make objects available to us. The result is a set
of principles that are synthetic, but not known a posteriori, not known through experi-
ence of things being as the principles say they are. We can know that the principles hold
because that they do is a condition for our experience of objects to be possible; thereby
it is a condition for our thought to be genuinely thought. That way round: not, as in
Travis’s account, that entitlement to the principles averts skepticism about whether our
seeming judgments are genuinely judgments, and thereby reassures us that experience
can provide us with something that bears rationally on what we should think.
5. Frege says the ‘parts’ of thoughts should be conceived not as self-standing items out
of which thoughts are put together, but as obtained from thoughts by decomposition.
(See Travis’s Frege epigraph: 223.) Travis suggests (223, 242, 250–4) that this tells
against Kant’s talk of a function that gives unity to judgments and intuitions.
I do not believe there is anything in this. It is not to be expected that Kant would be
explicitly attuned to the insight Frege expresses by denying that thoughts (and we
might add: items that are thought-like in the way intuitions are) are constructed out of
self-standing building-blocks. But there is no ground to suppose Kant’s talk of a unify-
ing function is actually inconsistent with Frege’s insight.
Kant’s talk of a unifying function need come to no more, for the case of thoughts,
than something of which the following would be an example. Suppose I entertain the
thought that Sid is snoring and Pia is sleeping quietly. My thinking must engage with
Sid and Pia and the ways to be, snoring and sleeping quietly. The ways to be must, by all
30 John M c Dowell
means, be conceived only as potential elements in thoughts. That is not true of Sid and
Pia; but it is true of the corresponding Sinne, modes of presentation of Sid and Pia, that
would be elements in the thought on a Fregean account. Now, that my thinking engages
with the items I listed is not enough for it to be that thought that I entertain. My think-
ing would engage with the same items if the thought I entertained were that Sid is
sleeping quietly and Pia is snoring. If I am to entertain the thought I imagined myself
entertaining, my thinking must join Sid and snoring with a kind of togetherness with
which it does not join Pia and snoring, and correspondingly with Pia and sleeping
quietly. That can be harmlessly expressed by saying, in a way that echoes Kant but
employs a Fregean conception of the relevant thought-elements, that my understand-
ing, my faculty of thinking, must unify a mode of presentation of Sid and the way to be,
snoring, into the thought that Sid is snoring, and similarly with a mode of presentation
of Pia and the way to be, sleeping quietly.
And this harmlessness carries over to the Slogan’s recommendation that we should
say corresponding things about intuitions. The presentations of visually sensible ways
to be that are the elements of a visual intuition are not a mere multiplicity; in the
intuition the ways to be are understood together—so in a unity for which the subject’s
understanding is responsible—as ways a single object is, and the object is thereby
visually present to the subject.
In my example I characterized a thought, with its unity, in terms of what would be
required to think it. That is not psychology in a sense that might violate Frege’s insist-
ence on keeping psychology out of logic. (Travis may be suggesting something on
those lines at 242.) Thoughts must be thinkable. Frege’s exclusion of psychology
cannot be meant to imply that when we consider thoughts logically all talk of thinking
is prohibited.
III Frege
6. I think it is precisely the requirement I have described in terms of avoiding the Myth
of the Given that Frege—who is a good, though of course not uncritical, Kantian—is
getting at in Travis’s master passage (cited by him at 233).
Here is part of the passage (with the translation slightly modified):
Sense impressions are certainly a necessary ingredient of sensory observation, and these are
part of the inner world . . . These by themselves do not open the outer world for us. Perhaps
there is a being that only has sense impressions, without seeing or feeling things. Having sense
impressions is not yet seeing things . . . Having sense impressions is, to be sure, necessary for
seeing things, but not sufficient. What must still be added is not something sensory. And it is
just this which unlocks the outer world for us; for without this non-sensory thing each of us
remains shut up in his inner world.
Travis thinks this expresses his own view. On Travis’s reading, the imagined being,
restricted to sense impressions, is not thereby deprived of sensory, for instance visual,
awareness of objects, for instance pigs. What he lacks is only the ability to make
something of what he, for instance, sees, by recognizing it as falling under concepts, for
instance the concept of being a pig. Things in the outer world are perceptually present
to him. ‘He sees, for example, the pig snuffling’ (235). It is just that without the missing
non-sensory ingredient, which Travis plausibly explains in terms of conceptual cap-
acities (240), the imagined being is blind to such facts as that he sees the pig and that
what he sees is a pig. They are facts all right, but they are not within his cognitive reach.
But this reading does not fit what Frege actually says in the passage. Frege says hav-
ing sense impressions is not yet seeing things; though necessary, it is not sufficient for
seeing things. (Travis’s quotation leaves out ‘things’ in the second remark, but it is there
in the original.) How can that cohere with Travis’s idea that being restricted to sense
impressions does not deprive the imagined being of sensory, for instance visual, aware-
ness of objects?
What Frege says is a better fit for this thought: the non-sensory ingredient, which is
indeed to be understood in terms of conceptual capacities, is a further necessary con-
dition, over and above sense impressions, for having the specific form of perceptual
awareness that makes objects available to be brought under concepts. The outer world
is unlocked for us because the non-sensory ingredient—the understanding rather
than sensibility, to speak in Kantian terms—is in act in our perceptual awareness itself.
Travis wants to discourage attributing to Frege the idea that for the imagined being
the sense impressions to which it is restricted are objects of ‘visual, or other sensory,
awareness’. (This is a hangover from his taking seriously H. A. Prichard’s view that Kant
at least opens himself to being read as treating sensations, the results of the impacts of
objects ‘outside our minds’ on our sensibility, as what we are perceptually aware of.)
Thus Travis writes (234):
For Frege . . . objects without the mind generate impressions—for us as things stand, for the
creature locked in an inner world (for us if so locked). But Frege’s story does not require these
impressions to be of anything other than the objects which generate them. Our experience can
be awareness of these [i.e. the objects which generate the impressions], and of nothing else.
There need be no other objects of visual, or other sensory, awareness . . . What changes when the
outer world is unlocked need not be, and for Frege is not, what our sensory awareness is of,
of what we enjoy sensory awareness. Being locked in an inner world is not a matter of being
furnished with the wrong things to experience.
I agree that Frege does not conceive the unlocking effected by the non-sensory
ingredient as replacing one sort of object of visual (for instance) awareness, sensory
impressions, with another, things in the outer world. But if we register what Frege actu-
ally says in the master passage, we can see that that is not because the imagined being
has visual awareness, which is already of objects in the outer world, but because he
does not have visual awareness—he does not see things—at all.
Would that imply that creatures without conceptual capacities cannot see things?
(In §1 I mentioned the risk that Frege might seem to imply that.)
32 John M c Dowell
The right thing to say here, if one wanted to say something about the perceptual
capacities of non-rational animals, would be this: for non-rational animals too, perceiving
things, for instance seeing them, requires more than just sense impressions, though the
extra that is required cannot be, as with us, that conceptual capacities must be in act in
their perceptual awareness. But Frege is not talking about non-rational animals. When
he imagines a being restricted to sense impressions, he is imagining what is left of the
truth about us if we abstract away the non-sensory ingredient that unlocks the outer
world for us. He is not imagining the result of replacing that ingredient with whatever it is
about non-rational animals that combines with the impacts of objects on their senses to
make it intelligible that they, for instance, see things. His imagined being is not one that is
perceptually related to things in the outer world in the way non-rational animals are.
7. Travis (236) quotes Frege saying this:
A thought always contains something which reaches beyond the particular case, by means of
which it presents this [i.e. the particular case] to consciousness as falling under some given
generality.
He understands this, plausibly, as putting in place a distinction between the conceptual,

in some sense, and the non-conceptual.
I have been framing things in terms of the distinction between objects and concepts,
in the not quite Fregean sense of ‘concepts’ I explained in §1. Objects and concepts, in
that sense, are surely non-conceptual and conceptual respectively, in the sense that is
relevant to Frege’s remark: objects are particular cases, which are presented in thoughts
as falling under generalities expressible by specifying ways for things to be, Sinne of
concept-expressions.
But Travis has an idiosyncratic interpretation of Frege’s remark. He thinks what
Frege means by ‘the particular case’ is not primarily objects, for instance Sid, who
might be presented in a thought as falling under, for instance, the generality of being
engaged in eating peanuts, a concept in that not quite Fregean sense; but rather such
items as Sid’s being as he is, which might be presented in a thought as falling under a
generality consisting in Sid’s being engaged in eating peanuts; or things being as they
are, which might be presented in a thought as falling under a generality consisting in
things being such that Sid is eating peanuts. (See 236–8.) Those specifications of the
relevant generalities—Sid’s being engaged in eating peanuts, things being such that Sid
is eating peanuts—are expressions of the thought that Sid is eating peanuts. It is
thoughts, rather than ways for objects to be, that are the paradigmatic occupants of the
conceptual side of the distinction between the non-conceptual and the conceptual.
And it is items like Sid’s being as he is and things being as they are that are the paradig-
matic instances of what Frege means by ‘the particular case’, the non-conceptual. Such
items belong on the opposite side of the distinction from thoughts.
I think this reading of what Frege means by ‘the particular case’ is grammatically
impossible. ‘Being’ in ‘Sid’s being as he is’ can only be a form of the copula, and similarly
in ‘things being as they are’. ‘Sid’s being as he is’ can only be a nominalization of
something with the logical form of a proposition. So ‘Sid’s being as he is’ can only
specify something with the logical character of a thought. The grammar of ‘Sid’s being
as he is’ is like the grammar of ‘Sid’s being engaged in eating peanuts’. Given an inter-
pretation for ‘Sid’ (which we have to imagine we have in all these examples), and given
an understanding of ‘eating peanuts’, ‘Sid’s being engaged in eating peanuts’ would
specify a thought (equivalently, for Frege, a possible fact), the thought that Sid is eating
peanuts. Similarly, ‘Sid’s being as he is’ would specify the thought that Sid is as he is.
(That would be, certainly, a thought of a rather special kind; I will come to that dir-
ectly.) Grammar cannot allow Sid’s being as he is and Sid’s being engaged in eating
peanuts to be on opposite sides of a distinction with thoughts on one side and non-
conceptual items on the other.
As I said, that Sid is as he is would be a thought of a special kind; it would contrast
strikingly in a certain respect with such thoughts as that Sid is eating peanuts. If
someone we can refer to as Sid is eating peanuts, there are multiple different ways he
might be, such that he might be any one of them and still count as being engaged
in eating peanuts. But there are not multiple different ways someone we might refer
to as Sid might be, such that he might be any one of them and still count as being
as he is.
Travis misconstrues that difference. Items like Sid’s being as he is do not have mul-
tiple possible instantiations, and Travis thinks it follows that they are not thoughts. But
as I have argued, that is inconsistent with the only possible grammar for expressions
like ‘Sid’s being as he is’. And we can accommodate what is distinctive about such
expressions without doing violence to grammar. For any way Sid is, if he were not that
way he would not be as he is. In ‘Sid’s being as he is’, ‘being as he is’ expresses a way to
be, so that Sid’s being as he is belongs on the conceptual side of the distinction. The way
to be that ‘being as he is’ expresses can be specified like this: for any way Sid is, his being
as he is includes his being that way.
Travis’s reading of Frege on ‘the particular case’ cannot be justified on the ground that
it is needed to accommodate what is distinctive about items like Sid’s being as he is. We
should respect the grammar of such phrases and read Frege’s remark straightforwardly.
The particular case is an object; presenting it in thought as falling under a generality is
bringing it under a concept.
8. I have argued that Travis’s interpretation of Frege on ‘the particular case’ is impos-
sible. I will end with a diagnosis of why it seems compulsory to him. This reflects his
taking my account of the epistemological role of perceptual experience to be ruled out
on the basis of a doctrine that, in another misreading, he finds in Frege.
Judgments about objects can be rational in the light of our sensory awareness of
them. For that to be intelligible, the truth about our sensory awareness cannot be
exhausted by saying, truly enough, that it is of objects. If what is given in our sensory
awareness of an object did not include at least some of the object’s being as it is, in some
34 John M c Dowell
sense of that phrase, it would be impossible to understand how our sensory awareness
makes it rational to judge that the object is this or that way.
In the conception I have recommended, what provides for meeting that requirement
is that in an intuition of an object, presentations of ways the object is are unified into
sensory awareness of the object as being those ways. Ways the object is are conceptual
items in that not quite Fregean sense, Sinne of the sort that can be expressed by con-
cept-expressions. Some ways the object is are given in the sensory awareness that the
intuition is. That explains the rationality of judgments that the object is those ways,
judgments of the first of the two kinds I distinguished (§3). And we can understand the
rationality of judgments of the second kind by seeing them as the results of bringing to
bear, on objects that are given in experience as being various ways, capacities to recog-
nize objects as being various further ways. One recognizes a seen object as being, say, a
pig on the basis of ways it is presented as being in one’s visual experience of it.
Now Travis thinks he has Frege’s authority for thinking the requirement cannot be
met like that.
Frege distinguishes between seeing, for instance, a flower and seeing, for instance,
that a flower has five petals. In terms Travis introduces, the distinction is between
O-seeing—seeing objects—and T-seeing—seeing that . . . (see 238–9). And Travis says,
correctly, that the thing to think, the thinkable, specified in the ‘that’-clause that is the
complement of an expression of T-seeing is ‘not the sort of thing to be visible, tangible,
and so on—not a possible object of sensory awareness’ (238, my italics). A thinkable,
for instance that a flower has five petals, is not related to sensory awareness in the way
things like flowers can be.
Travis does not entertain a possibility that Frege might accept thinkables as contents
of our sensory awareness. I think he takes the distinction between O-seeing and T-seeing
to exclude any involvement of thinkables in sensory awareness itself—as if the only
way one might have supposed thinkables could be involved in sensory awareness itself
is by being objects for it, which, as he rightly says, Frege’s distinction excludes.
This would rule out the idea that an object’s being this or that way might be given in
our sensory awareness, as in my conception.
So, to meet the requirement of making it intelligible that judgments can be rational
in the light of our sensory awareness, Travis is forced to postulate items of the sort he
thinks can be specified by phrases like ‘Sid’s being as he is’ or ‘things being as they are’.
These items are to be objects of sensory awareness. They must be like facts, in that it
must be intelligibly rational to judge that an object is this or that way in the light of
sensory awareness of (some of) such an item. But as Travis rightly concludes from
Frege’s distinction between O-seeing and T-seeing, objects of sensory awareness do
not include thinkables, things that belong in the realm of Sinn. So these fact-like
objects of sensory awareness must be distinguished from facts as Frege conceives
them, which are thinkables: things it would be true to think.
We would need to postulate such items to meet the requirement if it were right to
think Frege’s distinction between O-seeing and T-seeing excludes any involvement of
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
“A good picture of national life and customs with a rather more
dramatic plot than that of former volumes of the series.”
+ Booklist 16:176 F ’20

Boston Transcript p9 D 20 ’19 300w
“Jock and Jean have, perhaps, the most exciting and amusing
adventures of any of the twins, but, as a small boy critic said, ‘They
have an absent-minded way of using occasional Scottish words and
then relapsing into plain American talk.’”
+ − Nation 109:780 D 13 ’19 140w

+ Outlook 124:29 Ja 7 ’20 40w
“‘The Scotch twins,’ Jock, the sleepy-head, and Jean, the canny
little polisher and scrubber, are just as lovable as any of their
predecessors. There is a nice little surprise, too, in the last chapter.”
+ Pub W 97:606 F 21 ’20 120w
“Anyone who has never before understood the claims of a clan will
find this and other peculiarities of Scotch life thoroughly explained.”
+ Springf’d Republican p12 D 19 ’19 100w
PERRY, ALLEN MASON, comp. Electrical aids

to greater production. il *$2 McGraw 621.3
19–10529
“Based upon a series of articles in the Electrical World, of which

the author is engineering editor. The best of practice, as developed by
the war, is presented as a practical handbook, rather than as a text-
book, full of suggestions for the installation, operation, and
maintenance, as well as the problems of layout and control. The eight
chapters cover: General power problems of industrial plants;
Distribution, transformation, switching and protection; Motors,
control, specific applications, troubles and remedies; Illumination,
selection of equipment, economies, and specific applications; Electric
furnaces, welding, etc.; Meters and measurements as applied to
industries; Handling material in industrial plants with electric
tractors; Outdoor substations.”—N Y P L New Tech Bks
Booklist 16:159 F ’20

N Y P L New Tech Bks p47 Jl ’19 120w
Pratt p20 Ja ’20 30w
PERRY, BLISS. Study of poetry. *$3.25

Houghton 808.1
20–9853
In attempting “to set forth in decent prose some of the strange

potencies of verse” the author has given but little space to the epic
and drama and has devoted himself more especially to the various
forms of the lyric, which to him seems to hold the future of poetry.
“The folk-epic is gone, the art-epic has been outstripped by prose
fiction, and the drama needs a theatre. But the lyric needs only a
poet, who can compose in any of its myriad forms.... Through it
today, as never before in the history of civilization, the heart of a man
can reach the heart of mankind.” Accordingly the book falls into two
parts. Part I, Poetry in general, treats of poetry in retrospect, of the
province of poetry and the poet, of rhythm and metre, rhyme, stanza
and free verse. Part II, The lyric in particular, contains: The field of
lyric poetry; Relationships and types of the lyric; Race, epoch and
individual; The present status of the lyric. There are also Notes and
illustrations, an appendix, a bibliography and an index.
+ Booklist 17:106 D ’20
“While it has a genuine interest for the creator and critical

interpreter of poetry, its specific value is for that very large body of
readers who are between these two groups.” W: S. Braithwaite
+ Boston Transcript p6 O 30 ’20 2100w
“The book is avowedly written with the classroom’s needs in view,

as well as those of the inquiring general reader, and the former aim
to some extent vitiates the author’s treatment by imposing too
eclectic an ideal upon him. The book is a résumé of poetics rather
than a personal confession.” Llewellyn Jones
+ − Freeman 2:235 N 17 ’20 1500w

“No critic since Matthew Arnold seems to us to have so positively
as Mr Perry the capacity to make us see more clearly and think more
accurately and sensibly about poetry and at the same time make the
seeing and the thinking increase our enthusiasm for the vital things.”
C. F. L.
+ Grinnell R 16:308 D ’20 640w
“In the long run his book is not simple enough. He will be useful to
a certain kind of teacher; but he will move few students and he will
enkindle no poets.” Mark Van Doren
− + Nation 112:sup241 F 9 ’21 120w
“The fault of the book is that it contains too many long quotations
from other critics. But this very fault, in the present instance, makes
the book a presentation of the best modern critical thought on the
lyric. He will be a bold man who attempts to cover Professor Perry’s
field for many years to come.” C. E. Andrews
+ − N Y Evening Post p5 O 23 ’20 1100w
“Professor Perry’s volume is suggestive and stimulating. It will be

useful to the classroom teacher, to the solitary student and to the
average reader, who will gain from it knowledge certain to increase
his enjoyment of verse.” Brander Matthews
+ N Y Times p6 S 12 ’20 2000w
“He gives an unusually clear analysis, supported by rich and apt

quotation, of the effects of poetry upon the reader. The value of his
essay lies in its vivid ability to provide us with those moments of
lucid understanding in which poetic experience is restored to us.” L.
R. Morris
+ Outlook 126:377 O 27 ’20 400w
“He is first of all a collector, secondly, an assayer, thirdly, and a

little less willingly, an arbiter, and, only incidentally and reluctantly,
a reasoner or controversialist.” O. W. Firkins
+ − Review 3:501 N 24 ’20 2000w
PERRY, LAWRENCE. For the game’s sake. (Fair

play ser.) il *$1.65 Scribner
20–15706
“Half a dozen tales, each having to do with some special form of

athletics, make up Mr Lawrence Perry’s little volume entitled ‘For the
game’s sake.’ The first tells of a football ‘star’ who, being also ‘The
spoiled boy,’ broke training and misbehaved himself until the coach
found it necessary to put him off the team. But there was a sensible
and eloquent girl in the case, who brought the culprit to book in a
manner which convinced him of the error of his ways. Another tale
has to do with an international tennis tournament. Baseball of course
is not neglected. Each of the tales presupposes a fairly close
acquaintance on the reader’s part with that particular game with
which it has to do.”—N Y Times
+ N Y Times p27 S 26 ’20 230w
“The book stands for clean playing in every sport. Each story works
up thrillingly to a dramatic climax where victory comes by the
narrowest of margins.”
+ Springf’d Republican p9a O 31 ’20 200w
PERRY, STELLA GEORGE (STERN) (MRS

GEORGE HOUGH PERRY). Palmetto. *$1.90 (1c)
Stokes
20–15507
Palmetto, as a child of thirteen, runs away from the only parents

she has ever known, but whom she instinctively feels are only foster
parents. She finds a refuge in New Orleans with a kindly fisherman
who adopts her and brings her up as his own daughter. Associated
with him is David Cantrelle, a lad of good birth whose family is
genuinely shocked at his choice of occupation. He loves Palmetto
from the first, and when her heart awakens and responds to his, they
become engaged. But his family objects to the match, on account of
the mystery of her birth and she determines to show them she is
worth while. So she goes to New York where she makes a
conspicuous success as an actress. One of her southern admirers
follows her there, makes ardent love to her and almost succeeds in
replacing David in her heart. But she learns in time that her love for
David is deeper than any Hartley can command. The mystery of her
birth is eventually cleared up and she finds she has as good blood in
her veins as either David or Hartley.
“The greatest defect in this romance of the bayou region of
Louisiana is that it is somewhat overlong. Individual sentences and
paragraphs are frequently overgrown with too rank a growth of
adjectives.”
+ − N Y Times p20 D 5 ’20 500w
PETERSON, SAMUEL. Democracy and

government. *$2 Knopf 321.8
20–104
According to the author’s initial assumption that “a government

carries into effect ideas,” the book naturally falls into two parts:
What persons should have the legal right to determine finally the
ideas to be carried into effect; and in what manner the ideas to be
carried into effect should be selected, and how they should be carried
into effect. Accordingly part 1, The ruling power of the state,
discusses the difference between autocracy, oligarchy and democracy
as one of conditions rather than of law, and defines a democratic
government as a government of the intelligent members of the ruling
race. Part 2, The organization of the government, is an inquiry into
how the ideas to be carried into effect may be selected as reliably and
carried into effect as certainly and efficiently as possible. The
contents under part 2 are: Governmental functions; Legislative
organization; Administrative organization; Judicial organization;
Direct legislation. There is an index.
Booklist 16:331 Jl ’20

+ N Y P L Munic Ref Lib Notes 7:39 O 20
’20 60w
Outlook 126:558 N 24 ’20 180w
R of Rs 61:560 My ’20 50w
R of Rs 62:672 D ’20 30w
“A book which, while blazing no new paths, is well designed to

assist the reader in forming a reasonably critical view of the state is
Samuel Peterson’s ‘Democracy and government’ which treats
fundamental political theories with knowledge of their historical
importance, yet with hard-headed sociological insight. The author is
always frank, and, while he has pronounced views of his own, he
cannot be called a doctrinaire.”
+ Springf’d Republican p8 Ap 13 ’20 400w
“His criticisms of the present governmental machinery are

generally just, but the remedies suggested might prove to be worse
than the disease. The book shows hard work and earnestness
throughout, however, and should prove a valuable contribution to
the literature on the subject.” A. G. Dehly
+ − Survey 44:307 My 29 ’20 200w
PETRUCCI, RAPHAËL. Chinese painters; a

critical study; tr. by Frances Seaver; with a
biographical note by Lawrence Binyon. il *$2
Brentano’s 759.9
20–7443
“The book comprises a comprehensive and yet compact study of

painting in China. His survey takes us back to the dim ages long
before the appearance of Buddhism in China, and then brings the
reader to the present time.” (Outlook) “It explains briefly the
principles of technique and then, as it sketches the historical
evolution of painting, reveals its dominating philosophical idea, the
search for abstract form. The author was an authority on oriental art.
There are numerous pleasing reproductions, bibliography, index of
painters and periods.” (Booklist)
“Concise and illuminating volume.”
+ Booklist 16:336 Jl ’20
“Happily the author writes for the general reader and the lover of
art rather than for the elect; his treatment of a large theme shows the
advantage of one who has a gift for luminous condensation.”
+ Outlook 125:541 Jl 21 ’20 170w
“For the uninitiated in these matters, ‘Chinese painters’ is a

necessary education. For him who understands already the beauty of
the masters of China, the book is valuable.”
+ Springf’d Republican p6 Ag 26 ’20 280w
PETTIGREW, RICHARD FRANKLIN. Course

of empire; introd. by Scott Nearing. il *$4.50 Boni &
Liveright 815
20–12790
“The author of this volume held a seat in the United States senate
during the ’90s of the last century. He was active in the senate at a
turning point in the career of the nation, a period when the frontier
was disappearing, when the great oligarchies of capital were
organizing, and when the United States became a colonial power. In
short, his public career is identical with the origin of imperialism in
the United States. The book consists of a compilation of the speeches
of ex-Senator Pettigrew in the senate on these imperialist policies as
they were forming. They fall into three groups—those dealing with
the annexation of the Hawaiian islands; those dealing with the
conquest of the Philippines; and those dealing with the antagonism
of the West to the banking and trust groups of the East.
Accompanying the addresses which reveal a wide variety of
information on the part of the author, are many documents of much
historical value to the reader.”—N Y Call
“These speeches, both concerning Hawaiian affairs and those in

the Philippines, are useful as a matter of record; they will be very
valuable to the future historian, who desires to understand the
obstacles encountered by the nation in its movement toward an
expanded civilization and world power.” E. J. C.
“The addresses show that the author during his public career had
that capacity which is so rare in the men of a later generation who
have served in Congress. His mind was always open, and he
advanced with the progress of his time.” James Oneal
+ N Y Call p10 N 21 ’20 940w
“Although the book comprises a vivid study of the development of

imperial policy in the United States it might better have been
compressed into half the size for the benefit of the general reader.
There are too many and too liberal quotations from Mr Pettigrew’s
own speeches.”
+ − Springf’d Republican p6 D 27 ’20 570w
PHELPS, EDITH M., comp. Selected articles on

the American merchant marine. (Debaters’ handbook
ser.) *$1.50 Wilson, H. W. 387
20–4721
To this second edition of a handbook published in 1916 nearly one

hundred pages of reprinted matter have been added. This matter is
designed to cover events since the publication of the first edition,
including the assembling of a large merchant fleet and the question
of its disposal, together with arguments for and against government
ownership and operation. The bibliography has been enlarged and
brought down to date, and the introduction and briefs have been
rewritten.
Ann Am Acad 90:172 Jl ’20 40w

Booklist 16:291 My ’20
“A volume covering intelligently and with reasonable fulness the
history and present status of the commercial fleet of the United
States.”
+ Springf’d Republican p10 Ap 30 ’20

280w
PHELPS, EDITH M., ed. University debaters’

annual; constructive and rebuttal speeches delivered
in debates of American colleges and universities
during the college year, 1919–1920. v 6 *$2.25
Wilson, H. W.
808.5
Seven subjects of timely importance are included in this volume of

the debaters’ annual: Government ownership and operation of coal
mines; The Cummins plan for the control of railroads; Affiliation of
teachers with the American federation of labor; Compulsory
arbitration of railway labor disputes; Compulsory arbitration of labor
disputes; The closed shop; Suppression of propaganda for the
overthrow of the United States government (two debates). Each
debate is accompanied by briefs and a selected bibliography. “The
bibliographies have been compiled mostly by the editor, and are not
limited to the material actually used in the debate, as their main
purpose is helpfulness to the prospective debater.” (Preface) The
volume is indexed.
PHILLPOTTS, EDEN. As the wind blows.
*$1.50 Macmillan 821
20–18071
“Mr Phillpotts sings a good deal about his beloved Dartmoor, but
he tells of other subjects, too—Gallipoli, the grave of Keats, etc.—and
he has one descriptive piece from the jungle called ‘Tiger,’ and a
longish blank verse poem staging Adam and Eve in Paradise.”—The
Times [London] Lit Sup
“Of some of his pieces one has the impression that they were
written as an exercise in verse. But in others a genuine inspiration is
apparent. ‘The neolith’ and ‘Tiger’ contain fine things.”
+ − Ath p718 My 28 ’20 70w
“It is the reality of the atmosphere rather than the circumstance

that gives Mr Phillpotts’s verse its individuality; the taste, smell,
contour of locality, rather than the sharp and sudden force of either
crisis or event in human action that gives the unique character to his
rhythmic expression.” W. S. B.
+ Boston Transcript p6 Jl 24 ’20 1750w
“He writes in the great English tradition, but brings a note that is
essentially his own at the same time.”
+ N Y Times p16 N 7 ’20 290w

“It is always difficult to analyse charm, but in this instance the
effect of the attraction is that we are apt to like poems that have very
palpable faults.”
+ − Spec 124:86 Jl 17 ’20 430w

+ The Times [London] Lit Sup p443 Jl 8
’20 60w
PHILLPOTTS, EDEN. Evander. *$2 Macmillan
20–4895
“Evander is an apostle of plain living and high thinking in the early

days when the gods of Olympus had not settled their respective
rights in the hierarchy of worship and when marriage was still a rare
thing among humble folk. Festus and Livia were perhaps the first
among their neighbours to wed, under the auspices of Bacchus, while
Evander, as the votary of Apollo, endeavours to convert her to the
higher worship of his god. He succeeds for a time in gaining her
allegiance, and she leaves her husband to follow him, but finds the
mental atmosphere too rarefied for her, and finally returns to her
home and husband, Bacchus being able to show his half-brother the
unwisdom of vengeance on Festus.”—Sat R
“The delicate, bright atmosphere in which this enchanting book is

bathed must be left for the reader to enjoy.” K. M.
+ Ath p15 Ja 2 ’20 650w

“The dialogue is full of witty and amiable satire of our own times,
the barb being especially sharp for the ‘intelligentzia’ of all times.” H.
W. Boynton
+ Bookm 51:340 My ’20 460w
“It is impossible to overlook the roguish satire upon social affairs

of the present day that Mr Phillpotts has woven into his story. The
very presence and name of Bacchus proves that he has reference to
the immediate present in writing of the far-away past.” E. F. E.
+ Boston Transcript p6 F 18 ’20 1600w

+ Dial 68:664 My ’20 80w
“The trouble with the book is the same as with all of Mr Phillpotts’s
books—a lack of felicity which is not compensated for, as it is in the
case of his master, Hardy, by a dour grandeur. ‘Evander’ particularly
needed grace and there is none.”
− + Nation 110:304 Mr 6 ’20 400w
“The tale would, indeed, be worth reading merely for the grace and
charm of its style, and its flexible, deft, and effective phrasing.”
+ N Y Times 25:89 F 15 ’20 900w
“A bit of irony impishly humorous, entirely delightful.”
+ N Y Times 25:190 Ap 18 ’20 20w

“The vein is one of mild social satire; the touch is light and easy;
and here also is the charm of imagination and fancy.”
+ Outlook 124:430 Mr 10 ’20 80w
“We should like to congratulate the author on his success in a

rather limited style of fiction. We can remember nothing in English
at all equal to it since Dr Garnett’s ‘Twilight of the gods,’ while it has
much in common with Anatole France in the satire of the foibles of
the philosopher which lies at its root. It may be perceived we are
giving Mr Phillpotts high praise.”
+ Sat R 129:40 Ja 10 ’20 150w
“A pretty, though often rather cheap, little story.”
+ − |Spec 123:822 D 13 ’19 100w
“Mr Phillpotts’s literary cunning makes an agreeable tale out of all

this—picturesque and quietly humorous.”
+ The Times [London] Lit Sup p697 N 27

’19 100w
PHILLPOTTS, EDEN. Miser’s money. *$2

Macmillan
20–3882
“The characters [of this novel] are drawn with realism and
subtlety. More especially that of David Mortimer, the hard-bitten old
miser, whose cheese-paring, hatred of women, and cynical disbelief
in everybody and everything are so cleverly defended that they
almost capture the young soul of his nephew Barry Worth, who lives
with him and works his farm. David leaves his money to Barry on
condition that he doesn’t marry, the fact that Barry was ‘tokened’ to a
buxom barmaid having been concealed from him. Barry is true to
Marian; the will is void; and the money divided between the miser’s
brother and two sisters. But the lawyer who handed the will to Barry
delivered at the same time a bulky letter from David to be read in
solitude. In that letter is contained the mystery, the heart of the
matter which makes the novel.”—Sat R
“The characters are interesting and the story moves along

pleasantly and very calmly. There is less humor than in some of the
earlier work.”
+ Booklist 16:283 My ’20
“After all, Mr Phillpotts has said his say about human nature on
Dartmoor, and he has little new to offer in type or situation. It is
pleasant and comfortable to meet some more of his people now and
then—and that is all.” H. W. Boynton
+ − Bookm 51:339 My ’20 520w
“The story as a whole is an excellent example of Mr Phillpotts’s

style at its best.” E. F. E.
+ Boston Transcript p4 Mr 17 ’20 1200w

“The novel is beautifully written. All Mr Phillpotts’s readers know
how fine are his descriptions of his dearly loved Dartmoor, though
there are fewer of them in this his latest novel than in the majority of
his Dartmoor books.”
+ N Y Times p116 Mr 14 ’20 1150w
“An excellent example of the author’s quiet, subtle, and humorous

exposition of contrasted character.”
+ Outlook 124:657 Ap 14 ’20 100w
“It is as charming a novel, and as telling a picture of family life on

‘Dartymoor’ as we ever read, or as Mr Phillpotts has ever written.
Worthy to rank with the best of his many delightful novels.”
+ Sat R 129:333 Ap 3 ’20 440w
“The different veins of his talent, tragic and humorous, are here
fused with happy results. ‘Miser’s money’ shows him at his mellowest
and best as artist and observer.”
+ Spec 125:215 Ag 14 ’20 530w
“The plot is simple and rather erratic, but taken as a whole the
story displays that excellence of craftsmanship which long since
placed the author in the forefront of his peculiar field.”
+ Springf’d Republican p13a Ap 18 ’20

750w
“Mr Phillpotts keeps us almost too near to life. He presents us with
one more faithful and consistent study of Dartmoor people, but of
Dartmoor people principally in their heavier and less significant
moments. The plot, though simple and pastoral, is a very good plot;
but no plot could survive this flood of conversation.”
+ − The Times [London] Lit Sup p186 Mr

18 ’30 400w
[2]
PHILLPOTTS, EDEN. West country
pilgrimage. il *$9 Macmillan 914.2
“A by-product of Mr Phillpotts’s researches into the lore of

Devonshire has been put together in a volume entitled ‘A west
country pilgrimage,’ with sixteen illustrations in color by A. T.
Benthall. Here he sketches in a series of sixteen essays the scenes of
heath and river, of village and shore as they meet the eye of the
traveller through or the sojourner in that corner of England.”—
Boston Transcript
“The book represents the happiest combining of language,

printing, and art.” Margaret Ashmun
+ Bookm 52:344 D ’20 130w

“Some of the water colors by A. T. Benthall are unusually fine, and

they all display a decided originality of talent. To many, perhaps, the
illustrations will seem preferable to the text, for they achieve their
intended result with less effort.” B. R. Redman
+ − N Y Times p9 Ja 9 ’21 140w
“An attractive book for lovers of Devon and Cornwall.”
+ The Times [London] Lit Sup p442 Jl 8

’20 90w
PICKARD, BERTRAM. Reasonable revolution.

*$1.25 Macmillan 336.2
(Eng ed 19–12869)
“A thin blue volume entitled ‘A reasonable revolution,’ filled with

economic principles and suggestions, has just been brought out by
Macmillan company. It is an ardent and eager defense of the state
bonus for motherhood and national minimum income scheme as
evolved by Dennis Milner, the head of the state bonus league of
England. This book is written by Bertram Pickard, who has been a
co-worker with Milner for some time.” (Springf’d Republican)
“Briefly, the scheme is for a national appropriation of 20 per cent of
all incomes, without consideration of other taxes or burdens on
them; the resulting fund to be pooled and redistributed in such a way
as to provide every individual and family with a national minimum
sufficient to sustain national standards of comfort, health, education
and other essentials of a full and efficient life.” (Survey)
Ath p570 Jl 4 ’19 50w

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In the Light of Experience: New Essays

on Perception and Reasons Johan

Non-Being : New Essays on the Metaphysics of

Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and

Seeing and Saying: The Language of Perception and the

The Fountain Light: Studies in Romanticism and Religion

Reason in Nature: New Essays on Themes from John

Reasoning: New Essays on Theoretical and Practical

The Sensible and Intelligible Worlds: New Essays on

Idealism: New Essays in Metaphysics Tyron Goldschmidt

In the Light of Experience

This series consists of carefully selected volumes of significant original papers

Director, Mind Association: Julian Dodd

Recently published in the series

Part I. The Myth of the Given

Part II. The Epistemology of Empirical Knowledge

Part III. The Nature of Experience

Part IV. The Object of Experience

Bill Brewer, King’s College London

2 Johan Gersel and Rasmus Thybo Jensen

4 Johan Gersel and Rasmus Thybo Jensen

if experiences are to figure as knowledge-yielding reasons for belief about external

Epistemological and metaphysical disjunctivism thus seem to sever the envisaged

6 Johan Gersel and Rasmus Thybo Jensen

The Papers of the Anthology

1. The Myth of the Given

8 Johan Gersel and Rasmus Thybo Jensen

object of experience and the concept-application involved in experience. Our seeing

2. The Epistemology of Empirical Knowledge

3. The Nature of Experience

10 Johan Gersel and Rasmus Thybo Jensen

4. The Object of Experience

12 Johan Gersel and Rasmus Thybo Jensen

14 Johan Gersel and Rasmus Thybo Jensen

The Travis–McDowell Debate

can indeed be conceived as a form of passive awareness of our surroundings. However,

The Travis–M c Dowell Debate 17

The Travis–M c Dowell Debate 19

Travis on Frege, Kant, and the Given 25

Now Travis focuses exclusively on the first of these. He writes (246):

Travis on Frege, Kant, and the Given 27

Travis on Frege, Kant, and the Given 29

Travis on Frege, Kant, and the Given 31

7. Travis (236) quotes Frege saying this:

He understands this, plausibly, as putting in place a distinction between the conceptual,

Travis on Frege, Kant, and the Given 33

+ Booklist 16:176 F ’20

+ − Nation 109:780 D 13 ’19 140w

+ Pub W 97:606 F 21 ’20 120w

+ Springf’d Republican p12 D 19 ’19 100w

PERRY, ALLEN MASON, comp. Electrical aids

“Based upon a series of articles in the Electrical World, of which

Booklist 16:159 F ’20

PERRY, BLISS. Study of poetry. *$3.25

In attempting “to set forth in decent prose some of the strange

+ Booklist 17:106 D ’20

“While it has a genuine interest for the creator and critical

+ Boston Transcript p6 O 30 ’20 2100w

“The book is avowedly written with the classroom’s needs in view,

+ − Freeman 2:235 N 17 ’20 1500w

+ Grinnell R 16:308 D ’20 640w

− + Nation 112:sup241 F 9 ’21 120w

+ − N Y Evening Post p5 O 23 ’20 1100w