In this paper I analyze some important contemporary criticisms of McDowell ́s conceptualism by Kant and Husserl scholars. Many Kant scholars have recently taken a stance against McDowell ́s reading of Kant in Mind and World, arguing that Kant’s account involves non-conceptual content. At the same time, phenomenologists such as Dreyfus [2013] have drawn on first person descriptions of skillful cop...

Inspired by the writings of J. M. Hinton (1967a, 1967b, 1973), but ushered into the mainstream by Paul Snowdon (1980–1, 1990–1), John McDowell (1982, 1986), and M. G. F. Martin (2002, 2004, 2006), disjunctivism is currently discussed, advocated, and opposed in the philosophy of perception, the theory of knowledge, the theory of practical reason, and the philosophy of action. But what is disjunc...

The matching law, regardless of the version, is a mathematical model that accounts for an organism's response rate as a function of the reinforcer rate. McDowell (2013) investigated to which extent a combined version of the quantitative law of effect (Herrnstein, 1970) and the generalized matching law (Baum, 1974) accounts for a substantial amount of the variance through several data sets. Even...

Dreyfus presents Todes’s (2001) republished Body and World as an anticipatory response to McDowell (1994) which shows how preconceptual perception can ground conceptual thought. I argue that Dreyfus is mistaken on this point: Todes’s claim that perceptual experience is preconceptual presupposes an untenable account of conceptual thought. I then show that Todes nevertheless makes two important c...

The contents of perceptual experience, it has been argued, often include a characteristic “non-conceptual” component (Evans, 1982). Rejecting such views, McDowell (1994) claims that such contents are conceptual in every respect. It will be shown that this debate is compromised by the failure of both sides to mark a further, and crucial, distinction in cognitive space. This is the distinction be...