Premium
Intentional Relations and the Sideways‐on View: On McDowell's Critique of Sellars
Author(s) -
Shapiro Lionel
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
european journal of philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.42
H-Index - 36
eISSN - 1468-0378
pISSN - 0966-8373
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2010.00448.x
Subject(s) - normative , intentionality , epistemology , perspective (graphical) , order (exchange) , distortion (music) , prejudice (legal term) , philosophy , psychology , sociology , social psychology , computer science , artificial intelligence , amplifier , computer network , finance , bandwidth (computing) , economics
McDowell opposes the view that the intentionality of language and thought remains mysterious unless it can be understood ‘from outside the conceptual order’. While he thinks the demand for such a ‘sideways‐on’ understanding can be the result of ‘scientistic prejudice’, he points to Sellars's thought as exhibiting a different source: a distortion of our perspective ‘from within the conceptual order’. The distortion involves a failure on Sellars's part to see how descriptions from within the conceptual order can present expressions and mental acts as related to extra‐conceptual objects (a failure in turn explained by his failure to see how such relations could have normative import ). In this paper, I argue that Sellars's thought suffers from no such distortion. If that is right, McDowell's examination of Sellars has not uncovered a disorder whose treatment might help relieve the desire for a sideways‐on view.