ABSTRACT
John McDowell in his paper “A Sellarsian Blind Spot” (2016) offers a serious criticism of Wilfrid Sellars’s account of the epistemology of perception. He claims that Sellars’s discussion of the warrant of perceptual knowledge neglects a crucial option—namely, the one McDowell himself wants to defend. Hence, a “blind spot”.
Haag argues that McDowell misinterprets Sellars’s views on perceptual warrant. He suggests that McDowell’s interpretation of Sellars’s views on perceptual warrant rests on a misunderstanding of Sellars’s conception of the trans-level credibility and justification involved in assessing this warrant.
The real difference between the two accounts, Haag claims, is that Sellars ultimately is committed to the position that a perceptual belief is warranted by having a state of affairs conceptually present to one in a cognitive act that itself is already a believing, while McDowell needs to insist that the perceptual belief is warranted by a cognitive act that is more basic than any believing.
While Sellars therefore never wanted to defend a McDowellian conception of perceptual warrant, he nevertheless can be shown, far from sporting a “blind spot” with respect to McDowell’s position, to be defending a conception that is conceptually closely akin to it.
