The McDowell-Travis Debate regardless of any conceptual knowledge of body language. Yet, perception, in this form, can never give reason to act or judge. It can provide cause to act (see footnote 1 for an explanation of cause and reason). For both, the experience is different, but the perception is the same. The confusion comes in how concepts relate to perception and then experience. For McDowell, concepts are as close to perception as possible. McDowell sees the concepts of letters as contributing to perception in an indistinguishable way that gives experience. Travis says if that is true, then concepts must shape perception so that experience is just in the mind and untied from the objects as they are in the world. It is here that Travis has misunderstood McDowell and McDowell has not been able to correct him. For McDowell, perception and the conceptual give experience, experience then allows for judgments that can be true or false. For Travis, there is the perception that is our experience and judgments that come when we add concepts to experience. They both agree that perception gives things for which rational beings have the capacity to respond. Both philosophers seek to understand how rational beings have access to the world as the basis for judgments. Both seek to answer the questions about the relationship between subject and object. Travis says McDowell falls short in this for he falls into idealism—the world depends on and exists only in the mind. McDowell says Travis falls short for he falls into the Myth of the Given—he allows for something unquestionable and given to guide and constrain rational thought.
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The Confusion
This debate starts with Travis’s response to Mind and World. Neither wants to fall into Idealism and only McDowell wants to avoid the Myth of the Given. McDowell thinks he avoids Idealism by saying that our awareness of reality is dependent on the conceptual, but reality is not dependent on our experience or perception of it.7 What avoids idealism is his passive use of the conceptual with perception and therefore in experience—the conceptual shapes nothing. Therefore, we can get at the world as it is, not just how we think of it. Travis has mistaken passive application as having a shaping role in experience; McDowell means it differently. Influenced by Gilbert Ryle of Oxford University, the passive application of concepts is a way of being in the world. Perception occurs with or without concepts, yet concepts tune experience. The world does not fit into our concepts—instead, our concepts must fit into the world. This is what McDowell means. 7. McDowell, “Mind and World,” 42.
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