Last year I gave a paper at the workshop leading up to the Sellars Centenary Conference organised by UCD in Dublin (by the wonderful Jim O’Shea, with financial help from the generous John McDowell). I was very unhappy with the paper at the time, as it seemed to me that the idea I’d attempted to articulate in the abstract didn’t pan out in the finished piece, probably due to the fact that I didn’t leave myself enough time to write it, and was, as ever, typing away right up until the last minute. In retrospect, though I still see the inadequacies of the piece, these are largely matters of a dearth of specific examples and a failure to tackle certain more tricky details, both forced upon me by the length of the presentation. So, as a first step to getting me to revise the paper into something more adequate (and hence, publishable) I’m going to put it up here for those of you interested in Sellars and/or the philosophy of perception.
The title of the paper is ‘Is there a TV in my head?: Content, Functional Mapping, and the Myth of the Given’. This is my first real foray into the philosophy of perception, and my goal was twofold: a) to articulate a worry I have with much work on perception, namely, that the notion of perceptual content is all too often implicitly defined in such a way that it vitiates the possibility of productive debate regarding whether or not it is conceptual, representational, or anything else for that matter, by outlining an alternative methodology that begins by outlining the explanatory role that the notion must play, and the resources available to it as a form of content per se, and b) to use this alternative methodology to clarify Sellars’ account of what Jim O’Shea calls the myth of the categorial given. I don’t think the paper entirely delivers, but it’s certainly on the right lines, and I aim to return to those lines when I have the time. It may also be of interest to those who’ve read my paper on Sellars and Metzinger (here), and vice versa, as it deals with some of the same issues from a different angle.
DEONTOLOGISTICS 