From PhilPapers forum Epistemology:

2011-09-22
McDowell and the view "that the content of experience can be true or false".
Hi Pierre-Normand and Ali,

I think it would be to misunderstand McDowell's picture of the nature of experience (in Avoiding the Myth of the Given) to see it as being at odds with his perceptual disjunctivism. McDowell argues that even though experiences understood as intuitions involve the operation of conceptual capacities (thus avoiding the Myth of the Given), they do not have propositional content.  "[V]isual experiences just bring our surroundings into view", he says. Such experiences are not taking things to be so, though we may go on to take things to be so, thereby forming judgments and possibly beliefs. We may be entitled to take some things to be so on the basis of experiences, but may not always exploit this potential inherent in those experiences.

This falls short of Sellars' 'fragmentary discursive content'. Having something in view, such as a red cube, may be complete in itself and need not imply that one would utter the words 'this red cube'.

McDowell (as I understand him) is saying that an entitlement to take things to be so may not actually be implicit in the experiences. Some experience may not provide such entitlement, there being no good reason to take things to be so, or at least not all the things we might take to be so in the light of those experiences. Therefore there is both the possibility that our experiences may provide the basis for knowledge and the possibility that they may mislead us. This picture seems to leave McDowell's disjunctivism intact and also a necessary part of his picture of experience, because some experiences may indeed mislead us.

I hope this does justice to McDowell's picture and also to your own conceptions.

Romney