2010-07-02
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Dretske on seeing
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Mohan MatthenUniversity of Toronto, St. George Campus
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Ah, that's clearer now -- thanks Matthew. Alston says that one person can go validly while another goes invalidly from the same grounds to the same conclusion. I am still having some trouble, though, in figuring out how this point would transfer to perception. You quote Alston as saying: ... no propositional or factive ground to serve as a ground rather than
the experience itself. One who does take experiences to be essentially
propositional attitudes will find the same problem with doxastic
grounds.
I half-agree with the first part of this: when I conclude on the basis of my visual experience of the chocolate that it is brown, I may have only my experience of the chocolate to go on. Now suppose (as I think) that the experience is indeed a propositional attitude: the experience that leads me to the belief that the chocolate is brown has content "That is brown". This is where I get stuck. Are there supposed to be multiple routes from the perceptual experience to the conclusion? (Perhaps there are, but there is only one instinctive route, I think.) You say that this undermines the connection with the phenomenology. What connection? And how is it undermined?
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