This is more or less a direct reply to Tyler Burge. Check out Burge's "Disjunctivism and Perceptual Psychology" and McDowell's reply "Tyler Burge on Disjunctivism" as well as Burge's reply to that article in his "Disjunctivism Again."

1. If you are genuinely and deeply concerned about the questions that concern philosophy, and the answers that philosophy seeks: (1). Listen through the messenger to the message (2). Comprehend the meaning and it logic, not the rhetoric and the style (or the 'sniffing' - for goodness' sake!) Sometimes that requires some concentration and effort. But if you genuinely care about the fundamental topic that is being debated, and the meanings and arguments that are being offered, then that is precisely what you'll be listening to; that is precisely what you'll be thinking about. If that's not what you want, go watch your local prime time commercial TV entertainment, where the style, rhetoric, and messenger are all that there is, and the message, meaning, and logic are totally irrelevant, if they even exist. Despite its guardedness and repetitiveness (understandable, if you're at all familiar with the "minefield of epistemology" to which McDowell refers in this lecture - if you're trying to tiptoe through a minefield, you would definitely take considerable care about every single little step), McDowell's argumentation is in fact quite clear, and quite compelling. It definitely deserves very serious philosophical consideration and discussion. (Wouldn't it be nice if there were serious and intelligent philosophical discussion about the philosophical content of such videos appended to them... Clearly, one has to look for that elsewhere.) Anyway. McDowell is expressing a very important philosophical idea, here; one that matters very much to the contemporary situation of epistemology and metaphysics, and the philosophy of cognitive science (and of natural science more generally). What he actually says is far more important, and makes a lot more sense, than any of the inane comments that have been made, below, to this lecture. In my considered judgment, I think the conclusions for which he argues here are - in their essential content - correct. But I think the argumentation can be made more cogent and more accessible by means of, and from the perspective of, Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. In any case, I'm a seriously interested follower of what McDowell actually SAYS, as distinct from the way he says it, or what his body happens to do while he's in the process of saying it. Incidentally, this reminds me of a story in Diogenes Laertius, The Lives of the Philosophers, about Plato in the agora, being commented upon by Diogenes the Cynic. Diogenes says, "I can see the cup, but I can't see this alleged 'cupness'." And Plato says, "That's because you don't have the nous to see it."

I would not be surprised if the whole content of this presentation can be stated more clearly in a page at the very most. Take this snippet: “If someone sees that there is a sloping surface in-front of her, her experience itself makes visually present to her some environmental reality who’s being a reality entails that there is a sloping flat surface in-front of her. So her position in having the experience she has leaves open no possibility that there isn’t a sloping flat surface in front of her”. That's just "Seeing P entails P" which is hardly controversial.

There is nothing to say that future neuroscience won't be able to recognise a seeming-seeing for what it is (experientially); while scientific method would simultaneously tell us that it is so -- has only experiential truth value -- but that it is in fact an optical illusion, or whatever... we're no less stuck with the question: 'how do we treat the 'scientific' evidence that tells us the other scientific evidence is false'? In that sense we never get 'beyond' epistemology, no matter how much neuroscience we throw at it.

Am I the only one who wets themselves with laughter every time he brings up the flat sloping surface?

I can see his point about why neuroscience doesn't rule out his project, but I'm not sure I totally buy the argument given at the beginning of the lecture for why "seeings" have a different status than "seeming seeings." For one thing, it is seeming seeings which are accessible to self-conscious reflection. I'm not sure I know that it means to "seem to have a reason," in this context. Moreover, surly there are cases where we want to acknowledge the possibility of perceptual error without dismissing the "seeming seeing" as an instance of illusion or taking it for granted. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like he relies on the constraint that in order to have knowledge we be totally warranted in ruling out all possibility of error. In order to do this he externalizes the ideas of "warrant" and "reasons," thereby leaving self-conscious reflectors with "seeming warrant" and "seeming reasons" as resources to reflect with. I can't say that he's wrong exactly, but I can say that this is a strange use of the words "warrant" and an even stranger use of the word "reasons." Or have I totally missed the boat on this?

when the sloping flat surface bottom text

buen hombre

51:05 bookmark

I've tried so many time to sit through this and I just can't do it. Can anyone provide a precis?

It seems to be steaming; it’s a steaming seeing; an epic-steamy-bogical seeing,…

You can really appreciate the dire philosophical implications of leaving the notion of ‘action’ out of the perceptual picture. Alva Noe would be pulling his hair out over this if he had any, or maybe that’s why he doesn’t (?),…

"... is more or less a direct ..." spoken like a true student of philosophy Thanks for the homework, I will indeed check them out, perhaps it will inspire me to finish the other 90% of this vid. Thanks again

If a philosopher's presentation on seeming seeing involves a lot of seeming sniffing; is it epistemically valid, from a cognitive science perspective, to sell pseudoephedrine over the counter, given a seeming sloping surface may well be a running nose and does this entail a necessary ontological difference regarding the subjective epistemic gain of a nonlocal seeming seer? I say yes.

This is why the nimbus in philosophy is lost.....

Using a monotone generic computer voice would have gone a long way to make the lecture more interesting.

This is like a spoken word version of an Ad Reinhardt painting- listening to paint dry!

I'm sorry, I stopped at 5:17 because this lecture but does not translate well from the written text. I've seen many epistemology vids, because I have a great interest in the subject, so I am more likely to put up with things that many others won't. I invite you to view them to get a idea of how to better deliver your message.

Sniff sniff sniff...

Grounded and 4E theories of cognition stop all over this verbiage. The biggest mistake of the analytic and formalist traditions was to leave out (embodied!) action. Not even a mention of James Gibson. This seems a load of ‘steaming’ Intellectualist codswallop- par excellence. Seeing the slope and judging it to be so is of no consequence if you don’t plan on negotiating its ‘affordances’; and where exactly is there an office I can get one of these ‘warrants’ from? Can I get one online? Cue Dan Hutto!

So an hour of impenetrable waft just to adumbrate that perception might not be representational; and we don’t even get to find out why, because they guy who recorded the first lecture fell into a deep coma and couldn’t record the second.

Yawn

The entire lecture amounts to two words: legitimized babble.....