Description
According to a popular picture, the action-directed cognition of normal humans involves the integration of an I-perspective with a we-perspective. There has been considerable debate about how this integration works, but rarely does this debate go so far as to contend seriously with Sellars’ idea that moral thought and agency is involves the widest possible integration between I- and we-perspectives. I suspect this is due to a latent challenge for Sellars’ idea: It’s very difficult to identify a relevant “we”, integration with which could plausibly be argued to be constitutive of moral (rather than merely collective) thought and agency. Most suggestions are either covertly parochial or uninformatively formal.In this paper, I explore parallels with a similar challenge arising for the idea that the object-directed cognition of normal humans involves the integration of appearances from a subjective perspective with a conception of what remains constant for experience across any possible particular perspective to yield something like the view from everywhere.
My hypothesis is that we can gain unexpected traction on both challenges by extending ideas that have so far been developed exclusively about action-directed or object-directed cognition, and thereby find paths between the extremes of slapdash pragmatism and naïve platonism.
| Period | 14 Oct 2024 |
|---|---|
| Held at | Georgetown University in Qatar |
| Degree of Recognition | International |