Perception: A Blind Spot in Brandom's Normative Pragmatics

DANIEL ENRIQUE KALPOKAS

Conferencia; Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Brandom; 2019

Brandom explains perceptual knowledge as the product of two distinguishable sorts of capacities: (i) the capacity to reliably discriminate behaviorally between different sorts of stimuli; and (ii) the capacity to take up a position in the game of giving and asking for reasons. However, in focusing exclusively on the entitlement of observation reports, rather than on perception itself, Brandom passes over a conception of perceptual experience as a sort of contentful mental state. In this article, I argue that this is a blind spot, which makes Brandom?s account of perceptual knowledge unable to properly accommodate the phenomenon of seeing aspects.