Charles Travis

McDowell defends conceptualism about experiential content by arguing that contrary views of experience are forms of the Myth of the Given. The direct realist view of experience, which rejects experiential content all together, is thus according to McDowell a mythical view of experience. A series of defenders of direct realism have responded to McDowell’s accusations. However, the recent debate has revealed that there is very little agreement on the details of McDowell’s argument, let alone on how to respond to it. I will argue that the responses to McDowell given by thinkers such as Travis, Brewer, Kalderon and Johnson, all rest on various misunderstandings of his line of argument. The aim of this paper is to provide an interpretation of the Myth of the Given, which lives up to the dialectical role it plays in McDowell’s argumentation. I aim to elaborate the notions of reasons and the notion of conceptuality in play in McDowell’s writings. On this basis, I present an argument leading from the requirement that experience provides reasons for thought to the conclusion that experience must possess conceptual content.

Many philosophers have held that perceptual experience is fundamentally a matter of perceivers being in particular representational states. Such states are said to have representational content, i.e. accuracy or veridicality conditions, capturing the way that things, according to that experience, appear to be. In this thesis I argue that the case against representationalism — the view that perceptual experience is fundamentally and irreducibly representational — that is set out in Charles Travis’s ‘The Silence of the Senses’ (2004) constitutes a powerful, but much misunderstood and neglected argument against this prevailing philosophical orthodoxy.

In chapter 2, I present an interpretation of Travis’s arguments that poses a dilemma for the representationalist concerning the indeterminacy and availability of perceptual content. Chapters 3 and 4 evaluate a variety of arguments in favour of such content based upon the nature of appearances, or ‘looks’, including those by Byrne (2009), Siegel (2010) and Schellenberg (2011b), each of which I find to be problematic. Finally, chapters 5 and 6 examine the relationship between representational content and phenomenal character, i.e. what perceptual experience is subjectively like, outlining some potential responses to Travis’s anti-representationalism. These include the external individuation of content and self-knowledge, and the operation of perceptual discriminatory capacities (the latter of which does not necessarily favour a representationalist account of experience).

I conclude that Travis’s arguments establish substantive constraints upon the nature and role of perceptual content. Moreover, I argue that the debate centres less upon the existence of such content than its explanatory role, particularly in relation to phenomenal character and the contents of other mental states: belief, intention, thought, knowledge, and so on. This in turn highlights the need for representationalists to better clarify the role of the contents their theories posit, and why such theories constitute a better explanation of the relevant phenomena than the corresponding non-representational view.

Many philosophers and scientists take perceptual experience, whatever else it involves, to be representational. That is, to perceive an object via one or more of our senses is to represent it as being some particular way: that tomato is red, round, sweet, and so on. In ‘The Silence of the Senses’, Charles Travis (2004; 2013) argues that this view involves a kind of category mistake, and consequently that perceptual experiences are non-representational. However, the details of this argument are somewhat obscure, and have been widely misinterpreted or misunderstood by Travis’s representationalist opponents. In this paper, I offer an interpretation of one of Travis’s central arguments—the argument from looks—which appears to present a genuine and important challenge to representational views of perception. I argue that this challenge may be (pace Travis) surmountable, but does place a substantial burden upon the representationalist to explain how the alleged contents of perceptual experience come to feature in our conscious mental lives. Alternatively, if they do not so feature, then perceptual representation fails to play its alleged explanatory role, and so is superfluous.

This article provides a brief overview and introduction to the debate between McDowell and Travis on the nature and reason-providing potential of experience, as it unfolded up until their exchange in the OUP anthology 'In the Light of Experience' from 2018

I argue, in this thesis, that proper name reference is a wholly pragmatic phenomenon. The reference of a proper name is neither constitutive of, nor determined by, the semantic content of that name, but is determined, on an occasion of use, by pragmatic factors. The majority of views in the
literature on proper name reference claim that reference is in some way determined by the semantics of the name, either because their reference simply constitutes their semantics (which generally requires a very fine-grained individuation of names), or because names have an indexical-like semantics that returns a referent given certain specific contextual parameters. I discuss and criticize these views in detail, arguing, essentially, in both cases, that there can be no determinate criteria for
reference determination—a claim required by both types of semantic view. I also consider a less common view on proper name reference: that it is determined wholly by speakers’ intentions. I argue that the most plausible version of this view—a strong neo-Gricean position whereby all utterance content is determined by the communicative intentions of the speaker—is implausible in light of psychological data. In the positive part of my thesis, I develop a pragmatic view of proper name reference that is influenced primarily by the work of Charles Travis. I argue that the reference of proper names can only be satisfactorily accounted for by claiming that reference occurs not at the level of word meaning, but at the pragmatic level, on an occasion of utterance. I claim that the contextual mechanisms that determine the reference of a name on an occasion are the same kinds of thing that determine the truth-values of utterances according to Travis. Thus, names are, effectively, occasion sensitive in the way that Travis claims predicates and sentences (amongst other expressions) are. Finally, I discuss how further research might address how my pragmatic view of reference affects traditional issues in the literature on names, and the consequences of the view for the semantics of names.

Par une sélection de six textes emblématiques traduits en français, l'enjeu du présent volume est d'introduire le lecteur francophone à l'histoire de la controverse sur le contenu conceptuel de la perception et d'interroger la pertinence des débats qu'elle a suscités.
Avec des textes de Tim Crane, Fred Dretske, Gareth Evans, John McDowell, Christopher Peacocke et Charles Travis

I analyze the long road from Sellars to McDowell and Travis and what is at stake for allowing experiences to have representational content. I do this especially putting the disagreement between John McDowell and Charles Travis under a microscope.

Faire dire dans l’écoute c’est donner sens à l’écouté. On peut trouver des métaphores pour dire les choses, et en quelque sorte on ne peut que les trouver: toute compréhension de quelque chose de propre, de relatif à notre vie, passe par l’emprunt (l’appropriation, la transposition à des circonstances à soi, infiniment particulières) de certains fragments de langage déjà constitués que l’on rencontre. En écoutant et recevant les morceaux de langage qui peuplent le monde et traversent aléatoirement notre quotidien, on ne les filtre, on ne les prend, on ne voit leur sens que par rapport à notre histoire individuelle. On ne peut pas éviter d’inventer, de reconnaître, parmi les symboles que l’on croise, des symboles d’elle —ou adéquats pour la dire, pour dire ce qu’on est, ou ce qu’on a été. Et si faire dire dans l’écoute c’est de donner sens à l’écouté, il pointe vers la liberté de donner sens à ce qu’on écoute, une liberté qui se situe aux limites de l’inévitable (on ne peut écouter sans donner sens.) Immédiatement, on “met en relation”: lorsqu’une occurrence de langage se présente à nous, on la met en relation avec quelque chose qu’elle puisse recouvrir: on trouve ce quelque chose, et on ne le trouve qu’en puisant dans son expérience propre. Elle nous permet de trouver un sens aux agencements langagiers nouveaux, mais sans eux, sans leur apport continuel, on ne pourrait pas comprendre, ni même construire notre expérience non plus: cela forme un circuit, une boucle qui ne cesse jamais d’être alimentée. Des paroles nouvelles soudain perçues peuvent être immédiatement/objectivement significatives d’une situation à soi: le plus subjectif est alors le plus objectif. Ce qui se présente objectivement au sujet comme une description d’un vécu profondément sien montre son objectivité par l’immédiateté avec laquelle il se présente comme tel; et le fait que cela arrive montre à son tour comment l’expérience —et la compréhension, toujours inachevée, de l’expérience propre, par une intériorité toujours active— se situent au coeur de la production de sens.

Odd and memorable examples are a distinctive feature of Charles Travis's work: cases involving squash balls, soot-covered kettles, walls that emit poison gas, faces turning puce, ties made of freshly cooked linguine, and people grunting when punched in the solar plexus all figure in his arguments. One of Travis's examples, involving a pair of situations in which the leaves of a Japanese maple tree are painted green, has even spawned its own literature consisting of attempts to explain the context sensitivity of color adjectives (green", e.g.). For Travis, these examples play a central role in his arguments for occasion-sensitivity, which he takes to be a pervasive feature of how we understand natural language. But how, exactly, do these examples work? My aims in this paper are to  put Travis's examples under the microscope, using recent experimental studies of Travis-style cases to raise worries about aspects of the way Travis's cases are informally presented, but then show how his examples can be redesigned to respond to these doubts.

Charles Travis has developed a distinction between “the historical” (the sensible world) and “the conceptual” (thoughts and concepts), which underlies his influential contributions to the philosophy of language and perception. The distinction is based on the observation that there are, for any thought, indefinitely many different circumstances that would render it true. The generality of thoughts and concepts contrasts with the particularity of the sensible world. I challenge the assumption that what exhibits such generality cannot belong to the sensible world. I also defend a version of the claim that perception involves the exercise of conceptual capacities.

Accessible également via le lien suivant / Also available via the following link: https://www.revue-klesis.org/pdf/klesis-47-Putnam-01-Henri-Wagner-introduction-sur-l-unite-de-la-pensee-de-Hilary-Putnam.pdf
Introduction au numéro de la revue Klēsis (47, 2020) consacré à Hilary Putnam
La troisième section de l'introduction (p. 41-50) présente de manière détaillée les contributions du numéro et fournit quelques éléments de bibliographie introductive à la pensée de H. Putnam.
Introduction to the special issue of the French philosophical journal Klēsis (47, 2020) devoted to Hilary Putnam. The third and last section of the introduction (p. 41-50) presents in detail the several contributions to the issue and provides some bibliographical indications

Review for NDPR of John Collins and Tamara Dobler (eds.), The Philosophy of Charles Travis:  Language Thought, and Perception, Oxford, 2108.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-philosophy-of-charles-travis-language-thought-and-perception/#fn292

This paper argues that, though contemporary 'contextualists' about linguistic sense have tended to be representationalist in how they think about language, they ought not to be: thought through, contextualism shows that, and how, our words may do their work for us, and may be beholden to the world in which we find ourselves, and speak, even apart from representing that world truly or falsely. Moreover, only by breaking away from the representationalist conception of language would we be able to truly appreciate the depth of insight, and reap the therapeutic benefits of, ordinary language philosophy as exemplified, however differently, in the works of Austin and Wittgenstein.

Critical review of Jocelyn Benoist, L'adresse du réel (2017). The text is part of a special issue of the journal PHILOSOPHIQUES (http://laspq.org/philosophiques), with contributions from Charles TRAVIS, Markus GABRIEL, Mathieu MARION, Aude BANDINI, and Jocelyn BENOIST. The text is in French.             

Étude critique sur L'adresse du réel (2017) de Jocelyn Benoist. Le texte est extrait d'une disputatio publiée dans la revue PHILOSOPHIQUES (http://laspq.org/philosophiques). Avec des textes de Charles TRAVIS, Markus GABRIEL, Mathieu MARION, Aude BANDINI et Jocelyn BENOIST.

Nous nous proposons de montrer que l’usage que McDowell fait de la philosophie de Wittgenstein - s’il prend sa source dans des problèmes appartenant à des domaines distincts et se déploie dans des horizons multiples - consiste à développer une même intuition : la défense du truisme de Wittgenstein selon lequel « lorsque nous disons et que nous signifions que certaines choses sont le cas, nous ne manquons pas le fait, la signification est bien, c’est ainsi ». Nous tentons de mettre en évidence la portée de ce truisme en revenant dans un premier temps à sa source, la discussion critique de la théorie de la signification de Dummett. Ce cadre fait une place particulière au débat portant sur la question du suivi de la règle (1) ; nous tentons de montrer dans un second temps (2) les enjeux philosophiques de l’exégèse de cette séquence des Recherches. Le truisme commande lui-même une lecture particulière de l’argument du langage privé compris comme l’expression paradigmatique du mythe du donné (3). Nous concluons enfin, en nous appuyant sur les critiques de Charles Travis que McDowell maintient une condition qui porte sur la nature de la pensée elle-même, celle de l’unicité de sa structuration qui nous semble rendre problématique à la fois la détermination purement thérapeutique de l’activité philosophique dont McDowell se réclame et l’intelligibilité de la rupture radicale que les Recherches philosophiques consomment avec le Tractatus.

With Prof Gabriele Mras, co-editor (Routledge, 2016). Richard Wollheim famously tried to found a theory of pictorial representation on the notion of seeing-in, or earlier, seeing-as (which we call both indifferently aspect-perception). The notion or cluster of notions captured Wittgenstein's attention throughout his philosophical life, especially towards its end. What exactly is the role and status of aspect-perception? Is it unusual, or is it in some sense present in all seeing? Can Wittgenstein's ruminations illuminate Wollheim's approach, or do they show what is wrong with it? If the latter, can the substance of Wollheim's ideas be saved? In the book, these questions and related ones are addressed in papers by: Avner Baz, Charles Travis, Richard Heinrich, Hanjo Glock,Garry Hagberg, Joachim Schulte, Fabian Dorsch, David Hills, Volker Munz, Michael Levine, Gabriele Mras. and myself. Table of Contents: Introduction and Acknowledgements Part I Wittgenstein and Seeing-...

Entre 1892 et 1895, Frege écrit : « Les concepts ne peuvent jamais
être dans les mêmes relations que les objets. Penser qu’ils le
peuvent ne serait pas faux mais impossible ». Certains y voient
quelque chose de romantique ou de mystérieux : la structure
du sens serait manifeste, mais resterait indicible. Or, Frege
s’est trompé. Au fond, il confond le catégoriel et le relationnel.
Cet article cherche d’abord à comprendre les raisons de cette
distinction, puis à expliquer la confusion qui en résulte.

The central issue in this PhD thesis is whether the world, as we fnd it in perceptual experience, shares structure with thought. According to the view that I label “monism”, it does; according to “dualism”, it does not. It is my aim to defend monism: in a basic case, we think of something that it is some way; we can also see that something is some way, so that it is then manifest before our eyes that something is some way. Thought, experience, and the world share predicative structure. In chapter I, I argue for monism by arguing against dualism, which in chapter III is discussed more specifcally as the view of Charles Travis.
But an at least equally important aim is to overcome a certain philosophical framework within which monism cannot come into its own. The core assumption of this framework is that a thinkable content is, in itself, without assertoric force, and to hold it to be true one must add such force. In chapter II, I argue that a thinkable content rather has the character of a claim, even if this character can be muted in certain special contexts, or when the content occurs in a more complex whole. Only against this background can monism be understood as the truism that it is. When it comes to this framework issue, “Fregean monism” functions as a foil, which in chapter IV is discussed more specifcally as the view of John McDowell in Mind and World.

Jocelyn Benoist, philosophe francais de premier plan, evoque l’importance de la psychanalyse, et en particulier le traitement, dans le Moise de Freud, du theme de la tradition et de sa transmission, qu’il oppose a celui de la phenomenologie. Il indique que la preservation du caractere symbolique de cette tradition exige de s’affranchir d’une conception phylogenetique de sa transmission, qui s’appuie plutot sur le langage, qui recode ce qu’il transmet. Nous soulignons en reponse, mobilisant le concept d’identification, la variete structurale des symbolisations de l’intergenerationnel, et le role qu’y joue le langage. J. Benoist esquisse pour finir une grammaire philosophique de l’identite : si, dans l’identification, le sujet determine symboliquement son identite, en revanche son rapport a la realite (notamment au corps) doit se dire en termes d’avoir.

On the most common interpretation of occasion-sensitivity what varies cross-contextually is the truth-conditional content of representations. Jerry Fodor argues that when extended to mental representation this view has some problematic conse- quences. In this paper I outline an approach to occasion-sensitivity which circumvents Fodor’s objections but still maintains that the aspect of thought that guides deliberation and action is occasion-sensitive. On the proposed view, what varies cross-contextually are not truth conditions but rather the conditions for accepting a (true) representation as true relative to a practical goal that is pursued on an occasion. I show that although the proposal entails an error theory this theory is not problematic since it is meant to compensate for the over-generating nature of semantic competence, namely, the fact that not all of the representation’s truth-makers are conducive to a given contextually salient goal.

This paper argues that, though contemporary 'contextualists' about linguistic sense have tended to be representationalist in how they think about language, they ought not to be: thought through, contextualism shows that, and how, our words may do their work for us, and may be beholden to the world in which we find ourselves, and speak, even apart from representing that world truly or falsely. Moreover, only by breaking away from the representationalist conception of language would we be able to truly appreciate the depth of insight, and reap the therapeutic benefits of, ordinary language philosophy as exemplified, however differently, in the works of Austin and Wittgenstein.

Discussion du dernier livre de Jocelyn Benoist avec des textes originaux de Charles Travis, Markus Gabriel, Aude Bandini, Mathieu Marion, Jocelyn Benoist et moi-même.

Organisation et coordination: Maxime Doyon

https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/philoso/2018-v45-n1-philoso03795/

"Journée organisée par Raphael Ehrsam et Raoul Moati à l'initiative de Sandra Laugier.
Le dossier contient des textes de Charles Travis, Sofia Miguens, Raoul Moati, Pierre-Jean Renaudie, Fausto Fraisopi, Raphael Ehrsam, Jeanne-Marie Roux, Elise Olmedo et Florian Forestier"