In characterising an episode or a state as that of knowing, we
are not giving a ... description of that episode or state; we are
placing it in the.. .space of reasons, of justifying and being able
to justify what one says.
(Sellars cited in McDowell 1996, p.5)
The philosophy involved here is not easily accessible but this does not mean that it is
not important. Our common sense understanding of saying that we know something is
that we give a description of an event as the event impinges on our senses. However
taking a step back from this apparently self-evident proposition it can be seen that the
organization of words contained in our description relies upon a whole set of reasons
informing each term in the description (i.e. each concept depends upon many other
concepts for its meaning). This is counterintuitive, as we believe an utterance -
particularly one as simple as the exclamation „Fire!’ - to be nothing more than a
straightforward response to a stimulus. However, when we look at the issue from the
standpoint of Vygotsky or Brandom, this is not the case. If it were indeed the case,
then the „description’ we would give could be given by a parrot or a machine: i.e. it
would not be a case of knowing but merely that of a response to a stimulus. The
distinctive feature of human contact with the world is that perception has a conceptual
dimension. Without this, we could understand our responsiveness to an environment
as indistinguishable from a fire alarm or parrot which responds differentially to
environmental forces (Brandom 2000).
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