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2
Belief and Experience
I regard it as an undeniable datum that perception is a basic
source of knowledge about the mind-independent, spatial
world. My overall project is to solve simultaneously for the
nature of the conscious experiences involved in perception, the
relation such experiences bear to perceptually based empirical
beliefs, and the relevant sense of 'basic', in such a way that these
solutions are both independently plausible in each case, and con-
join to illuminate and explicate this datum.The first claim which I aim to establish is this:
(R) Perceptual experiences provide reasons for empirical
beliefs. 1

This is the sense in which I contend that there are genuinely
epistemic requirements upon the very possibility of empirical
belief, and therefore the sense in which I accuse the dominant
historical-epistemological tradition within philosophy of being
seriously misguided. For that tradition takes a person's posses-
sion of beliefs about the mind-independent world, and especially
his understanding of the contents of these beliefs, entirely for
granted, as prior to, and independent of, any specifically episte-
mological relation which may or may not obtain between per-
ceiving subjects and the constituents of the world in which they
live. It then goes on to ask which further conditions such beliefs
must meet if they are to be reasonable for the subject, in the sense
in which this is crucial to their status as cases of knowledge. Yet
I argue that unless perceptual experiences provide reasons for
empirical beliefs in precisely this sense--in which the subject's

____________________
1 This claim is a crucial component of McDowell ( 1994b) position in this
area. Indeed, the argument which I offer in support of it is my own extended
development of his very suggestive comments on the matter (see especially
Lecture 1).

-18-

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Publication Information: Book Title: Perception and Reason. Contributors: Bill Brewer - author. Publisher: Clarendon Press. Place of Publication: Oxford. Publication Year: 1999. Page Number: 18.
    
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