<scp>McDowell</scp> and Sellars on Objective Purport

Abstract John McDowell has criticized Wilfrid Sellars on several occasions and over a number of years for his ‘non‐relational’ account of intentionality. This account is, according to McDowell, at least partly responsible for a ‘blind spot’ in Sellars's thinking: Sellars, allegedly, fails to see how objects or states of affairs in the external world can be essentially related to our perceptions and thereby become ‘immediately present’ to perceiving subjects. Furthermore, this blind spot, makes it, supposedly, impossible for Sellars to make sense of the ‘objective purport’ of empirical thought. i.e. its directedness at a genuinely independent reality. I argue against McDowell's criticism in essentially two steps. First, I try to show that his criticisms of Sellars are off‐target and that there is a clear sense in which for Sellars objects are immediately present to perceiving subjects. Second, in what I take to be a novel argument against the disjunctive theory of perception, I show that McDowell's own essentially relational, disjunctive theory of perception fails to make intelligible the very thing it is supposed to explain, i.e. the ‘objective purport’ of empirical thought.