Representation, Experience, and Metaphysics - Towards an Integrated Anti-Representationalist Philosophy

This book provides an original perspective on the debate about anti-representationalism and the nature of philosophy. This debate has come to prominence in recent years through the work of people like Richard Rorty, Paul Horwich, Huw Price and Amie Thomasson. It is the first book to explicitly consider this well-known pragmatist kind of anti-representationalism in relation to anti-representationalist views in other areas of philosophy, in particular the philosophy of perception and cognitive science. Taking as its point of departure the neo-pragmatism of Rorty and Price, it critiques the way these (and other) thinkers develop, on this basis, a positive view of philosophy and its remit. By examining the debate about representationalism versus anti-representationalism in perception and cognitive science it provides a different way of understanding the significance of neo-pragmatism, as well as providing an independently interesting perspective on these other debates. A central idea in this perspective involves distinguishing between a world-for-us and a world-in-itself, though in a different way from Kant and many other philosophers. The book extends these reflections to examine questions about realism and the limits of metaphysics for anti-representationalist pragmatism, arguing the view can uphold a common sense kind of realism, as well as the value of distinctively philosophical enquiry in metaphysics.

Jonathan Knowles is professor of philosophy at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. He took his PhD at Birkbeck College, London (1995) with a thesis on the nature and philosophical significance of cognitive science, with special focus on the interrelationships between the views on language of Chomsky, Davidson and Dummett. On moving to Norway his interests turned to embrace philosophy of science and epistemology, yielding amongst other things the book Norms, Naturalism and Epistemology: The Case for Science without Norms (Palgrave 2004) in which it is argued that naturalist approaches to epistemology are incapable of providing normative guidance to science that is both necessary to achieve optimal belief-formation and correct. Since then his work has moved in a more explicitly metaphilosophical direction with papers on naturalism, representationalism, realism, and the possibility of metaphysics, work which he has also related to the question of how we should understand and explain mind and experience.