Abstract

John McDowell and Wilfrid Sellars respectively intend to develop a conception of the relationship between mind and world that must subvert a fundamental dilemma between the Myth of the Given and Coherentism: both are committed to the “transcendental task” of accounting for the way in which conceptual activity is directed towards a reality that is not a mere reflection of it. This article focuses on a divergence between their respective conceptions of this transcendental task. According to McDowell, this task involves accounting for the intentional properties of experience in terms of the actualization of semantic properties: a central thesis of Mind and World is that thought and reality meet in the realm of sense if we are to avoid the Myth of the Given. On the other hand, Sellars argues that in order to give an adequate account of the transcendental task, we need to leave the realm of sense. The argument defended in this article is that the central thesis of Mind and World threatens to make McDowell fall back into a (sophisticated) form of coherentism: the actualization of semantic properties has, according to Sellars, only limited explanatory scope to account for the intentionality of experience.