The Problem of Causality

Abstract

Abstract In the previous chapter, I have presented and defended a use for transcendental arguments that allies them to a phenomenological response to normativist justificatory scepticism, as attempting to show that the sceptic’s position is based on an impossibly limited conception of our perceptual content. Transcendental arguments of this sort are therefore experience-directed, in so far as they set out to demonstrate that this rich perceptual content is a necessary condition for the kind of mental life the sceptic takes as his starting-point: in this way, it is shown that we are entitled to believe much more about the world than the sceptic is prepared to allow, once the extent to which we appear to have experience of that world is established. In this chapter I wish to consider a somewhat different approach, which takes a belief-directed rather than experience-directed form, using transcendental arguments to show that the picture we have of the world rests on particular beliefs that we take for granted in constructing that picture, and that (the transcendental claim is) this picture would be impossible for us to construct without them. To this extent, the approach to be considered shares Strawson’s recent view that transcendental arguments can be used as a way of ‘investigating the connections between the major structural elements of our conceptual scheme’. in order to show that ‘one type of exercise of conceptual capacity is a necessary condition of another’.