Kant and McDowell on Skepticism and Disjunctivism

This paper is to propose a new form of Kant’s anti-skepticism argument in light of John McDowell’s works on disjunctivism. I first discuss recent debates between McDowell and Crispin Wright on disjunctivism. I argue that Wright wrongly downplays McDowell’s disjunctivism, whose metaphysical claim that our perceptual faculties directly engage in the world has an epistemological implication that should be able to dismiss the skeptic’s imagery as fictitious. However, McDowell does not clearly offer such an argument. I will show that we can derive from Kant’s Fourth Paralogism of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason—which many scholars regard as Kant’s implicit commitment to phenomenalism—the requisite argument that makes us able to dismiss skepticism.