Abstract. Towards a Theory of Cognitive Responsibility: Action, Perception and Normativity from Plato to Searle.

2011

The talk articulates the normative commitments allowing us to consider perceptual experience as a form of knowledge - that is, as a form of the human activity situated in the normative space of reason of which we can be held responsible. More specifically, John Searle's characterization of the logical structure of perceptual experiences as causally selfreferential intentional states can be developed into an account of the causal and normative-intentional aspects of experience, the genealogy of which can be traced back to Plato's Theaetetus and Meno. In these dialogues, in fact, a picture of experience as "knowledge" seems to be based on a specific "reasoning about the cause" as the specific…