Nonconceptual Self-Consciousness and Agency: Perspective and Access

Abstract

Distinguish conceptual and nonconceptual content for conscious states. A subject/agent can only have conscious states with conceptual content if she possesses the relevant concepts and associated structured reasoning abilities. Without giving an account of what it is to have concepts, we can register the widely held view that if someone has states with conceptual content then she has certain general abilities. If the information that a given object has a certain property is conceptualized, it is not context-bound. It has a structure that enables the person in principle to generalize systematically, to decompose and recombine, to make other applications of the same concepts. She can entertain and act not just on this information in this context, or closely related contexts, but also in principle on the information that the same object has a different property or the information that a different object has the same property. And she can quantify and make inferences that depend on such decompositional structure and context-freedom. That is, her reasoning abilities display the generality of concepts