Abstract
The argument from contradictory contents presented here is based directly on observations about the content of experience. It claims that experience content, if conceptual, allows for contradictions within one and the same content. There are at least two examples of this, the waterfall illusion and the visual experiences of some grapheme-color synesthetes. However, due to a Fregean principle of content individuation, no conceptual contents are contradictory. So experience content is nonconceptual. I motivate a particular version of the argument and defend it against two central objections: First, the objection that there is more than one content involved in apparently self-contradictory experiences and second, the claim that conceptual contents are sometimes contradictory, as is true of some desires. In reaction to the second objection, I argue that we need an explanation of why subjects are not irrational if they do not revise their self-contradictory perceptual experiences, and that the conceptualist has no good account of this. For on his view, just as in thought, conceptual abilities are involved in experience and we are dealing with the same Fregean propositional contents. By contrast, nonconceptualism provides such an explanation, for no conceptual abilities are involved in experience itself, and scenario content is not the kind of content that can be revised under rational pressure.
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Notes
- 1.
I try to speak of mental contents as contradictory (or not); I will mostly speak of logical relations obtaining between mental contents as well as mental contents being revised by the subject. This way of speaking makes sense especially in contexts like the current chapter, where I try to argue from such features of content to its structure. But recall that I claim that there is a parallelism between the inferential relations obtaining between exercises of conceptual abilities and between conceptual contents; correspondingly, sometimes I will also speak of the mental states that are contradictory, of logical relations obtaining between them, or of their being revised by the subject.
- 2.
At this point, it is relevant that I take conceptualism to be combined with propositionalism. Recall that this is the position I fixed on at the end of Chap. 3 Correspondingly, the argument as I put it here does not address McDowell’s recent view that perceptual content has an intuitional structure. It does not establish that perceptual experience has scenario content. I will address these issues below in my defense of premise (3).
- 3.
The idea, which will be made clearer below, is that on the assumption of conceptualism such perceptual contents will come out as self-contradictory. I will argue that the Modest Nonconceptualist’s scenario contents do not allow for self-contradictory contents in the full sense of the word.
- 4.
Note that, on one understanding, this principle applies only to rational subjects. I leave out this qualification as it does not affect the argument: We just have to add to premise (2) that some perceptual contents of rational subjects are self-contradictory, to match the claim in premise (3) that no perceptual contents of rational subjects are self-contradictory.
- 5.
There are many examples of this illusion available on the internet. One example may be found at Neave (n.d.).
- 6.
For more details, see Fish (2010, 132).
- 7.
Here is a description of synesthete A.D.’s experience: A.D. “told us that the digit she saw was both black and the induced color at the same time. When probed about the locations of the two colors, A.D. reported that she didn’t know how to explain it, but that both appeared on the shape in the same location at the same time. … When one color (we are including black) is generated by wavelengths from the stimulus and another by its shape, the two colors appear to coexist.” (Robertson and Sagiv 2005, 100)
- 8.
Raphael van Riel provided me with some counterexamples to this principle. Take beliefs about literature, for instance. An author might tell a story that involves a contradiction, and the reader may rationally believe that, in a certain book, an object is F and not-F, with F being just one concept. Moreover, a thinker might have a very long and complicated belief which involves a direct contradiction that he is not aware of, but this would not change the fact that F is really just one concept.
As to the first counterexample, I think that the reader can believe that, in the book, an object is F and not-F only in a limited sense. She can have a belief about the words and sentences printed in the book along the following lines: the book says that o is F and not-F—on one page, there is a sentence saying o is F, on another page, there is a sentence that says that o is not-F. But she is not able to understand what the book’s claim that o is F and not-F is about (in the sense of grasp the corresponding state of the world). And what she cannot understand, she is unable rationally to believe or judge. Similar concerns will surface below.
As to the second counterexample, it is irrelevant to the claim made by (CI). This is an example in which the subject lacks complete grasp of the whole proposition of which she grasps the constituting concepts. The example is relevantly similar to what I will argue to be irrelevant below, situations in which a thinker has two distinct beliefs that contradict each other.
- 9.
That the example of A.D. is pertinent comes out even more clearly if we compare her situation with the visual experiences of other synesthetes for whom it is plausible that they do not have experiences of graphemes as black and not black. Apparently, not all synesthetes experience the synesthetic color to be located in the numeral. Some report “that the color is anywhere from slightly off the shape to hovering elsewhere or as an aura.” (Robertson and Sagiv 2005, 100)
- 10.
Note that this makes (CI) and (PCI) even stronger than I have claimed so far: Even an irrational agent cannot really believe a contradiction, given that she fully grasps her belief’s content.
Interestingly, there are ties between my claims here and the Generality Constraint. To meet the Generality Constraint is to understand a concept and, on the basis of this understanding, to be able to entertain all kinds of thoughts involving the concept in question. Plausibly, this involves an understanding of what (apparent) thoughts involving the concept are unintelligible, for instance by being self-contradictory, such that the subject cannot be required to be able to entertain contents of this kind. Rather, possessing the concept requires her to refrain from trying to entertain such apparent thoughts. So grasping a concept, as defined by the Generality Constraint, involves an inability to entertain self-contradictory thoughts involving same-said concept.
- 11.
Cf. Mellor (1988, 148/149) for a different formulation of this point. Heck (2000, 508) calls this the “assertoric force” or the “presentational aspect” of both perceptual experience and belief and uses it in a defense against McDowell’s claim that the nonconceptualist cannot explain how perceptual experience can justify empirical belief. I will get to this topic in Chap. 7
- 12.
- 13.
See Sect. 2.1.2.4
- 14.
See Sect. 3.2
- 15.
In his newer writings, McDowell partially phrases the issue in a Kantian jargon, which I do not find very illuminating either. For instance, he says that conceptual abilities are “involuntarily drawn into operation under ostensible necessitation from an ostensibly seen object” (McDowell 2009d, 31) and that “[i]n intuiting, capacities that belong to the higher cognitive faculty are in play. The unity of intuitional content reflects an operation of the same unifying function that is operative in the unity of judgments.” (McDowell 2009a, 264) His idea still seems to be that it is one and the same conceptual abilities that are drawn on in perceptual experience and belief. In belief, they are exercised as part of a discursive activity such as making judgments; this exercise is paralleled by a belief content with a propositional structure. In perceptual experience, on the other hand, their activation is forced on the perceiver in reaction to what she is perceptually confronted with. This activation is paralleled by a perceptual content with an intuitional structure. (I have not found any useful explications of what characterizes this structure.) Crucially, this content is not yet articulated, but it could be—the very elements of an intuitional content can be elements of a propositional content, in the event that they are carved out and taken up by a belief.
- 16.
I make a suggestion of how to resolve this tension in a way that profits the nonconceptualist below in Sect. 6.2.4
- 17.
But what about attitudes with conceptual contents that are not under my active control? Think of a student’s fear of failing his exam, for instance. This fear seems to have a conceptual content, but the student does not have control over whether he has this fear or not. Let me make three points in reply. For one, the kind of control relevant to belief is not that the subject can believe whatever she wants to, but that her beliefs can be revised if this is rational. The same is true of some of our fears. If we realize that they are not warranted, we lose them. But we do not have this power over perceptual experience.
For another, our talk of the attitude of fear is ambiguous between being an emotion that is characterized by what it is like to undergo it, and that sometimes may not even have a clear articulable intentional object, and a propositional attitude. With respect to the former, I will say that it has a kind of nonconceptual content, so it fits my account that it is not revisable. As to the latter, it seems to be the kind of fear that can be revised if that is the rational thing to do.
Finally, my discussion in the preceding paragraphs has been restricted to attitudes whose function it is accurately to represent the world. Attitudes such as desire or fear were left to one side, granting that it may be less problematic to ascribe irrational desires or fears to a subject than it is to ascribe irrational beliefs, judgments, or perceptual experiences.
- 18.
This is true at least to the extent that it is non-propositional and nonconceptual. I allow that some conceptual elements may enter a perceptual content. But I have argued above that it is phenomenally inadequate to ascribe more than one distinct content to a perceptual experience. So I do not think that an experience can have a propositional content in addition to its scenario content.
- 19.
If we read ‘concept’ broadly, as a re-combinable building-block of structured, truth-evaluable propositions, this allows for self-contradictory Russellian propositions. For possible-worlds propositions, we cannot ‘formulate’ a contradiction—a contradictory mental state will have the empty set of possible worlds associated as its content.
- 20.
So, even if someone were to argue that the relevant elements of the contents of the waterfall illusion or the synesthete’s experience are Fregean elements, a possibility not in principle excluded by Modest Nonconceptualism, the fact that there is no propositional structure still prevents self-contradictions in the full sense. Let me add that I find the claim highly implausible that the relevant elements (moving/stationary; black/blue) are Fregean senses and thus correspond to exercised concepts. For the subject is not in a position to revise her experience of the waterfall illusion or her synesthetic experience, which I would expect if conceptual abilities were involved.
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Schmidt, E. (2015). The Argument from Contradictory Contents. In: Modest Nonconceptualism. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18902-4_5
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