Online research in philosophy

Dienes and Perner offer us a theory of explicit and implicit knowledge that promises to systematise a large and diverse body of research in cognitive psychology. Their advertised strategy is to unpack this distinction in terms of explicit and implicit representation. But when one digs deeper one finds the HOT theory of consciousness doing much of the work. This reduces both the plausibility and usefulness of their account. We think their strategy is broadly correct, but that consensus on the explicit/implicit knowledge distinction is still a fair way off.

In this article we question the utility of the distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual content in cognitive science, and in particular, in the empirical study of visual perception. First, we individuate some difficulties in characterizing the notion of “concept” itself both in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Then we stress the heterogeneous nature of the notion of nonconceptual content and outline the complex and ambiguous relations that exist between the conceptual/nonconceptual duality and other pairs of notions, such as top–down/bottom-up and modular/nonmodular. Finally we look in greater detail at the proposal developed by Jacob and Jeannerod (Ways of seeing. The scopes and limits of visual cognition. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003 ), who apply the notion of nonconceptual content to empirical research on visual perception. After reconstructing their point of view on concepts, we try to reject their major arguments in support of the conceptual/nonconceptual distinction, i.e. the compositionality of thought and the fineness of grain of percepts.

Implicit knowledge is perhaps better understood as latent knowledge so that it is readily apparent that it contrasts with explicit knowledge in terms of the form of the knowledge representation, rather than by definition in terms of consciousness or awareness. We argue that as a practical matter any definition of the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge further involves the notion of control.

The question to be discussed is whether the distinction between the conceptual and the nonconceptual is best understood as pertaining primarily to intentional contents or to intentional states or attitudes. Some authors have suggested that it must be understood in the second way, in order to make the claim that experiences are nonconceptual compatible with the idea that one can also believe what one experiences. I argue that there is no need to do so, and that a conceptual content can be understood as being simply one which is composed of concepts, without compromising this intuitive view of the relation between beliefs and experiences.

In this response, we start from first principles, building up our theory to show more precisely what assumptions we do and do not make about the representational nature of implicit and explicit knowledge (in contrast to the target article, where we started our exposition with a description of a fully fledged representational theory of knowledge (RTK). Along the way, we indicate how our analysis does not rely on linguistic representations but it implies that implicit knowledge is causally efficacious; we discuss the relationship between property structure implicitness and conceptual and nonconceptual content; then we consider the factual, fictional, and functional uses of representations and how we go from there to consciousness. Having shown how the basic theory deals with foundational criticisms, we indicate how the theory can elucidate issues that commentators raised in the particular application areas of explicitation, voluntary control, visual perception, memory, development (with discussion on infancy, theory of mind [TOM] and executive control, gestures), and finally models of learning.

Dienes & Perner's target article contains numerous but unsystematic references to the implicit or explicit knowledge of the temporal context of a known state of affairs such as may constitute the content of a propositional attitude. In this commentary, the forms of cognition that, according to D&P, require only implicit knowledge of time are contrasted with those for which explicit temporal knowledge is needed. It is suggested that the explicit representation of time may have been important in human evolution and that certain developmental disorders including autism may be (partly) caused by defective ability to represent time.

I suppose that substantive philosophical theses are much like second marriages. The philo- sophical thesis I wish to discuss in this paper is the thesis that experiences have nonconceptual content. I shall not attempt to argue that _all_ experiences have nonconceptual content nor that the only contents experiences have are nonconceptual. Instead, I want to ? esh out the thesis of nonconceptual content for experience in more detail than has been offered hithertofore and to provide a variety of motivations for the view.

In the past twenty years, issues about the relationship between perception and thought have largely been framed in terms of the question of whether the contents of perception are nonconceptual. I argue that this debate has rested on an ambiguity in `nonconceptual content' and some false presuppositions about what is required for concept possession. Once these are cleared away, I argue that none of the arguments which have been advanced about nonconceptual content do much to threaten the natural view that perception and thought are relations to the same kind of content.

Philosophers of mind have recently sought to establish a theoret- ical use for nonconceptual content. Although there is disagreement about what nonconceptual content is supposed to be, this much is clear. A state with nonconceptual content is mental. Hence, while one may deny that refrigerators and messy rooms have conceptual capacities, their states, as physical and not mental, do not have nonconceptual content. A state with nonconceptual content is also intentional, which is to say that it represents a feature of the world for a subject. It may be tempting to think of qualitative states as having nonconceptual content since they can be experienced by indi- viduals independently of their possession of the requisite concepts, e.g. someone could experience pains, itches or tingles without possessing the concept pain, itch or tingle. But on such a view, one would have to assume that qualitative states are representational since mental states cannot be candidates for nonconceptuality unless they have intentional properties.2.

Self-consciousness can be defined as the ability to think 'I'-thoughts. Recently, it has been suggested that self-consciousness in this sense can (and should) be accounted for in terms of nonconceptual forms of self-representation. Here, I will argue that while theories of nonconceptual self-consciousness do provide us with important insights regarding the essential genetic and epistemic features of self-conscious thought, they can only deliver part of the full story that is required to understand the phenomenon of self-consciousness. I will provide two arguments to this effect, drawing on insights from the philosophy of language and on structural differences between conceptual and nonconceptual forms of representation. Both arguments rest on the intuition that while self-consciousness requires explicit self-representation, nonconceptual content can at best provide implicit self-related information. I will conclude that in order to explain the emergence of self-conscious thought out of more basic forms of representations one has to explain the transition between implicit self-related information and explicit self-representation.