Empirical concepts and the content of experience
European Journal of Philosophy 14 (3):349-372 (2006)
| Abstract | The view that the content of experience is conceptual is often felt to conflict with the empiricist intuition that experience precedes thought, rather than vice versa. This concern is explicitly articulated by Ayers as an objection both to McDowell and Davidson, and to the conceptualist view more generally. The paper aims to defuse the objection in its general form by presenting a version of conceptualism which is compatible with empiricism. It proposes an account of observational concepts on which possession of such a concept involves more than the ability for perceptual discrimination, but less than the capacity to employ the concept in inferences: it consists in the capacity to perceptually discriminate objects with the awareness that one is discriminating as one ought. This understanding of concept-possession allows us make sense of experiences' having conceptual content without supposing that the subject must grasp the relevant concepts prior to having those experiences | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,679 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesHemdat Lerman (2010). Non-Conceptual Experiential Content and Reason-Giving. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (1):1-23.
John MacFarlane (2008). McDowell's Kantianism. Theoria 70 (2-3):250-265.
Mohan Matthen (2005). Visual Concepts. Philosophical Topics 33 (1):207-233.
Uriah Kriegel (2004). Perceptual Experience, Conscious Content, and Nonconceptual Content. Essays in Philosophy 5 (1):1-14.
Philippe Chuard (2006). Demonstrative Concepts Without Reidentification. Philosophical Studies 130 (2):153-201.
Dennis Schulting (2010). Kant, Non-Conceptuele Inhoud En Synthese. Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 72 (4):679-715.
Anders Nes (2006). Content in Thought and Perception. Dissertation, Oxford University
Michael D. Barber (2008). Holism and Horizon: Husserl and McDowell on Non-Conceptual Content. Husserl Studies 24 (2):79-97.
James Genone (2006). Concepts and Imagery in Episodic Memory. Anthropology and Philosophy 7 (1/2):95-107.
Adina L. Roskies (2008). A New Argument for Nonconceptual Content. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (3):633–659.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads90 ( #7,748 of 549,087 )Recent downloads (6 months)5 ( #15,152 of 549,087 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
