Abstract
In this chapter, I discuss arguments for the claim that a subject can both have an experience with a certain content and not be in possession of all the concepts needed to specify this content. If she does not possess all the relevant concepts, then she cannot exercise them. So, she can undergo such an experience without being required to exercise all the concepts needed to specify its content. The argument from memory experience goes back to Martin (Philos Rev 101:745763, 1992). Since we can extract new information from memories of previous experiences when we acquire new concepts, the content of these previous experiences cannot have been fully conceptual. The argument from animal and infant perception presupposes that some subjects who lack concepts of any kind nonetheless have perceptual experiences with the same kind of content as human perception. So, the content of human perception must be nonconceptual just like the perceptual contents of these subjects. The third argument, the argument from concept acquisition (Roskies, Philos Phenomenol Res 76:633659, 2008; Noûs 44:112134, 2010), shows that we cannot explain how subjects acquire some of their first concepts, particularly perceptual-demonstrative concepts, unless we assume that experience content is nonconceptual. The question of whether a subject can have a conscious perceptual experience only if she is able to cognitively appreciate its content is a recurrent theme in the chapter; it is answered in the negative by Modest Nonconceptualism.
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Notes
- 1.
To compare with the argument from fineness of grain in Sect. 4.1, the way to avoid the same objection in that context was by appeal to phenomenology. Although I possess no recognitional capacities for two very similar shades of orange, I can distinguish them in my visual experience, for there is a difference between what it is like to see each of these shades.
- 2.
The step from (5) to (6) relies on (S2C)—if S does not possess a concept needed to specify a feature represented by her experience, then she cannot be required to exercise such a concept in order to undergo the experience. So by (S2C), the content of her experience is nonconceptual at least with respect to this feature. See Sects. 3.2 and 3.3
- 3.
Page reference to the online version of the paper. I have adapted Chuard’s example, which originally involves a mustache.
- 4.
This line of argument would fit well with Gennaro’s higher-order thought view: The relevant subpersonally represented features become conscious as soon as Mary is able to form a higher-order thought involving concepts that apply to these particular features. As a matter of fact, Gennaro (2012, 165–172) is more sympathetic to the second objection presented below.
- 5.
- 6.
I will present McDowell’s views in detail in Chaps. 7 and 8.
- 7.
This paraphrase of premise (1) exploits the fact that the premise is ambiguous as it stands. It can be read either as ‘S does not possess a certain one out of a range of concepts, one of which is needed to specify a particular feature of S’s perceptual content’ or as ‘S possesses none of the concepts that would be needed to specify the feature of S’s perceptual content.’ On the first reading, the subject’s perceptual content may well be conceptual, for the premise does not speak to the possibility that S possesses one of the other concepts out of the relevant range of concepts. On the second reading, premise (1) is falsified as soon as S possesses any one of the concepts that would be needed to specify the dodecahedron. This is what the objection tries to establish.
- 8.
- 9.
As is suggested by Martin (1992, 759).
- 10.
Notice the following similarity with the argument from fineness of grain above in Sect. 4.1: That the argument here does not establish the truth of nonconceptualism does not show that conceptualism is therefore correct. That the subject possesses all the relevant concepts does not guarantee that she has to exercise them in order to undergo the experience.
- 11.
For phenomenal concepts, see e.g. Nida-Rümelin (2010). Note that the conceptualist view might be incompatible with the claim that Mary has phenomenal concepts based on a—presumably nonconceptual—content of her experience. But the current point is only that the nonconceptualist’s concession that Mary has a distinct phenomenal concept of the dodecahedron counts against the truth of premise (1) of the argument.
- 12.
- 13.
I will discuss this at length in Chap. 8
- 14.
- 15.
That is, (5.) is incoherent if supplied with the claim that the subject cannot even acquire concept c.
- 16.
See Sect. 2.1.3
- 17.
In contrast to Tye, I will argue in Chap. 8 that the central behavior-guiding system is not in all cases a conceptual system or belief system. What is crucial for poise, in my view, is that a representation stands ready to impact the central control system that guides the subject’s behavior or that it is in a position to be unified with the output of other perceptual/experiential modules so as to constitute the subject’s perceptual, or more broadly, experiential perspective on the world. This allows for creatures who lack conceptual belief to have genuine content-bearing experience, as stated by the Autonomy Thesis introduced in Sect. 6.2.
- 18.
In light of the Modest Nonconceptualist account just sketched, the problem is that Mary exhibits no special behavior towards dodecahedra despite the fact that the relevant perceptual representations are supposedly poised to impact her central behavior-guiding system.
- 19.
Recall that Speaks’s argument needs no more than some way to pick out the dodecahedron that enables Mary later that she used to play with a dodecahedron. Even a phenomenology-based concept such as the die that looks like this would do the trick.
- 20.
Some of the material from this section has been published in Schmidt (2010).
- 21.
When speaking of animals, I thereby mean non-human animals. When I speak of adults and infants, I mean human adults and infants. The infants of interest in this chapter are infants at a very young age, before it is uncontroversial that they possess concepts. I will not add these qualifications every time in what follows.
- 22.
Also see my discussion of (NC-ism min ) in Sect. 3.3 Given the plausible claim that an infant or an animal could have all the same perceptual experiences, with at least partially the same content as an adult human, this argument shows that all perceptual experiences have minimal nonconceptual content. It thus supports (General NC-ism min ).
- 23.
(S2C) is presupposed together with the thought that subjects who do not possess conceptual abilities when undergoing an experience cannot be required to exercise them in order to undergo the experience.
- 24.
- 25.
For my full account, see Chap. 8
- 26.
McDowell would probably oppose this claim, seeing as he opposes the conflation of content as it is used in the cognitive sciences and a genuinely philosophical notion of content. I will discuss this issue in Chap. 8
- 27.
It might also mean that these elements are represented as part of a spatial, as opposed to a propositional subject-predicate structure
- 28.
- 29.
- 30.
Similarly, see Evans and Stanovich (2013, 236).
- 31.
I will discuss this topic at length in Chap. 8
- 32.
‘Response to an affordance’ here means ‘reaction to a possibility for action’, i.e., in this case, the cat’s and the human’s walking through the hole in the wall, which makes it possible for them to bypass an obstacle in their path.
- 33.
Related to the current point, one might worry that McDowell’s view entails that animals cannot feel pain since they cannot have experiences with genuine content. He tries to avoid this consequence by ascribing a kind of “proto-subjectivity” to animals, but once again I find his arguments obscure. See McDowell (1994a, 119–121)
- 34.
McDowell considers the question of the evolutionary explanation for the existence of humans as concept-possessors: “How has it come about that there are animals that possess the spontaneity of understanding?” (McDowell 1994a, 123) He takes this question to be about how there could be animals with conceptual abilities as well as about the worry how human culture could have developed. But he seems to think that this is not a very pressing question. He holds that human infants are originally just normal animals, who are only special because of their potential for concept acquisition; when they do acquire their first concepts, this is a part of their nature, or to be more precise, of what McDowell calls their “second nature.” (McDowell 1994a, 84)
- 35.
Whether evolution counts in the nonconceptualist’s favor depends on whether evolution necessarily happens gradually. There are evolutionary biologists who claim that evolution happens in leaps. If this is true, the conceptualist story may be equally compatible with an evolutionary account of our conceptual abilities as the nonconceptualist story. (Cf. Lennox 2015.)
- 36.
I have referred to these studies above in Sect. 6.2.
- 37.
For a similar response, cf. Brewer (1999, 177–179).
- 38.
A note on my use of ‘aware’: I think that the expression ‘awareness of one’s environment’ is per se neutral between nonconceptualism and conceptualism—the way ‘awareness of’ is normally used leaves it open whether there is only awareness when there are concepts. It is a substantial claim in need of argument that there is only conceptual awareness.
- 39.
- 40.
This might be a weak spot of the argument. Note that McDowell himself claims that “[P]erceptual sensitivity to the environment need not amount to awareness of the outer world”, which I take to mean that perceptual sensitivity without conceptual capacities does not entail the subject’s awareness of her environment. (McDowell 1994a, 119)
- 41.
The terminology is from Fodor (1981, 273).
- 42.
A view along these lines is defended by Gennaro (2012, 189–199). I find his claims about undemanding implicit concept acquisition more challenging and will therefore focus on them below. A helpful exposition of the core cognition view/core concept nativism and empirical evidence for it can be found in Samet and Zaitchik (2014).
- 43.
Fodor (1981) emphasizes this problem, which leads him to maintain that all of our lexical concepts are not compositional and thus innate—I will not address this radical view here.
- 44.
For a more detailed criticism of concept nativism in combination with conceptualism, cf. Roskies (2008, 642–648).
- 45.
Should I say that only implicit proto-concepts (see Sect. 6.2) can be acquired unconsciously/implicitly, and that genuine explicit concepts can be acquired only consciously? I am not sure that this is the correct view. For example, when children learn their first genuine concepts, they plausibly are not aware of the fact that they are acquiring concepts. The most natural account seems to include their perceptual awareness of their surroundings, but I do not think that the account I have just presented, on which they acquire their first explicit concepts without awareness, is incoherent.
- 46.
Alternatively, the conceptualist might hold that we have an innate grasp of this pattern, an innate demonstrative capacity that enables us “to track objects in space and time.” Gennaro (2012, 197) It is plausible that subjects have an innate general ability to demonstrate things. But it is not plausible that they possess a particular innate demonstrative concept for every single object or feature that they are able to demonstrate.
- 47.
I emphasize here that it is perceptual-demonstrative concepts that are relevant because it is obviously possible to think about things demonstratively that one is not perceptually confronted with. Perceptual-demonstrative concepts, by contrast, are concepts that I can only exercise when I base them directly on my perceptual awareness of my environment. Note that Roskies (2010) focuses on the conceptualist’s problems with demonstrative, but not with perceptual-demonstrative concepts.
- 48.
He allows that infants after birth may have rather ‘empty’ conscious perceptual experiences: They will experience only those features that they possess innate or can immediately acquire (partial) concepts of. Their experiences will become more and more differentiated as they acquire more and more concepts that can enter their perceptual contents.
- 49.
See Sect. 6.2.
- 50.
I am not sure that Gennaro would mount this defense, since he is “not as enamored with the demonstrative strategy as McDowell and Brewer are.” (Gennaro 2012, 175)
- 51.
Again, Gennaro could say that the demonstrative concept involved in the child’s experience is a mere implicit concept, but this the nonconceptualist can grant as before. On the other hand, as I have argued in Chap. 5, genuine explicit concepts cannot be exercised unconsciously and without the subject’s control in experience. Even if Gennaro could argue that genuine demonstrative concepts constitute the content of perceptual experience, he would then run into the same problems with the phenomenology of hallucinations that I pointed to above in Sect. 4.1.6.
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Schmidt, E. (2015). Arguments from Concept Possession. In: Modest Nonconceptualism. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18902-4_6
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