Abstract
It has recently been pointed out that perceptual nonconceptualism admits of two different and logically independent interpretations. On the first (content) view, perceptual nonconceptualism is a thesis about the kind of content perceptual experiences have. On the second (state) view, perceptual nonconceptualism is a thesis about the relation that holds between a subject undergoing a perceptual experience and its content. For the state nonconceptualist, it thus seems consistent to hold that both perceptual experiences and beliefs share the same (conceptual) content, but that for a subject to undergo a perceptual experience, the subject need not possess the concepts involved in a correct characterization of such content. I argue that the consistency of this position requires a non-Fregean notion of content that fails to capture the way the subject grasps the world as being. Hence state nonconceptualism leaves perceptual content attribution unsupported. Yet, on a characterization of content along the relevant (neo-Fregean) lines, this position would become incoherent, as it would entail that a subject could exercise cognitive abilities she doesn’t possess. I conclude that, given the notion of content demanded by the debate, the state view does entail the content view after all.
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Notes
In the Gareth Evans Memorial Lecture delivered at Oxford in 2007 (‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’), McDowell rejected this view of what being conceptual amounts to. He now relies heavily on the Kantian notion of ‘Anschauung’ so as to recast the content of perceptual experiences as intuitional—as opposed to conceptual. Intuitional content doesn’t have propositional structure and is not composed of concepts. Intuitional content is, however, conceptual in character because, McDowell claims, the cognitive capacities whose exercise accounts for the unity of perceptual experiences are the same conceptual cognitive capacities whose exercise accounts for unity of judgments. In what follows, I shall only refer to McDowell’s (1994) view, although the new characterization of the (intuitional) content of experience remains faithful to the commitments of the original debate.
Bermúdez (2007, p. 60) uses these two guiding ideas—that perceptual content and perceptual discriminative abilities come hand in hand and the idea that we need more than just discriminative abilities to explain concept possession—to provide an elegant and compelling characterization of what he calls the “master argument” for nonconceptualism: “[t]the claim is simply that a perceiver need not possess concepts corresponding to everything that they are capable of perceptually discriminating, even when we confine our attention to perceptual discriminations that reflect perceptual representation”.
The other possibility, namely, that the content is not compositional but consists entirely in one single Fregean concept, doesn’t seem consistent with a neo-Fregean account of concepts cashed out in terms of the subject’s abilities to entertain thoughts with such content, since the subject wouldn’t then be able to entertain any singular proposition. However, someone may still claim that a subject in a state with such content may be able to engage in a (perhaps single) inference regarding a concept analytically related to the one the subject possesses, and hence that CNC would be consistent with the content of that state being conceptual. My use of ‘essentially different in kind’ in the CNC definition would also rule out such a possible set-up.
Questions about fineness of grain do indeed play some small role in the defence of CNC, but for reasons other than taking Russellian propositions to be appropriate tools to characterize both the content of perceptual experiences and beliefs. See Sect. 3 below. See also Bermúdez (2007, pp. 60–61) and Hanna (2008, pp. 46–49) for compelling arguments against the relevance of fineness of grain considerations as a means of settling the dispute between perceptual conceptualists and nonconceptualists.
But see Crowther (2006) for an argument in support of T2 as a coherent and well-motivated position, which he uses to justify the claim that standard arguments in favour of perceptual conceptualism also fall short of establishing the view. I believe T2 suffers from the same kind of problems as T1, but I will not argue for such a claim here.
Bermúdez (2007, p. 67. See also Bermúdez 2008) makes the same point when he claims: “There is some plausibility in the idea that belief contents can be understood in terms of possible worlds. One might think, for example, that to believe that p is essentially to partition all the ways that things could be into those compatible with p and those not. But how can this be carried over to the content of perception? How could any such machinery adequately capture how things perceptually appear to the subject?”. See Hanna (2007, p. 52) for a similar view.
Tye (2006) suggests, for instance, that the different ways in which an object a appears represented in perception as having a particular property F can be captured by specifying not only F, but some other additional properties that a itself has.
In the case of Tye, only the properties that objects appear to have occur in the ordered sequence that constitutes the Russellian proposition.
Although the context is slightly different, Bermúdez (2007, pp. 64–75) offers a persuasive defence of the need to specify correctness conditions for any kind of content, including, of course, nonconceptualc content.
Of course, to maintain that the consistency of T1 allows for only these two inadequate non-Fregean notions of content doesn’t entail that no non-Fregean account of content is suitable for perception. If it did, it would be tantamount to claiming that all of the traditional nonconceptualists hold an inadequate view. My argument targets only those notions of content that can serve as common currency for the T1 theorist. Although it is not an argument in favour of perceptual nonconceptualism, it certainly leaves open the possibility of a non-Fregean account of (just) perceptual content that doesn’t have to face the kind of problems pointed out here.
This is why, as mentioned earlier, McDowell’s new characterization of the content of perception as intuitional does not alter the real terms of the debate.
In a footnote, Heck (2000, p. 486, ft. 6) suggests that state nonconceptualism might ultimately be indefensible “—even incoherent, if coupled with the claim that the contents of beliefs are conceptual”. This paper was inspired by a desire to find an argument supporting (what I take to be) Heck’s correct insight.
As pointed out earlier, some of these arguments do indeed fall short of establishing CNC, notably the fineness of grain argument.
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Acknowledgements
This paper was written while visiting the University of Barcelona (LOGOS). I would like to thank the University of Edinburgh for granting a semester research leave, the LOGOS group for providing a wonderful research environment, and the Caledonian Research Foundation, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Spanish Ministry of Education for their financial support. I am also deeply indebted to two Erkenntnis referees for their many detailed comments and suggestions. The paper is greatly improved thanks to their care and interest.
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Toribio, J. State Versus Content: The Unfair Trial of Perceptual Nonconceptualism. Erkenn 69, 351–361 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-008-9120-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-008-9120-3