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Preconceptual intelligibility in perception

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Abstract

This paper argues that John McDowell’s conceptualism distorts a genuine phenomenological account of perception. Instead of the seemingly forced choice between conceptualism and non-conceptualism as to what accounts for perceptual and discursive meaning, I provide an argument that there is a preconceptual intelligibility already in the perceptual field. With the help of insights from certain nonconceptualists I sketch out an argument that there is a teleological directedness in the way in which latent order and structure can be discriminated at the level of perceptual content. This content can then be brought to discursive, conceptual clarity by understanding in such a way that it is guided by the order already discovered in perception. With the help of Husserlian phenomenology of perception, I argue that the fundamental roots of epistemic normativity lie in the discriminating intelligence or mindedness operative below the level of the explicitly conceptual. By preconceptual is meant the directedness of explication of the structures present in the sensory manifold toward fully explicit conceptual judgments.

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Notes

  1. Mark Tanzer (2005) has convincingly argued that McDowell and Heidegger come to divergent conclusions about Kant’s predicament about (non)conceptual content precisely because they each see the major unresolved problem in the first Critique as Kant’s notion of subjectivity as spontaneous receptivity.

  2. The influence on McDowell of Wilfrid Sellars’ inferentialist account of justification of perceptual judgments is manifestly evident all the way from McDowell (1996) to (2011). See Sellars (1997). McDowell claims that “the point of invoking spontaneity is to suggest that the paradigmatic or central cases of actualization of conceptual capacities are in judgment, and that is free, responsible cognitive activity.” See McDowell (2004, p. 194). Because it involves freedom and cognitive responsibility, the act of “judging can be singled out as the paradigmatic mode of actualization of conceptual capacities.” See McDowell (1998, p. 434). Although McDowell argues that experiences are to be modeled on acts of judgment, because they capture the synthetic togetherness of a perceptual state of affairs, he nonetheless admits that this conception “leaves room for conceptual capacities…to be actualized in non-paradigmatic ways, in kinds of occurrence other than acts of judging.” See McDowell (2000a: pp. 10–11) McDowell maintains that “the occurrence of an experience, on the conception I urge, is to be distinguished from the occurrence of an act of judgement, but it would be quite another matter, and quite wrong by my lights, to say that there is experience, as I conceive it, in the absence of the capacity to judge. It is a pity English has to make do here with one word, ‘judgement,’ where (German, say) has both ‘Urteil’ and ‘Urteilskraft.’” See McDowell (2000b, p. 335). Furthermore, the argument is such that “the paradigm exercise of a conceptual capacity is precisely the free act of judgement, and on that basis I speak, in a Kantian vein, of conceptual capacities as capacities of spontaneity. What is true…is that not all actualizations of these capacities are exercises of them.” (McDowell 2000b, p. 342–43).

  3. See Husserl (2001, p. 356, and 1978: §§1 and 3).

  4. See Pradelle (2012, p. 19).

  5. “Flowing-into,” a phenomenon described by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty to account for the way in which previous theoretical accomplishments recede into the givens of the life-world.

  6. Joséph Rouse in a sense rightly argues that “Perception is conceptual ‘all the way down’ only because discursive conceptualization is perceptual ‘all the way up.’” See Rouse (2005, pp. 38, 40 and 58).

  7. Christopher Peacocke (2001) has stressed the need to focus on the ways in which objects, properties, and their relations are given in order to specify perceptual content.

  8. Bernstein (2000, p. 292, emphasis added).

  9. Evans (1982, p. 143).

  10. Strawson (1966, p. 72). See also his later, modified interpretation of the basic Kantian transcendental problematic, which argues that perception issues in thought via the imagination, in Strawson (1982).

  11. Evans (1982, p. 159).

  12. Evans (1982, p. 158).

  13. Evans (1982, p. 227).

  14. Evans’ Generality Constraint is put thus: “Any thought which we can interpret as having the content that a is F [that John is happy] involves the exercise of an ability—knowledge of what it is for something to be F—which can be exercised in indefinitely many distinct thoughts, and would be exercised in, for instance, the thought that b is F.” See Evans (1982, p. 103). See also p. 101: “I should prefer to explain the sense in which thoughts are structured, not in terms of their being a complex of several distinct elements, but in terms of their being a complex of the exercise of several distinct conceptual abilities.” McDowell concurs with this condition of possibility of conceptual thought in his insistence on the knower executing “a joint exercise of a multiplicity of conceptual capacities, including at least a capacity that would also be exercised in judging [in the case of being visually presented with a red cube] that there is a red pyramid in front of one and a capacity that would also be exercised in judging that there is a blue cube in front of one.” See McDowell (1998, p. 457). For an excellent statement of what the possession of conceptual capacities implies, namely, that conceptual content is defined in terms of its context-free “decompositional/recombinant structure,” see Hurley (1998, ch. 4.1).

  15. “The transcendental thought is that we need to be able to see how the spontaneity of the understanding can be constrained by the receptivity of sensibility if we are to be entitled to the very idea of subjective postures with objective constraint.” See McDowell (1998b, p. 365). McDowell glosses “‘transcendental’ in what [he hopes] is sufficiently close to a Kantian way, to characterize [the] sort of concern with the very possibility of thought’s being directed at the objective world.” See McDowell (2000a, p. 3). On his recent adoption of a transcendental method, see McDowell (2000a, pp. 3–4), (1998b, pp. 470, 473, and 475), and (2002, pp. 271 and 287). McDowell even speaks of a “transcendental anxiety” concerning “how our intellectual activity can make us answerable to reality for whether we are thinking correctly or not.” See McDowell (2000a, pp. 3–6 and 17). McDowell articulates the “background against which I find it liberating to see our experience as structured by our conceptual capacities, at least insofar as experience figures in the transcendental framework within which alone we can make sense of our having the world in view.” See McDowell (2001, p. 181).

  16. McDowell (1996, p. 51).

  17. Quine (1960, p. 5.).

  18. See especially McDowell (1996, p. 157), (1998a, p. 489), (2002, p. 269), and (2000a, p. 107). See also Tanzer (2005) on how McDowell tries to make room for a notion of nature that differs from Kant’s notion, according to which we are affected by a mechanistic world of efficiently caused stimuli.

  19. See McDowell (2002, p. 272) and (1996, pp. 77 and 123).

  20. McDowell (2000b, p. 336).

  21. See Koch (2004, pp. 165–66). See also Koch (2012, p. 56). Kjosavik in a similar vein argues that a “face is recognized as a complex whole, prior to any conceptual analysis of its texture.” See Kjosavik (2003, p. 63).

  22. Even McDowell has admitted that non-paradigmatic (i.e., non-judgmental) cases of spontaneous conceptual capacities within perception may involve cases of discriminative abilities: “For some purposes, in fact, it might be a good thing to use the label ‘conceptual capacities’ differently, so that it applies also to…, for instance, the discriminative abilities that help determine the behaviour of simple organisms.” See McDowell (2000a, p. 91).

  23. Clark (2003, p. 166, emphasis added).

  24. Stephen J. Boulter makes the case for a biologically based increased capacity for thoughtful differentiation within the environment: “Selective [evolutionary] pressures would certainly encourage the development of more discriminating visual systems, not all aspects of the environment being of equal interest.…So rather than having to supplement the information contained in the optic array with additional structure, it makes more sense to hold that perceivers actually come to discriminate and differentiate between aspects of what is already there….” (Boulter 2004, p. 254).

  25. Wittgenstein (2001, p. 181).

  26. Freundlieb (2003, p. 47).

  27. Jeremy Koons has argued in a similarly transcendental vein that if “causal interaction with the world establishes what might be called ‘protoconcepts’…, responses (in the form of beliefs) to environmental stimuli,” then the question about nonconceptual content is what are the conditions of possibility for this system of protoconcepts to become genuinely conceptual? In other words, “How does the conceptual world emerge out of the perceptual world?” See Koons (2004, p. 145). Evidence of the transcendental appeal Koons’ argument makes is that according to him the reliability of sensible presentations of the world is prima facie justified and must therefore be presupposed.

  28. Tim Crane has argued that “the mere fact that a state has a structured content [is] neither necessary nor sufficient for its being conceptual.” See Crane (1992, p. 140). Furthermore, he claims that “to say that perceptions lack inferential structure of the kind typical of beliefs does not mean that they are entirely unstructured.” (Crane 1992, p. 152).

  29. The widest meaning of content is best explained as a mode of presentation or givenness of certain states of affairs to a person. This notion of content satisfies even the conceptualist Bill Brewer, who asks “What substance could there possibly be to the idea of things being determinately thus and so, phenomenally speaking, for a subject without anything being presented as being any way to him at all?” See Brewer (1999, p. 156). On this account, content, whether nonconceptual or conceptual, is world-displaying content. See also the important distinction between the Content View and the Object View in Brewer (2011).

  30. McDowell (1998a, p. 458, emphasis added; see also 462).

  31. See Merleau-Ponty (2012) on how both empiricism and intellectualism illicitly render the indeterminate (bougé) scientifically determinate.

  32. Among the reds on Cézanne’s palette there were vermilion, red ochre, burnt Siena, crimson lake, carmine lake, burnt lake; the greens included Veronese green, emerald green, and terre verte; and the blues contained cobalt blue, ultra marine, Prussian blue, and noir de pêche. See D’Ors (1936, pp. 41–42).

  33. For this point, see Merleau-Ponty (2012, p. 30).

  34. Bernstein (2000, p. 280, emphasis added). Christopher Peacocke helpfully moves beyond the example of the perception of a finely-grained spectrum of colors to introduce more compelling examples of articulated states of affairs capable of being registered by perceptual awareness. He mentions the experience of looking at a range of mountains for which the concepts of “round” and “jagged” can capture only certain general features of the perceptual layout. He also considers the experience of looking at the mist in a particular area of a morning landscape during a particular season at a particular place. The question about perceptual content thus becomes one about the extent to which already acquired conceptual capacities simultaneously enable and restrict our openness to the disclosure of multi-faceted and already articulated structures in an experience: “[T]he content of your visual experience in respect of the shape of mountains is far more specific than that description indicates: The description involving the concepts round and jagged would cover many different fine-grained contents which your experience could have, contents which are discriminably different from one another.” See Peacocke (1992b, p. 111). Furthermore, we may confront the situation where a certain volume of space in a kitchen is perceived to be just large enough to contain, say, a microwave, even though the perceiver cannot articulate the dimensions of that space by means of precise units of measurement. For this example, see Brewer (1999, p. 171).

  35. Peacocke argues that “The representational content [of an experience] is the way the experience presents the world as being, and it can hardly present the world as being that way if the subject is incapable of appreciating what that way is.” See Peacocke (1983, p. 7).

  36. See Cussins (1990, p. 409). This is the “developmental” explanation of concept-formation advocated by José Luis Bermúdez on the basis of recent findings from developmental psychology. See Bermúdez (1998, pp. 60–76).

  37. James (1968, p. 233).

  38. See Barbaras (2005, p. 214).

  39. On Abgehobenheiten as prominences within the perceptual field toward which the attentive perceiver naturally turns, see Husserl (1973, §§15–17). See also Lohmar (1998, p. 247).

  40. Wittgenstein (2001, §129).

  41. Husserl argues that “what affects us from the current passively pregiven background is not a completely empty something, some datum or other…as yet entirely without sense, a datum absolutely unfamiliar to us. On the contrary, unfamiliarity is at the same time always a mode of familiarity. What affects us is known in advance at least insofar as it is in general a something with determinations [a bearer of properties]; we are conscious of it in the empty form of determinability, that is, it is equipped with an empty horizon of determinations (‘certain’, or underdetermined, unknown).” See Husserl (1973, pp. 37–38).

  42. On sub-personal information, see Peacocke (1992a, pp. 57–58), Crane (1992, pp. 138–39), Bermúdez (1995, p. 335), and McGinn (1989). Key to the notion of sub-personal information is Quine’s conception of stimulations of sensory receptors as the evidence upon which our beliefs about the world are based. See Quine (1981, p. 40) and (1969, p. 75). Peacocke’s version of nonconceptualism is helpful in this context in answering the original transcendental question of how a thought emerges out of perception. He draws attention to how genuine perception is thoughtful in a wide sense because it registers saliency within the perceptual environment. According to the argument, the move from nonconceptual representational content to conceptual explication is mediated by what he calls “protopropositions” by which the perceiver registers an object and its salient properties and relations. Protopropositional awareness is a second layer of nonconceptual representational content, but distinct from conceptual content. The notion of protopropositions explains the way in which perceptual content is never simply being causally impinged upon by sensible impressions such as undifferentiated shades of colors; there must be more than this notion if content can be said to present things as being thus and so in relationally complex ways. In other words, protopropositional awareness is sensitive to that perceptual content which stands out in the sense that it is suffused with pre-categorial structure. Protopropositional consciousness consists of higher-level perceptual sensitivity to objects, the salient properties and relations in which they stand, but not the concepts thereof. These relations include at least such spatial properties and relations as square, curved, parallel to, equidistant from, same shape as, and symmetrical. Protopropositional awareness captures not all fine-grained detail but the salient properties and relations detected nonconceptually in perception. Arguing for perceptually registered salient structure without possessing the concepts required to specify that saliency is already part of the argument about the conditions of possibility of nonconceptual content. We cannot fully explain nonconceptual content simply by referring to discrete objects and properties, without an account of the relational structures eventually disclosed or potentially disclosable by conceptual capacities. My argument glosses proto-propositional awareness as preconceptual intelligence, where intelligence is not necessarily identified with full-blown judgment. Intelligence as used here can be glossed as a thoughtfulness operative at the pre-conceptual level.

  43. Bermúdez (2007, p. 94); see also Prinz (2002). Jesse Prinz argues that psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, and robotocists are blurring the boundary between perception and cognition. He claims that his “concept empiricism” accounts for how percepts issue in concepts via experientially acquired proxytypes; see Prinz (2002, ch. 6). For a neurobiological account of prototypical representations, see Churchland (1995, pp. 29–34 and 143–50).

  44. See Bermúdez (2007, ch. 7).

  45. See Bermúdez (1998, p. 74).

  46. See Bermúdez (2007, p. 144).

  47. Husserl (1973, §50a).

  48. Taylor (2002, p. 112).

  49. Strawson (1974b, p. 93). See also Strawson (1998, p. 326). In Strawson (1974a), he calls the subject-predicate structure the “basic combination in logic.” (p. 4) But is there not a more basic combination which underlies predication, namely, the distinction and unification between an object and its property or relation which is yielded when we “take” the object” as something or other?

  50. Sokolowski (1978, p. 45).

  51. Burge (2007, p. 221). In his most recent work, Tyler Burge goes so far as to say that “The objectification that is the mark of perceptual representation is pre-intellectual.” (2010a, b, p. 401n., emphasis added).

  52. For an exhaustive account of how “concepts” as understood by contemporary analytic philosophers can and should be understood as prototypes, exemplars, and theory-based notions, see Machery (2009, ch. 4).

  53. See Kant (2007, p. 141).

  54. What Burge allows us to do is reclaim for the world, in the wake of (McDowell’s) conceptualism, its revelatory and disclosive function, a point on which classical phenomenologists agree. See the all-too-brief interlude in which Burge calls to task Sellars’ and McDowell’s hyper-intellectualization of perception (2010, pp. 433–34). For a contemporary argument for the world-disclosive and -revealing character of intentionality, see Rowlands (2010a, especially chs. 7 and 8). See also Rowlands (2010b). In the latter work, Rowlands claims that “In its transcendental role, a mode of presentation is a condition of possibility of intentional objects.” (p. 281) Alva Noë argues in a similar vein for a broad conception of experience “as encompassing thinking, feeling, and the fact that a world ‘shows up’ in perception.” See Noë (2009, p. 8).

  55. Bernstein (2000, p. 181, emphasis added). Bernstein (2002, pp. 225 and 231) speaks of (an originally Husserlian) idea of passive synthesis.

  56. See Lohmar (1998, esp. p. 118).

  57. Lohmar (1998, p. 241).

  58. Lohmar (1998, pp. 159 and 241).

  59. On types, see Lohmar (2008, Part II).

  60. Husserl (1978, p. 160, trans. modified).

  61. See Lohmar (2012) for a lucid exposition of the differences between static and genetic phenomenology.

  62. Lohmar (2012, p. 273).

  63. On this point, see Gander (2010, pp. 280f).

  64. Sokolowski (1970, p. 175).

  65. Sokolowski (1970, p. 176).

  66. Sokolowski (1970, p. 207). For a recent analysis of the teleological structure of Husserlian reason, see Pradelle (2012, pp. 203–6).

  67. Husserl (1989, p. 274).

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Correspondence to Daniel Dwyer.

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Many thanks to Gabe Gottlieb and Emmanuelle Briant for reviewing an earlier draft of this essay.

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Dwyer, D. Preconceptual intelligibility in perception. Cont Philos Rev 46, 533–553 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-013-9279-4

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