Abstract
I argue that the debate about the reason-giving character of perception, and, derivatively, the contemporary debate about the nature of the (non)conceptual content of perception, is best viewed as a confrontation with refined versions of the following three independently plausible, yet mutually inconsistent, propositions:
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Perceptual apprehension Some perceptions provide reasons directly
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Exclusivity Only beliefs provide reasons directly
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Bifurcation No perception is a belief
I begin with an evaluation and refinement of each proposition so as to crystallize the source of the difficulties that dominate our thinking about the reason-giving character of perception. I argue that the contemporary literature is broadly split between those denying Bifurcation and those denying Perceptual apprehension. Though Exclusivity, too, has been target to criticism, its grip on our thinking has all too often been underestimated. As a result, a proper denial or modification of Exclusivity is yet wanting. Overcoming Exclusivity involves a considerable challenge that has not been adequately acknowledged or met—to develop a substantive account of nonconceptual apprehension. Getting a clearer understanding of the nature, the source, and possible resolution of this challenge is the primary aim of this paper.
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Notes
As I argue below, it is a response that should be unacceptable to all participants in the contemporary debate.
Another interesting objection, courtesy of an anonymous reviewer, appeals to the empirically plausible hypothesis that vision involves two distinct visual pathways—the ventral stream, which is conscious and dedicated to object identification, and the dorsal stream, which is unconscious and dedicated to the online fine-grained control of action (e.g., Milner and Goodale 1995). If this is correct, then at least some aspects of fluent action, in particular, our fine-tuned bodily adjustments, should be explained by appeal to unconscious visual processing, rather than to any reasons that the subject has for performing them (on the plausible assumption that having reasons presupposes being conscious of those reasons).
There is much to be said about this potential objection. But, for brevity, I will limit my reply. I agree that the two visual systems hypothesis forces us to rethink the role of conscious awareness in guiding action. However, I think that the extent to which we must do so—the extent to which the empirical data from psychopathologies such as patient D.F. or neatly confined laboratory experiments involving the Ebbinghaus illusion (for example) generalize to our real-life daily activities—is yet an open empirical matter. Clark (2001), for one, argues that the hypothesis completely upends our conception of the function of consciousness in the online guidance of action. Yet, this appears to me to be too radical a suggestion. While some very fine-grained aspects of our fluent activities may be beyond conscious control, e.g., the precise aperture of our coffee cup grasping behavior, other aspects of those same activities are not so, e.g., the choice of hand doing the grasping and its general angle of approach. Or consider your crossing a messy room and swerving to the left as the looming figure of a colleague approaches from the right. Such fluent activity involves many fine-grained adjustments that would most naturally be explained without appeal to awareness—e.g., the relative placement of your feet or the precise posturing of your body to maintain balance. Nonetheless, larger-scale adjustments within the very same fluent activity seem to be more accurately explained by appeal to your awareness of your situation, e.g., your swerving to the left rather than to the right.
Ultimately, to deflect the two visual pathways objection we need not be committed to the claim that all aspects of an action are consciously guided, only that some online control of the action is conscious and yet does not depend on the simultaneous formation of any beliefs regarding our reasons for so controlling our action. I think fluent effortless action provides paradigm examples of such cases, even if some aspects of these actions are not consciously controlled. See Wallhagen (2007) for a more elaborate treatment, with which I am very sympathetic, of this line of objection.
Michael Martin voices this concern nicely: “When Philippa looks in the drawer [and sees a gun], she acquires the belief that there is a gun in the drawer. Why should she acquire that belief rather than any other at that time? Is there any explanation for this in terms of her other beliefs or mental states? The beliefs she had prior to this surely cannot explain the acquisition of this [particular] belief” (1993, p. 77). If our beliefs are simply ‘spinning in the void’ and make no rational contact with the world, it seems that we have no other way to explain her forming this belief except by appeal to how it rationally relates to her other beliefs. The situation is in fact even more severe—there is no clear sense in which Philippa even has a belief with the empirical content that there is a gun in the drawer in the first place. Indeed, avoiding such consequences is McDowell’s (1994a) central concern.
This is not to say that attempts have not been made to remedy these apparent difficulties. Those who argue against Perceptual apprehension must give some account of how considerations of coherence can be sufficient for our beliefs to have genuine empirical content. Davidson is perhaps the strongest defender of coherentism, and providing a solution to this problem is one of his primary aims (e.g., Davidson 1983). Another possibility is to argue for a broadly causal/informational theory of content. For the moment, it is enough merely to point out that these latter accounts are notoriously unsatisfying insofar as our concern is with an explanation of the rational/normative influence of the world on our thinking. In other words, such theories tend to deny that our perceptual beliefs are normatively constrained by the world. The aim of this section is to explicate a range of considerations advanced in favor of Perceptual apprehension; yet causal theories of intentionality deny any such apprehension. More on this in Sect. 2.1 below.
On the intentional explanation of animal behavior see for example the works of José Luis Bermúdez and Susan Hurley. Of special interest in this regard are Bermúdez (2003), and, in particular, his discussion of the various intentional explanations applicable to a rat’s ‘figuring out’ a route through a maze (circa pp. 98–103). See also Hurley (2001, 2003), who discusses several examples of animal behavior that, she argues, are best explained by appeal to an animal’s sensitivity to reasons, in the absence of its possession of beliefs. Finally, see Hurley and Nudds (2006) and Lurz (2009) for two excellent collections of essays surrounding this topic.
Both points, about the mentality of non-doxastic animals as well as of human beings, demand links between perception and action that are unmediated by beliefs. Though unmediated, these links nonetheless provide the creature in question with reasons for producing an appropriate action. Gibson’s ecological optics, to which I briefly return in Sect. 2, has been especially influential in framing the considerations underwriting the need for such perception–action links (Gibson 1979).
Much of the ‘reason’ terminology employed here is borrowed from Audi. According to Audi, the fact itself can be a reasonfor some subject S to perform some action A—the fact that a speeding car is approaching is a reasonfor you to halt (or, in other words, it is a normative reason for halting). But, there being such a reason is not yet to say that S has a reasonto A (or, in other words, a motivating reason). It is this latter notion of reason that is important for the present discussion as it is only reasons that S has to A (motivating reasons) that can potentially also be reasons for which S does in fact A. It is the reason for which you stop crossing the street, and the role perception plays in providing that reason, that we are interested in. See also, Schroeder’s (2008) extensive discussion of the distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ reasons—reasons for S to A, and reasons S has to A, respectively.
Of course, when asked why you stopped you might appeal instead to the actions of the mischievous prankster, but that will not do as an explanation so long as you weren’t fooled by his actions into believing that the car was approaching. It is your believing the car to be approaching that is relevant to your halting, in this context, however it happened to come about (veridically through perception, or falsidically by the prankster or other means).
Note that the above is intended to be neutral with respect to the ontology of reasons in at least the following respect. It is consistent with the claim that beliefs are our reasons, with the claim that facts are our reasons (so long as we believe them to obtain), and with the claim that the contents of our beliefs (whatever our view of content might be) constitute our reasons. There are various difficulties with each of these different formulations; however, the ontological question may be put aside for the moment. What is crucial for the purposes of this paper is only that having a belief makes available to the agent reasons in light of which certain further deliberations and actions are appropriate from the agent’s perspective. Believing that a speeding car is approaching provides you with a reason to halt, a reason that you did not have prior to your so believing.
As Crane (2009) says: “[A] conceptual state is one to be in which requires the possession of certain concepts, viz the concepts which canonically characterize the content of the state. A canonical characterization of a state of mind is one which characterizes it in such a way as to capture the point of view of someone who is in that state. So a state is conceptual when the subject S does have to possess the concepts that are required in order to characterize it from S’s own point of view.” (p. 466)
Having reasons for action follows a similar path. However, in this case the subject will have to recognize a piece of practical reasoning—the conclusion being a description of an action.
A variation of this argument is already present in Dretske (1969). The argument has been developed, reiterated, and elaborated by many philosophers. Among the most significant contributions are Dretske (1981, 1995), Peacocke (1992, 2001a), Tye (2000, 2006), Dokic and Pacherie (2001), Kelly (2001a, b), Coliva (2003) and Bermúdez (2007). Raffman (1995) provides empirical support for this claim.
See also Heck (2000), Ayers (2002, 2004), Hopp (2009) and Roskies (2008) for similar arguments. However, see Brewer (2002, 2005) and Sedivy (2006) for possible responses to this priority concern. In particular, Sedivy rejects the notion that ‘the seeing is prior to the demonstrating’, as this already imports a view of our demonstrative thinking about individuals and their properties as detached from, and therefore possibly based upon, our perceiving them. Yet, the conceptualist position “...takes a holistic approach to beliefs and perceptions. Highlighting the holistic relations among what I see and what I say—and what I think—stresses the mutual inter-dependence among our capacities rather than a uni-directional flow from perception ‘inwards.”’ (2006, p. 51) Instead, she argues, perception is already a kind of engagement with the world that requires individuating understanding of the individuals perceived and their properties; an understanding that, she argues, is best modeled in terms of conceptual, demonstrative, capacities. For present purposes, supposing that Sedivy is correct that perception requires an individuating understanding of individuals and their properties, the crucial question is whether or not such understanding can be captured in terms of a creature’s nonconceptual capacities. Though within the limitations of this paper I cannot address this question directly, I believe that my Sect. 2.3, below, suggests that we can (though it does not, all by itself, suggest that we should).
As one reviewer pointed out, the conceptualist need not accept this claim of perceptual commonality. Indeed, given the transformativeandholistic impact they take concept possession to have on a creature’s modes of engagement with the world, the rejection of such commonality is a consequence of their position that they would happily accept. Thus, though conceptualist can accept that ‘mere’ animals and infants perceive, they would deny that such perceptual experiences are akin to those enjoyed by adult human beings. By virtue of their conceptual capacities, the latter have perceptions of objective reality—of mind-independent individuals and their properties. Thus, McDowell, for example, argues that “creatures without conceptual capacities lack self-consciousness and—this is part of the same package—experience of objective reality” (1994a, p. 114). See also Sedivy (2006) for an elaboration of the conceptualist reply that emphasizes the role of a perceiver’s conceptual capacities in providing the individuating understanding that, she argues, must be internal to perception if it is genuinely to be of mind-independent individuals and their properties.
According to Armstrong (1968), we form beliefs whenever we receive information. Perception is a way of receiving information, and hence it is the acquisition of a belief (by way of the senses).
For strong arguments to this effect see Bermúdez (2007). The literature on the nonconceptual content of perception provides ample arguments in favor of Perception nonconceptualism, many of which, for brevity sake, have been omitted here. For a review of these arguments, their merits and difficulties, see, e.g., Bermúdez and Cahen (2015) and Toribio (2007).
See also Davidson (1982). Other proponents of the view are Dretske (1995), Tye (2000), and Evans (1982), to name but a very few. The case of Evans is controversial but the following seems to place him fully in this camp. He says: “In the case of such [concept possessing] organisms... [judgments] are then based upon (reliably caused by) these internal states [perceptions]; when this is the case we can speak of the information being ‘accessible’ to the subject, and, indeed, of the existence of conscious experience” (Evans 1982, p. 227). Evans considers the relation between the perceptual and conceptual systems as that of reliable causation.
Both McDowell and Brewer have changed their position since. McDowell (2009) no longer thinks that perception has the very same content as that of judgment in that the content of perception is not propositional. However, he still holds that perceptual content must be conceptual content, which then figures in the propositional contents of empirical judgments.
However, as an anonymous reviewer helpfully pointed out, Brewer has revised his views on perception and its reason-giving role rather dramatically. In his (2011), he denies his earlier position that “...having reasons in general consists in being in a conceptual mental state, and hence, in particular, that perceptual experiences provide reasons for empirical beliefs only if they have conceptual contents.” (p. 157) He develops an account that “...denies that the fundamental rational role of perceptual experience in connection with empirical belief is to be articulated by reference to any warranting inference.” (Ibid) Rather, Brewer argues that by registering certain similarities that some object has to paradigms that are constitutive of one’s grasp of some empirical concept, perception gives us reason (where the reason is that very object whose similarities it registers) to apply that concept in thought.
Addressing Brewer’s current position would take us too far afield. Suffice to say that, many differences aside (not least of which is his complete rejection of perceptual representational content of any kind), I believe that similar difficulties as I later identify in current nonconceptual accounts of perceptual content, e.g., in Peacocke’s account, also plague Brewer’s account. This should not be surprising given the structural similarity between his account, briefly presented here, and Peacocke’s account as it will be presented in Sect. 2.2. below. Spelling this out in full, requires considerably more space than I have here.
This is most explicit in Pryor (2005), where it amounts to the denial of, what he calls, the Premise Principle, whereby “[t]he only things that can justify a belief that P are other states that assertively represent propositions, and those propositions have to be ones that could be used as premises in an argument for P. They have to stand in some kind of inferential relation to P: they have to imply it or inductively support it or something like that” (p. 189). Some other notable examples are BonJour (1999), Vision (2009) and to some extent Evans (1982).
A position made popular by Goldman (1979).
Or, differences aside, by a coherentist account of knowledge as Davidson (1983) proposes.
Thus, reliabilism, as a paradigmatic form of non-inferential justification, might account for our finding ourselves saddled with beliefs there is good reason for us to have—i.e., objectively reasonable beliefs—but, it does not even purport to explain our forming these beliefs on the basis of reasons that we have and in light of which we find them reasonable from our perspective. Yet it is precisely this missing ingredient that is required in any defense of Perceptual apprehension.
For current purposes, we can put to the side his account of protopropositional content.
Putting aside cases of mixed perceptual content, and focusing on the role of the nonconceptual aspect of perceptual content.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to clarify this important point.
That is, for such purposes, they are no advance over non-inferentialist, or reliabilist, accounts of perception. It is interesting, and unfortunate, to note that Heck (2007) explicitly rejects reliabilism on similar grounds, yet does not recognize, as I argue here, that those very grounds should lead him to reject any merely correction conditions accounts of content, including those he explicitly endorses.
See especially McDowell (1994a, circa pp. 53–54). A detailed discussion of this more general point requires much more space than can be allotted here.
I believe that the argument provided here echoes nicely some of the concerns that Cussins (2002) expresses about popular nonconceptual accounts of perceptual content. My notion of apprehension corresponds to his appeal to ‘cognitive accessibility to the world’. He too expresses disappointment with the fact that insofar as we must account for modes of a subject’s cognitive access to the world, which are other than conceptual, “...scenarios and protopropositions and Stalnakerian propositions and just about anything else you’ll find in the literature supposedly on nonconceptual content won’t help you with this question.” (p. 149)
As mentioned in fn. 25, Brewer has since abandoned this position. Nonetheless, similar accounts have a long history. And though McDowell does not view the transition between perceptual experience to empirical belief/judgment as a kind of inference, because he no longer views the contents of perception as propositionally structured, the central common point is that having the perceptual experience is already to be presented with contents that can be taken up and utilized in judgment and inference—i.e., conceptual contents.
In an excellent paper, Lerman (2010) argues that she can find no obvious argument in the literature on the reason-giving role of perception against the view that “[t]he capacities in virtue of which a particular experience has the content it does (‘experiential capacities’), though distinct from conceptual capacities [i.e., Perception nonconceptualism], resemble them in that being in a state which is the result of the actualization of these experiential capacities involves the subject’s grasp of ways in which his current state—with the specific content it has—bears on which conceptual contents he should accept, on how he should act, etc. [i.e., Perceptual apprehension]” (p. 11) I agree that there is no obvious argument to rule this view out. However, I believe this misunderstands the dialectics of the debate about the reason-giving character of perception. Supporters of Reason conceptualism already have at their disposal a substantive account of how perception might provide the perceiver reasons for belief and action; an account that entails the denial of Perception nonconceptualism. It is not their burden to prove that no alternative account can be developed. To say that it is possible that the capacities exploited in perception are sufficient for the subject to find some belief or action reasonable even if the subject’s finding them reasonable cannot be understood along the lines of the inferential model, is merely to suggest that the conjunction of Perceptual apprehension and Perception nonconceptualism does not entail a contradiction. This is a good first step, but it is, as of yet, no help against Reason conceptualism and its proponents. In what follows I attempt to take this one step further.
Or, at the very least, it must be something one was at some point in one’s development capable of doing. Thus, certain acquired disabilities might prevent one from ever executing some actions, yet one’s perception might still provide one with reasons for those actions. Presumably, after some time one is no longer perceptually provided with reasons for actions one cannot perform. The extent to which this is the case is an empirical matter.
See, for example, Schellenberg (2013) for a position that fits nicely with this suggestion.
Which inferences one finds primitively compelling is a function of the possession conditions of the concepts involved in the reason-giving state (and their mode of combination). This is not to say that the reasons one has when believing that p are exhausted by those inferences mentioned in the possession conditions of the concepts involved in p (and their mode of combination). Believing that p may provide one with reasons for a great many other inferences, yet having such reasons will depend on capacities extrinsic to those involved in having the belief that p. For example, one who believes that p and believes that q may have a reason to believe that p and q. Yet this reason is not provided by either of these two beliefs taken singly or jointly, rather, it further requires that one possesses the concept conjunction.
One of the reviewers raised an interesting point regarding my general strategy. The reviewer asked whether it is not problematic for me to utilize Peacocke’s notion of ‘finding something primitively compelling’ as a primitive account of reason-giving, given that I reject his appeal to the notion as sufficient to ground the reason-giving role of perception. However, there is a crucial difference between Peacocke’s use of the notion and my own. For Peacocke, the notion enters into the possession conditions of that which is found primitively compelling—the observational concept. On my usage, on the other hand, the notion enters into the possession conditions of that in light of which one finds something primitively compelling. As such, I put the notion to use in the service of an analysis of a primitive notion of a mental state’s reason-giving character. This, then, tells us what it is about the capacities employed in perception in virtue of which having the perception provides one with reasons. On Peaocke’s account it is in the service of a primitive notion of reason-having; possessing the concept assumes that one is responsive to appropriate reasons that he has to apply it, but it is silent regarding the character of the reason-giving state.
An analogous story can be told, mutatis mutandis, for action. In the case of action, we would speak of the transition being appropriate or rational given that there is an inference relating the content of the perception to a canonical specification of the action.
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of Synthese for their invaluable comments and patience. I would also like to thank José Bermúdez, Hilla Jacobson, Carl Craver, Roy Sorensen, Santiago Amaya, and Kristina Musholt (among many others), for their very helpful insights on early stages of this paper’s development.
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Cahen, A. Nonconceptual apprehension and the reason-giving character of perception. Synthese 196, 2355–2383 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1543-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1543-4