Abstract
In this chapter, I clarify the notions of mental content and of concept. I present competing views on these notions and indicate my own position. I introduce content in terms of correctness conditions and distinguish several kinds of propositions, as well as non-propositional scenario content, with which perceptual content might be identified. I relate this discussion to a wide-spread commitment in philosophy of perception to respect the subject’s perceptual perspective in ascriptions of perceptual content. Then I compare views of concepts as Fregean senses, as mental representations, and as cognitive abilities and investigate how they relate to the central idea that concepts are possessed by subjects. I suggest that our talk of concept possession and exercise is anchored in subjects’ abilities for re-identification and for general thought and in their inferential abilities. I clarify how possession and exercise of these three conceptual abilities relate.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for instance, Martin (1997/2009).
- 2.
- 3.
Crane (2009, 458,462) argues that the content of experience is non-propositional for the related considerations that it cannot stand in logical relations and that truth-functional operators cannot operate on it. He distinguishes between truth conditions and accuracy conditions, where the latter are more inclusive than the former.
- 4.
This is part of what is meant when philosophers claim that belief or perception is normative—more on this in Sect. 7.2
- 5.
This is as a good a place as any to clarify how I am planning to indicate whether I am talking about an object or property itself, a content or proposition (or an element thereof) that is about the object or property, or a linguistic expression referring to either one. I will refer to the object or property itself by using normal script, to the content or proposition by using italics, and the expression by using single quotation marks. So I will refer to the orange cat, the orange cat, and ‘the orange cat’, respectively. In using italics in the described way, I follow, e.g., Peacocke (1992) and Tye (2000). I am aware that this may not be ideal—for instance, it does not do justice to the fact that I can express the same proposition in different languages. Sometimes, italics will be used to emphasize an issue. I will sometimes employ single quotes to indicate that I do not endorse the implications of an expression that I use—as, e.g., a qualia eliminativist who writes about ‘qualia’ to stress that he does not believe in their existence. I use double quotes to mark shorter quotations; longer quotations will be indented.
- 6.
- 7.
How can a mental content be constituted by entities that do not actually exist? The way to make sense of this is to think of Russellian propositions (at least of those that are identified with the contents of hallucinations) not as sets of complete possible worlds, but as states of affairs constituted by possible objects and non-instantiated properties and relations.
- 8.
The view is summed up in Stalnaker (1998), for instance.
- 9.
Peacocke’s exact view is that experience content is made up from scenario content and from what he calls ‘protopropositional content’. This sort of content is supposed to account for more finely-grained distinctions in experience content than scenario content alone can allow for. In his newer papers, Peacocke does not mention protopropositional content as such, but talks about ways of perceiving. I will ignore this kind of content in the current list.
- 10.
I am leaving out some of the detail of Peacocke’s presentation of these ideas on pp. 61–67, e.g. with respect to different spatial types we need to include in one scenario content because of perceivers’ lack of acuity, non-visual sensory modalities, the temporal dimension of perceptual experience and movement.
- 11.
Note that it is important to Peacocke that scenario contents are evaluable for correctness or incorrectness “outright” (Peacocke 1992, 64). We should be able to determine immediately whether a scenario content is correct, and not have to assign a certain place and orientation as part of the process of evaluating its correctness. To make this possible, he introduces the notion of a positioned scenario, which is a scenario combined with a fixed place (including origin and orientation) and a fixed time.
- 12.
For this reason, Modest Nonconceptualism will incorporate the claim that the nonconceptual content of perceptual experience consists in scenario content.
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
Helpful overviews of debates in the vicinity can be found in Botterill and Carruthers (1999), Goldman (2006), and Ravenscroft (2010). For discussion of belief in particular, see Schwitzgebel (2014). My ‘third-person views’ introduced below correspond to interpretationism/instrumentalism in Schwitzgebel and to anti-realism in Botterill & Carruthers, for instance.
- 16.
As far as I can see, such views fit quite well with the competitor of theory theory, viz. simulation theory. Defenders of simulation theory—such as Goldman (2006)—hold that we predict and interpret the behavior of others by putting ourselves in their shoes, by simulating what we would believe or desire in their situation. This naturally presupposes that we have a prior first-person familiarity with mental states in our own case, which we put to use in gaining an understanding of others. (See, for instance, Gopnik and Wellman 1992, 145/146.)
- 17.
Note that Peacocke is concerned with harmony between Davidson’s radical interpretation view and his own view of concept possession.
- 18.
- 19.
For a good overview of these ideas, see Crane (2011).
- 20.
Also, see Siewert (1998).
- 21.
This will be brought out in my discussion of the phenomenological worry in the following chapter.
- 22.
For the current debate on cognitive phenomenology, see Bayne and Montague (2011).
- 23.
Similar arguments can be produced against possible-worlds views of belief content. For subjects will judge many of their beliefs involving necessary truths to have distinct contents, whereas the possible-worlds account will have to ascribe identical content to them.
Those adherents of third-person views who take into account behavior that reflects fine-grained distinctions between mental states will have similar objections against Russellianism and possible-worlds views. They can point to differences in behavior—think of who Mary Jane will turn to for help when fighting a super-villain—that can only be accounted for by introducing Fregean propositions.
- 24.
Again, see Heck (2007) on this.
- 25.
Think of Putnam’s famous claim that his beech thoughts are distinct from his elm thoughts even though he cannot distinguish (and therefore does not have full mastery of two distinct concepts of) the trees in question.
- 26.
In the debate over nonconceptual content, this view is usually called ‘Fregean’, and it is supposedly in Frege’s spirit. By adopting this label for the position, I do not want to suggest that Frege himself would have agreed with it; nowhere do I intend to make claims about Frege’s own views. To name just one difference to the neo-Fregeans, Frege distinguished senses (‘Sinne’) from concepts (‘Begriffe’); the neo-Fregeans take the expressions ‘concept’ and ‘sense’ to mean the same thing.
- 27.
A very useful discussion of the pros and cons of the ability view is provided by Glock (2010).
- 28.
This view is closely related to a ‘pleonastic’ view that takes our talk of concepts to be nothing but a façon de parler and which attempts to reduce concepts to their possession conditions. The purpose of concept possession conditions is to provide requirements that a person has to meet in order for us to legitimately ascribe possession of a concept to her. Generally, these requirements turn out to be possession of certain cognitive abilities. Minimally, on the thought-based conception of concept possession mentioned above, the subject has to be able to think thoughts involving the concept in order to possess it. Similarly, one might say that to possess certain concepts, a subject has to have (the ability) to have corresponding beliefs. Again, see Byrne (2005) and Speaks (2005).
- 29.
One may wonder whether the Generality Constraint could not also successfully be applied to mental imagery or to perceptual experience: E.g., my imaginative ability to picture Angela Merkel with two arms seems to be related to my ability to picture her with four arms; I have both the ability to have a perceptual experience of a two-armed creature and the ability to have a perceptual experience of a four-armed creature. Correspondingly, one could formulate the Generality Constraint more neutrally as involving an ability to have (and to produce new) systematically related mental states.
- 30.
You may have noticed that, in describing Crane’s conditions, I sometimes slip between concepts being involved in thought or belief and their being involved in a thought or belief content. This is so because Crane’s view takes us (at least implicitly) from talk of concepts as conceptual abilities to talk of concepts as components of mental contents. This is actually a good thing, as I shall argue in Sect. 3.4
- 31.
For example, there are some thoughts involving concepts I possess that are just too long for me to have a chance to think them all the way through. Another problem could be caused by a certain interpretation of the Generality Constraint: It might be argued that, even though a subject possesses the concepts green and justice, she cannot possibly understand what it would be for justice to be green. The Generality Constraint might be taken to entail that she should understand this thought. A more plausible version of the constraint, I think, is to say that part of knowing what a concept is about is knowing with which other concepts it cannot be combined. So to possess the concepts green and justice is to be able to think all kinds of thoughts involving these concepts, but also to know what combinations involving these concepts do not amount to real thoughts.
- 32.
I think it is natural to say that a subject possesses a certain ability in virtue of another ability. For instance, I may have the ability to predict tomorrow’s weather in virtue of my ability to read tarot cards or in virtue of my ability to interpret satellite images of cloud configurations. I have the ability to read a book in virtue of my ability to read standard Latin script; a blind person has the same ability in virtue of his ability to read Braille.
- 33.
A related point I will argue in Sect. 3.4 is that it is only when the subject exercises her relevant inferential abilities (or abilities for re-identification and general thought she has in virtue of these inferential abilities) in undergoing a mental state that we should say that it has conceptual content. That the mental state meets the Generality Constraint is not good enough by itself.
- 34.
Concept possession has to be sufficient for having conceptual abilities because, both on the representationalist and the Fregean view, the subject’s possessing the concept (i.e., having the representation stored or standing in a relation to a Fregean sense) is all that is needed for her to have the respective abilities. Vice versa, possessing the concept is necessary for having the conceptual abilities because neither of the views can allow that there could be an explanation of a subject’s conceptual abilities that does not appeal to her possession of the relevant concepts (mental representations or Fregean senses, respectively). In the current context, I find the fact that concept possession is sufficient for conceptual abilities more interesting, for it is related to the question of how storing a mental representation or grasping a Fregean sense could account for our conceptual abilities. In what follows, I will focus on this issue.
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Schmidt, E. (2015). Content, Concepts, Concept Possession. In: Modest Nonconceptualism. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18902-4_2
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