Abstract
I examine two arguments for nonconceptualism from the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. The idea is that only the assumption that experience content is nonconceptual does justice to the phenomenology of experience. In particular, if experience content is conceptual, we cannot account for its finely grained representational content. The problem is that visual color experience makes differences between shades of a color that are much more fine-grained than our conceptual repertoire allows. Further, conceptualism is incompatible with the situation-dependence of perceptual content Kelly (Philos Phenomenol Res 62:601–608, 2001b). For instance, it is hard if not impossible to make room, in purely conceptual terms, for the difference between perceiving a certain shade of purple instantiated by a steel ball as compared to seeing it instantiated by a wool carpet. As to the argument from fineness of grain, I concede that the conceptualist’s demonstrative strategy against the argument is initially successful. However, it fails in the end because of problems with the phenomenal character of hallucination, which cannot be accounted for by appeal to only demonstrative concepts. As to the argument from situation-dependence, I point out that the conceptualist cannot convincingly account for the perceived presence, at the same time and in the same place, of situation-dependent and independent properties in experience.
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Notes
- 1.
I should add that this division is somewhat arbitrary; some of the arguments could have been grouped differently, such as the argument from fineness of grain, which relies on assumptions about the phenomenology of experience and about concept possession. Moreover, the arguments in Chap. 6 draw on the content worry, as will become apparent below.
- 2.
Byrne (2003) argues that, in Jackson’s knowledge argument, the reason why Mary cannot learn propositions such as an experience that represents objects as red represents them like this before leaving her black-and-white room is that they cannot be expressed linguistically. After her encounter with a red object, Mary can think that an experience that represents objects as red represents them like this, so the proposition can be the content of a thought. But since this proposition cannot be conveyed to her linguistically in her lessons in the black-and-white room, the proposition cannot be linguistic content. So here we have a case of thought content that is not identical with linguistic content.
The question of how linguistic content and thought content are related is certainly very interesting. However, I do not want to go into this question any further here, for I think that the question of whether experience and thought have the same kind of content is independently interesting, and that it can be answered independently.
- 3.
The numbers of these shades are made up randomly—just think of two rather similar shades of orange.
- 4.
Cf. Sect. 2.2.1.3
- 5.
This can be derived from (S2C).
- 6.
That is to say, it does not provide us with a strong enough nonconceptualism to help the Modest Nonconceptualist. Note, however, that my final response to the conceptualist on this issue will establish the needed (General NC-ism min ). See Sect. 4.1.6.
- 7.
Let me qualify this claim: I do not want to deny that I can infer from this thought to further beliefs. But the content of my original thought does not contain further details about the curtain, whereas the content of my visual experience does.
- 8.
Recall that I endorse Peacocke’s view that experience has scenario content. For further discussion of what experience represents, see Sect. 7.3
- 9.
As I read him, Dretske (1981, 137/138) captures this difference by calling experience content analog and thought content digital. Potentially, more could be made of this argument than a mere comparative difference of detail, such as a genuine difference between two formats of content. I will not discuss this possibility. For a detailed discussion of the argument, see Chuard (2007).
- 10.
This line of thought goes back to Dretske (1981) as well.
- 11.
Thanks to Gualtiero Piccinini for pressing me on this point.
- 12.
McDowell compares this case to the Wittgensteinian example of a person claiming that she knows how tall she is just because she is able to put her hand on top of her head. We would deny (according to McDowell) that her utterance, ‘I am this tall,’ really expresses a thought about how tall she is, for it lacks the necessary distance from the facts that make it true.
This talk of “distance” should probably be interpreted as follows: To give expression to a real conceptual ability, a subject’s ability linguistically to refer to a certain property has to be somewhat independent of the property referred to itself. If I can only talk about orange1 by relying on the presence of this shade itself, it might seem questionable whether I really possess the respective conceptual ability, and not just a mere linguistic ability.
- 13.
In the previous chapter, my emphasis was on the other two conditions for concept possession, the ability to draw inferences and the ability for general thought. My change of focus (to the ability to (re-)identify) is due to the fact that it is the one ability that philosophers in the debate focus on. At least prima facie, this is a plausible move, for we are currently dealing with observational concepts, concepts which are directly based on experience, such as red, square, or orange 1. Plausibly, to know what red is (and to be able to have thoughts involving such an experience-based concept of red), a subject has to be able to identify and re-identify the color on different occasions.
- 14.
The argument is expounded by Gennaro (2012, 176).
- 15.
Kelly (2001a) makes a similar point.
- 16.
- 17.
Speaks (2005) makes this point as well.
- 18.
Contrary to my line of thought here, Veillet (2014) claims that the nonconceptualist has to stick with the re-identification condition—otherwise, she is forced to abandon the argument from fineness of grain. Veillet argues quite rightly that, on the presupposition of the re-identification condition, some demonstrative thoughts threaten to turn out nonconceptual as well. I think that the latter problem should and can be bypassed. Some demonstrative concepts are concepts even though they do not meet the re-identification condition; their concepthood is ensured by the fact that they meet the inferential condition and the Generality Constraint.
- 19.
- 20.
Cf. Dretske (1969).
- 21.
Peacocke makes the same argument with respect to the concept that shape in Peacocke (2001a, 245).
- 22.
- 23.
To connect this back to my discussion of the argument from the determinateness of perceptual content in Sect. 4.1.1: For every fully determinate aspect of her perceptual experience, S possesses a pure demonstrative concept. The conceptualist can claim that her experience requires the exercise of all these concepts, and that its determinate content is therefore conceptual (and demonstrative).
- 24.
- 25.
This distinction goes back to Peacocke (1998, 381).
- 26.
This option is the one picked by Brewer (2005, 156). He holds that “all phenomenology is a matter of the mode of presentation of certain states of affairs to a person.” (my emphasis)
- 27.
There is an analogous claim that experience content is abstract: My visual experience of Charlie the cat is phenomenally indistinguishable from my experience of his identical twin, Chuck the cat. Apparently, which individual is present is irrelevant for the correctness of my visual experience. Particular objects are not part of experience content—experience content is abstract. (Cf. Tye 1995, 138.)
The correctness of my inverted twin’s and my experiences is due to the fact that each of us exercises her respective proper concept (corresponding to the relevant mode of presentation) for the color of the curtain in undergoing her experience.
- 28.
This adaptation also deals with the criticism in Bengson et al. (2011, 176) that Brewer has no account of what the demonstratives in non-veridical experiences succeed to refer to.
- 29.
- 30.
For this view, see McDowell (1982/2009, 80). Note that the appearances in the veridical case just are the facts. McDowell, by the way, is an epistemological disjunctivist, but not a metaphysical disjunctivist. While he denies that the subject’s evidence is as good in the case of hallucination as it is in the case of veridical perception, he assumes that both cases, if indistinguishable, involve the same perceptual content. A very helpful statement of the distinction, as it applies to McDowell, can be found in Byrne and Logue (2008, 66/67).
- 31.
Note that Brewer, as one major proponent of conceptualism, does not take this view. He claims that the phenomenology of experience is owed to its representational content, or rather, to the modes of presentation involved. He even suggests that the notion of pure phenomenal properties is incoherent (Brewer 1999, 156).
- 32.
To avoid counterexamples, his position as presented so far would have to be amended in the following way: If a property is perceived as a property of an object, then it is perceived as the property of this particular object. I am not sure what he would say of properties that we do not perceive to be properties of specific objects, e.g. the colors of rainbows or afterimages.
- 33.
How are context-dependence and inextricability understood in these terms related to each other? What both of these features come down to is that we cannot fully capture any single property presented in experience all by itself, while leaving out its context. As for context-dependence, we will not understand everything about the way a certain property, e.g. a color, appears to a subject in experience unless we take into account such aspects of its context as the lighting or the distance away from the subject. These other properties that constitute the context of our original property determine how the property is presented differently even while it appears to be the same all over.
As for inextricability, we will not fully understand how a certain property appears to the subject if we leave out the other properties of the object. These help determine the appearance of our original property in the experience and are therefore needed to fully capture how the property is presented. So, both features of experience content are based on the fact that no single aspect of experience content can be fully captured without its context.
- 34.
I weaken the claim from ‘all’ to ‘some’ because experiences such as the visual experience of pitch black are counterexamples to the universal claim.
- 35.
This can be derived from (S2C). For subjects cannot be required to exercise concepts that would be needed to specify a situation-dependent perceptual content in order to undergo the corresponding experience if these concepts simply cannot be had.
- 36.
Speaks (2005) makes a similar point.
- 37.
Alternatively, the nonconceptualist might hold that scenario contents can contain more than one property at each point of a scenario. I have to concede that I am not sure how best to spell out the details of the nonconceptualist view here; overall, the nonconceptualist’s options seem to be more attractive than the conceptualist’s, however.
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Schmidt, E. (2015). Arguments from Phenomenology. In: Modest Nonconceptualism. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18902-4_4
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