Concepts,Attention, and Perception

Abstract

According to the conceptualist view in the philosophy of perception, we must possess concepts for all the objects, properties and relations which feature in our perceptual experiences. In this paper, I investigate the possibility of developing an argument against the conceptualist view by appealing to the notion of attention.

In Part One, I begin by setting out an apparently promising version of such an argument, a version which appeals to a link between attention and perceptual demonstrative concept possession. In Part Two, however, I show how the conceptualist can challenge what appears to be the key premise of the argument, and I go on to describe, in Part Three, an important further difficulty which we face if we attempt to overcome this challenge in a particular way. My conclusion will be that the conceptualist's challenge to the argument is convincing and hence that the argument remains inconclusive.     

The Transcendental Nature of Mind and World

Critics of John McDowell's Mind and World have by and large failed to take sufficient notice of the transcendental context within which McDowell situates his work—a failure that has adversely affected their criticisms. In this paper, I make clear this transcendental context and show how it figures in the transcendental argument I see McDowell offering in Mind and World. Interpreting McDowell's argument in this way, I further argue, helps to answer some of the most pressing objections to what he is doing in Mind and World, particularly certain objections made by Robert Brandom and Hilary Putnam.     

Demonstrative Concepts Without Re-Identification

Conceptualism in the philosophy of perception is the doctrine that perceptual experiences have a fully conceptualized content. Conceptualists have laid particular emphasis on the role demonstrative concepts play in experience, in order to deal with the objection that experiences are fine-grained. Normal perceivers, they point out, are able to form fine-grained demonstrative color concepts for the specific shades they perceptually discriminate. Recently, however, Sean Kelly (2001b: ‘Demonstrative concepts and Experience’, The Philosophical Review 110 (3), 397–420.) has argued that, in order to possess a particular demonstrative concept, a perceiver must be able to re-identify things which fall under that concept. Since normal perceivers typically fail at such re-identification, he concludes, they do not in fact possess demonstrative concepts for the specific shades of color they experience. In response to Kelly’s attempt to resurrect the objection from the fineness of grain of experience, I argue that his defense of this Re-identification constraint (i) is not as intuitive as it might seem, (ii) is ill-motivated, and (iii) appears to rest on a conflation between different kinds of concepts.     

Mind,Body, and World: Todes and McDowell on Bodies and Language

Dreyfus presents Todes's (2001 Todes S 2001 Body and World Cambridge MA MIT Press  ) republished Body and World as an anticipatory response to McDowell (1994 McDowell J 1994 Mind and World Cambridge MA Harvard University Press  ) which shows how preconceptual perception can ground conceptual thought. I argue that Dreyfus is mistaken on this point: Todes's claim that perceptual experience is preconceptual presupposes an untenable account of conceptual thought. I then show that Todes nevertheless makes two important contributions to McDowell's project. First, he develops an account of perception as bodily second nature, and as a practical‐perceptual openness to the world, which constructively develops McDowell's view. Second, and more important, this account highlights the practical and perceptual dimension of linguistic competence. The result is that perception is conceptual “all the way down” only because discursive conceptualization is perceptual and practical “all the way up”. This conjunction of McDowell and Todes on the bodily dimensions of discursive practice also vindicates Davidson's and Brandom's criticisms of McDowell's version of empiricism.     

From nihilism to monism

McDowell has argued that external world scepticism is a pressing problem only in so far as we accept, on the basis of the argument from illusion, the claim that perceiving that p and hallucinating that p involve a highest common factor--something which functions, in the manner of the classical 'veil of ideas', as a perceptual intermediary. McDowell traces the power of this argument to disputable Cartesian assumptions about the transparency of subjectivity to itself. I argue, contra McDowell, that the reflections to be found in, paradigmatically, Descartes's First Meditation are better interpreted as offering a causal argument for scepticism that depends upon a naturalistic conception of sense experience. This is more powerful than the argument from illusion, since it requires no commitment to a highest common factor in perception, nor to the transparency of the mental. The availability of this alternative route to scepticism raises serious problems for McDowell's quietism, which aims to earn the right to avoid, rather than answer, the sceptic. Since the appeal to externalism about content cannot settle the matter, I conclude that there is, at present, an unsatisfactory stand-off between the sceptic and McDowell's position.     

Aesthetic Judgment and Perceptual Normativity

I draw a connection between the question, raised by Hume and Kant, of how aesthetic judgments can claim universal agreement, and the question, raised in recent discussions of nonconceptual content, of how concepts can be acquired on the basis of experience. Developing an idea suggested by Kant's linkage of aesthetic judgment with the capacity for empirical conceptualization, I propose that both questions can be resolved by appealing to the idea of “perceptual normativity”. Perceptual experience, on this proposal, involves the awareness of its own appropriateness with respect to the object perceived, where this appropriateness is more primitive than truth or veridicality. This means that a subject can take herself to be perceiving an object as she (and anyone else) ought to perceive it, without first recognizing the object as falling under a corresponding concept. I motivate the proposal through a criticism of Peacocke's account of concept‐acquisition, which, I argue, rests on a confusion between the notion of a way something is perceived, and that of a way it is perceived as being. Whereas Peacocke's account of concept‐acquisition depends on an illicit slide between these two notions, the notion of perceptual normativity allows a legitimate transition between them: if someone's perceiving something a certain way involves her taking it that she ought to perceive it that way, then she perceives the thing as being a certain way, so that the corresponding concept is available to her in perceptual experience.     

General-purpose content

In this paper, I consider the objection, raised by Radu Bogdan, that a teleological theory of content is unable to ascribe content to a general-purpose, doxastic system. I begin by giving some attention to the notion of general-purpose representation, and suggest that this notion can best be understood as what I term "interest-independent" representation. I then outline Bogdan's objection in what I take to be its simplest form. I attempt to counter the objection by explaining how a teleologist might ascribe content in a particular case - the case of a perceptual judgement whose content is learned. I reject the idea that the teleologist can appeal to the way in which the subject has used the judgement, or its constituent concepts, in the past, on the grounds that it is possible for the subject to produce judgements and concepts that never help her to satisfy any of her interests. Instead, my account depends on the idea that the process of learning is regulated by a mechanism whose function is to produce a harmony between the information carried by perceptual judgements and the way in which they are used in inference.     

The Embodied Subjective Perspective

Perspective is a distinctive feature of external perception. There is a question of how to account for perceptual constancy in spite of changing perspectives. Alva Noe proposes the notion of ＂perspectival property＂ [P-property] and appeals to the perspectival aspect of perceptual content. His proposal conflicts with perceptual experiences and hence incurs many criticisms. Drawing on Husserl＇s phenomenology and Gibsonian psychology, I propose the notion of ＂perspectival awareness＂ [P-awareness]. I will argue that P-awareness is embodied pre-thematic self-awareness instead of the experience of a special kind of objective property. With the notion of P-awareness in mind, I then elaborate on the embodied subjective feature of perspective.     

Sellars and Nonconceptual Content

In this paper I take up the question of whether Wilfrid Sellars has a notion of non‐conceptual perceptual content. The question is controversial, being one of the fault lines along which so‐called left and right Sellarsians diverge. In the paper I try to make clear what it is in Sellars' thought that leads interpreters to such disparate conclusions. My account depends on highlighting the importance of Sellars' little discussed thesis that perception involves a systematic form of mis‐categorization, one where perceivers mistake their sensory states to be properties of physical objects. I argue that the counterpart color and shape attributes of these states, which become ‘point of viewish’ when organized by the productive imagination, provides perceptual experience with its non‐conceptual representational content. I then argue that this content is not a form of the mythical Given because one can only have a non‐conceptual point of view on an object when an object is introduced into one's perceptual experience through the conceptual mis‐taking of one's sensory states. So, while Sellars has a notion of non‐conceptual representational content, it can only be salient in the context of a perceptual act that is conceptual overall.     

Emotion in Personal Construct Theory: A Controversial Question

George Kelly's personal construct theory (PCT) has been accused of disregarding the role of emotion in human life. This charge originates from a misunderstanding of PCT's basic assumptions. Kelly deals with experiences commonly called “emotional” in terms of dimensions of transition according to a genuinely constructivist epistemology. A review of the literature shows few elaborations of Kelly's original formulation of constructs relating to transitions, and even some contributions critical of Kelly's approach to emotions. This article rebuts the criticisms while making clear the epistemological and theoretical bases of Kelly's treatment of transitional experiences, its peculiarities, and its role in the diagnostic/therapeutic process.     

Kant's Opus Postumum and McDowell's Critique of Kant

In this article, I have a modest goal: (1) to sketch how Kant can avoid the charge of “subjective idealism” advanced against him by John McDowell and (2) to do so with reference to Kant's last work, the so‐called Opus Postumum. I am interested in defending Kant on this point because doing so not only (a) shows how we need not—at least not because of this point about idealism—jump ship from Kant to Hegel (as McDowell and others think), but also (b) suggests that the Opus Postumum is a text that ought to be explored more by Kantians and those interested in Kant. A subsidiary, implicit point is that (c) we need not shy away from McDowell's reading of Kant in order to oppose McDowell's criticism of Kant. In order to defend against McDowell's charge, I focus on the argument of the Refutation of Idealism, showing how this argument evolves in Kant's later works, especially the Opus Postumum.     

NEWTON AND SPINOZA: ON MOTION AND MATTER (AND GOD,OF COURSE)

This study explores several arguments against Spinoza's philosophy that were developed by Henry More, Samuel Clarke, and Colin Maclaurin. In the arguments on which I focus, More, Clarke, and Maclaurin aim to establish the existence of an immaterial and intelligent God precisely by showing that Spinoza does not have the resources to adequately explain the origin of motion. Attending to these criticisms grants us a deeper appreciation for how the authority derived from the empirical success of Newton's enterprise was used to settle debates within philosophy. What I emphasize is that in the progression from More to Clarke to Maclaurin, key Newtonian concepts from the Principia (1687), such as motion, atomism, and the vacuum, are introduced and exploited in order to challenge the account of matter and motion that is presented in Spinoza's Ethics (1677). Building on this treatment, I use the arguments from More and Clarke especially to help discern the anti‐Spinozism that can be detected in Newton's General Scholium (1713). Ultimately, the Newtonian criticisms that I detail offer us a more nuanced view of the problems that plague Spinoza's philosophy, and they also challenge the idea that Spinoza seamlessly fits into a progressive narrative about the scientific revolution.     

Editorial Notice

Abstract

John McDowell has claimed that the rational link between perceptions and empirical judgements allows us to perceive objects as belonging to a wider reality, one which extends beyond the objects perceived. In this way, we can be said to have a perceptual awareness of the world. I argue that McDowell's account of this perceptual awareness does not succeed. His account as it stands does not have the resources to explain how our perceptions can present objects as belonging to a wider reality, regardless of the judgements we make about that reality. I suggest that we can give a better account of this perceptual awareness of the world by appealing to transcendental phenomenology. A phenomenological study of perceptual experiences describes how they are structured by a sense of the perceived objects as belonging to a world containing other objects of possible perception. I shall outline this sense we have of the world, and argue that it allows us to perceive objects as belonging to a wider reality. Transcendental phenomenology can thus help to explain our perceptual awareness of the world.     

Affordances and the Nature of Perceptual Content

Abstract

According to John McDowell, representational perceptual content is conceptual through and through. This paper criticizes this view by claiming that there is a certain kind of representational and non‐conceptual perceptual content that is sensitive to bodily skills. After a brief introduction to McDowell’s position, Merleau‐Ponty’s notion of body schema and Gibson’s notion of affordance are presented. It is argued that affordances are constitutive of representational perceptual content, and that at least some affordances, the so‐called ‘conditional affordances’, are essentially related to the body schema. This means that the perceptual content depends upon the nature of the body schema. Since the body schema does not pertain to the domain that our conceptual faculties operate upon, it is argued that this kind of perceptual content cannot be conceptual. At least some of that content is representational, yet it cannot feature as non‐demonstrative conceptual content. It is argued that if it features as demonstrative conceptual content, it has to be captured by private concepts. Since McDowell’s theory does not allow for the existence of a private language, it is concluded that at least some representational perceptual content is non‐conceptual.     

RUDOLPH OTTO'S IDEA OF THE HOLY: A REAPPRAISAL

This paper explores the ambiguity in Rudolph Otto's discussion of the mysterium tremendum in order to address a broader set of difficulties in The Idea of the Holy (1917). In doing so, I outline two common criticisms of Otto's position. The first attacks Otto for not providing a secure transition from the numinous experience of terror to the holy experience of faith. The second attacks Otto for upholding a kind of theistic dualism, which seemingly puts his thought at odds with mysticism. Rather than reconstruct Otto's argument in favour of theism, I maintain that numinous experience, while still a form of otherness or alterity, is best characterized as the breakdown of subject‐object dualism. I further suggest that this breakdown is best understood in non‐theistic terms. For examples of the latter, I briefly turn to Jean‐Luc Marion's notion of saturated phenomena.     

Sensibility and understanding in perceptual judgments

The main aim of this paper is to work towards an account of how sensibility and understanding combine in perceptual judgments, with the emphasis on the role of sensibility in both the justification of such judgments and the explanation of how it is possible for them to apply to an objective world. I argue that in the normal course of events sensory intuitions function as (animal-level) beliefs about the objective world; and that these in turn acquire the status of perceptual judgments to the extent that they are imbedded in and engaged with the high-level patterns of consciousness and reasoning characteristic of full-blown human judgment. In terms of this account sensibility is seamlessly integrated with understanding in perceptual judgments. This does not, however, imply that its contribution to perceptual judgments cannot be separated analytically, for in my terms the basic justification and objective reference of perceptual judgments are directly inherited from the sensory intuitions (functioning as sensory beliefs) which constitute those judgments. I conclude by showing how this account can be used to undermine John McDowell's claim that any attempt to assign a separable contribution to sensibility cannot avoid a commitment to the Myth of the Given.     

Nietzsche's Pluralism about Consciousness

In this paper I argue that Nietzsche's view on consciousness is best captured by distinguishing different notions of consciousness. In other words, I propose that Nietzsche should be read as endorsing pluralism about consciousness. First, I consider the notion that is preeminent in his work and argue that the only kind of consciousness which may fit the characterization Nietzsche provides of this dominant notion is self-consciousness (^Sconsciousness). Second, I argue that in light of Nietzsche's treatment of perceptions and sensations we should conclude that he takes each of such state types to involve a specific kind of consciousness which differs from ^Sconsciousness. I label these two additional kinds of consciousness perceptual consciousness (^Pconsciousness) and qualitative consciousness (^Qconsciousness), respectively. I conclude the paper with some remarks on how, in Nietzsche's picture, these three different kinds of consciousness might relate.     

Mental colors,conceptual overlap,and discriminating knowledge of particulars

I respond to the separate commentaries by Jacob Berger, Charlie Pelling, and David Pereplyotchik on my paper, “Color-Consciousness Conceptualism.” I resist Berger’s suggestion that mental colors ever enter consciousness without accompaniment by deployments of concepts of their extra-mental counterparts. I express concerns about Pelling’s proposal that a more uniform conceptualist treatment of phenomenal sorites can be gained by a simple appeal to the partial overlap of the extensions of some concepts. I question the relevance to perceptual consciousness of the arguments for demonstrative concepts that Pereplyotchik attacks.     

Documentaries,Docudramas, and Perceptual Beliefs

The main accounts of the documentary in contemporary analytic aesthetics have difficulties in dealing with the distinction between documentaries and docudramas. On the one hand, the assertion-based accounts proposed by Noël Carroll, Trevor Ponech, and Carl Plantinga cannot properly differentiate documentaries from docudramas. On the other hand, Gregory Currie's account can do so by relying on the notion of trace, but this involves an undesirable side effect, namely, the exclusion, from the documentary, of those documentaries that do not include traces of their subjects, as, for instance, documentaries that resort to reenactment. Is there a way to exclude docudramas from the documentary without also excluding other films that we usually treat as documentaries? This article affirmatively answers by relying on the notion of perceptual belief, that is, a belief that one can form by endorsing the demonstrative content of one's perception. While documentaries primarily involve the formation of perceptual beliefs, docudramas invite us to form nonperceptual beliefs by primarily involving the formation of perceptual imaginings. That is why docudramas are not documentaries. By contrast, a documentary that resorts to reenactment primarily involves the formation of perceptual beliefs, namely, perceptual beliefs about the reenactment itself.