Nonconceptualists maintain that there are ways of representing the world that do not reflect the concepts a creature possesses. They claim that the content of these representational states is genuine content because it is subject to correctness conditions, but it is nonconceptual because the creature to which we attribute it need not possess any of the concepts involved in the specification of that content. Appeals to nonconceptual content have seemed especially useful in attempts to capture the representational properties of perceptual (...) experiences, the representational states of pre-linguistic children and non-human animals, the states of subpersonal visual information-processing systems, and the subdoxastic states involved in tacit knowledge of the grammar of a language. Nonconceptual content is also invoked in the explanation of concept possession, concept acquisition, sensorimotor behaviour, and in the analysis of the notion of self-consciousness. The notion of nonconceptual content plays an important role in many discussions about the relationships between perception and thought. (shrink)

We can distinguish two senses of the Given, the nonconceptual and the non-doxastic. The idea of the nonconceptual Given is the target of Sellars’s severe attack on the Myth of the Given, which paves the way for McDowell’s conceptualism, while the idea of the non-doxastic Given is largely neglected. The main target of the present paper is the non-doxastic Given. I first reject the idea of the nonconceptual Given by debunking the false assumption that there is a systematic relation between (...) the conceptual and the nonconceptual. I then propose a constitutive understanding of experience and concept, which at once challenges the idea of the non-doxastic Given. Unlike the more familiar Davidsonian challenge, which questions the transition from the non-doxastic to the doxastic, the constitutive understanding implies that the idea of the non-doxastic Given endangers the very possibility of having thought about the world. I urge an exorcism of the Myth of the Given by proposing doxasticism, the view that experience is essentially a doxastic attitude towards that which is experienced. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe acquisition of a skill, or knowledge-how, on the one hand, and the acquisition of a piece of propositional knowledge on the other, appear to be different sorts of epistemic achievements. Does this difference lie in the nature of the knowledge involved, marking a joint between knowledge-how and propositional knowledge? Intellectualists say no: All knowledge is propositional knowledge. Anti-intellectualists say yes: Knowledge-how and propositional knowledge are different in kind. What resources or methods may we legitimately and fruitfully employ to adjudicate (...) this debate? What is the right way to show the nature of the knowledge knowers know? Here too there is disagreement. I defend the legitimacy of the anti-intellectualist appeal to cognitive neuroscientific findings against a recent claim that anti-intellectualists conflate the scientific categories of procedural and declarative knowledge with the mental kinds of skill and propositional knowledge, respectively. I... (shrink)

Sydney Shoemaker has gone to great lengths to defend a repre-sentationalist view of phenomenal character, and yet he describes this view as breaking with standard representationalism in two ways. First, he thinks his representationalist position is consis- tent with the possibility of spectrum inversion, and second, he thinks there are qualia. Thus, we can think of his position in the qualia debate as moderate representationalism (or, equally, moderate qualia realism) by taking up some middle ground be- tween these two major (...) camps. This \moderate" view faces several problems. Here I will very briey explain Shoemaker's represen- tationalist account of spectrum inversion in which he appeals to the existence of a certain sort of subjective property of objects, namely, what he calls appearance properties (formerly he called these phenomenal properties). I will argue that an alternative ver- sion of representationalism provides a more plausible explanation of both inversion-type scenarios and Shoemaker's color constancy case, which he uses to motivate the existence of these subjective properties, without positing appearance properties at all. (shrink)

Pure representationalism or intentionalism for phenomenal experience is the theory that all introspectible qualitative aspects of a conscious experience can be analyzed as qualities that the experience non-conceptually represents the world to have. Some philosophers have argued that experiences such as afterimages, phosphenes and double vision are counterexamples to the representationalist theory, claiming that they are non- representational states or have non-representational aspects, and they are better explained in a qualia-theoretical framework. I argue that these states are fully representational states (...) of a certain kind, which I call “automatically non-endorsed representations”, experiential states the veridicality of which we are almost never committed to, and which do not trigger explicit belief or disbelief in the mind of the subject. By investigating descriptive accounts of afterimages by two qualia theorists, I speculate that the mistaken claims of some anti-representationalists might be rooted in confusing two senses of the term “seeming”. (shrink)

Pour contrer le scepticisme au sujet de la connaissance des valeurs, la plupart soutiennent avec John Rawls qu’une croyance comme celle qu’une action est bonne est justifiée dans la mesure où elle appartient à un ensemble de croyances cohérent, ayant atteint un équilibre réfléchi. Christine Tappolet s’inspire des travaux de Max Scheler et d’Alexius von Meinong pour défendre une conception opposée au cohérentisme. La connaissance des valeurs est affirmée dépendre de nos émotions, ces dernières étant conçues comme des perceptions des (...) valeurs. (shrink)

: A perceptual theory of introspection is one that treats introspection as a species of perception or as a special case of perception. Additionally, a perceptual theory of introspection is one for which introspection shares at least some of the essential features of perception. However, I will show that there are certain essential features of perception that introspection lacks. Moreover, those features common to perception and introspection are insufficient to distinguish perception from belief. Thus, there is good reason to deny (...) that introspection fits a perceptual model of introspection. (shrink)