In recent times, Evans’ idea that mental states could have non-conceptual contents has been attacked. McDowell (Mind and World, 1994) and Brewer (Perception and reason, 1999) have both argued that that notion does not have any epistemological role because notions such as justification or evidential support, that might relate mental contents to each other, must be framed in conceptual terms. On his side, Brewer has argued that instead of non-conceptual content we should consider demonstrative concepts that have the same fine (...) grainess of non-conceptual contents while having conceptual structure. In what follows I will argue that, first, that the notion of demonstrative concept is not viable and, second, that there is an epistemological role for non-conceptual content. (shrink)

: I present an argument for the existence of nonconceptual representational content. The argument is compatible with McDowell's defence of conceptualism against those arguments for nonconceptual content that draw upon claims about the fine‐grainedness of experience. I present a case for nonconceptual content that concentrates on the idea that experience can possess representational content that cannot perform the function of conceptual content, namely figure in the subject's reasons for belief and action. This sort of argument for nonconceptual content is best (...) achieved with examples from auditory perception, especially our perception of music. (shrink)

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)

Arguments for attributing non-conceptual content to experience have predominantly been motivated by aspects of the visual perception of empirical properties. In this article, I pursue a different strategy, arguing that a specific class of affective-evaluative experiences have non-conceptual content. The examples drawn on are affective-evaluative experiences of first exposure, in which the subject has a felt valenced intentional attitude towards evaluative properties of the object of their experience, but lacks any powers of conceptual discrimination regarding those evaluative properties. I also (...) show that by accepting this thesis we can explain relevant features of evaluative understanding. (shrink)

In this paper I address the question of whether the fact that our colour experiences have a finer‐grained content than our ordinary colour concepts allow us to represent should be taken as a threat to theories of the conceptual content of experience. In particular, I consider and criticise McDowell's response to that argument and propose a possible development of it. As a consequence, I claim that the role of the argument from the finer‐grained content of experience has to be redefined. (...) In particular, I acknowledge that this problem is helpful in order to bring to the fore the issue of the proper characterisation of the constraints upon the possession conditions of perceptual demonstrative concepts. Yet, I contend that, in light of the foregoing discussion, it is neutral with respect to the dispute between conceptual and non‐conceptual theorists. For that dispute hinges on whether it is possible to have experiences with a certain content independently of having the concepts, which are needed for its canonical specification and not on whether those experiences are conceptualisable in all their finesse of grain. (shrink)

Mon intention est de discuter quelques aspects du débat actuel sur la perception qui oppose les partisans du conceptualisme (essentiellement John McDowell et Bill Brewer) aux partisans du non-conceptualisme (Fred Dretske, Gareth Evans, Christopher Peacocke, Michael Tye, Tim Crane, José Luis Bermúdez, Adina Roskies et d?autres). Je commencerai par fixer le cadre théorique du débat, par clarifier son enjeu et par retracer brièvement son origine. Ensuite, je mettrai en évidence une difficulté majeure de la position conceptualiste. Pour finir, j?examinerai l?une (...) des approches qui me semblent les plus prometteuses pour décrire adéquatement la manière dont fonctionne le mécanisme référentiel de la perception et le rôle des contenus non conceptuels au sein de ce mécanisme. Cette approche se présente comme une variante de la thèse des « contenus multiples » (voir Siegel 2010, section 3.5). Selon cette variante, le contenu total d?une expérience perceptuelle doit être construit comme un contenu complexe, composé de plusieurs couches ou plusieurs strates distinctes. En d?autres termes, l?approche qui m?intéressera ici consiste à admettre l?existence de contenus perceptuels à plusieurs niveaux ou de ce que l?on appellerait, en langue anglaise, multi-levelled perceptual contents . Une telle conception peut être rattachée exemplairement, dans le paysage philosophique des vingt dernières années, à la position de Christopher Peacocke. (shrink)

Hubert Dreyfus has defended a novel view of agency, most notably in his debate with John McDowell. Dreyfus argues that expert actions are primarily unreflective and do not involve conceptual activity. In unreflective action, embodied know-how plays the role reflection and conceptuality play in the actions of novices. Dreyfus employs two arguments to support his conclusion: the argument from speed and the phenomenological argument. I argue that Dreyfus's argumentative strategies are not successful, since he relies on a dubious assumption about (...) concepts and reflection. I suggest that Dreyfus is committed to a minimal view of conceptuality in action. (shrink)

This paper provides a novel argument against conceptualism, the claim that the content of human experience, including perceptual experience, is entirely conceptual. Conceptualism entails that the content of experience is limited by the concepts that we possess and deploy. I present an argument to show that such a view is exceedingly costly—if the nature of our experience is entirely conceptual, then we cannot account for concept learning: all perceptual concepts must be innate. The version of nativism that results is incompatible (...) with naturalistic accounts of concept learning. This cost can be avoided, and concept learning accounted for if nonconceptual content of experience is admitted. (shrink)

Philosophers have often argued that ascriptions of content are appropriate only to the personal level states of folk psychology. Against this, this paper defends the view that the familiar propositional attitudes and states defined over them are part of a larger set of cognitive proceses that do not make constitutive reference to concept possession. It does this by showing that states with nonconceptual content exist both in perceptual experience and in subpersonal information-processing systems. What makes these states content-involving is their (...) satisfaction of certain basic conditions deriving from a general account of representation-driven behaviour that is neutral on the question of concept possession. It is also argued that creatures can be in states with nonconceptual content even though they possess no conceptual abilities at all. (shrink)

En su caracterización del contenido no conceptual, Christopher Peacocke realiza un esfuerzo constante por diferenciar el contenido no conceptual protoproposicional que propone del contenido de tipo conceptual. En este trabajo analizaré tales esfuerzos para concluir que resultan infructuosos, llevando al autor a lo que podría denominarse como una rotulación incorrecta del contenido protoproposicional como no conceptual. Para ello, reconstruiré la posición no conceptualista de Peacocke y señalaré, mediante los ejemplos que el mismo autor ofrece, la gran similitud que existe entre (...) ciertos contenidos y procesos paradigmáticamente conceptuales, y los ejemplos de contenidos y procesos que el autor considera como protoproposicionales y presuntamente no conceptuales. (shrink)

In the philosophy and psychology of perception there exists a long-standing debate about the detachability of the visual from the conceptual contents of perception. The article analyses the implications of this dilemma for the attribution of aesthetic properties independent of the classification of aesthetic objects and the possibility of aesthetic formalism.

It is today acknowledged by many that the debate about non-conceptual content is a mess. Over the past decades a vast collection of arguments for non-conceptual content piled up in which a variety of conceptions of what determines a state’s content is being used. This resulted in a number of influential attempts to clarify what would make a content non-conceptual, most notably Bermúdez’s classic definition, Heck’s divide into ‘state’ and ‘content’ conceptualism and Speaks’s ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ non-conceptualism. However, these interpretations, (...) I argue, like the majority of non-conceptualist arguments, rest on a misconception of the conceptualist viewpoint. This has brought about an imbalance of the conceptualism/non-conceptualism dichotomy that has not been properly brought into view. This paper proceeds as follows: I first outline the central tenets of the conceptualist doctrine. Subsequently, I show that most of the main arguments of the past decades for non-conceptual content have l.. (shrink)

Cognitive sciences such as developmental psychology, cognitive ethology and cognitive archaeology continuously produce evidence of high-level thinking in non-linguistic creatures. José Luis Bermúdez applies this evidence in formulating a philosophical theory of non-linguistic thought, the main elements of which I summarise here. While I agree with most of the positive aspects of his theory of non-linguistic thought, I argue that the negative aspects of his theory—according to which non-linguistic creatures are denied metacognitive capacities—fails to take into account the evidence from (...) aphasia. I conclude by offering a way of conceiving of non-linguistic metarepresentational thought. (shrink)

The main objective of this paper is to show that perceptual conceptualism can be understood as an empirically meaningful position and, furthermore, that there is some degree of empirical support for its main theses. In order to do this, I will start by offering an empirical reading of the conceptualist position, and making three predictions from it. Then, I will consider recent experimental results from cognitive sciences that seem to point towards those predictions. I will conclude that, while the evidence (...) offered by those experiments is far from decisive, it is enough not only to show that conceptualism is an empirically meaningful position but also that there is empirical support for it. (shrink)

Cet article porte sur une distinction familière entre deux formes de souvenirs: les souvenirs factuels ('Je me souviens que p', où 'p' est une proposition) et les souvenirs épisodiques ('Je me souviens de x', où x est une entité particulière). Les souvenirs épisodiques ont, contrairement aux souvenirs factuels, un rapport immédiat et interne à une expérience particulière que le sujet a eue dans le passé. Les souvenirs épisodique et factuel sont des souvenirs explicites au sens de la psychologie cognitive. J'esquisse (...) une théorie du souvenir épisodique qui rend compte de ce trait essentiel. L'une des conséquences de cette théorie est que lorsque je me souviens de quelque chose au sens épisodique, je me souviens que ce même souvenir remonte directement à l'une des mes expériences passées. Le souvenir épisodique est un souvenir factuel réflexif. (shrink)