Conceptualism

Abstract: In The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans (1982) argues that the content of perceptual experience is non-conceptual, in a sense I shall explain momentarily.1 More recently, in his book Mind and World, John McDowell (1996) has argued that the reasons Evans gives for this claim are not compelling and, moreover, that Evans’s view is a version of “the Myth of the Given”: More precisely, Evans’s view is alleged to suffer from the same sorts of problems that plague sense-datum theories of perception. In particular, McDowell argues that perceptual experience must be within “the space of reasons”, that perception must be able to give us reasons for, that is, to justify, our beliefs about the world: And, according to him, no state which does not have conceptual content can be a reason for a belief. Now, there are many ways in which Evans’s basic idea, that perceptual content is non-conceptual, might be developed; some of these, I shall argue, would be vulnerable to the objections McDowell brings against him. But I shall also argue that there is a way of developing it which is not vulnerable to these objections. The view I shall defend here is not one I am entirely comfortable attributing to Evans—nor one I am particularly comfortable claiming as my own. Because Evans does not say very much about the nature of non-conceptual content, nor about the relation between perceptual states and beliefs, the text is simply too thin to support the attribution to him of any specific, developed version of the view that perceptual content is non-conceptual. There is textual evidence that elements of the view I am about to develop were accepted by Evans, and I shall discuss these

Abstract: McDowell's claim that “in mature human beings, embodied coping is permeated with mindedness”,1 suggests a new version of the mentalist myth which, like the others, is untrue to the phenomenon. The phenomena show that embodied skills, when we are fully absorbed in enacting them, have a kind of non‐mental content that is non‐conceptual, non‐propositional, non‐rational and non‐linguistic. This is not to deny that we can monitor our activity while performing it. For solving problems, learning a new skill, receiving coaching, and so forth, such monitoring is invaluable. But monitoring what we are doing as we are doing it degrades performance to at best competence. On McDowell's view, there is no way to account for such a degradation in performance since the same sort of content would be involved whether we were fully absorbed in or paying attention to what we were doing. McDowell claims that it is an advantage of his conceptualism that it avoids any foundationalist attempt to build up the objective world on th...

Abstract: According to the widespread conceptualist view, all mental contents are governed by concepts an individual possesses. In recent years, however, an increasing number of philosophers have argued for the indispensability of nonconceptual content based on perceptual, emotional, and qualitative experiences; informational and computational states; memory; and practical knowledge. Writers from disciplines as varied as the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, epistemology, linguistics, religious psychology, and aesthetics have challenged conceptualism. This book offers some of the most important work on nonconceptual content in the philosophy of mind and psychology. It is divided into four parts. Part 1 presents influential positions that have helped to shape the contemporary debate. Part 2 focuses on arguments informed specifically by the naturalization of intentionality or the characterization of computational structure. Part 3 offers various attempts at motivating the need for nonconceptual content based on experiential phenomena such as perception, emotion, and memory. Finally, part 4 considers whether nonconceptual content can be used to explain the behavior of entities lacking conceptual capacities in addition to the actions of individuals possessing concepts.