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Abstract
In this essay I argue that a broadly Kantian strategy for demonstrating and explaining the existence, semantic structure, and psychological function of essentially non-conceptual content can also provide an intelligible and defensible bottom-up theory of the foundations of rationality in minded animals. Otherwise put, if I am correct, then essentially non-conceptual content constitutes the semantic and psychological substructure, or matrix, out of which the categorically normative a priori superstructure of epistemic rationality and practical rationality – Sellars’s “logical space of reasons” – grows.
Notes
1 For convenience I refer to Kant’s works infratextually in parentheses. The citations include both an abbreviation of the English title and the corresponding volume and page numbers in the standard ‘Akademie’ edition of Kant’s works: Kants gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Königlich Preussischen (now Deutschen) Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: G. Reimer [now de Gruyter], 1902–). For references to the first Critique, I follow the common practice of giving page numbers from the A (1781) and B (1787) German editions only. I generally follow the standard English translations from the German texts, but have occasionally modified them where appropriate. Here is a list of the abbreviations and English translations of the works cited: BL – ‘The Blomberg Logic’. In Immanuel Kant: Lectures on Logic, trans. J. M. Young, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 5–246.CPR – Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.DiS – ‘Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space’, trans. D. Walford and R. Meerbote, in Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy: 1755–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 365–72.ID – ‘On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World (Inaugural Dissertation)’, in Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy: 1755–1770, pp. 373–416.JL – ‘The Jäsche Logic’, in Immanuel Kant: Lectures on Logic, pp. 519–640.OT – ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’ In H. Reiss (ed.), Kant: Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 237–49.Prol – Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, trans. J. Ellington, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1977.VL – ‘The Vienna Logic’, In Immanuel Kant: Lectures on Logic, pp. 251–377.
2 G. Evans, Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 150.
3 J. McDowell, ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, in J. McDowell, Having the World in View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 256–72, at p. 257.
4 See, e.g., J. Bermúdez and A. Cahen, ‘Nonconceptual Mental Content’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition) Edward N. Zalta (ed.) [online]. Available from: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/content-nonconceptual/; G. Evans, Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 1982), esp. chs. 4–6; and Y. Gunther (ed.), Essays on Nonconceptual Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
5 See, e.g., J. McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); McDowell, Having the World in View; S. Sedivy, ‘Must Conceptually Informed Perceptual Experience Involve Non-conceptual Content?’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26 (1996), pp. 413–31; and B. Brewer, Perception and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
6 In Embodied Minds in Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Michelle Maiese and I distinguished carefully between:(1) ‘consciousness like ours’ (or ‘consciousnesslo’, for short) which is directly experienced by sentient living organisms like us, and (2) an unconstrained, unqualified notion of consciousness, which may include disembodied minds, angelic minds, divine minds, etc.In that book we focused exclusively on consciousnesslo for various methodological reasons. In the present essay I will focus my notion of consciousness in exactly the same way, but dispense with the subscripting convention.
7 W. Sellars, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, in W. Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality (New York: Humanities Press, 1963), pp. 127–96, at p. 169.
8 See, e.g., P. Guyer, ‘Thought and Being: Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy’, in F. Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 171–210.
9 See R. Hanna, Rationality and Logic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
10 See, e.g., R. Heck, ‘Nonconceptual Content and the “Space of Reasons”’, Philosophical Review 109 (2000), pp. 483–523; R. Heck, ‘Are There Different Kinds of Content?’, in J. Cohen and B. McLaughlin (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 117–38; T. Crowther, ‘Two Conceptions of Conceptualism and Nonconceptualism’, Erkenntnis 65 (2006), pp. 245–76; D. Laurier, ‘Nonconceptual Contents vs. Nonceptual States’, Grazer Philosophische Studien 68 (2004), pp. 23–43; and J. Speaks, ‘Is There a Problem about Nonconceptual Content?’, Philosophical Review 114 (2005), pp. 359–98.
11 I see no reason to think that content-bearing mental episodes or events must be mental states exclusively and cannot also be mental acts. Indeed, given my emphasis on cognitive and practical intentional agency, it seems to me that the primary bearers of content are intentional acts, and that intentional states derive their contents from act-contents. To keep things relatively simple however, I won’t argue for that thesis here, or tinker with standard formulations in the secondary literature; but it remains true, that every occurrence of ‘states’ should really be understood to mean the same as ‘acts or states’.
12 I argue this explicitly and in detail in The Rational Human Condition (unpublished MS, Summer 2011 version), ch. 2.3.
13 All of these arguments are covered in Gunther (ed.), Essays on Nonconceptual Content.
14 See also R. Hanna, ‘Direct Reference, Direct Perception, and the Cognitive Theory of Demonstratives’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1993), pp. 96–117.
15 Speaks, ‘Is There a Problem about Nonconceptual Content?’
16 Y. Gunther, ‘Introduction’, in Gunther (ed.), Essays on Nonconceptual Content, pp. 1–19, at p. 1.
17 R. Hanna, ‘Kant and Nonconceptual Content’, European Journal of Philosophy 13 (2005), pp. 247–90.
18 See R. Hanna, ‘Kant’s Non-Conceptualism, Rogue Objects, and the Gap in the B Deduction’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19(3): 399–415.
19 T. Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 16–17.
20 Bermúdez and Cahen, ‘Nonconceptual Mental Content’.
21 See, e.g., Evans, Varieties of Reference, p. 229; C. Peacocke, ‘Does Perception Have a Nonconceptual Content?’, Journal of Philosophy 98 (2001), pp. 239–64; and C. Peacocke, ‘Nonconceptual Content Defended’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1998), pp. 381–8.
22 See, e.g., McDowell, Mind and World , pp. 56–60, and 170–3. The Demonstrative Strategy is also endorsed by Brewer in Perception and Reason and by Sedivy in ‘Must Conceptually Informed Perceptual Experience Involve Non-conceptual Content?’.
23 Evans, Varieties of Reference, pp. 44 and 74. My own view is that Russell’s Principle has some counterexamples, and is therefore false. See Hanna, ‘Direct Reference, Direct Perception, and the Cognitive Theory of Demonstratives’.
24 Evans, Varieties of Reference, pp. 100–05.
25 See S. Kelly, ‘Demonstrative Concepts and Experience’, Philosophical Review 110 (2001), pp. 397–420; and S. Kelly, ‘The Nonconceptual Content of Perceptual Experience: Situation Dependence and Fineness of Grain’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (2001), pp. 601–8.
26 See P. Chuard, ‘Demonstrative Concepts without Re-Identification’, Philosophical Studies (2006), pp. 153–201.
27 Speaks, ‘Is There a Problem about Nonconceptual Content?’, p. 360.
28 See, e.g., Heck, ‘Nonconceptual Content and the “Space of Reasons”’ and Heck, ‘Are There Different Kinds of Content?’
29 This is Speaks’s own proposal for content Non-Conceptualism. See also M. Tye, ‘Nonconceptual Content, Richness, and Fineness of Grain’, in T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual Experience (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 504–30.
30 See R. Hanna, ‘Kantian Non-Conceptualism’, Philosophical Studies 137 (2008), pp. 41–4.
31 J. T. Ismael, The Situated Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
32 N. Bentley, M. Slater, and N. Burgis, The Dickens Index (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 118.
33 See also R. Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 2001), ch. 3; and Hanna, The Rational Human Condition, ch. 2.4.
34 See S. Yablo, ‘Mental Causation’, Philosophical Review 101 (1992), pp. 245–80.
35 Tye, ‘Nonconceptual Content, Richness, and Fineness of Grain’, pp. 507–8.
36 Tye, ‘Nonconceptual Content, Richness, and Fineness of Grain’, p. 525.
37 See J. McDowell, ‘De Re Senses’, Philosophical Quarterly 34 (l984), pp. 283–94.
38 Speaks, ‘Is There a Problem about Nonconceptual Content?’, p. 360.
39 See, e.g., J. Campbell, Reference and Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 4.
40 See McDowell, ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’.
41 See also Bermúdez, ‘Nonconceptual Mental Content’, section 6.
42 See Hanna, Rationality and Logic, chs. 4–6.
43 See, e.g., K. Koslicki, The Structure of Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
44 See Hanna, The Rational Human Condition, ch. 2.4.
45 Many thanks to Jane Heal for suggesting to me this informal ‘over-the-telephone test’ for conceptuality.
46 See also J. Bermúdez, Thinking without Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Like Bermúdez, I hold that there are non-linguistic concepts and thoughts; but unlike Bermúdez, who is a state non-conceptualist, I do not identify non-conceptual content with the content of mental states not necessarily involving concept-possession.
47 See also P. Carruthers, Language, Thought, and Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Like Carruthers, I hold that there is a substantive connection between conceptual thought and language; but unlike Carruthers, who is a higher-order thought theorist about consciousness, I do not think that the substantive connection between conceptual thought and language inherently constrains the nature of consciousness, which has a non-conceptual basis in sensorimotor subjectivity.
48 See, e.g., G. Frege, ‘On Sense and Meaning’, in G. Frege, Collected Paper on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, trans. M. Black et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 157–77.
49 See, e.g., B. Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995), chs. V–X.
50 See Hanna, The Rational Human Condition, ch. 2.3.
51 In other words, essentially non-conceptual content is normatively governed by an ideal standard of accurate direct reference, and can still be directly referential when it is more or less inaccurate.
52 See, e.g., J.V. Buroker, Space and Incongruence: The Origins of Kant’s Idealism (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1981); and J. Van Cleve and R. Frederick, The Philosophy of Right and Left: Incongruent Counterparts and the Nature of Space (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1991).
53 See Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy, ch. 4. See also Hanna, The Rational Human Condition, ch. 2.3.
54 See Kant, (DiS 2: 383); and G. Nerlich, ‘On the One Hand: Reflections on Enantiomorphy’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (1995), pp. 432–43.
55 One can also use the possibility of incongruent counterparts as a special kind of phenomenal inversion in order to argue for failures of materialist supervenience. See G. Lee, ‘The Experience of Right and Left’, in Gendler and Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual Experience, pp. 291–315.
56 See Kant, (DiS 2: 377–83); and R. Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 2006), ch. 1.
57 See Kant (ID 2: 385–419).
58 See Kant (Prol 4: 285–86); and Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature, ch. 6.
59 See Kant (OT 8: 131–47).
60 This formulation needs some qualifications that do not directly affect the main line of argument in the text, and I think would also only muddy the waters there. Strictly speaking, however, the neutrality of the argument from incongruent counterparts (i.e. The THA) is as between noumenal realism about space and strong transcendental idealism about space, according to which space is identical to (or logically supervenient on – ‘nothing more than’) the conscious representation of space. My own view is that noumenal realism about space is demonstrably false, that the classical Two World theory of Kant’s transcendental idealism is also demonstrably false, and that the neo-classical Two Standpoints theory version of transcendental idealism is also demonstrably false. Nevertheless, in addition to these philosophically unacceptable views, there is also, in my opinion, a fully intelligible and defensible version of transcendental idealism that I call Weak or Counterfactual Transcendental Idealism (WCTI), which says: (i) Things-in-themselves (a.k.a. ‘noumena’, or Really Real things, i.e. things as they could exist in a ‘lonely’ way, altogether independently of minds or anything else, by virtue of their intrinsic non-relational properties) are logically possible; but at the same time it is necessarily unknowable and unprovable whether things-in-themselves exist or not, hence for the purposes of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, they can be ignored (= methodological eliminativism about things-in-themselves). (ii) It is a necessary condition of the existence of the natural world that if rational human minded animals were to exist, then they would be able to know that world directly both a posteriori through direct sense perception and basic empirical judgments and also a priori through rational intuition, as well as indirectly through non-basic empirical judgments, theories, and inferential reasoning (= the counterfactual conformity thesis). (iii) The natural world has at some earlier times existed without rational human minded animals to know it, and could exist even if no rational human minded animals existed to know it, even though some rational human minded animals now actually exist who do in fact know it directly both a posteriori and a priori, however imperfectly (= the actual existence thesis). See, e.g., Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature, chs. 1–5.
61 I’m not denying that some or another sort of difference between my right and left hands could be conveyed to someone who was not directly confronted with these objects – after all, one of them is called ‘RH’s right hand’ and the other one is called ‘RH’s left hand’, so there is a difference that I can convey. But all such differences are more or less trivial and philosophically irrelevant, since they presuppose what is at issue, which is how to tell my hands apart when by hypothesis they are quality-for-quality counterparts. What I am denying, then, is that the essential difference between my hands could be conveyed to someone who was not directly confronted with them. Many thanks to Jon Shaheen for pressing me to make this point clearer.
62 See, e.g., Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, ch. 2; Hanna and Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action, esp. chs. 6–7; and Kim, Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, esp. chs. 4–6.
63 Kelly, ‘Demonstrative Concepts and Experience’, p. 398.
64 See J. Perry, ‘The Problem of the Essential Indexical’, Noûs 13 (1979), pp. 3–21. See also Hanna, ‘Direct Reference, Direct Perception, and the Cognitive Theory of Demonstratives’.
65 D. Kaplan, ‘Demonstratives: An Essay on the Logic, Metaphysics, Semantics, and Epistemology of Demonstratives and Other Indexicals’ and ‘Afterthoughts’, both in J. Almog et al. (eds.), Themes from Kaplan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 481–563; and Perry, ‘The Problem of the Essential Indexical’.
66 See, e.g., J. Campbell, Past, Space, and Self (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
67 See R. Hanna and M. Chadha, ‘Non-Conceptualism and the Problem of Perceptual Self-Knowledge’, European Journal of Philosophy 19 (June 2011), pre-published. Available from: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0378.2009.00377.x/abstract.
68 See, e.g., R. Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); and J. Prinz, Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and their Perceptual Basis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
69 See, e.g., G. Bealer, Quality and Concept (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); and D. Chalmers, ‘The Foundations of Two-Dimensional Semantics’, in M. García-Carpintero and J. Macia (eds.), Two-Dimensionalism: Foundations and Applications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 55–140.
70 See, e.g., C. Peacocke, A Study of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). Peacocke’s theory is also a Fregean theory of concepts.
71 See, e.g., J. Fodor, Concepts (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 1998). Fodor’s theory of concepts is not fully Quinean in that it accepts accepts all of Quine’s arguments against the analytic-synthetic distinction. Indeed, I think that any theory which is fully Quinean must also be Eliminativist about concepts and conceptual contents, which in turn has radically skeptical, nihilistic consequences for epistemic and practical rationality. See Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy, ch. 3, and Concluding Un-Quinean Postscript.
72 See, e.g., Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson, Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, chs. 10–13; R. Cummins, Meaning and Mental Representation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); and F. Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
73 See, e.g., R. Stalnaker, ‘What Might Nonconceptual Content Be?’, in E. Villanueva (ed.), Concepts Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1998), pp. 339–52.
74 This, e.g., is Speaks’s own view of the nature of conceptual content.
75 See Hanna, The Rational Human Condition, part 2/volume 2, esp. the Introduction.
76 See Hanna, The Rational Human Condition, chs. 2.3 to 2.5; and R. Hanna, Objectivity Regained: Benacerraf’s Dilemma and Intuitions in Mathematics, Logic, Morality, and Philosophy (unpublished MS, March 2011 version), complete working draft available at: http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/paper_hanna_objectivity_regained_march11.pdf.
77 See P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959).
78 E. Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, trans. J. S. Churchill (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1964).
79 E. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 111 and 115, texts combined and translation modified slightly.
80 See, e.g., I. Prigogine, Being and Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1980); and S. Savitt (ed.), Time’s Arrows Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
81 See A. Cussins, ‘Content, Conceptual Content, and Nonconceptual Content’, in Gunther (ed.), Essays on Nonconceptual Content, pp. 133–63, at 147; Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, chs. 1–6; and Noë, Action in Perception.
82 See note 31 above.
83 J. Stanley and T. Williamson, ‘Knowing How’, Journal of Philosophy 97 (2001), pp. 411–44.
84 A. Noë, ‘Against Intellectualism’, Analysis 65 (2005), pp. 278–90.
85 Noë, Action in Perception, ch. 6.
86 See Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy, ch. 4; Hanna, ‘Kant and Nonconceptual Content’, sections IV and V; and Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature, chs. 2 and 6.
87 See Hanna, The Rational Human Condition, part 1/volume 1, ch. 1.1.
88 Kim, Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, ch. 3.
89 Kim, Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, pp. 78–80.
90 Kim, Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, p. 91.
91 Many thanks to Kelly Vincent for pressing me to be clearer on this point.
92 Kim, Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, pp. 80–81.
93 See, e.g., J. Kihlstrom, ‘The Cognitive Unconscious’, Science 237 (1987), pp. 1445–52.
94 See, e.g., R. Jackendoff, Consciousness and the Computational Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).
95 See J. Bermúdez, ‘Nonconceptual Content: From Perceptual Experience to Subpersonal Computational States’, in Gunther (ed.), Essays on Nonconceptual Content, pp. 184–216. Bermúdez holds that subpersonal states have non-conceptual content, but would not agree that they are also conscious.
96 See E. Thompson, ‘Sensorimotor Subjectivity and the Enactive Approach to Experience’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (2005), pp. 407–27
97 T. Nagel, ‘What is like to be a bat?’, in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 165–80, at pp. 166–7.
98 Nagel, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, p. 166.
99 See Hanna and Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action, chapter 2.
100 See Hanna and Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action, section 2.3.
101 See, e.g., L. Weiskrantz, Blindsight (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 1986).
102 See N. Block, ‘Concepts of Consciousness’, in Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, pp. 206–18, at p. 211.
103 D. Milner and M. Goodale, The Visual Brain in Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
104 Directed by J. Frankenheimer, 1962..
105 See, e.g., L. Pessoa, E. Thompson, and A. Noë, ‘Finding out about filling in: A Guide to Perceptual Completion for Visual Science and the Philosophy of Perception’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1998), pp. 723–48.
106 See R. Hanna, ‘What the Bat Saw’ (unpublished MS, Summer 2011 version).
107 Speaks, ‘Is There a Problem about Nonconceptual Content?’, pp. 389–90.
108 See Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature, chs. 1–2.
109 Many thanks to Dan Korman for helping me formulate this anti-non-conceptualist line of argument more clearly.
111 See, e.g., Hanna, ‘Direct Reference, Direct Perception, and the Cognitive Semantics of Demonstratives’.
112 See, e.g., M. Steup, ‘Epistemology’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2008 Edition), E. Zalta (ed.) [online]. Available from: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/epistemology/.
113 I am very grateful to the participants in the Kant and Non-Conceptual Content Workshop at the University of Luxembourg in May 2009 for their very helpful critical comments on my papers and equally helpful conversation on related issues; and I am especially grateful to Dietmar Heidemann for organizing the Workshop, guiding our papers through to publication in IJPS, and also providing an Introduction for this special issue.
