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Articles

Two Versions of the Conceptual Content of Experience

Pages 36-55 | Published online: 11 Nov 2019
 

ABSTRACT

In ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, McDowell revisits the main themes of Mind and World in order to make two important corrections: first, he does not longer believe that the content of perceptual experience is propositional in character; second, he does not believe now that the content of an experience needs to include everything the experience enables us to know non-inferentially. In this article, I take issue with both retractions. My thesis is that McDowell’s first version of perceptual content is preferable to the latest one.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer of International Journal of Philosophical Studies for her/his helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See also McDowell (M&W, 26).

2. This is, I think, a striking remark, because the capacity that accounts for the unity of the content of judgments is, for Kant, a predicative one, i.e. it is a capacity to form judgments. It would be reasonably expected, then, that, if that form of unity actually operates in intuition, intuitional content should be propositional as well.

3. McDowell’s idea is not, then, that not all perceptual content is propositional, but, rather, that perceptual content is not propositional at all. The propositionalist conception is replaced now by the intuitional one, and this potentially encompasses all cases of perceptual experience. Thus, whereas in M&W McDowell believed that, in experience, we ‘take in’ facts (which includes the experience of objects), in AMG, by contrast, he holds that we merely experience objects.

4. See also McDowell (AMG, 264–265). One problem with this answer is that, as Crane (Citation2013) points out, many non-conceptualists may be prepared to accept it. On this view, discursive activity would conceptualize the putative non-conceptual content of experience.

5. McDowell refers to the response given in Davidson (Citation1999).

6. In the same direction, McDowell claims: ‘if experiences have propositional content, it is hard to deny that experiencing is taking things to be so’ (AMG, 269).

7. In M&W, fn 9, McDowell nicely illustrates his thesis that experience does not involve acceptance of its content with the Müller-Lyer illusion. In such a case, even though experience represents the two lines as being unequally long, it is up to one whether one accepts the appearance or rejects it.

8. See Kalpokas (Citation2017).

9. Note that I say ‘not merely’, because someone may think that, if things are presented in experience, propositions (or propositional contents) cannot be given in it. Indeed, nowadays many philosophers who hold that physical things are directly given in experience, believe that this is quite incompatible with attributing intentional content of any kind to it (see Brewer Citation2006, Citation2011; Campbell Citation2002; Travis Citation2004; Fish Citation2009). However, the idea that perceptual experience has propositional (or any other kind of) content and directly presents things, or facts, to us appears in several authors: Searle (Citation1983), Noë (Citation2004), McDowell (Citation2013a), Schellenberg (Citation2011, Citation2018). In M&W, McDowell holds both that we perceive facts and that experience is propositional. Now, how is it supposed that the idea that experience has propositional content is to be articulated with the idea that, in experience, we are directly presented with what material things? Well, this is a profound and very difficult issue, and none of the mentioned authors is completely clear on this point. In the literature, the alternatives run from conceiving perceptual content in terms of Russellian propositions to conceiving it as composed by de re senses. Although I cannot develop my own answer here, I would like to make the following suggestion. Background propositional knowledge, which is in possession of subjects, penetrates experience and thereby determines the phenomenal character of experience. Thus, in experience, we are directly presented with the physical things of our surroundings; but, in virtue of background propositional knowledge, things appear as being one way or another. According to this suggestion, the propositional content of experience and the perceived objects encounter each other in the phenomenal character of experience.

10. See Searle (Citation1983).

11. It might be thought that this argument works not only against the account that identifies experience with belief, but also against any conception that attributes propositional content to experience (included McDowell’s first version of perceptual content). Nevertheless, this depends on how the relation between the propositional content of experience and its object is conceived (see endnote 9). Let us suppose for a moment that, as the authors mentioned in note 9 hold (Searle, Noë, McDowell, and Schellenberg), experience reveals to us, in a direct way, the physical things of our surroundings. It could be seen now why attributing propositional content to experience is important. In effect, let us suppose that, in paying attention to a certain region of your visual field, you are presented with a book. If your experience reveals to you that the object you pay attention to is a book, you could entertain demonstrative thoughts about the object of your experience (e.g. ‘that is a book’, ‘that book is mine’, etc.). It is not clear at all how we could grasp or entertain demonstrative thoughts if experience did not have propositional content.

12. This does not mean that beliefs or judgments do not have any kind of phenomenology. Nowadays, some philosophers believe that they have a ‘cognitive phenomenology’. See Montague (Citation2016).

13. In order to grasp the phenomenal difference between perceptual experience and thought (belief and judgment), Montague (Citation2016) distinguishes between ‘sensory phenomenology’ and ‘cognitive phenomenology’, respectively.

14. For simplicity, I am slightly adapting McDowell’s example here, substituting ‘rectangular’ for ‘cubical’. See McDowell (Citation2013a).

15. Of course, the term ‘justification’ is understood here in internalist terms, i.e. as the reasons that a subject could give in favour of her believes or judgments.

16. In more complex cases, the content of the experience could make the truth of a judgment or belief more probable.

17. McDowell (AMG, 270–1) believes it is hard to make the non-inferential model of perceptual justification cohere with holding that experiences have propositional content. However, I think that the truth is the reverse: it is when experience is credited with non-propositional content that some kind of mediation is required to explain the justificatory relation between states with non-propositional content (experiences) and states with propositional contents (beliefs).

18. Many philosophers have argued that, in order to be reasons for beliefs, experiences need to be credited with propositional content. See, for example, Huemer (Citation2001, 74), Rosenberg (Citation2002, 121), Thau (Citation2002, 75), Lyons (Citation2008), and Ginsborg (Citation2011, 135–148).

19. For this distinction, see Ginsborg (Citation2006).

20. The difference is between saying that I believe that this cube is red because it is a fact that I see this red cube and saying that I believe so because I see the fact that this cube is red.

21. Of course, someone may think that one can know, or judge, that this cube is red, for example, in virtue of the following inference: from the fact of seeing this red cube, one could conclude that it is red. However, in this case one would need to know, believe or judge that it is a fact that one is seeing this red cube. This knowledge, belief or judgment, not the experience, would be the premise for the inference. Thus, it seems that the experience of this red cube would not be one’s reason to believe that this cube is red.

22. In other words, if my experience ‘takes in’ the fact that my neighbor’s car is parked, I can use the propositional content of my experience, which represents that fact, in order to infer another proposition, which represents another state of affairs, i.e. that my neighbor is at home.

23. McDowell (Citation2013b) claims: ‘I do not think reasons must be propositional, and I still think experiences provide reasons for belief’. Unfortunately, McDowell does not provide any clue about how he thinks reasons could be non-propositional.

24. Other potential cognitive penetrators include beliefs, moods, hypotheses, knowledge, desires, and traits. The key idea is that, if experience is cognitively penetrated, then it is possible for two subjects, or for a single subject in different times or counterfactual circumstances, to have experiences with different phenomenal characters while perceiving and attending to the same distal stimuli, under the same external conditions, as a result of differences in other cognitive states. Discussing cognitive penetration would require another paper. Here, I am just assuming the thesis of the cognitive penetrability of experience. For discussion, see Siegel (Citation2006, Citation2011), Macpherson (Citation2012), Pylyshyn (Citation1999), Stokes (Citation2013), and Vance (Citation2014).

25. See also Chalmers (Citation2006); Shoemaker (Citation1994a, Citation1994b); and Fish (Citation2009).

26. Some philosophers think that the phenomenal character of perceptual experience is not a feature of its representational content. According to them, the phenomenal character of experience is constituted by the very objects and properties of the environment. See, for instance, Campbell (Citation2002) and Brewer (Citation2006, Citation2011). However, although I cannot argue for this point here, I believe that cases of seeing aspects constitute obvious counter-examples against that conception of the phenomenology of perception.

27. Wittgenstein envisages this possibility in Philosophical Investigations (Citation[1953] 2009,, xi, § 257). Strawson (Citation1974, 63) conceives a similar situation. I develop this line of thought in Kalpokas (Citation2015).

28. The argument presented in this paragraph is not, thus, a mere appeal to the intuition that we see the duck or the rabbit in Jastrow’s picture, rather than being inclined to make a judgment about the figure. As I argue, a person may have ‘aspect-blindness’ and, yet, be inclined to make the appropriate judgments, just like the person that is able to see, alternatively, the duck and the rabbit in the figure. Thus, the difference between the experiences of these two subjects lies, not in their inclination to make the proper judgments, but, rather, in the phenomenology of their respective experiences.

29. I assume here that the possession of the concepts of a duck and a rabbit involves knowing how ducks and rabbits typically look like. Otherwise, one would not be able to perceptually recognize those animals as the animals they are.

30. It is worth noting here that non-conceptualists do not deny that, at a high level, perceptual content is conceptual in character. The non-conceptualist thesis has been posited to account for the experience of colors, shapes, sounds, and the like, not, then, for those cases in which one sees rabbits, ducks, trees, cars, or cardinals. See Peacocke (Citation1992, 85).

31. Someone might argue that, in order to see a duck and a rabbit in the figure in question, the concepts of a duck and a rabbit do not need to figure in the content of experience. It is enough, merely, to have seen a duck and a rabbit. Of course, in a certain sense, this is true; however, this possibility would not help McDowell. For one thing, the fact of having seen a duck and a rabbit, even when a person did not know what animals she was seeing, could still introduce a phenomenal difference in her experience, in comparison with the experience of someone that has never seen a duck or a rabbit. Now, she could alternatively see in the figure ‘this animal’ (i.e. the one that resembles the first of the animals that she saw in the past) and, then, ‘that one’ (i.e. the one that resembles the second animal that she saw in the past). For another thing, it could plausibly be argued that the experience of such a person would be different from the experience of someone who has the concepts of a duck and a rabbit. After all, the latter could alternatively see the figure as a duck and as a rabbit, and not merely as two unknown animals she once viewed.

32. My example is obviously inspired in Peacocke (Citation1992, 89).

33. This is true even if we consider the case in which a person, who is not semantically competent in the relevant foreign language, is, however, phonologically competent in it. In this case, whereas the person could perceptually recognize some phonological features of the foreign language, she could not recognize their meanings. Her experience would be, then, different from the person that perceptually recognizes what the uttered sentences mean. See Reiland (Citation2015).

34. Siegel (Citation2006) argues, convincingly I believe, that phenomenal differences of this sort are unlikely due to differences in cognitive phenomenology, or in background phenomenology pertaining to mood.

35. There is some discussion on why there is such a phenomenal difference: some philosophers argue that this difference is due to the (putative) fact that, once a person has learnt a language, she can perceive the meanings of the sentences that are produced in such language. Other philosophers deny this thesis and explain the difference in question by appealing to other factors (e.g. the phonological features of language). For this debate, see Bayne (Citation2009), Siegel (Citation2006, Citation2010), O’Callaghan (Citation2011), Reiland (Citation2015). However, these philosophers do not question that there is such phenomenological difference, which I take to be quite different from the mere inclination to say which object or property is represented by experience.

36. One important question that I will not pursue here is this: why should a person, in looking at a cardinal, be inclined to say it is a cardinal, if it is not because the perceived bird looks like (phenomenally speaking) a cardinal?

37. It may be true that the presence of an inhibited inclination introduces a difference between the possessor of the concept of a cardinal and the one that lacks such a concept. However, this difference is not the relevant one. As I argue, it is difficult to understand how an inhibited inclination to say that the bird is a cardinal could produce the same phenomenology as the non-inhibited inclination to say that.

38. This use of ‘looks’ and ‘appears’ coincides with the comparative use of ‘appear words’ distinguished by Chisholm (Citation1957). Notwithstanding this, there is no impediment here to use also the non-comparative or phenomenal sense of these words.

39. There is an intuitive contrast between the case of two people hearing a foreign language, discussed in the text above, and the one in which two people look at a cardinal. So, someone might think that McDowell would be happy to concede that, in the language case, the phenomenal character of the experiences of both people is quite different, while in the case of the cardinal, in contrast, it is the same. The response may be twofold: on the one hand, in the language case, McDowell should explain why there is such phenomenological difference, and this cannot be carried out by appealing, merely, to concepts of common sensibles. Then, it seems that more concepts (i.e. those that give the meanings of the heard words) are to figure in the content of people’s respective experiences. On the other hand, regarding the case of two people looking at a cardinal, in which only one of them possesses the concept of a cardinal, one would wonder whether their respective experiences are the same. One could think that whereas to the possessor of the relevant concept the bird appears as a cardinal, to the other person it appears, in contrast, as a mere bird. As a result, the salient features of the seen bird and the subjects’ expectations about its currently hidden sides should be predictably different.

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