Julia Krause Dissertation Abstract

What Non-conceptual Content Should Be Prof. Michael Williams, advisor Prof. Maura Tumulty, second reader Prof. Steven Gross, third reader Non-conceptualists claim that at least a part of the contents of human perception is non-conceptual. Nonconceptual content is usually defined as the content of perceptual states whose subject need not possess, or need not be able to exercise, the concepts that would be involved in articulating that content. It is argued that an account of human perception has to do justice to the richness and fineness of grain of perceptual experience, and explain, in a non-circular way, how new concepts can be acquired. The idea is that our perceptual capacities outstrip our conceptual resources, and may be referred to in order to explain how we come to have these resources in the first place. In my dissertation, I show that non-conceptualism faces a fundamental problem, and propose a more promising account of what non-conceptual content should be. The problem is this: the typical non-conceptualist position fails because it does not supply a clear notion of non-conceptual content. The non-conceptualist who claims that a subject can have a perceptual experience without possessing the relevant concepts, does not tell us what nonconceptual content is, i.e. he puts forward a version of relative, but not absolute non-conceptualism (using a terminology introduced by Jeff Speaks). While the difference between absolute and relative non-conceptualism has received some attention recently, I do not think that the importance of this difference has been adequately assessed. I claim that relative non-conceptualism is not non-conceptualism at all: since it does not tell us what nonconceptual content is, it does not preclude the possibility that the constituents of non-conceptual content are concepts. Examining Christopher Peacocke's and Gareth Evans' positions as representative of contemporary nonconceptualism, I show that the arguments prevalent in the contemporary debate about the contents of perception arguments which appeal to ideas such as the fineness of grain or richness of visual experience, or to visual illusionsnot only fail to describe non-conceptual content as being clearly different from conceptual content, but even suggest that both contents are structured in a similar way. For example, the claim that we can distinguish more color shades in perception than we can distinguish conceptually renders the difference between non-conceptual and conceptual content a gradual one, and assimilates non-conceptual to conceptual content, thus making it a redundant element in an explanation of how thoughts about the world are based on perception. Non-conceptualists fail to provide convincing arguments for the existence of non-conceptual content because they assume non-conceptual content for the wrong reasons. I argue that the notion of non-conceptual content should not be motivated, as it often is, by an interest in issues concerning the relations between perception and thought, such as the question how concepts are learned, or the question how perception can justify beliefs. A notion of non-conceptual content that is suitable for such endeavors will be remarkably similar to conceptual content, and thus uninteresting. I maintain that the minimum requirements for formulating a nonconceptualist view are that non-conceptual content should be characterized as clearly non-conceptual, and that it should be motivated by considerations that do not concern the relations between perception and thought. On the basis of this criticism, I develop a view of what non-conceptual content should be. I propose a version of non-conceptualism that is inspired by some promising aspects present in Peacocke's and Evans' positions, but which are insufficiently developed there: an appeal to early stages of human cognitive development, the role of space for human and animal perception, and the analogue-digital opposition. My account is motivated by the idea that human and animal perception share a common element, and that since animals do not possess conceptual abilities, that element has to be non-conceptual. I assume that the observable spatial behavior of animals presupposes the possession of perceptual spatial abilities, and can be explained by reference to nonconceptual spatial representations. I suggest that in describing the structure of these non-conceptual representations, we can exploit two readings of analogue that are at home in computation and communication theory: non-conceptual representations can be characterized as continuous (as opposed to discrete), or as models of what they represent, standing in relations of second-order isomorphism to perceived objects. The result is a non-conceptualism that describes animal perception in terms of egocentric spatial representations which are continuous along axes and model the spatial relations between perceived objects.