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Why Non-conceptual Content? Informational States in The Varieties of Reference

Julia Krause

Introduction

Non-conceptualists claim that at least a part of the contents of human perception is non-conceptual.

Non-conceptual content is usually defined as the content of perceptual states that a subject can be in

without possessing, or being able to employ, the concepts that would be involved in articulating that

content.1 Conceptualists such as McDowell claim that human perception is fully conceptual, and that non-

conceptualists conflate the causal and normative aspects of perception by assuming that a non-conceptual

element of perception can stand in rational relations to beliefs.2

The contemporary debate on non-conceptual content has been inspired by Gareth Evans' account of

informational states in The Varieties of Reference (VOR). In chapter 5 of VOR, Evans develops the idea of

an “informational system” which constitutes the “substratum of our cognitive lives.”3 In perception we

derive information from objects, and, as a result, are in informational states, or states with informational

content.4 Evans characterizes these states as non-conceptual: “the informational states which a subject

acquires through perception are non-conceptual, or non-conceptualized. Judgements based upon such

states necessarily involve conceptualization.”5 I argue that Evans does not supply a convincing notion of

non-conceptual content. His account does not adequately motivate non-conceptual content, and his idea

of non-conceptual content is not sufficiently clear. Thus, Evans plays into the conceptualist's hands by

1 Cf., for example, the introduction to Essays on Nonconceptual Content (Gunther 2003, 4, 14). 2 Cf. M&W, Lecture III. In this paper, I treat McDowell's position and criticism of Evans in Mind & World as representative of conceptualist replies to non-conceptualism. 3 Cf. VOR 122. 4 Cf. VOR 240: Evans calls perception “a capacity for gaining information about the world.” The informational system also includes communication and memory: “People are, in short and among other things, gatherers, transmitters and storers of information.” (VOR 122) I will restrict my discussion of Evans' view of perception to what Evans calls the “pure case” of perception, in which no other part of the informational system plays a role, but “… the conception governing [the subject’s] thought will be determined simply by the content of [the subject’s] perception.” (VOR 121) 5 VOR 227. Cf. as well VOR 123, footnote 5: “… the senses yield non-conceptual information.” Cf. as well VOR 144: “an information-link between subject and object ... provides the subject with (non-conceptual) information about the states and doings of the object over a period of time.” While Evans uses the terms “information” and “informational content” in a way that also allows for conceptual information(al contents) (cf. e.g. VOR 122f, and 144, n.2), he mostly employs these terms to refer to non-conceptual content. In this paper, I am going to use “information,” “informational state,” and “informational content” exclusively to refer to the non-conceptual.

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making non-conceptual content both redundant and uninteresting.

I will start out by showing that Evans describes non-conceptual states not only as causally connected

to their objects, but also as representing their objects correctly or incorrectly. In this, Evans' account of

perception is typical of the majority of contemporary non-conceptualist positions. But if

representationality is a feature of both non-conceptual and conceptual content, then the difference

between both contents still has to be explained. I argue that one of Evans' main interests in VOR—to

explain how a demonstrative thought about an object can be based on perceptual information—is

problematic, because it cannot justify the assumption that human perception involves a non-conceptual

element: it is not necessary to introduce non-conceptual representations into a story that tells us how

thoughts refer to perceived objects.6 Moreover, such a project does not provide a characterization of non-

conceptual content as clearly different from conceptual content. One typical non-conceptualist argument

that Evans employs (the fineness of grain argument) even suggests that both contents have the same kind

of structure.7

I conclude that in arguing for non-conceptualism, one should not rely on claims about the relations

between perception and thought. Instead, a clear characterization of non-conceptual content has to

precede such claims. Evans' remarks about a primitive stage of human cognitive development suggest a

6 I presuppose an understanding of non-conceptual “content” in the sense of non-conceptual “representation.” A representation is something that stands for something else. Applied to philosophical discussions of perception, this notion acquires a more specific meaning. Perceptual states are intentional, directed at the world. To claim that non-conceptual content is a representation is to say that it is a mental item that stands for, or is about, something in the world. Evans formulates a version of non-conceptualism on two levels, concerning non-conceptual perceptual abilities and concerning non-conceptual mental representations (cf. VOR 100ff). In this paper, I focus on the explanation in terms of non-conceptual representations. 7 It has been suggested that non-conceptual content cannot be structured at all, and that this is what distinguishes it from conceptual content. For example, Roblin Meeks (2006) claims that any characterization of non-conceptual content as compositional must fail to deliver a satisfying distinction from conceptual content. Meeks contends that since non-conceptualists ascribe an internal structure to conceptual content, non-conceptual content cannot be structured. He refers to Evans’ claim that thoughts are subject to the Generality Constraint: “if a subject can be credited with the thought that a is F, then he must have the conceptual resources for entertaining the thought that a is G, for every property of being G of which he has a conception.” (VOR 104) The Generality Constraint says that the constituents of thoughts can in principle be recombined indefinitely. Meeks understands this as a definition of conceptual content—accordingly, non-conceptual content cannot be structured, but must be “holophrastic” (missing the structural features that would fulfill the Generality Constraint). (Cf. Meeks 2006, 89, 92-93.) In contrast, consider Cussins' observation that “the possession of any content will involve carving up the world in one way or another,” (Cussins 2003, 134) or Bermúdez' (cf. 2003a, 200f) claim that representationality presupposes a compositional structure. I cannot evaluate this issue here—my point in this paper is simply to show that it is a mistake to construe non-conceptual content as being similar to conceptual content. It might be legitimate to describe non-conceptual representations as compositional, as long as their structure is cognizably different from the structure of conceptual representations.

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more promising approach in this sense. I propose that non-conceptualists exploit this feature of Evans'

position, for example by arguing that human perception shares representational states with animal

perception.

1 Evans’ Notion of Non-conceptual Content

When Evans introduces the notion of information at the beginning of chapter 5 of VOR, he compares

the relation between information and the object the information is derived from with the relation between

a photograph and its object:

We can speak of a certain bit of information being of, or perhaps from, an object, in a sense resembling the way in which we speak of a photograph being of an object... The sense in which a photograph is of an object is as follows. A certain mechanism produces things which have a certain informational content. ... The mechanism is a mechanism of information storage, because the properties that figure in the content of its output are (to a degree determined by the accuracy of the mechanism) the properties possessed by the objects which are the input to it.8

The photograph analogy illuminates Evans’ idea of non-conceptual content. First, the relation between an

object and a photograph of that object is a causal relation. The object is the cause, the photograph is the

effect, and there is a mechanism that makes this relation possible. Evans wants to say that the information

gathered in perception is causally derived from objects via a mechanism enabling this derivation.

However, the photograph-analogy involves a second aspect. A photograph is not only causally related to

its object; it is also similar to it. In fact, the degree of similarity can be very high: Evans says that the

properties of the informational content are the same as the properties of the object, if the mechanism

works properly.9 Evans’ photograph analogy clearly distinguishes between these two features of

8 VOR 124f. 9 Cf. as well VOR 128, where Evans says that the informational content “fits” the object. Evans' claim that the properties of input and output are the same sounds puzzling: A photograph does not have the same properties as its object (for example, it is not three-dimensional), and it is not clear how a mental representation could share the properties of that which it is a representation of. Nor is it clear why a mental representation should share the properties of its object. Similarity with what is represented is not a necessary feature of representation, and it is not clear why it should be a feature of non-conceptual representations. The claim that non-conceptual content has correctness conditions does not presuppose that the correctness of non-conceptual content will depend on whether or not it is similar to its object. One might attempt to make sense of Evans' position by understanding the similarity between informational content and object in terms of what Shepard and Chipman call

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informational states. Accordingly, I am going to use Evans' terminology as follows: I distinguish between

the “information link” (the causal relation between the object and the perceptual state of the subject) and

the “information” or “informational content” of informational states (which is similar to its object, and,

more generally, representational—see below). We are in “informational states,” which contain

“information” or “informational content” (non-conceptual content), in virtue of an “information link”

with the object.10

To illustrate this difference, one may appeal to a semiotic distinction, a distinction between different

kinds of signs. While Evans does not explicitly refer to semiotics, I think that such a reading provides a

helpful frame for clarifying the central features of the way he describes non-conceptual information.

Specifically, we have to acknowledge that in describing informational content as similar to its object, Evans

is committed to the idea that informational content is representational—that it can be correct or incorrect.

Consider Peirce’s distinction between symbol, index and icon:

... every sign is determined by its object, either first, by partaking in the characters of the object, when I call the sign an Icon; secondly, by being really and in its individual existence connected with the individual object, when I call the sign an Index; thirdly, by more or less approximate certainty that it will be interpreted as denoting the object, in consequence of a habit..., when I call the sign a Symbol.11

One might say that, according to this theory, a photograph is both an index and an icon. It is an index in

“second-order isomorphism,” which does not require a direct similarity between a represented object and the representation, but is rather “the second-order relation between (a) the relations between alternative external objects, and (b) the relations among their corresponding internal representations.” (Shepard & Chipman 1970, 2) Such a weak notion of similarity would be compatible with the way Evans describes the structure of non-conceptual content in the context of the photograph analogy when he says that informational content “can be specified neutrally, by an open sentence in one or more variables (the number of variables corresponding to the number of objects in the photograph).” (VOR 124f) According to this, similarity would hold between the number of objects represented in a photograph and the number of objects it is a photograph of. If one complements this isomorphism of numbers with an isomorphism of relations, one could say that the relations between the variables of the open sentence specifying the informational content are isomorphic to the relations between the objects represented in the photograph. 10 While Evans often uses “information” and “informational content” interchangeably (as, for example, in the passage quoted above on p.3, VOR 124-125), he sometimes distinguishes “informational content” from “information,” focusing on the representationality of informational content. Cf. VOR 129: “… two informational states [can] embody the same information, provided that they result from the same initial informational event …, even if they do not have the same content: the one may represent the same information as the other, but garbled in various ways.” Here Evans distinguishes between “informational event” (the causal feature), “information,” and “informational content” (the representational—in this case, misrepresentational—feature). Garbled information, or misinformation, is specified on the level of content, while “information” in this context takes on a non-representational meaning and is closer to the causal feature, the “information link” and “informational event” (cf. as well VOR 129: “When two states embody the same information, they are necessarily such that if the one is of an object x, then so is the other”). 11 Prolegomena 251.

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that it is the result of a physical procedure. As such, it presupposes the existence of its object: the referent

of a photograph is necessarily real.12 It is an icon in that it shares properties of its object, in being similar

to it. Evans uses the photograph-analogy in order to express the idea that the informational content

stands in an indexical and in an iconic, and thus in a causal and in a representational relation to the object.

The iconicity of informational content implies that informational states are representational, i.e. that

they have correctness conditions.13 While the causal mechanism determines the degree of similarity

between object and informational content,14 it does not figure in the description of that content, and is not

referred to when the correctness of the information is assessed. The informational content is specified “by

an open sentence in one or more variables (the number of variables corresponding to the number of

objects in the photograph)”15, and nothing in this specification tells us which object the information is

derived from, or how it is derived from it.16 What renders the information representational, according to

the photograph analogy, is the fact that it is similar to its object—this is the standard for evaluating

whether the informational content is correct or incorrect.

Evans expresses the idea that non-conceptual information is representational in several different

ways. The most striking, apart from the photograph analogy, is perhaps his claim that informational states

are seemings, “events, that is, already imbued with (apparent) objective significance.”17 A seeming need not

12 Cf. Sign 239f: “An index is a sign which would, at once, lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if there were no interpretant. Such, for instance, is a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it as sign of a shot; for without the shot there would have been no hole; but there is a hole there, whether anybody has the sense to attribute it to a shot or not.” 13 Of course iconicity is not implied by representationality. In order for x to represent y, it does not have to be similar to y (cf. footnote 9 above). 14 Thus, strictly speaking, the causal relation between object and information can explain the possibility of error―problems with the causal mechanism can lead to misrepresentations of the object, and thus explain that we can perceive things incorrectly. (Evans notes: “An informational state may be of an object even though its content fails to fit the object at all well—because of malfunction in the system, either at source, or in transmission, or in memory.” (VOR 128)) 15 VOR 124f. 16 Cf. VOR 125, n.10: “In fact I do not believe that a specification of the content of a photograph should make reference to the object or objects that it is of… We see, here, the need for a distinction between, on the one hand, an a-representation (i.e. a species of particular-representation, in a specification of whose content mention of a would figure…, and, on the other, something which, without being an a-representation, is a representation of a.” 17 VOR 123; cf. VOR 154 as well: “… the way things seem to the subject, to use our most general term for the deliverances of the informational system.” Informational states have objective significance as opposed to subjective significance, which distinguishes them from sensations. The significance is only “apparent” because if the perceptual apparatus does not function properly, things are not as they seem (cf. VOR 187).

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be true (it has only apparent objective significance), but it is true or false: “it has a certain content—the world

is represented a certain way—and hence it permits of a non-derivative classification as true or false.”18 That

Evans thus distinguishes informational states from sensations also becomes clear from his remarks in

Molyneux's Question (MQ),19 where he argues that we employ the same concepts on the basis of tactile and

visual perception, because the informational content in both cases has to be understood in terms of the

same “egocentric,” or “behavioral” space.20 While Evans acknowledges the roles that different sense

modalities play in perception,21 he also maintains that, in any sensory mode, an informational state

represents its object as spatial. The spatial quality of information is not simply a conceptual abstraction

from particular sense modalities, but plays a role for the non-conceptual level of perception:

A perceptual spatial representation, although it embodies spatial information, is not a conceptual representation, and there is room for the explanation of our acquisition of concepts like square, with their characteristic generality, in terms of our exposure, in perception, to a range of squares.22

The spatial aspect of perception is the same for all sense modalities, not only in the sense that spatial

concepts apply to all sense modalities, but also in the sense that non-conceptual content itself already has

this spatial quality—informational states are perceptual spatial representations.23

In describing non-conceptual content as representational, Evans presents a position that is typical of

contemporary non-conceptualism; in general, non-conceptualists agree that non-conceptual content has 18 VOR 226. Cf. as well VOR 202, Appendix to chapter 6: “It is of the essence of a representational state that it be capable of assessment as true or false. If a state is a representational state, it represents something other than itself as being thus and so, with the consequence that the state is true if and only if the thing concerned is thus and so.” (McDowell agrees with this: “The very idea of representational content brings with it a notion of correctness and incorrectness” (M&W 162). He does not agree, however, that non-conceptual content is representational; see 3.1 below.) Moreover, for Evans, representationality is implied by the notion of content: “… it [a perceptual experience or informational state] has a certain content—the world is represented a certain way…” (VOR 226) Bermúdez (2003a, 183-185, 195) shares this view. It seems to me that this point is purely terminological, and of no consequence for the issue that non-conceptualists and conceptualists disagree on: whether or not human perception involves non-conceptual representational states. 19 “Molyneux's question” is whether someone who was born blind and is able to distinguish a sphere and a cube by touch, could, if enabled to see, distinguish a sphere and a cube on the basis of what he sees (cf. MQ 364). In this article, Evans presents a condensed version of his theory of perception; many passages are essentially the same as in chapters 4-6 of VOR. 20 Cf. MQ 389-390: “It is a consequence of the fact that the spatial content of auditory and tactual-kinaesthetic perceptions must be specified in the same, egocentric, terms, that perceptions from both systems will be used to build up a unitary picture of the world, and hence that spatial concepts applicable upon the basis of one mode of perception must generalize to the other. There is only one behavioural space.” Cf. as well MQ 372ff and VOR 160. 21 VOR 174, n.45. 22 Cf. Evans' remarks about the “sensory modality involved in the information link” (MQ 377). 23 For more about the role of space for Evans' non-conceptualism, cf. footnote 78 below. Unfortunately the details of his account of spatial abilities and spatial representations are beyond the scope of this paper.

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correctness conditions.24 This demands a more detailed characterization of informational states, to show

that they are different from thoughts. Since both non-conceptual and conceptual states have correctness

conditions, the difference between both kinds of content has to lie elsewhere. Unfortunately, Evans does

not draw a clear line between the non-conceptual and the conceptual. In 3.1 I will argue that this failure

has to do with his plan to explain how demonstrative thoughts can be based on perception. First,

however, I would like to show that Evans is committed to the idea that informational states do not

amount to conscious experience unless they serve as input to a conceptual system. This claim brings his

account of perception close to a conceptualist position, and clarifies what exactly is at stake in the debate

between conceptualists and non-conceptualists.

2 The Relation between Informational States and Thoughts: Evans' Notion of Experience

Evans holds that perceptual informational states are non-conceptual, and that “judgements based upon

such states necessarily involve conceptualization.”25 There is an important constraint on how we may (or

rather, may not) describe the process of conceptualization:

Although the subject’s judgements are based upon his experience (i.e. upon the unconceptualized information available to him), his judgements are not about the informational state. The process of conceptualization or judgement takes the subject from his being in one kind of informational state (with a content of a certain kind, namely, non-conceptual content) to his being in another kind of cognitive state (with a content of a different kind, namely, conceptual content).26

This passage certainly says what being based upon does not mean: judgments are not about informational

states; they are about the world. Evans objects to the idea that we have access to our mental

representations of objects, that when we think about objects, we “read” perceptual representations of

them. He says:

24 Cf. Tye 2006, 507: “On the usual understanding of this thesis, a visual experience E has a nonconceptual content if and only if (i) E has correctness conditions ...” Cf. Bermúdez 2003a, 183-185, 195: “Conceptual and nonconceptual contents are distinguished not by whether they are representational, but according to how they represent.” Cf. as well Peacocke 1989, 317; Peacocke 1991, 131; Peacocke 1998, 381; Peacocke 2001a, 240; Peacocke 2001b, 609. Cf. Gendler & Hawthorne 2006, 14: “Those who hold that there is non-conceptual content maintain that there are mental states which represent the world, even though their subject lacks the concepts that would enable her to specify their content.” Cf. Heck 2000, 521; cf. VOR 226; cf. Gunther 2003, 4-5. 25 VOR 227. 26 VOR 227.

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One commits the homunculus fallacy when one attempts to explain what is involved in a subject's being related to objects in the external world by appealing to the existence of an inner situation which recapitulates the essential features of the original situation to be explained—by introducing a relation between the subject and inner objects of essentially the same kind as the relation existing between the subject and outer objects.27

The homunculus fallacy unnecessarily reproduces the perceived object in a perceptual representation, and

makes that representation the object that the thought is directed at. What Evans says here, and in various

other passages, is that informational states do not become objects for us—when we think about an object

that we perceive, we think about that object, and not about the informational state representing it.28

Central to this criticism is the claim that we are not aware of informational representations: “... in a state of

information on the basis of which a subject may ascribe to himself an experience as of seeing, say, a tree,

what he observes (if anything) is only the tree, not his own informational state.”29 Evans says that we

“have” information, or are “in” informational states, as opposed to reading or looking at information:

“Note: the subject has this information, he does not confront it on an inner screen.”30

In VOR, this criticism seems to go hand in hand with the claim that unconceptualized informational

states are not conscious and only become conscious when they are available to the subject of thought. For

example, Evans remarks that informational states “are not ipso facto perceptual experiences―that is, states of a

conscious subject,”31 and holds that “we can speak of the information being 'accessible' to the subject, and,

indeed, of the existence of conscious experience”32 only once informational states have been

conceptualized. However, he also says that “we may regard a perceptual experience as an informational

27 MQ 397-398. The passage continues: “Thus, we start by wondering what is involved in a subject’s gaining knowledge of the spatial relations of outer objects, and we appeal, quite correctly, to an inner, psychological, state―a perceptual experience ‘of items disposed in the visual field’. We cannot then go on to take the ‘visual field’ description literally, by supposing that there are certain items which in fact stand in spatial relations. For the question arises again: how are we to understand the subject’s capacity to gain knowledge of these relations?” (MQ 397-398) 28 Cf. VOR 158: “… although it is true that our intuitive concept requires a subject of experience to have thoughts, it is not thoughts about the experience that matter, but thoughts about the world.” Cf. as well: “... if in perception anything is before the mind, it is the public objects themselves, not some internal representative of them.” (Appendix to chapter 6, VOR 199) 29 VOR 230; cf. as well VOR 231: “For what we are aware of, when we know that we see a tree, is nothing but a tree.” 30 MQ 398. Cf. as well VOR 227: the subject’s “… internal [informational] state cannot in any sense become an object to him. (He is in it.)” Cf. as well VOR 231: “... those inner states of the subject that we spoke of cannot intelligibly be regarded as objects of his internal gaze.” 31 VOR 157. 32 VOR 227.

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state of the subject.”33 It seems that Evans claims both that informational states are perceptual

experiences and that they are not perceptual experiences, which would, of course, be inconsistent.

In interpreting Evans, McDowell resolves this issue by suggesting that for Evans, “a state of the

perceptual informational system counts as an experience only if its non-conceptual content is available ...

to a faculty of spontaneity.”34 In Evans' terminology, this means that an informational state can be an

experience if it is available to our conceptual system. McDowell’s reading of Evans leads to a distinction

between two meanings of “informational state.” Informational states considered as such (“ipso facto”) are

not conscious, and thus do not amount to experience, while informational states insofar as they are

available to the conceptual system are conscious, and thus can be called “experiences.” That it is possible

to make sense of Evans' terminology in this way shows that Evans views consciousness as a mark of the

conceptual, which blurs the differences between his view and McDowell’s: McDowell holds that concepts

are employed in perception—he argues, against Evans, that a seeming “is already itself a mode of actual

operation of conceptual capacities.”35 But if Evans says that non-conceptual content is only experience

when it is available to spontaneity, then that criticism seems to lose its force, and it is hard to see what

might be the point of contention between McDowell and Evans.

The issue, expressed in McDowell-Kantian terminology, comes down to this: McDowell insists that

receptivity is “not even notionally separable” from spontaneity.36 However, Evans, as McDowell correctly

33 VOR 226. 34 M&W 49. McDowell identifies the problem in lecture III of Mind and World, where he ascribes two different notions of experience to Evans: one of experience in a narrow sense, involving the Kantian idea of spontaneity (an idea that involves concept-use and consciousness; cf. M&W 50), and one of experience as non-conceptual (cf. M&W 55: McDowell claims that, according to Evans, experience, considered in itself, is “blind.”) 35 M&W 62. 36 M&W 51: “… we must not suppose that receptivity makes an even notionally separable contribution to its co-operation with spontaneity.” Cf. as well CPE 205: “We must see our way to not needing to give an account of how concepts and intuitions are brought into alignment.” McDowell refers to Kant’s famous remark at the beginning of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories: “intuitions without concepts are blind.” (CPR A51/B75; cf. M&W 52). In the Introduction to Essays on Nonconceptual Content, Gunther calls this claim the “doctrine of conceptualism” (Gunther 2003, 1). However, if conceptualists appeal to the claim that intuitions without concepts are blind as an argument for the nonexistence of non-conceptual content (McDowell speaks of a “Kantian attack on the Myth of the Given” (M&W 52)), the non-conceptualist can reply by invoking Kant's intuition as a precursor of non-conceptual content, and pointing out the obvious mistake in concluding, from “x is blind”: “x does not exist.” This step is dubious, to say the least―whatever “intuitions without concepts are blind” means, it certainly does not entail that intuitions do not exist. McDowell fails to recognize that if Kant is a conceptualist, then he is a conceptualist for whom sensibility does make a “notionally separable contribution to its cooperation with spontaneity” (M&W 51; cf. CPR A50ff, B74ff). Thus it seems that both conceptualists and non-conceptualists can appropriate Kant for their means. (Robert Hanna

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observes, maintains that “the independent operations of the informational system figure ... as a separable

contribution made by receptivity to its co-operation with spontaneity.”37 Evans does assume

informational states “ipso facto”—McDowell does not. This raises the following question: Evans holds

that pre-conceptualized informational states do not amount to conscious experience.38 Why then not just

say that perceptual experience, for all we know, is conceptual? What is Evans' motivation for maintaining

that human beings can be in states with non-conceptual content?

3 Why Non-conceptual Content?

Evans' theory of reference is peculiar in that it is not only concerned with referring utterances but

also with referential thought, or, in other words, not only with talking but also with thinking about objects

in the world.39 Specifically, he wants to explain the phenomenon of a Russellian thought (a thought only

possible in the presence of the object to which it refers). In 3.1, I show that this plan motivates both the

causal and the representational feature of informational states, and argue that it does not deliver a

successful basis for non-conceptualism, because it does not support the assumption that perception

contains a non-conceptual element. In 3.2, I consider a common argument for non-conceptual content

that Evans employs, concerning the specificity of color perception. I argue that this argument does not

holds that “... Kant's theory of intuition is the hidden historical origin of both sides of the debate between conceptualists and non-conceptualists” (Hanna 2006, 90f).) Such an appropriation is not unproblematic on either side, of course, since Kant's concepts and intuitions operate within a framework that is very different from the contemporary debate in that it presupposes the subjectivity of space and time. 37 M&W 51. 38 I have said that in VOR, this claim seems to go hand in hand with the attack on introspection. However, it is important to note that these are two independent issues. Evans' criticism of introspection concerns the question whether we are aware of mental representations. Whether we are aware of the objects we perceive when we are in preconceptualized informational states is a different question. Evans' stand on the introspection issue is a valid point, and it is a point that does not distinguish between the non-conceptual and the conceptual—we are not aware of any kind of mental representation. However, Evans also holds that perception only involves awareness when informational states are conceptualized. Preconceptualized informational states (informational states “ipso facto”) are not conscious: we would not be aware of the object of perception if the informational state was not “input” to the conceptual system. Demonstrative thoughts are conscious in the sense that we are aware of the object we are thinking about, and in this sense consciousness is associated with thoughts, and not with informational states, on Evans' view. This is a different point, and an unfortunate one to make for the non-conceptualist. If the absence of awareness is what defines non-conceptual content, then conceptualism seems pragmatically convincing, and non-conceptualism becomes uninteresting. I think that non-conceptualists should avoid this line of thought. 39 Cf. VOR 171: “… the notion of understanding a reference of a certain type is a more fundamental notion than the notion of making a reference of that type, because of the possibility of exploiting an established device of reference in order to manifest the intention to be understood in a certain way, when one is not in a position to understand one’s own words in that way …” Cf. VOR 92 as well. One might say that Evans is concerned with referring utterances insofar as they express thoughts about the world.

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only fail to provide a notion of non-conceptual content as clearly non-conceptual, but even suggests that

non-conceptual content has the same kind of structure as conceptual content. I conclude that if non-

conceptualists want to maintain that non-conceptual content has correctness conditions, they need to

describe it in a way that shows a clear and interesting difference from conceptual content, in order to give

meaning to the distinction between the conceptual and the non-conceptual.

3.1 Russellian Thoughts

A central feature of Evans’ approach to explaining reference is his claim that there are Russellian

singular terms40—terms that only have a sense if there is an object in the world that they refer to. Evans’

focus on the understanding of a referring utterance leads him from the notion of a Russellian singular term

to the notion of a Russellian thought, i.e. a thought “... of such a kind that it simply could not exist in the

absence of the object or objects which it is about.”41 Such a thought is only possible if there is a referent

corresponding to the singular term that would be used in an utterance expressing this thought. Evans

takes the occurrence of Russellian thoughts as a phenomenon to be explained: “… we need an explanation

of exactly how it is that perceiving something makes a thought of a certain kind possible.”42 The notion of

a perceptual informational state is motivated by this phenomenon: a Russellian thought has to be based on

exactly such a state, i.e. on a state that presupposes the existence of the object it is derived from.43

More precisely, within Evans' characterization of informational states, the indexical or causal feature is

motivated by the phenomenon of a Russellian thought. The causal connection between informational

state and object secures the existence of the object referred to and thus shows how there can be Russellian

thoughts. However, I have shown that Evans also describes non-conceptual content as iconic—similar to

40 Cf. VOR 71: “… a term is a Russellian singular term if and only if it is a member of a category of singular terms such that nothing is said by someone who utters a sentence containing such a term unless the term has a referent … To say that nothing has been said in a particular utterance is, quite generally, to say that nothing constitutes understanding the utterance.” 41 VOR 71. Cf. VOR 73: “... in the case where the subject does perceive an object, there is available to him a thought with a content of a certain type, and no thought with a content of this type is available when there is no object which the subject is perceiving.” Evans also calls thoughts that are based on perceptual information “demonstrative thoughts” (cf. VOR 72, 78, 173). 42 VOR 143. 43 Cf. VOR 72f.

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the object it is derived from. This aspect, insofar as it expresses the representational character of the

perceptual state, seems to do the work of explaining how there can be thoughts—in general, or insofar as

they are thoughts, not insofar as they are Russellian thoughts—based on perception.44 Evans' informational

states seem to function as a middle ground between a causal and an epistemic level of perception, thus

enabling him to provide a clearer explanation of how thoughts are related to objects.45 But such a project

cannot justify the assumption of non-conceptual representational states.

This deserves some explanation: In section 1 I showed that Evans describes non-conceptual content

as representational and thereby distinguishes it from sensation. Evans criticizes the belief-sensation

opposition when he describes informational states as “seemings:”

… the subject would have been regarded as receiving data, intrinsically without objective content, into which he was supposed to read the appropriate objective significance …. … the traditional conception gets things impossibly the wrong way round. The only events that can conceivably be regarded as data for a conscious, reasoning subject are seemings—events, that is, already imbued with (apparent) objective significance ….46

We thus have to correct the common misunderstanding that non-conceptual content is opposed to

thought content in the same way that sensation is opposed to belief. The opposition of sensation or

“pure” perception (reminiscent of Kant’s pure manifold of intuition) to conceptual perception, or

perception as, does not capture what Evans is after. Criticism of that opposition, for example as an attack

44 Note that Evans criticizes the “Photograph Model,” a theory of reference according to which demonstrative thoughts can be explained in purely causal terms. He says that this theory contradicts Russell's Principle, the claim that “in order to have a thought about a particular object, you must know which object it is about which you are thinking” (VOR 74; cf. as well VOR 89). Thus, according to Evans, a causal relation to the object does not suffice for an explanation of how thoughts can refer to perceived objects. While he uses the example of a photograph—a representation which is causally related to its object—to illustrate informational content, he focuses on the representational aspect of photographs. I think that this feature is supposed to do justice to Russell's Principle: “the notion of an information-based thought involves a duality of two factors: on the one hand, the subject’s possession of information derived from an object …; and, on the other hand, the subject’s satisfaction of the requirement imposed by Russell’s Principle—his identification of the object which his thought concerns” (VOR 138, Appendix to chapter 5; cf. VOR 83 as well). 45 This may seem like a smart move: If one is going to explain how we think about objects in the world, to say that thoughts about the world are based on other representational states seems more promising than simply to state that a causal relation to an object can somehow ground a thought about that object. Nevertheless, I do not think that such an approach is obviously successful. For example, one might object that Evans' middle ground is only a middle ground because he simply ascribes both causal and representational features to it. However, whether or not Evans can explain how demonstrative thoughts are based on perception is not my main concern in this paper. Rather, I would like to show that Evans' plan to explain how demonstrative thoughts are based on perception is not a good motivation for being a non-conceptualist. 46 VOR 123. Cf. as well Molyneux's Question, where Evans explicitly distinguishes between sensation and perception: “It is unacceptable to argue from the successiveness of sensation to the successiveness of perception.” (MQ 368)

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on the “Myth of the Given,”47 is therefore likely to miss the point if applied to Evans' non-conceptualism,

or, for that matter, to any other version of non-conceptualism that presents non-conceptual content as

representational. However, conceptualists address non-conceptual content as non-representational for a

reason. They maintain that the possibility of representation and misrepresentation is inextricably linked

with the possession and employment of concepts—that what is not conceptual cannot be

representational.48 And if this is explicitly argued, it is a vital issue; if the non-conceptualist does not

respond to this challenge then non-conceptualism is bound to fail.

I think that the non-conceptualist's credibility in this debate depends to a considerable extent on his

motivation for ascribing correctness conditions to non-conceptual content. Evans' motivation is not a

good one because it stresses what non-conceptual and conceptual content have in common, and thus runs

the risk of making non-conceptual content a redundant element in a story about perception and thought.

Evans regards informational states as a middle ground between the causal aspects of perception and the

epistemic aspects of thought—this invites the response that such a middle ground explains nothing, that it

simply reiterates something already accounted for on the level of thought. An account of how thoughts

are based on perception needs to make sense of two facts: that the perceived objects play a causal role for

perception, and that thoughts about them can be correct or incorrect. It seems unnecessary to introduce

another level of representations, about which we can then also say that they are correct or incorrect.49 But

47 Cf. M&W 62f: McDowell claims that Evans' account of non-conceptual content falls into the “Myth of the Given.” The term was coined by Wilfrid Sellars in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (which was originally called The Myth of the Given: Three Lectures on Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind) (cf. EPM 13). 48 In McDowell's case, this claim follows from two assumptions: that all conscious experience is conceptual, and that only conscious experience is representational. Therefore, only conceptual content can be representational. (Cf. M&W 47: “… it is only because experience involves capacities belonging to spontaneity that we can understand experience as awareness,” and M&W 52, where McDowell suggests that what is “blind” cannot be representational.) Cf. Peacocke's conceptualist position in Sense and Content (Peacocke 1983, 19f): “... no one can have an experience with a given representational content unless he possesses the concepts from which that content is built up: an experience cannot represent the world to the subject of experience as being a certain way if he is not capable of grasping what that way is.” Cf. Chakrabarti 1998, 322: “Concepts do open up the possibility of error, for they make truth possible. The mythical blind or raw intuitions which were supposed to be preconceptually received would not have given us any truer picture of reality. They would have given us no picture at all.” 49 Returning to the semiotic description of Evans’ position which I suggested above, it seems that his plan (to explain how thoughts about objects can be based on perception) requires a symbolic relation to the object (provided by conceptual content) in addition to the indexical one (provided by non-conceptual content). The usefulness of the iconic relation between informational state and object for this project becomes questionable—it seems that one does not need iconicity to explain intentionality. This thought is a challenge to non-conceptualism, because it calls into question the representational character of

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if we subtract representationality from Evans' informational states, then all we are left with is the causal

connection to the perceived object—the notion of non-conceptual content is lost.

Evans' project does not demand a satisfying notion of the non-conceptual—instead, it calls for a

characterization of non-conceptual content that makes it similar to thought. I have expressed this problem

by saying that Evans cannot justify the assumption that human perception involves non-conceptual

content—in other words, he cannot motivate non-conceptual content. But even if we were able to

motivate non-conceptualism in this way, the notion of non-conceptual content that would result from this

would be a very weak one. The minimal requirement for a non-conceptualist position should be that it

supplies a notion of non-conceptual content that is clearly different from conceptual content. It is not

clear that Evans' characterization of informational states can pass this test. His remarks in VOR have even

inspired an idea which suggests that non-conceptual and conceptual content have the same kind of

structure: the idea that perception is more specific than thought.

3.2 Fineness of Grain

Non-conceptualists often appeal to the fineness of grain of perceptual experience. For example, they

claim that we can distinguish more color shades in perception than in thought, that conceptualization

involves a loss of specificity. In Evans’ words:

… no account of what it is to be in a non-conceptual informational state can be given in terms of dispositions to exercise concepts unless those concepts are assumed to be endlessly fine-grained; and does this make sense? Do we really understand the proposal that we have as many colour concepts as there are shades of colour that we can sensibly discriminate?50

The question suggests that while our conceptual resources are limited, our receptivity is not. Thus, a

a non-conceptual element in perception. For Evans, this means that, in order to account for the phenomenon of a Russellian thought, only an information-link on the one hand and a conceptual element on the other hand are necessary. This is a general point which critically applies to any version of representational non-conceptual content—whether formulated in terms of similarity or not—which is motivated by considerations concerning the relations between perception and thought. 50 VOR 229. Note that in assuming that we can compare the number of color concepts we have with the number of color shades we can sensibly discriminate, Evans presupposes that we have knowledge about the objects of our preconceptualized informational states, which seems to be at odds with his insistence that those states do not amount to conscious experience (cf. VOR 227, cf. p.8 above).

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perceiver will not be able to apply a concept to every shade she can perceive.51 Since it is impossible to

represent perceptual content conceptually with the same degree of detail or specificity that is present in the

perceptual content itself, we have to introduce a level of non-conceptual content when describing

perceptual experience.52

There has been a debate about the question whether this argument is convincing, which has mainly

focused on the application of demonstrative concepts to color shades. John McDowell claims that any

perceived color shade can be captured by a demonstrative concept 'that shade:' “if we have the concept of

a shade, our conceptual powers are fully adequate to capture our colour experience in all its determinate

detail.”53 This means that perception does not outstrip our conceptual resources; therefore, we are not

justified in assuming a level of non-conceptual content in perception. Christopher Peacocke has replied to

this by using the counter-example of a perceiver who does not possess the concept 'shade' but is

nevertheless able to distinguish between different shades in perception.54 McDowell's next move is to

claim that “unsupplemented” perceptual demonstrative concepts (such as 'that') capture our experience of

color shades. Peacocke objects that 'that' is too indeterminate to fix a reference, and thus does not belong

on the conceptual level.55 Interestingly, however, he thinks that even if McDowell was right here, this

would not settle the issue:

This point does not count unequivocally in support of the conceptualist. If the ways which contribute to the individuation of both the unsupplemented and the supplemented demonstratives are themselves nonconceptual, there remain nonconceptual representational features of experience.56

51 For example, cf. Bermúdez 2003a, 185; Tye 2005, 13, 18 (n.21), and Tye 2006, 519. 52 In another sense, non-conceptual content is sometimes said to be more “coarse-grained” than conceptual content. According to Tye, to say that non-conceptual representations are coarse-grained is to say that they “cannot represent the same particulars, properties, and relations arranged in the same possible ... states of affairs and yet differ in content.” (Tye 2005, 4; cf. Tye 2006, 508-509, as well). This point is independent of the argument I consider here: cf. Tye 2005, 13: “To say that the content of an experience of a shade of color is coarse-grained ... is to say something about how its individuation conditions are fixed by sets of possible worlds or by arrangements of properties and relations in possible states of affairs. It is not to say anything about the kinds of properties (or relations) represented. Patently, experiences having contents with such coarse-grained individuation conditions can nonetheless differ in virtue of representing different, minimal shades of color.” 53 M&W 58; cf. as well McDowell: Reply, 415. 54 Cf. Peacocke 1998, 382; cf. Peacocke 2001a, 245. Cf. Peacocke 1989, 306: “I will defend the distinctness of these manners of perception from thought-contents even in the case of such perceptually based demonstrative thought-components of the form “that distance” or “that direction.”” 55 Cf. Peacocke 1998, 382f. 56 Peacocke 2001b, 611.

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Here Peacocke says that even if our conceptual resources cut as finely as our perceptual resources, this

does not prove conceptualism; there could still be a level of non-conceptual content. I agree; but this does

not mean that the fineness of grain argument is effective against the conceptualist. Rather, the fineness of

grain argument does not “count unequivocally in support of the” non-conceptualist, either: McDowell is

right when he says that “fineness of grain is no threat to the thesis that the content of experience is

conceptual.”57

It is not clear who wins this dispute, and it does not matter—the fineness of grain argument misses

the point. Even if it is successful, it cannot establish non-conceptualism. The conceptualist is free to

agree that the contents of perception are more specific than the contents of thought—this will not

establish the existence of non-conceptual content, because it does not supply a notion of non-conceptual

content as sufficiently different from conceptual content. A distinction between the contents of

perception and thought in terms of degrees of specificity implies that both contents differ merely in how

specific they are. Specificity is a matter of degree; conceptualization becomes an omission of distinctions.

On this picture, the only difference between the constituents of perceptual content and the constituents of

thoughts is that there are more of the first than of the second.58 The idea that the contents of perception

are more specific than the contents of thought is particularly unfortunate for the non-conceptualist,

because it suggests that non-conceptual and conceptual content have the same kind of structure.59 The

fineness of grain-argument does not justify a distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual

content—it even undermines non-conceptualism, and should be abandoned.60

57 M&W 58, n.15. 58 It is telling that Peacocke was already convinced that perception is more specific than thought in Sense and Content (cf. Peacocke 1983, 11: “Our perceptual experience is always of a more determinate character than our observational concepts which we might use in characterizing it”). This is perfectly compatible with his conceptualist position in Sense and Content, insofar as the specificity of perception does not make a good case for non-conceptualism. 59 Unfortunately, the idea that non-conceptual content is more specific than conceptual content seems to be rather influential within the non-conceptualist camp (cf., for example, Peacocke's claim that there are more manners of perception than modes of presentation (cf. Peacocke 1986, 6-7; cf. Peacocke 1989, 304)). 60 A closely related argument concerns the richness of perceptual experience: perception is supposed to be richer than thought. Both ideas, fineness of grain and richness, are contained in Dretske's remarks about the loss of information that is involved in conceptualization. Dretske states that in the process of conceptualization, the output is always quantitatively less than the input,

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I have suggested that Evans does not fulfill the minimal requirement for a non-conceptualist position,

to provide a characterization of non-conceptual content as interestingly different from conceptual content.

One might think that Evans does supply such a notion when he compares informational states to

photographs (cf. 1 above)—after all, he has something substantial to say about informational content: that

it is similar to its object. I do not think that this feature can successfully distinguish non-conceptual from

conceptual content. The kind of similarity that Evans seems to have in mind—an isomorphism between

the relations among the constituents of mental representations on the one hand and the relations among

the perceived objects on the other hand (cf. footnote 9 above)—might be applied to conceptual content as

well: the relations between the concepts we employ in thinking about objects could correspond to the

relations between objects thought about. Moreover, Evans applies the idea that informational content is

more specific than conceptual content directly to the photograph analogy: he says that the content of a

photograph “can be specified conceptually only with some loss” and that “the content of even the simplest

photograph will be much more complex than” its conceptualization. Thus, we should expect the

informational content itself to have essentially the same structure as its conceptualization—the only

difference would be that there are fewer constituents on the conceptual level.61

Jeff Speaks provides a helpful tool for understanding why non-conceptualists run into problems in

motivating the notion of non-conceptual content. He distinguishes between absolute and relative non-

conceptualism:

A mental state has absolutely nonconceptual content if and only if that mental state has a different kind of content than do beliefs, thoughts, and so on. ... A mental state of an agent A (at a time t) has relatively nonconceptual content if and only if the content of that mental state

and that sensation is informationally profuse and specific: he claims that sensation contains “finer details” and “more subtle discriminations” than beliefs, and that perceptual information is “embedded within a richer matrix of information” (Dretske 2003, 28ff, 38). While the fineness of grain argument concerns higher specificity on one dimension (e.g. color), the richness argument simply says that perception contains much information simultaneously, and that the perceiver does not possess concepts for all of that information (cf. Tye 2005, 13; cf. SC 68, cf. Heck 2000, 489f). Just like the fineness of grain argument, it can only establish a quantitative, but not a qualitative difference between the constituents of perception and thought, and thus does not justify a distinction between non-conceptual and conceptual content. Michael Tye correctly sums up this issue: “the thesis of richness alone does not rule out the possibility that visual experiences are conceptual states whose conceptual contents contain more information than the belief-forming processes can handle under certain constrained circumstances ...” (Tye 2005, 13; cf. as well Tye 2006, 519). 61 Cf. VOR 125, n.9.

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includes contents not grasped (possessed) by A at t.62

Absolute non-conceptualism tells us that non-conceptual content is different in kind from conceptual

content.63 Relative non-conceptualism does not tell us anything about what non-conceptual content is—

instead, it tells us something about the relation between non-conceptual content and conceptual content:

that non-conceptual content is in some sense not accessible to our conceptual abilities. While this

distinction has received some attention recently, it seems to me that its consequences are not taken

seriously.64 What one should say here is that relative non-conceptualism is not non-conceptualism at all: it

does not provide a convincing notion of non-conceptual content. Unfortunately, the typical definition of non-

conceptual content faces exactly this problem—for example:

The general thought is that it is theoretically legitimate to refer to mental states which represent the world but which do not require the bearer of those mental states to possess the concepts required to specify the way in which they represent the world... A nonconceptual content can be attributed to a creature without thereby attributing to that creature mastery of the concepts required to specify that content.65

The idea is that someone can be in states with non-conceptual content without being able to grasp or

employ the concepts that would be involved in articulating that content. According to this definition, non-

conceptual content would not be non-conceptual content (and thus would be conceptual content), if the

person in question grasped or exercised the relevant concepts. Which concepts an individual grasps, or

exercises, is a contingent matter. What is non-conceptual content for one person or at one time, can turn

out to be conceptual content for another person, or at another time. The definition does not exclude the

62 Speaks 2005, 360. Heck and Byrne express the same distinction in terms of content versus state nonconceptualism. According to content non-conceptualism, non-conceptual content cannot be the content of a belief because it is of a different kind than contents of beliefs are. According to state non-conceptualism, non-conceptual content is not a special kind of content—it is called non-conceptual because it is the content of a mental state that someone can be in without possessing all the concepts necessary to characterize the content of that state (cf. Heck 2000, 485, cf. Byrne 2005, 231ff). 63 Cf. Speaks above: “a different kind of content.” I think we should say that non-conceptual content should be “significantly,” or “interestingly” different from conceptual content, to warrant the introduction of an independent level of content. 64 Bermúdez' article What Is at Stake in the Debate on Nonconceptual Content? (2007) is an exception (see below). 65 Bermúdez 2003a, 184. Cf. Bermúdez 2003b, 293-294: “... a particular content is taken to be a nonconceptual content if, and only if, it can be attributed to a creature without thereby attributing to that creature mastery of the concepts required to specify that content.” Cf. Tye 2006, 507: “On the usual understanding of this thesis, a visual experience E has a nonconceptual content if and only if (i) E has correctness conditions; (ii) the subject of E need not possess the concepts used in a canonical specification of E’s correctness conditions.” (Cf. Tye 1995, 139, and Tye 2005, 223, as well.) Cf. Gendler & Hawthorne, 14: “Those who hold that there is non-conceptual content maintain that there are mental states which represent the world, even though their subject lacks the concepts that would enable her to specify their content.”

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possibility that the very same content can be both non-conceptual and conceptual; it does not distinguish

non-conceptual content from conceptual content.66

In a recent article, What Is at Stake in the Debate on Nonconceptual Content? (2007), Bermúdez has

acknowledged this problem:

Any plausible version of nonconceptualism is committed both to the thesis that perception is concept-independent and to the claim that this concept-independence is a function of the distinctive type of content enjoyed by perceptual experiences. ... the state view proposes a principled distinction between concept-dependent state-types and concept-independent state-types. Plainly, proponents of the distinction owe us an account of where it comes from. Why is it the case that beliefs do, while perceptions do not, respect the conceptual constraint? The most obvious answer is that the concept-independence of perceptual states is a function of their distinctive type of content. This answer is of course not available to the state view theorist...67

To say that we should be absolute non-conceptualists is to make the obvious point that claims about the

nature of non-conceptual content are logically prior to claims about its relations to conceptual content, and

that a description of the features of non-conceptual content should thus precede any such claim. Before

we can discuss such questions as whether non-conceptual content can be captured by our conceptual

abilities, whether non-conceptual states can justify beliefs, or whether perceptual content is independent of

our conceptual resources, we need a satisfying distinction between non-conceptual and conceptual

content.

Insofar as Evans' notion of non-conceptual content is motivated by his plan to explain the

phenomenon of a Russellian thought, it cannot be convincing. An interest in explaining how it is that we

think about the world is not a good motivation for being a non-conceptualist, because a notion of

66 Not only is it a contingent matter which concepts an individual possesses, but it is also a contingent matter which concepts are involved in the articulation of a given content (it depends on which concepts the person articulating the content possesses, and chooses to use). If we think that there are indefinitely many descriptions of any given experience, then, according to the definition above, every experience is non-conceptual, since there will always be concepts that could be used in the description of the experience but that the experiencer does not possess. The definition allows us to characterize any content as non-conceptual. (As Garcia-Carpintero (2006, 66) points out, “... every content is nonconceptual, in that sense, relatively to some theory ...”) Cf. Heck 2000, 485, as well: “There is, on this view, … nothing unusual … about perceptual content.” Cf. as well Tye 2006, 5: “It appears, then, that, given the usual understanding of the thesis of nonconceptual content, as far as the nature of content itself goes, there need be no distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual content.” Cf. Tye 2006, 507 as well: “The first point to note here is that the thesis, as just stated, does not preclude the nonconceptual content of a visual experience from being the content of a thought of another subject.” 67 Bermúdez 2007, 67f. Bermúdez uses Heck's terminology of “state” versus “content” non-conceptualism (cf. footnote 62 above). Cf. as well Bermúdez 2007, 55, and 69: “... the state view does not bear serious scrutiny.”

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representational non-conceptual content is not necessary for such a project.68 A better strategy for non-

conceptualists seems to be this: one has to make non-conceptual content a necessary element of some

story about perception, and distinguish it from conceptual content before considering any kind of relation

between perception and thought. Non-conceptualists who have a reason to assume the existence of non-

conceptual content on grounds that have nothing to do with the relations between perception and

thought, will be in a better position to argue that conceptuality is not a necessary condition for

representationality, and thus defend the representationality of non-conceptual content.69 To conclude, I

will briefly indicate how one can exploit an aspect of Evans' position for developing a more convincing

version of non-conceptualism. I have so far ignored this feature of Evans' account, because it is at odds

with his overall view (cf. discussion below).

3.3 A Better Motivation for Non-conceptualism: the Animal Argument

To explain the phenomenon of a Russellian thought is not Evans' only reason for assuming that human

perception involves non-conceptual content. He also wants to account for an early stage of human intellectual

development. He holds that informational states are more primitive than conceptual states:

… I do not think we can properly understand the mechanism whereby we gain information … unless we realize that it is already operative at a stage of human intellectual development that pre-dates the applicability of the more sophisticated notion [belief].70

Informational states are more primitive than beliefs in the sense that they belong to an earlier stage of

cognitive development, phylogenetically understood.71 I suggest to read Evans' remarks that the

68 I think that this point applies to any approach that concerns relations between perception and thought—for example, the idea that perception justifies belief, the idea that we have to refer to perception in order to provide possession conditions for observational concepts (cf. Peacocke 1991, 130, and SC 61), or the idea that non-conceptual content can explain how we learn concepts (cf. MQ 377: “spatial concepts can be learned through the subject’s capacity to perceive spatially”). 69 Of course, it would still be necessary to directly attack the claim that representationality requires conceptuality, and the framework within which this claim acquires its meaning: the distinction between a sub-personal and a personal explanation of experience (cf. Dennett 1969, CPE, Bermúdez 2000, Hornsby 2000, Davies 2000, Elton 2000). I think that non-conceptualists need to argue against the association of the non-conceptual with the sub-personal and make credible the idea of a non-conceptual person. Evans' account of non-conceptual perceptual abilities, such as the ability to locate an object in space (cf. VOR 146, 154f), might be helpful here. Space does not permit me to explore this issue further. 70 VOR 124. 71 The animal-argument can also be applied to very young children (cf. Cussins 2003, 134; cf. Bermúdez 2003a, 189ff). For

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informational system is the “substratum of our cognitive lives”72 and that the “operations of the informational

system are more primitive” than a “more sophisticated cognitive state” (a belief)73 in this light, i.e. as comments

from an evolutionary perspective. He says that non-conceptual perceptual abilities are present in organisms that

do not possess conceptual capacities.74 This suggests a quite promising argument for the existence of non-

conceptual content.

Very briefly, and in Evans' terminology, this argument says that we share perceptual states with certain

animals, and that since animals do not possess conceptual abilities,75 these states have to be non-conceptual. We

might call this the “animal argument.” It depends on some strong assumptions, such as the claim that non-

linguistic creatures do not possess conceptual abilities, the claim that animal perception is representational, and,

most importantly, the claim that human and animal perception share a common element. I think that it is

possible to defend these assumptions.76 However, it is important to realize what exactly the argument, if

convincing, can accomplish: while it motivates non-conceptualism, it does not provide a characterization of non-

conceptual content, and has to be supplemented with a characterization of non-conceptual content which clearly

distinguishes between the non-conceptual and conceptual levels of human cognition.

Since the animal argument suggests a characterization of non-conceptual content solely with respect to

animal perception, and thus in isolation from conceptual content, it promises to be less problematic than other

motivations for non-conceptualism; misguided attempts to define non-conceptual content by its relations to Evans, however, the example of very young children cannot be a reason for assuming states with non-conceptual content, since he characterizes them as “thinkers” (cf. VOR 117, n.43). 72 VOR 122. 73 VOR 124. 74 Cf. VOR 159: “... the concepts exercised in the thoughts are learned by an organism in which the links between sensory input and behaviour have already been established.” Cf. MQ 388 as well. Evans hints at an evolutionary explanation for this link:: “We can say, then, that auditory input—or rather that complex property of auditory input which encodes the direction of sound—acquires (non-conceptual) spatial content for an organism by being linked with behavioural output in, presumably, an advantageous way.” (VOR 156) Evans' interest in evolution seems to go hand in hand with an interest in a material explanation of perception. He describes informational states as “internal states which have a content by virtue of their phylogenetically more ancient connections with the motor system” (VOR 277), and claims that sensory input is “connected to behavioural dispositions ... perhaps in some phylogenetically more ancient part of the brain” (VOR 158). But the two aspects can certainly be separated, and the argument I propose does not have to appeal to material aspects of perception. 75 Bermúdez calls this premise the “Priority Thesis.” (Cf. Bermúdez 2003a, 192: “The Priority Thesis: Conceptual abilities are not available to nonlinguistic creatures.”) 76 For example, the second premise demands empirical support: does the way animals behave justify attributing to them perceptual states that are representational? The third premise is not an empirical claim—its force will depend on how convincing one finds a philosophical anthropology that refers to animals in order to elucidate our understanding of human beings and at the same time holds that we are animals.

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conceptual content will be cut off. The non-conceptual character of the primitive perceptual element would be

guaranteed by the initial description of the animal case.77

Note that such an argument is not available to Evans. He holds that the non-conceptual content of

animal perception is not the same as the non-conceptual content of human perception. Evans provides

two different accounts of the non-conceptual: one concerning the non-conceptual states of human

perception, which are part of a reasoning system, and one concerning the non-conceptual states of animal

perception, which are not. In our case, informational states are input to a concept-using system—and that,

apparently, makes all the difference, for Evans: because this is so, we can say, about human perception,

that the non-conceptual states it involves are representational. In the case of animals, there is no such

conceptual system, and thus the non-conceptual content of animal perception cannot be representational.78

The resulting picture is one of sensation on the one hand and conceptually enabled perception on the

77 Note that the non-conceptual content of animal perception has been discussed in relation to the “Autonomy Thesis”—the thesis that “it is possible for a creature to be in states with nonconceptual content, even though that creature possesses no concepts at all” (Bermúdez 2003a, 187; cf. Hamlyn 2003, 258 as well). In the animal argument I propose, non-conceptualism about animal perception follows from the fact that animals are not conceptual creatures—it does not have to be defended against the fact that they are not conceptual creatures. Given that they do not possess concepts, whether they can be in states with non-conceptual content (the Autonomy Thesis) is not an issue—instead, the argument says that, given that animals do not possess concepts, they have to be in non-conceptual states. Someone who defends the Autonomy Thesis presents an argument that proceeds in a different direction. For example, Bermúdez does this in order to extend the notion of non-conceptual content from human to animal perception. On his view, the assumption that humans are in perceptual states with non-conceptual content has already been justified by the phenomena of richness and fineness of grain of perception (cf. Bermúdez 2007, 55, 60ff). (This shows that Bermúdez does not view these arguments as problematic, although he criticizes relative non-conceptualism (cf. p.19f above).) He then proceeds to argue that the notion of non-conceptual content thus motivated can also be applied to creatures that do not possess concepts. 78 This becomes clear from Evans' treatment of space. He characterizes the ability to locate a perceived object in space as non-conceptual—for example, he says that it is a “fundamental perceptual skill” (VOR 146, cf. VOR 154f as well), and claims that a non-conceptual representation is a spatial representation, a “cognitive map,” which is “a representation in which the spatial relations of several distinct things are simultaneously represented” (VOR 151). More specifically, Evans says that information has to be specified in egocentric terms. The perceiver locates an object, or the source of a sound, in egocentric space, i.e. in a space that centers around himself: “The subject conceives himself to be in the centre of a space (at its point of origin), with its coordinates given by the concepts 'up' and 'down', 'left' and 'right', and 'in front' and 'behind'.” (VOR 153ff) Evans distinguishes egocentric from objective space, which does not center around the perceiver: “Each place is represented in the same way as every other; we are not forced, in expressing such thinking, to introduce any 'here' or 'there'. ... the thinking is truly objective—it is from no point of view.” (VOR 152) He claims that the ability to impose objective on egocentric space provides the subject with an adequate Idea of a perceived object (cf. VOR 168, 173). An adequate Idea is a component of a thought (cf. VOR 100, 102). According to this picture, the step from egocentric to objective space is the step from the non-conceptual to the conceptual level of cognition. What is important here is this: Evans claims that egocentric space would not be representational (and thus, would not be space after all) without objective space. Without a conceptual system, egocentric perception reduces to sensation: “the network of input-output connections which underlie the idea of an egocentric space could never be regarded as supporting a way of representing space (even egocentric space) if it could not be brought by the subject into coincidence with some such larger spatial representation of the world as is constituted by a cognitive map.... This means that he must be able to impose the objective way of thinking upon egocentric space.” (VOR 163) This means that according to Evans, we can ascribe representational informational states only to conceptual creatures.

23

other hand. Since on this picture non-conceptual content is not something we share with animals, Evans

cannot motivate the non-conceptual content of human perception via the animal argument. In order to

exploit the animal argument, we need to develop a unitary notion of non-conceptual content for both non-

conceptual and conceptual creatures.

24

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