Must Conceptually Informed Perceptual Experience Involve Non-Conceptual Content?

1996 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Sedivy
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Proper Part ◽  
Nonconceptual Content ◽  
Conceptual Content ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Empirical Thought ◽  
Mental Contents

The idea of nonconceptual contents proposes that there are mental contents at the level of the experiencing person that are individuated independently of ‘anything to do with the mind.’ Such contents are posited to meet a variety of theoretical and explanatory needs concerning concepts and conceptual mental contents which are individuated in terms having to do with the mind. So to examine the idea of nonconceptual content we need to examine whether we really need to posit such content and whether there is a coherent, viable way of doing so. I will examine the idea of nonconceptual contents by considering Christopher Peacocke's attempt, in his Study of Concepts, to posit such contents.Three principal kinds of considerations motivate positing non-conceptual content: epistemological, phenomenological, and explanatory-psychological. A theory of knowledge might posit nonconceptual content in order to show that our experience contains the justificatory base for empirical thought as its own proper part. Non-conceptual content might also be posited in order to account for the finely detailed or determinate phenomenological character of perceptual experience.

Philosophy

Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 24-68
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
David Hartley ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Contents

This chapter examines how the late seventeenth-century British philosophy of sensation, feeling, and selfhood responded to the challenges of mechanism with the idiom of the insensible. It shows how this idiom carries forward from John Locke and Robert Boyle to philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of sensibility, who use it to address a variety of problems. The consistent, Lockean element in these usages by David Hartley, Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and David Hume, Eliza Haywood and Adam Smith, is that they do not refer to mental contents. One does not hear of “insensible perceptions.” There are no “unconscious thoughts” or “unfelt sensations” in the British tradition surveyed here. Writers in this tradition rather describe insensible powers that affect the mind without themselves being mental. They are nonconscious, not unconscious. This is an implication carried by the idiom into articulations of quite a wide variety of other ideas. All of them indicate the persistent usefulness in philosophies of feeling of a stylistic gesture toward something beyond the reach of both feeling and philosophy.

Douglas Gordon and the Gallery of the Mind

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mind's Eye ◽  
Made In

Made in collaboration with Rufus Wainwright after the loss of his mother, Douglas Gordon’s Phantom (2011) engages gallery-goers in an embodied perceptual experience of the darkness of grief, which is felt as well as seen. And yet the titular phantom points to what ghosts embodied vision, making space for images of the mind’s eye. Lost love, mourned but also conjured back through memory, dream, or imagination, extends beyond the personal to include a bygone era of classical film. Phantom draws from and returns us to cinema, expanding the experience of the moving image through its insistence upon the importance of both what is present or visible in the gallery space and what exists in the liminal state of mental vision.

Perceptual Experience, Conscious Content, and Non-Conceptual Content

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uriah Kriegel ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Phenomenal Character ◽  
Representational Content ◽  
Conceptual Content ◽  
Perceptual Consciousness ◽  
The Face ◽  
Content Of Experience ◽  
Representational Approach

One of the promising approaches to the problem of perceptual consciousness has been the representational theory, or representationalism. The idea is to reduce the phenomenal character of conscious perceptual experiences to the representational content of those experiences. Most representationalists appeal specifically to non-conceptual content in reducing phenomenal character to representational content. In this paper, I discuss a series of issues involved in this representationalist appeal to non-conceptual content. The overall argument is the following. On the face of it, conscious perceptual experience appears to be experience of a structured world, hence to be at least partly conceptual. To validate the appeal to non-conceptual content, the representationalist must therefore hold that the content of experience is partly conceptual and partly non-conceptual. But how can the conceptual and the non-conceptual combine to form a single content? The only way to make sense of this notion, I argue, leads to a surprising consequence, namely, that the representational approach to perceptual consciousness is a disguised form of functionalism.

scholarly journals Re-examining Husserl’s Non-Conceptualism in the Logical Investigations

2019 ◽  
Vol 101 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chad Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Recent Trend ◽  
Perceptual Content ◽  
Conceptual Content ◽  
Logical Investigations ◽  
Hybrid View ◽  
Vicious Regress ◽  
Categorial Intuition ◽  
Conceptual Nature

Abstract A recent trend in Husserl scholarship takes the Logische Untersuchungen (LU) as advancing an inconsistent and confused view of the non-conceptual content of perceptual experience. Against this, I argue that there is no inconsistency about non-conceptualism in LU. Rather, LU presents a hybrid view of the conceptual nature of perceptual experience, which can easily be misread as inconsistent, since it combines a conceptualist view of perceptual content (or matter) with a non-conceptualist view of perceptual acts. I show how this hybrid view is operative in Husserl’s analyses of essentially occasional expressions and categorial intuition. And I argue that is also deployed in relation to Husserl’s analysis of the constitution of perceptual fullness, which allows it to avoid an objection raised by Walter Hopp – that the combination of Husserl’s analysis of perceptual fullness with conceptualism about perceptual content generates a vicious regress.

Plato’s Theaetetus

Classics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mi-Kyoung Lee
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Young Student ◽  
Philosophical Writing ◽  
Introductory Discussion ◽  
The Mind

Plato’s Theaetetus is a dialogue devoted to the question of what knowledge (epistêmê) is; the narrators recount a conversation that Socrates had the day before his trial with Theodorus of Cyrene, who teaches geometry at Athens, and his young student, Theaetetus, who would later go on to make some important mathematical discoveries. After some introductory discussion about what Socrates is looking for, Theaetetus proposes three definitions of knowledge, each of which is subjected to critical examination, and then rejected in turn: knowledge is perception (151e–186e), it is true opinion (187a–200d), or it is true opinion accompanied by a logos (200d–210a). The dialogue ends in aporia. The Theaetetus along with the Meno and Republic form the three most important works for understanding Plato’s epistemology and theory of knowledge. Because of its elenctic or dialectical character—in which the candidate definitions are rejected on the basis of problems or refutations based on the cooperative discussion between Socrates and Theaetetus—it is difficult to pronounce confidently what conclusions the reader is meant to draw, and what views, if any, Plato as the author of the dialogue holds. The dialogue is chock full of original ideas and arguments which would go on to have an enormous influence on later philosophers, including, for example, Socrates’ comparing himself as a philosopher-teacher to a midwife, the idea that knowledge is perception, the thesis of relativism, the thesis of radical metaphysical flux, the comparison of the mind to a wax block, etc. It is also a masterpiece of philosophical writing and often thought of along with the Phaedo and Republic as one of Plato’s most brilliant dialogues. For more on Plato, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Classics article “Plato.”

Objectivity, subjectivity and intersubjectivity

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-213
Author(s):  
Karolina Krawczak
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Conceptual Level ◽  
Conceptual Content ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Diachronic Changes

Subjectivity and intersubjectivity have long been recognized as central to the understanding of the relations between language, mind and society. They arise in an interactive world for the mind of the individual and shape his/her (inter)personal reality. In present-day linguistics, there are two major approaches to subjectivity. One is associated with Langacker and focuses on cognitive construal. The other framework, which was developed by Traugott, zooms in on diachronic changes on the conceptual level. Naturally, diachronic developments are intimately related to synchronic variation and the conceptual content of an utterance hinges on its presentation and perspectivization. This paper, therefore, argues that, rather than being discrepant and treating distinct phenomena, as is widely suggested (e.g. Brisard 2006; Nuyts 2001, 2012), the two frameworks can be reconciled. By so doing, the ensuing discussion yields an integrated view on objectivity and (inter)subjectivity, a view that will be organized around four main arguments.

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