The Non-conceptual Content of Perceptual Experience: Situation Dependence and Fineness of Grain

2001 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 601-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
SEAN D. KELLY
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Conceptual Content ◽  
Fineness Of Grain

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.

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.

Numerical symbols as explanations of human perceptual experience

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Barner
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Number Words ◽  
The World ◽  
Symbolic Systems ◽  
Perceptual Systems

Why did humans develop precise systems for measuring experience, like numbers, clocks, andcalendars? I argue that precise representational systems were constructed by earlier generationsof humans because they recognized that their noisy perceptual systems were not capturingdistinctions that existed in the world. Abstract symbolic systems did not arise from perceptualrepresentations, but instead were constructed to describe and explain perceptual experience. Byanalogy, I argue that when children learn number words, they do not rely on noisy perceptualsystems, but instead acquire these words as units in a broader system of procedures, whosemeanings are ultimately defined by logical relations to one another, not perception.

Getting Outside of Ourselves

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher McCarroll
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
The Self ◽  
Sources Of Information

This chapter provides an account of the spatial perspectival characteristics and the self-presence of remembering from-the-outside. The chapter develops the Constructive Encoding approach, according to which the context of encoding may play a role in the construction of observer perspectives. The Constructive Encoding approach recognizes the multiple and multiperspectival sources of information available during perception, and suggests that observer perspectives may be constructed from non-egocentric information available during perceptual experience. This chapter provides a way of understanding the idea that one need not see oneself from-the-outside in order to have a memory that is recalled from-the-outside. This chapter not only provides a better understanding of observer perspectives but also sheds light on the perspectival mind.

Attentional Engines

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William P. Seeley
Keyword(s):  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Abstract Objects ◽  
Cognitive Systems ◽  
Musical Expression ◽  
Broad Base ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Perceptual Psychology ◽  
Unique Source ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

What is it about art that can be so captivating? How is it that we find value in these often odd and abstract objects and events that we call artworks? My proposal is that artworks are attentional engines. They are artifacts that have been intentionally designed to direct attention to critical stylistic features that reveal their point, purpose, or meaning. My suggestion is that there is a lot that we can learn about art from interdisciplinary research focused on our perceptual engagement with artworks. These kinds of studies can reveal how we recognize artworks, how we differentiate them from other, more quotidian artifacts. In doing so they reveal how artworks function as a unique source of value. Our interactions with artworks draw on a broad base of shared artistic and cultural constitutive of different categories of art. Cognitive systems integrate this information into our experience of art, guiding attention, and shaping what we perceive. Our understanding and appreciation of artworks is therefore carried in our perceptual experience of them. Teasing out how this works can contribute valuable information to our philosophical understanding of art. Attentional Engines explores this interdisciplinary strategy for understanding art. It articulates a cognitivist theory of art grounded in perceptual psychology and the neuroscience attention and demonstrates its application to a range of puzzles in the philosophy of the arts, including questions about the nature of depiction, the role played by metakinesis in dance appreciation, the nature of musical expression, and the power of movies.

Direct Realism and Illusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Christopher Maloney
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Direct Realism ◽  
Perceptual Representation ◽  
Perceptual Error ◽  
Standard Response ◽  
Perceptual Representations ◽  
Ambiguous Stimuli ◽  
Physical Objects ◽  
Apparent Problem

The supposed problem of perceptual error, including illusion and hallucination, has led most theories of perception to deny formulations of direct realism. The standard response to this apparent problem adopts the mistaken presupposition that perception is indeed liable to error. However, the prevailing conditions of observation are themselves elements of perceptual representation, functioning in the manner of predicate modifiers. They ensure that the predicates applied in perceptual representations do indeed correctly attribute properties that perceived physical objects actually instantiate. Thus, perceptual representations are immune to misrepresentation of the sort misguidedly supposed by the spurious problem of perceptual misrepresentation. Granted the possibility that perceptual attribution admits of predicate modification, it is quite possible that perceptual experience permits both rudimentary and sophisticated conceptualization. Moreover, such treatment of perceptual predication rewards by providing an account of aspect alteration exemplified by perception of ambiguous stimuli.

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