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This chapter explores the ‘direct’ aspect of direct perceptual realism, and in particular, Kant's theory of non-conceptual perceptual content. A cognition is direct in the Kantian sense if and only if it refers ‘immediately’ (unmittelbar) to an object, and in turn, a cognition refers immediately to an object if and only if it is non-epistemic (belief-independent), non-conceptual (concept-independent), and otherwise unmediated (in the sense that it does not, or at least need not, refer by means of any other sort of representational faculty, representational content, psychological intermediary, or physical intermediary). Since all beliefs intrinsically contain concepts, then non-conceptuality is both necessary and sufficient for a cognition's being non-epistemic. It is argued that non-conceptuality is also both necessary and sufficient for a perception's being otherwise unmediated. Thus, non-conceptuality is both necessary and sufficient for the directness of perception.

This chapter develops the idea that there is a normative dimension to all propositional attitudes in virtue of the fact that these attitudes have conceptual content. The starting point is Kripke’s critique of dispositionalism about semantic meaning. It is argued that meaning something by a term is a matter of participating in a practice of using that term in a manner that respects its conditions of correct, in the sense of true, application. The relevant normative commitment is to using the word in this way and is to be explained in terms of general considerations about practices. In the course of discussion, much is made of a distinction between correctness as true application and correctness as keeping faith with the meaning. It is argued that possessing a concept incurs a normative commitment of a sort that is structurally analogous to that implicated by semantic meaning.

This chapter addresses some of the central issues raised by Evans's paper ‘Molyneux's question’, exploring how Evans's approach to Molyneux's question is informed by his account of the content of conscious perceptual experience, as developed in The Varieties of Reference. It takes issue with Evans's account of the content of perceptual experience, and in particular with what he sees as its conflation of subpersonal information processing content and personal-level experiential content.

Argues that reasons require conceptual contents. That is to say, a person has a reason for believing something only if he is in some mental state or other with a representational content that is characterizable only in terms of concepts that the subject himself must possess and that is of a form that enables it to serve as a premiss or the conclusion of a deductive argument, or of an inference of some other kind (e.g. inductive or abductive).

This chapter is concerned with the final compositional process in LCCM Theory: interpretation. Interpretation involves activation of conceptual content, in a way that is in keeping with the linguistic content associated with the lexical conceptual unit(s) in the utterance, and the interpretation associated with other lexical concepts in the utterance. The chapter provides detailed exemplification of the range of principles which govern the operation of interpretation.

This chapter begins with an overview and a taxonomy of philosophical accounts of intentionality and conceptual understanding. Differences among these views often cause confusion: debates between John McDowell and Hubert Dreyfus over whether practical and perceptual skills are conceptually articulated exemplify such confusion from different understandings of the “conceptual.” Two distinctions together provide an instructive taxonomy of four philosophical approaches to the topic. First, is the difference between conceptual and non-conceptual performances determined by an operative cognitive process, or does it mark a normative status within a larger pattern of practice? Second, does the analysis start with an “empty” conceptual content that is then fulfilled or disconfirmed in perception or action, or begin instead with an agent’s perceptual and practical interaction with the world before asking how that interaction is conceptually articulated? The chapter then builds upon John Haugeland’s arguments against several strategies in this taxonomy to show why the best approach is to analyze intentionality and conceptuality as a normative status that conceptually articulates an agent’s practical and perceptual engagement with the world. The chapter also introduces a third important distinction among philosophical approaches: is intentionality or conceptual understanding a distinctively human phenomenon, or are humans and non-human animals continuous in this respect?

This chapter consists in development of some of the key ideas of the previous chapter. It begins by showing how an arithmetical epistemology along the lines suggested in the previous chapter sits well with a structuralist conception of arithmetic and arithmetical concepts (although it is also compatible with other views). It cautions against a simplistic understanding of the envisaged grounding relationship between concepts and sensory input, arguing that the proposed account allows us to say that our arithmetical beliefs count as knowledge by the lights of Chapter 3. It shows that the account is consistent with realism as characterized in Chapter 1. The chapter spends some time discussing the crucial notion of unconceptualized sensory input, and also offers some comments on what is called here ‘ungrounded’ and ‘unfitting’ concepts.

This chapter begins by bringing out three common mistakes that lie behind the various arguments against ordinary objects discussed in this book. It goes on to suggest that all of these mistakes may be avoided by adopting a unified picture, based on the thesis that our singular and general nominative terms have a basic conceptual content in the form of frame-level conditions of application and coapplication collectively established by competent speakers. It shows how to develop a workable ontology of ordinary objects — one that can avoid all of the standard arguments against such objects — from that basis, and defends the claim that this provides a common sense view. The closing sections consider some prominent objections to the positive view, including that it posits too many objects and that it leads to some form of anti-realism.

If the basic package (equivalently, being a decider) requires not only the capacity to acquire and use information, but to do so in a sense which involves the ability to represent the world and to have concepts, then it may seem hard to understand how anything but language-users could have the basic package. In that case, either perceptual consciousness does not require the basic package, or else only creatures with language can be perceptually conscious. It is argued that both alternatives should be rejected. There are no good reasons to adopt sufficiently strong assumptions about the relations between information, belief, concepts, and language. Discussions of the contrary views of Evans, Davidson, and others reinforce these points. The relevance of the notion of ‘non-conceptual content’ is also considered.

This chapter argues that the cognitive science of the knowledge behind skilled action is consistent with the view of knowing how, and its relation to skill, argued for in the book. First, the chapter shows that the notion of procedural knowledge as it is discussed in the cognitive science literature could be identified with knowing how in the sense in the sense defended in the book. Secondly, an argument for the view that all propositional knowledge is declarative knowledge in the cognitive scientific sense is considered and rejected. Another set of arguments that uses the cognitive neuroscience literature to show that procedural knowledge is not propositional knowledge are shown to rest on an insufficient appreciation of externalist insights about knowledge. Various arguments for the view that knowing how to do something is non-conceptual in nature are considered. Finally, the chapter argues that the literature of the verbal overshadowing effect confirms some of the previous morals on what it is to act for a reason.

This chapter focuses on Heidegger’s claim (chapter 2) that propositional content has a prepredicative foundation to assess the relationship between a phenomenological approach to language and standard semantics-based approaches that assume the primacy of propositional content. Having clarified the distinction between these two approaches and various possibilities for interpreting Heidegger’s claim, it argues against a weak foundation claim, according to which prepredicative factors do not affect the philosophical adequacy of the semantic notions of propositional and conceptual content, and instead defends a stronger claim – ‘moderate’ functional foundation – based on differences in the functioning of prepredicative factors and semantic properties. This claim is then situated in the context of a debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell about the role of concepts in prereflective intelligence, in which it offers a midway between their respective extremes of nonconceptual coping and pervasive conceptualism.

This chapter provides a brief introduction to the distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual content and presents several arguments in favour of nonconceptual content. It argues that the distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual content should be understood as a difference in contents, rather than states. Following Cussins, it further proposes that nonconceptual content is best understood in terms of procedural knowledge or “knowledge-how”.

What is the analytic-synthetic distinction? According to the contemporary Kantian conception offered in this book, it is the categorically sharp contrast between two fundamentally different kinds of truth, distinguished in terms of what each kind is “true-in-virtue-of.” Chapter 4 tells the thrilling three-part story of how the analytic-synthetic distinction departed from mainstream Analytic philosophy, not with a bang but a whimper, why the analytic-synthetic distinction must now return with a bang, and what that bang must sound like. In so doing, the chapter deploys the earlier accounts of conceptual content and non-conceptual content in order to provide a full explanation and vindication of the analytic-synthetic distinction, including a theory of synthetic a priori truth. This vindication includes an extended critique of Quine’s critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction, and also an explicit argument against the Kripke-Putnam conceptions of the necessary a posteriori and the contingent a priori.

This chapter examines the main theories of concepts that are currently on offer in the cognitive science literature. So much of the cognitive science literature is devoted to the nature of concepts, conceptual structures, and conceptual content. Once a psychologist has made up his mind about concepts, much of the rest of what he says about cognition is a forced option. However, proposing constraints on theories of concepts is different from proposing an empirically adequate theory that satisfies the constraints. This chapter first considers the “dual code theory” of mental representations, with particular emphasis on its assumption that some concepts (or at least some tokens of concepts) consist of mental words in one's native language while other concepts consist of mental pictures. It then discusses some of the reasons why concepts can't be images before turning to other options for representing concepts. It also looks at concepts as stereotypes and as inferential roles, as well as whether concepts are locations in associative or “semantic” networks. Finally, it argues that all the available accounts of conceptual content seem to be not viable.

Defending intentionalism, some argue that perceptual content is idiosyncratically nonconceptual: conceptually innocent; defiant of verbalization; or too richly fine-grained for subsumption under concepts carrying ratiocination. No: perception is conceptual in a manner that fits the cognitive capacities of perceivers generally. If perception is subservient to attention, a speaker's perceptual content admits of relatively simple reports implying rudimentary conceptualization. Perception's content is neither too rich nor fine-grained for expression or conceptualization. Intentionalism's temptation towards the contrary be may be urged by memory’s misguided tendency towards constructive confabulation. So, perceptual content may be neither so rich, dense, nor determinate as post-perceptual consideration and testimony may suggest. Finally, Sperling’s early important empirical work on perceptual memory cuts against intentionalism's conjecture of perception's nonconceptual content. Sperling discovered that perceptual memory can completely rehearse its recollected content. Accordingly, but contrary to intentionalism, memory might echo perception's content yet shed its phenomenal character.

This chapter aims to give the reader a fuller sense of the theory of distinctively sensory content presented in the previous chapter, by showing how it may be used to handle examples of various sorts and by addressing some important questions about the theory. The theory is used to account for certain sorts of indeterminacy that distinctively sensory representations commonly manifest, for instance; it is also used to explain the ways in which our recognitional powers interact with our understandings of distinctively sensory representations. The chapter also discusses questions about the relationships between distinctively sensory contents and non-conceptual contents, and about the relationships between distinctively sensory representations and verbal ones.

I distinguish two reactions to Russell’s theory of acquaintance, specifically to its claim that perceptual awareness is simpler than and independent of conceptual thought and yet a source of propositional knowledge. The conceptualist response, championed inter alia by John McDowell, argues perception can be a source of knowledge only if conceptual capacities are in play in perception. The relationist response, championed inter alia by John Campbell, endorses Russell’s view that perceptual awareness is non-propositional and even non-representational, yet holds it is a relation to physical objects not sense-data. I here point up an underappreciated convergence between McDowell’s recast, non-propositionalist conceptualism and Campbell’s attention-centric relationism; I show how the former can be defended drawing inter alia on some central claims in the latter.