Empirical Concepts and the Content of Experience

Abstract

The view that the content of experience is conceptual is often felt to conflict with the empiricist intuition that experience precedes thought, rather than vice versa. This concern is explicitly articulated by Ayers as an objection both to McDowell and Davidson, and to the conceptualist view more generally. The paper aims to defuse the objection in its general form by presenting a version of conceptualism which is compatible with empiricism. It proposes an account of observational concepts on which possession of such a concept involves more than the ability for perceptual discrimination, but less than the capacity to employ the concept in inferences: it consists in the capacity to perceptually discriminate objects with the awareness that one is discriminating as one ought. This understanding of concept-possession allows us make sense of experiences' having conceptual content without supposing that the subject must grasp the relevant concepts prior to having those experiences.The issue of the nonconceptual content of experience has been a subject of lively debate in recent philosophy of mind and epistemology.

The Value of Aesthetic Experience

“…18 Such a view is taken by its partisans to indicate that "introspection has no phenomenology" and that there is no phenomenologically-substantive inner sense. 19 Whether or not we nowadays hold with a theory of taste as such, most discussions of aesthetic experience seem to take for granted the idea that there is some sort of phenomenological character to our experiences themselves. Indeed, the feature that seems to distinguish aesthetic experience from mere sensory experience seems to be that there's some sort of phenomenology, some "what-it's-like-ness" to the experience itself that cannot be captured in a mere specification of the object of experience.…”

The Kantian (Non)‐conceptualism Debate

“…Watkins (, 519–20) also suggests an imagistic view, though it is not fully articulated. Other views that seem compatible with such an account include Strawson (, ), Sellars (), and Ginsborg (, ). Schulting () presents a recent and helpful overview of many of the relevant issues.…”

“…For some defense of the conceptualist position, see McDowell (, chs. 3 and 6), Ginsborg (, , ), and Gomes ().…”

WhichKantian Conceptualism (or Nonconceptualism)?

“…These proponents include Lucy Allais (), Robert Hanna (; ), and Peter Rohs (). On the other side of the debate, Hannah Ginsborg (; ), Aaron Griffith (), John McDowell (), and Christian Helmut Wenzel () claim that Kant is a conceptualist . They argue that on Kant's view, the possession of concepts is a prior condition for perception.…”