Abstract
In this chapter, I turn to the claim that we cannot speak of perceptual content unless we assume it is objective content. The conceptualist argues that only conceptual content can meet the requirement of being objective. I start out by presenting the objection from objectivity as it can be found in McDowell (Mind and world, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1994a). I then discuss the following replies: First, even if objective perceptual experience requires the perceiver to have an objective world-view, the experience’s own content may be nonconceptual; second, perceptual objectivity can be had in virtue of mere nonconceptual personal-level abilities; third, a weaker kind of perceptual objectivity that does not even require personal-level capacities is substantial enough to provide for genuine perceptual content. The last reply is the one championed by Modest Nonconceptualism. All that genuine perceptual content presupposes is that the world is perceptually presented to the subject. This requirement can be elucidated via a subpersonal account of how the perceptual systems generate representations underlying her experiences that are poised to influence her central behavior-guiding system.
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Notes
- 1.
Some of the materials from this chapter are published in Schmidt (2015).
- 2.
There are some passages in Brewer (1999) dealing with the same ideas; otherwise, most of the literature on the problem of objectivity consists in defenses of nonconceptualism against the objection. See Cussins (2003), Hutto (1998), Dreyfus (2007), Burge (2009, 2010), and Peacocke (1992, 1994, 2001a,b, 2003).
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
He is concerned with what specific features can be represented in an experience, not with the more general issue of how perceptual content can be objective. However, his claim covers perception of objects as having particular properties, for instance. In experience, the perceiver is confronted with specific mind-independent objects and properties. So we need an account of how she can perceive a world of objects and properties that are independent of any perceptual experience. Together with Peacocke’s quote, this leads us back to her appreciation of their mind-independence.
- 6.
From now on, I will speak only of a subject’s world-view (without ‘as of an objective world’). For McDowell, talk of a world-view already implies that it is a view of a world as objective—otherwise, there could not be a world and a view of it.
- 7.
- 8.
McDowell would not even grant this much, for without rational integration, our beliefs cannot have empirical content.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
One might object that her urge to duck will be due to her anticipation of painful qualia, and nothing more. But I do not think that this is plausible. Just like it is beyond the subject’s control that she will raise her foot reflexively when stepping into a nail, so it is not under her control that she will duck in expectation of being hit by a rock because her visual experience represents a rock to be flying at her face.
- 12.
See Sect. 4.1
- 13.
This is the argument I alluded to in the previous chapter (Sect. 7.4.3), where I attacked the conceptualist claim that understanding perceptual experience as openness to the facts can be explained in terms of the conceptual embedding of the conceptual abilities exercised in experience. We can now see that perception purports to represent objective facts without drawing on conceptual abilities; moreover, the epistemic authority of perceptual experience is independent of the subject’s belief in an objective world.
- 14.
Note that, in this paper, Peacocke claims that the views presented here are compatible with his account of exhaustive vs. merely canonical methods for establishing contents about the objective world in Peacocke (2001a,b). As far as I can see, however, the views defended in Peacocke (2003) are not compatible with those described in Peacocke (2001a,b). In particular, in the 2003 paper, Peacocke insists that creatures with no reflective-critical abilities can have objective perceptual contents, while in both his 2001 papers, he holds that the ability to accept and reject contents is essential for having objective contents at all. The crucial difference he draws is between creatures who accept and reject contents based on an exhaustive set of methods and those who have, in principle, unlimited resources to find out more about their environment.
In what follows, I will ignore the 2001 account and focus on Peacocke (2003) because I think this latter view is more immune to the worry that he tacitly presupposes concept possession for objective content. I will discuss the relation between objective content and spatial content in the following section.
- 15.
For all this, there is no need even to introduce a first-person notion. Peacocke also explains how a further nonconceptual self-notion ich can be introduced starting from these resources. I will ignore this addition, seeing as it is irrelevant for the current discussion. Also, see his distinction between de se contents and here-contents in Peacocke (2014, 30). Here, he also suggests that representation of stable objects over time requires the subject to have so-called “object files.” (p. 15) Maintaining an object file seems to be something done by subpersonal-level processes. By contrast, Peacocke’s cognitive map, as I understand it, is a conscious, personal-level representation.
- 16.
In a similar vein, Bermúdez (1998) describes the ability of the subject to have an integrated representation of her environment over time as one nonconceptual way for her to grasp the distinction between self and world. But he argues that there are even more primitive ways to make this distinction, which do not presuppose that the subject remembers her changing position in her environment and which appear to occur at the subpersonal level. For example, he claims that in proprioception the subject has a primitive form of self-consciousness and, at the same time, a very basic grasp of the distinction between self and world—in proprioception, the subject registers which of those things that she perceives, e.g. in vision, do or do not belong to herself.
- 17.
See my discussion of perceptual constancy in Sect. 4.2
- 18.
For an argument that the possibility of misrepresentation is necessary for genuine representation, see Dretske (1988). There is a lot more to be said on the topic of what distinguishes mere sensation from genuine representation of distal features. Burge (2009, 2010) provides a convincing account of how transformations in the perceptual systems can produce contents that are characterized by veridicality conditions, perceptual constancies, and, adding perceptual memory and perceptual anticipation, representation of bodies as bodies. See, for example, Burge (2010, 397–403 and 437–450).
Corresponding to the distinction between proximal and distal stimuli, the relevant contrast in this context is between ‘pre-objective’ and ‘objective’, not between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ content.
- 19.
- 20.
My claims here are closely related to Burge’s arguments in his recent book The Origins of Objectivity. Just like him, I emphasize the relevance of genuine perceptual experience taking place at the personal level (though I came up with this idea independently of his book). For example, he states that “[p]erception is a type of objective sensory representation by the individual.” (Burge 2010, 368)
One significant difference between our accounts is that, unlike Burge, I focus on the connection between phenomenally conscious experience and genuine perceptual content. Burge is more restrictive than I am with respect to the question of what is required for genuine representation. In addition to the claim that genuine content requires veridicality conditions, he asks for objectification and perceptual constancies, thereby implying that our senses of smell and taste do not produce genuine representations. See Burge (2010, 397–403). Despite these differences, I find his arguments very enlightening and engaging.
- 21.
See Sect. 6.1
- 22.
Let me make explicit here that I am not committing myself to the claim that it is sufficient for phenomenal content and thus phenomenally conscious experience that a perceptual representation with distal content is available to the central behavior-guiding system. Rather, the claim I am driving at is that all the previous necessary conditions for conscious, world-involving perceptual content were too demanding. They should be replaced by my weaker necessary condition.
- 23.
See, for instance, Tye (2003a).
- 24.
See Sect. 6.2
- 25.
This is in line with the views defended by Piccinini (2011, 187/188) and Evans and Stanovich (2013, 235), who emphasize that hypothetical and counterfactual thinking is tied to explicit cognitive processes. These kinds of thinking, in turn, rely on the thinker’s meeting the Generality Constraint: How could you think about hypothetical and counterfactual situations if you lacked the ability to combine your concepts to form thoughts independent of you current situation?
- 26.
I am not sure whether there is a tension between this account and the way that Evans and Stanovich (2013, 236) set up the distinction between implicit and explicit cognition. They argue that implicit (or Type 1) processes are characterized by the fact that there is no central high-level control involved in them, but that they are autonomous. On the other hand, they do allow that animals do have some “rudimentary forms of higher order control”, which they seem to attribute to the presence of an implicit cognitive system. Since centralized behavior control and coordination is much more wide-spread than hypothetical and counterfactual thought and moreover does not depend on this kind of thought, I think it makes sense to line up the implicit/explicit process distinction so that centralized higher-order control may coincide with implicit processes and detached general thought with explicit processes.
- 27.
Tye (1995, 7–10) explicates unilateral visual neglect in the same spirit: He suggests that a unilateral visual neglect patient has phenomenally conscious visual experiences in the ‘neglected’ part of her visual field and that her real deficit is of a higher cognitive order—it is her inability to attend to and notice what she experiences.
- 28.
Peacocke (2014, 15) plausibly accounts for this by appeal to object-files.
- 29.
In the following paragraphs, I will focus on the question of how a subject can perceive objects as such, but similar issues could be raised and, I think, solved in similar ways, for perception of spatial relations or of perceptible constant properties of objects. I will leave this out for simplicity’s sake.
- 30.
Cf. Burge (2010, 448), where he attacks this claim. Note that this does not imply that personal-level capacities are involved in objective perceptual experience.
- 31.
See e.g. Burge (2009), who appears to be ambiguous between the claim that the perceptual system or, respectively, the individual, needs to have capacities such as the ability to track a body over time. I thank him for a clarifying e-mail on this topic.
- 32.
Interestingly, but maybe just for the sake of argument, McDowell diverges here from his view that only concept possessors who have an understanding of their situation in their environment can have content-bearing perceptual experience.
- 33.
The argument presented in this chapter is the argument I alluded to previously in Sects. 6.1 and 6.2, which supports the claim that additional or conceptual appreciation is not needed to explain how the subject can be presented with her environment in perceptual experience. Note that, in the current chapter, I am concerned with the subject’s appreciation of the fact that her experience represents a mind-independent world, whereas previously, the question was whether any feature that the subject is perceptually presented with has to be appreciated by her. The claim defended here is applicable to the issues I have discussed previously—for according to Modest Nonconceptualism, no additional conceptual appreciation whatsoever is needed for genuine perception.
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Schmidt, E. (2015). The Objection from Objectivity. In: Modest Nonconceptualism. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18902-4_8
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