I want to pose a question that occurred to me during the discussion about naturalism in the “Placement Problems” thread, and also reading McDowell.
Let’s take an important sentence from Mind and World: “Experiences have conceptual content.” This thesis is pretty much what the book is devoted to demonstrating. But my question would apply to a vast array of similar philosophical sentences.
My question: What sort of sentence is it? Specifically, what does it refer to?
Should we understand it in the way we understand “Brillo pads have abrasive qualities”?
Or should we understand it to be more like “Circles are 2-dimensional figures”?
Or is it more like “When I examine what the word ‛honesty’ means, and then examine what the words ‛best policy’ mean, I can say that honesty is the best policy”?
Philosophy has names for these different kinds of sentences, but I’m deliberately avoiding them so as to keep the question as intuitive and jargon-free as I can.
What do you think? What does “Experiences have conceptual content” refer to? When we use such a sentence, what are we talking about?
PS – This question is not about whether the sentence is true. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with it or not. It’s about how we could know whether the sentence is true, or meaningful.
It depends on what you mean by “experience” and “conceptual content.” As I understand it, both refer to mental processes, so it is a claim about human psychology.
OK, good. Let’s go with that and see what follows. For instance: If it’s a claim about human psychology, does that mean that it could be falsified if psychologists discovered that experiences do not (mostly or usually) have conceptual content?
The word “circle” is a completely abstract concept so at first it seems different from “Brillo pads” because Brillo pads are part of the physical world. Except what is part of the physical world are the atoms of Brillo pads (not even that because atoms themselves are a human concept), what we call “Brillo pads” is still a concept.
This reminds me of the claim by Anil Seth: reality is a controlled hallucination.
Sure, a circle is more abstract than a Brillo pad, but both are abstract concepts.
I think the sentence “experiences have conceptual content” is closer to “circles are 2-dimensional figures” because the notions in it are distant from physical objects, but it’s not fundamentally different from “Brillo pads have abrasive qualities”.
Well, one difference might be that the sentence about the circle isn’t verifiable (or falsifiable) by way of experience. We don’t go looking for circles to see if they all have the same qualities. Whereas the sentence about the Brillo pad would seem to require empirical verification.
Good. So to discover whether either sentence was true, we’d use a mix of empirical inquiry and conceptual analysis? I’m curious what the empirical aspect of the circle inquiry would be.
Thank you! Whether the sentences are true is not the point.
The only item in that list that may need belaboring is “experience”, since a great deal may depend on whether experience is conceived to be a psychological phenomenon, as @T_Clark has suggested.