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.
curved shape - both physical terms. We don’t meet circles walking down the street, but when we see tires rolling by, we might think of the circle. That’s enough of a connection for me. Experience and concepts in the same single mix.
Or linguistic. The proposition was “experiences have…” So are experiences a noun, a subject, a substance, and we attach properties they can have to them?
@T_Clark seems to be likening experience and concepts both to mental process. Makes sense, but why switch the conversation to psychology? Isn’t experience still an ontological phenomenon, begging speculations like ‘experiences have conceptual content’?
Right, that’s why it might need belaboring. My third alternative way of reading the sentence, you may recall, was as being about linguistic items.
Good question. In part, that was what I had in mind when I asked them whether we need input from psychologists if experiences (and concepts) are mental events.
I see. What about how we verify statements about the properties of circles? Is there anything empirical involved in that? Do we still need to think of, or be reminded of, an actual circle – a shape in space?
I’m thinking of “experience” in the kind of terms Chalmers talks about in his discussion about consciousness. He means subjective conscious experience. As I understand it, and experience it personally, it consists of images. A movie playing in my head. Sensations, emotions, memories, thoughts. When I think of “concepts” I think of words, language. There is no reason experiences have to be mediated by concepts, although some might be.
As for scientific studies, I think there probably already are some. I don’t have the information at hand, but I’m thinking about things that Stephen Pinker has written about. Thought without language.
Yes, that’s a bit of arm waving, but it’s the best I can do right now. I think your question can be addressed scientifically, even if I can’t tell you exactly how.
Because it is, or at least I claim it is, a psychological question. It can be answered in terms of psychological concepts. Has anyone else offered an alternative?
Following Bakhtin, I’d be careful with this “we.” (I understand why you use it here, because you are talking to us. ) If we re-situate or un-de-situate the “meaning” of signs, we find it between the concrete participants in a concrete dialogue. Between and in-progress. Then the sentence can be understood as a pointing at some aspect of the world.
If you and I visit the zoo together, and I point at a mostly concealed lion, then my pointing finger does not contain the lion. The meaning depends as much on the lion and on you as the finger.
That’s fair enough. Something can be claimed to be within the province of science even if the current state of that science doesn’t give an answer.
I don’t know what @FireOlogist will say, but judging from their post above, they might be suggesting that the alternative is phenomenology. If experience is an “ontological phenomenon” which, because subjective, can’t be studied scientifically, that would still leave us with 1st-person reports. In fact, I think philosophers have always relied on this sort of thing. But should they? – that’s the question. When McDowell says, “Experiences have conceptual content,” whose experiences is he talking about? How does he claim to be able to say something general about what experiences must have, if he only has access to his own?
Again, it comes back to my puzzlement about the sort of sentence McDowell’s sentence is. 1st person report? Result of empirical investigation? Conceptual analysis? Linguistic stipulation?
Yes. And I think you’re right to highlight this. Not only am I writing in what I hope is a friendly, collegial way, but I’m also adopting the “philosophical we”. See my remarks about McDowell, above, to @T_Clark . I read McDowell as speaking in the plural, as it were. What he says about the nature of experience, he believes is true for us, for all of us. Hmm. OK, why? I understand how talking about the properties of circles might be “true for all of us” in the relevant ways, but how does this work with experiences?
That’s not quite what I meant. I meant I can’t give you an answer, not that science can’t. I think it probably can. I think it is the kind of question science can answer.
I don’t necessarily think the only way to look at the question is psychologically, only that it is a valid way.
The claim that subjective phenomena can’t be studied scientifically is not correct, although there might be complicating factors.
I would include properties of circles in your question about experience.
I’m tempting to say that we can’t get “behind” or “above” the dialogue. McDowell is standing on the ground that is an abyss, comporting himself believingly as he must. To speak at all, however doubtfully in terms of foreground, enacts a blind faith in the intelligibility-for-others of the signs that express that doubt. “Thrown projection.” Following Peirce, we might say that foreground-unsettled belief ( doubt) is settled upon or “with” a background haze of settled belief. This settled belief is the “prejudice” that “constitutes” us. As I see it, the most “powerful” philosophers make this “crust of false necessity” visible and therefore optional. But we never get all the way above or behind ourselves.
That’s an interesting position. Do you think that both 1st-person reports in a phenomenological vein and empirical reports from psychologists could produce the putatively true sentence “Experiences have conceptual content”? Would they mean the same thing?
As it happens, I agree with you, but you’re aware that there’s a great deal of unclarity around this. Many philosophers want to say that subjectivity can’t be studied objectively, citing point-of-view problems. That position would perhaps lead one to claim that psychology can’t help us when it comes to the qualities of experiences.
I’m sure there are good insights here, but I honestly can’t figure out what you’re saying, though I’ve read it carefully. Would it be possible to rephrase, perhaps with examples and less specialized terminology, so that I can follow you? If it’s not worth your trouble, I understand, no worries.
I’m trying to point out the “blind faith” we have in all speaking.
When Descartes said “I think therefore I am,” he took the secure significance or meaning of these words utterly for granted. He was virtually “with” his readers on a presumed “unthematic ground” as he explicitly treated what he did not take for granted.
If I want to investigate the meaning of a strange word, then my investigation proceeds by employing other, familiar words “credulously.”
I can’t worry about and check everything at once. I use the unchecked to check the checked.
I’ve cracked open Mind and World and read the first few chapters, but so far haven’t persisted with it. But surely the important point about that sentence is the context. I think here he’s contesting a point, or making a point, that is relevant to a larger context. Almost as if he could be saying, ‘unlike so-and-so, I say that experiences have conceptual content.’ So, what is he challenging?
It also brings to mind Kant’s ‘Percepts without concepts are blind’ which should not be surprising as from what little I’ve read, McDowell acknowledges that he’s working in a broadly Kantian framework.
So isn’t it about the idea that experiences are conceptually mediated? That the mind brings concepts to experience, such that it is always already subject to interpretation?
Yes indeed. This looks like a fundamental issue in philosophy. The world is “articulated” or “intelligible.” Can this be explained ? Or it something so primary that we can only point it out ? As something wonderful and strange ? Einstein called it a “miracle.”
A sniper is carefully aiming at a distant moving target. The sniper is not worried in the least about the gun firing when the trigger is pulled. The sniper is absorbed in the aiming. But this aiming is only important if the gun fires when the triggered is pulled.