Tell me how I can distinguish which of your experiences have conceptual content from those that don’t so I can know how you use “conceptual content” so I can decide if the sentence is true.
More Lao Tzu—The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnamable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things.
You see things differently than I do.
Probably, but how differently? And how much is just different semantic divvying up. For example:
You seem to connect concepts with language far more than I do, which suggests some of the things I count as concepts you wouldn’t.
Can you give me an example of a concept without using words? Or an example of a concept that doesn’t use words.
A woodpecker banging on a tree, but not a drain pipe, to me, implies a concept of some sort. One that is triggered by a tree, but not a drain pipe. Any sort of behaviour that goes beyond a reflex, really.
You’re using a very idiosyncratic meaning for the word. Pretty sure you’re using it differently than McDowell did.
Now that read @Pierre-Normand’s entries above - he supplies what I meant by the ‘missing context’ of the sentence you’ve quoted. I mean, McDowell’s use of the term ‘experience’ has a particular meaning, in a particular context, namely, in the discussions between McDowell, Sellars, Brandom, and others of the ‘Pittsburgh School’. So the point I was trying to make about the role of experience in judgement was just a general point about that broader question, not particularly in response to McDowell’s statement of it.
Good. That’s clear, coherent way of reading the sentence, and I tend to agree.
Is it inference, though? This is part of where I find McDowell unclear. Judgment occurs within spontaneity. So is the identification of conceptual content an act of logic, rather like a transcendental deduction? Or is it supposed to occur within experience itself?
Yes. Justification rather than “exculpation.”
Interesting. You may be right. The phrase you use – “described in abstraction from the items that those practices purportedly (as construed in the Manifest Image) are about” – seems to me to capture the unresolved part of the placement problem, despite Price’s efforts. The Kantian framework in which McDowell situates this may be more insightful. To oversimplify, the placement problem is the problem of what to do about the Manifest Image and Scientific Image if each requires a different mode of explanation. McDowell expands this into a question about reasons versus causes, I think rightly.
OK, makes sense. But I think your question is still a good one: Is the use of “experience” in the Pittsburgh school an expert use? Are McDowell et al. saying, in so many words, that introspectors who don’t see it their way have got it wrong, due to insufficiently subtle inquiry? I don’t finish Mind and World, to stick with that example, feeling like McDowell is saying " . . . and that’s just my take on it."
@j_j @Hanover @Dawnstorm @T_Clark Offline for a while but I’ll get back to your interesting responses, thanks!
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In short, yes, I do, but with qualifications pursuant to a specific metaphysical doctrine, to wit:
…..any proper experience is direct;
…..no proper experience is a feeling;
…..experiences are ends, a system is means;
…..words do nothing more than express, or publicly objectify, the systemic methodology post hoc, hence they do not intervene on it.
Give an example of an indirect experience and what makes it improper?
If I have a feeling, if it’s not an experience, what is it?
Why can’t I have an experience of thinking in words? Why can’t the words be the part or whole the experience?
Ok.
Feelings are experiences.
By “system” do you mean mental processes? If so, I’m ok with that.
I agree with the first part, but I’m not sure what you mean by “intervene” here. Words can affect experiences.
Can’t. Dunno what that would be like. If it is the case experience is cognition by means of synthesis of conceptions to sensory phenomena, any rendition of experience contrary to such rules, is improper. Improper here carrying the connotation of not even being an experience at all, a.k.a., “useless rhapsody of perceptions”, or, “phantasms of the brain”.
It’s a feeling; that’s why it’s so-called. It’s not experience because feelings are determinations of aesthetic judgements based on a priori conceptions alone arising from pure practical reason, whereas experiences are determinations of discursive judgement based on the synthesis of conceptions with phenomena, arising from pure theoretical reason.
Because thinking is not experience, it is merely the operation of understanding alone. It is nonetheless possible to think myself thinking in words.
They can, they are, iff they are given to the senses in the same way as any other thing. If they are your words you’ve already thought them before objectifying them; if they are not your words, you still have to relate them as things, to that which logically conforms to them…….or doesn’t…….in your intelligence. Such is not to think them as if they were yours, but to think about them because they are not.
Easy peasy.
If those words, as far as the intellect is concerned, are just more things perceived and thereby taken as occasions for its use, then they are the experience, rather than affecting it. Which reduces to….it is the subject himself that is affected by the words he experiences.
Yes. So this tells me that McDowell can’t be denying that, it would be too implausible. What he has in mind is a different construal of “conceptual content” that would not be predicated on language use, but also would not be reducible to some Given.
I would love a McDowell thread to examine all this. Can’t really do that here, and I’m not expert enough on McDowell anyway to be the one. Maybe someone else will step up. @Pierre-Normand ?
Very well put. If experiences can be justificatory rather than merely causal, they need to have a “foot in” the space of reasons somehow. McDowell’s idea is that this can be explained in terms of conceptual content, if I understand him. Dogs etc. don’t have worry about this, as they needn’t justify any beliefs.
Ha, good example! Yes, since I myself would not care to be called “helplessly blind but [with] heroic faith” in regard to my philosophical work, I assumed you would feel the same.
Right. And I think this applies just as well to your concepts, not just mine. It isn’t just a problem about you getting into my mind in order to have my experiences. Even within the friendly confines of your own mind, the question looms: Can you clearly recognize “conceptual content” when you see it? Is this a matter of introspection at all, or is it more a kind of a priori deduction of how experience must be in order for empirical beliefs to be about more than internal coherence?
I agree. In fact, after reading @Pierre-Normand’s post (the one I quoted above), I was already pretty sure of it. Which is why I have to step back from my intuitive meaning, no? Which is part of figuring out what sort of sentence the word occured in was.
Yes, on a perfectly reasonable understanding of how to use the term “experience”.
The problem, for me, comes in when we examine the structure of the statement (that is, as a piece of language) and find that each possible experience seems to include what we’re calling “the rabbit-duck picture.” We could not say what you’ve just said without the placeholder “rabbit-duck picture.” Even granting that the term is retrospective – we might not know it was “a rabbit-duck picture” until later – we still are left with something posited for the statements to be about. Traditionally, that would be the Given, some raw perceptual content to which we apply our concepts.
McDowell of course wants to see it differently. What I haven’t yet understood in his thesis is how moving “experience” to the position it now occupies in your construal gets us out of the problem. Should we say that we can’t have an experience without conceptual content, if we intend to base an empirical belief on it? But the third of your examples – “not being recognized as anything in particular” – is an instance of precisely that, isn’t it? What conceptual content would McDowell describe here? Or would he merely shrug and agree that no judgments can be formed from that third experience? But then the initial startling claim that “Experiences have conceptual content” turns out not to be strictly true.
I’m not saying he’s wrong, only that I haven’t yet grasped his thought.
I remember a place where McDowell contrasts his stance regarding putative non-conceptual contents of experience with the stance of his (by then long deceased) friend Gareth Evans, possibly in the context of a debate with, or response to, José Bermúdez. The gist I retained is that even if one would grant Evans’ point about the contents of experiences being non-conceptual, then, by Evans’ own lights (and, if I remember, own insistence), such contents would still not be what proponents of the Given need for grounding perceptual judgement.
After doing some digging, although I didn’t locate the exact text I had remembered reading, I found a place in Lecture III of Mind and World where McDowell characterizes his divergence with Evans regarding non-conceptual content roughly in the way in which, as I had remembered from the other text, he had denied that Evans could be an ally to proponents of non-conceptual contents for such contents furnishing the right kind of epistemological grounding that they claim for it. I also found in Reading McDowell: On Mind and World (edited by Nicholas Smith) relevant comments in McDowell’s response to Charles Taylor.
Here is the relevant part in Lecture III:
‘’’
It is important not to misconceive this divergence. In Evans’s view, experiences are states of the informational system, and as such they have content that is non-conceptual. But he does not equate the idea of an experience with the idea of a perceptual informational state, produced independently of spontaneity by the operations of the informational system. On the contrary, he insists that perceptual informational states, with their non-conceptual content, “are not ipso facto perceptual experiences-that is, states of a conscious subject” (p. 157). According to Evans, a state of the perceptual informational system counts as an experience only if its non-conceptual content is available as “input to a thinking, concept-applying, and reasoning system” (p. 158); that is, only if its non-conceptual content is available to a faculty of spontaneity, which can rationally make or withhold judgements of experience on the basis of the perceptual state. So a non-conceptual informational state, produced by the perceptual element of the informational system in a creature that lacks a faculty of spontaneity, does not count as a perceptual experience, even though a state that does count as a perceptual experience, by virtue of its availability to spontaneity, is in itself just such a non-conceptual informational state, endowed with its non-conceptual content independently of the coming into play of the faculty of spontaneity.
‘’’
And here is the relevant part of McDowell’s response to Taylor:
‘’’
Taylor’s second “continental” move is a reaction to my taking issue with Gareth Evans, who claims that the content of experience is non-conceptual. Taylor’s worry is that in doing so I deny myself insights from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, according to which conceptual capacities are embedded in a pre-intellectual mode of living in the world.
But Evans portrays empirical judgments, not as embedded in a holistic background of pre-conceptual coping, but as based on non-conceptually received content. In Evans’s picture, the relevant non-conceptual content is no less “particulate” than the content of the judgments that are based on it. Evans conceives empirical judgment as converting already particulate non-conceptual content into conceptual form. This is not the view of conceptual content that Taylor applauds, in which particulateness emerges out of an “undelimitable background” of preunderstanding. When I object to Evans, it is not with a view to setting my face against the idea of a background.
It is true that I do not exploit the idea of a background of pre-understanding. I am not sure how much of a divergence this reflects from Taylor’s “continental” thought. Part of the seeming divergence may come from the fact that Taylor works with a notion of conceptual capacities according to which they are in play only when things come into focus. I do not see why we should accept this connection between conceptuality and determinacy.
Taylor does not emphasize my insistence that actualizations of conceptual capacities must be seen as manifestations of life, as opposed to operations of a pure intellect. Perhaps if he had, I would have seemed less distant from the idea of a background that he wants to urge.
Anyway, how much would it have helped me if I had made much of a background of pre-understanding? I agree with Taylor that there is something between spontaneity in what he calls “the strong Kantian sense, turning crucially on conceptual, reflective thought,” on the one hand, and conformity to Galilean law, on the other. We need this middle ground for thinking about non-human animals, and it is what is supposed to be occupied by pre-understanding even in our case. But the difficulty that concerns me arises because making up our minds about the world is an exercise of spontaneity in precisely the Kantian sense. The problem is how spontaneity in that sense could be rationally constrained by receptivity. This difficulty would not be addressed by appealing to spontaneity in the weaker sense that Taylor thinks my argument must involve. What my project requires is that we see how spontaneity in the strong Kantian sense, although it is indeed “freedom” in the sense of something “full-blown, reflective, self-possessing, radical,” is exactly not an “emancipation from nature,” as Taylor suggests Kantian spontaneity would be.
‘’’
One interesting feature of Evans’ account that I had forgotten is that what it is that Evans claims to be non-conceptual is the content of experience, qua informational states of “informational systems” as he construes them, although he also crucially insists that such an informational state, or content, only becomes the content of a perceptual experience in virtue of its “availability to spontaneity” (and hence only in creatures who have such a faculty).
Maybe, then, one way to characterize what it is that distinguishes McDowell, on one side, from Evans, on the other side, and also makes him immune from Taylor’s appeals to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, is that McDowell views the perceptual abilities of non-rational animals, although they are abilities of a general kind that we share with them, and that we can exercise with no active (e.g., with no need for reflection) involvement of spontaneity when, say, we unthinkingly know where to place our feet as we walk around, don’t provide an informational ground or content on the basis of which our conceptualized experiences and judgements are justified, but rather are the general sorts of animal abilities to transact with the world that are transformed through acculturation in a rational form of life in such a way as to become so involved (thereby becoming constitutively integrated into our abilities to navigate the space of reasons).
I was very surprised when I was reminded that Evans viewed the non-conceptual contents (or states of our informational systems) to comprise not only, say, things like visual perceptual contents but also linguistically mediated testimonies from others. But I can make (some) sense of this through analogy with the sort of “testimony” that the forms and contents of LLM pre-training data supply to their pre-training process. And likewise for the early exposure of infants to human language, though, in this case, their developmental processes benefit from more scaffolding from other sensorimotor modes of engagement with their natural and social world. If it’s something like this that Evans is thinking of, though, he may have somewhat conflated a genealogical/developmental story about the source of the “information” that our rational abilities have been molded from with a justificational story about their proper conditions of exercise.
Evans likely isn’t crudely confusing genealogy with justification. He does, like McDowell, take care to separate causation from justification. But he may still conflate contentful causal input (to the development of rational abilities) and rational ground (for their exercise), and this conflation may be forced by the very idea of non-conceptual content. In the animal/perceptual case and in the developmental/testimonial case alike, something that is constitutively taken up into, or transformative of, the rational capacity (which is something McDowell can wholeheartedly embrace) gets mistaken for a separable foundation on which the exercised capacity rests, which is the Given McDowell spends his whole book refuting.
For my own weird reasons, I confess the blindness inherent in my vision. But I’m coming from the more continental side which is obsessed with finitude, which might be read as a necessary blindness. One is “perhaps” less blind in the seeing of this blindness, which takes us back of course to Socrates.
Can we understand this in terms of : you don’t see the world through my eyes. So I have to “communicate” somehow the event that I saw that you didn’t see. I have to “pass on” what is useful in what I present as world-unseen-by-you but nevertheless important for your movement in this world.
We make noises and marks to “pass on this unseen-by-the-other world.” What drives the phrase “conceptual content” ? I suspect it’s at least the sign as repeatable. A finite set of signs can be arranged is a teeming plurality of possible chains. If we abstract the material-sensory “flesh” and consider only what is iterable — and if we restrict ourselves to assertions — we get “pure” propositions which are themselves iterable. We might even understand propositions as equivalence classes of concrete speech acts.
Language entry is something like the “conversion” of “otherwise ineffable experience” into one of these equivalence classes.
Are these classes “internal” and "mental " ? I suggest we see them in terms of our enacting the sufficient equivalence of concrete sounds and marks in the world.
How do marks “talk about” the world ? What is the “representational effect” in the significance of these marks and noises ?
Does it help us if we think of recognizable objects as generalized signs ?