Is ‘Non-Conceptual Content’ Content?

Louise M. Antony

The Ohio State University

Sellars’s Problem

Inspired by Sellars’s attack on “the given”:

Where do (mere) causes stop, and reasons start?

In McDowell’s terms, question about possibility of empirical knowledge

Empirical KnowledgeA. McDowell - minimal

empiricism: “the idea that experience must be a tribunal, mediating the way our thinking is answerable to the way things are.”

B. Experience must exist “within the space of reasons:” there must exist a justificatory relationship between experience and empirical beliefs based upon it.

(A) requires there to be s.t. wrt which we are passive, to which we make no contribution, s.t. the character of which is due entirely to the way the world is – hence, “the given”

-- since conceptualization is spontaneity, (A) entails that “the given” must be unconceptualized

(B) requires that experience be brought within the “space of reasons;” anything else would be “mere exculpation.”-- entails that experience be conceptualized.

It appears that (A) and (B) cannot both be satisfied.

A Naturalistic, Computationalist Translation

Naturalistic assumption:

Anything relevant to mental processes must be psychologically tractable

Computationalist assumption:

Psychological tractability = computational tractability

More computationalist assumptions Methodological solipsism:

Computations are sensitive to form and insensitive to content (except insofar as content is encoded in form)

Classicism: Mental processes exploiting rational relations among thought contents are realized by comp’l processes exploiting syntactic relations among thought vehicles. (Note: May be other kinds of mental processes as well.)

Normal Perceptual Belief Fixation

1. flower retina

2. retina optical nerve (retinal signal)

3.

4. formation of perceptual belief

The Problem, Briefly Perceptual belief (4) has intentional content

– represents the world as being a certain way. Has correctness conditions

Retinal signal (RS) simply transduces information contained in light reflected from flower -- has no correctness conditions

When does the intentional content appear?

For perceptual belief to count as knowledge:

1. There must be a rational relation between RS and belief

2. Rational relations hold only among items that have intentional content

Therefore, IS must have intentional content

For RS to carry information about the world:

1. Character of RS should strictly depend upon state of the world

2. But if character of RS depends strictly upon state of the world, RS cannot misrepresent the world.

3. Therefore cannot stand in normative relationship to world.

Therefore, RS cannot have intentional content

Sellars’s Problem Again

Requirement that RS carry information about the world (i.e., that RS = the given) RS cannot be genuinely representational

Requirement that RS stand in proper epistemic relationship to perceptual belief RS must be genuinely representational

A way out?Evans, Peacocke, Brewer, Heck, Fodor: posit

non-conceptual contentStates w/ NCC can: Serve as reasons for fully conceptualized

states (e.g., perceptual beliefs) Be faithful registers of information about the

world – information isn’t “packaged” into concepts

Additional motivations for positing NCC

Phenomenology of perceptual experience (“richness” & “ineffability” arguments)

Animal and infant thought Empirical considerations: psych’l processes

sensitive to information not conceptually represented.

What is the distinction?

Rough idea: NCC is picture-like and CC is language-like

First suggestion (Dretske?):

Conceptual = digital

Non-conceptual = analog

No – Pictures, graphs can be digital in format, but still represent pictorially

The Generality Constraint…[I]f a subject can be credited with the thought that a is F, then he must have the conceptual resources for entertaining the thought that a is G, for every property of being G of which he has a conception.

Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference, p. 104

FodorDiscursive (conceptual) representation

canonical decomposition:

Only canonical parts are semantically evaluable

Iconic (non-conceptual) representation no canonical decomposition:

Every part is semantically evaluable: if R iconically represents S, then every part of R represents part of S

Examples“The woman on the

glacier is playing the flute.”

“The woman on the glacier” is a constituent; is semantically evaluable

“on the glacier is” is not a constituent; not semantically evaluable

Will the NCC proposal work? No “Empirical” side of Sellars’s Problem shows

that NCC shouldn’t be genuinely intentional Communication-theoretic considerations +

philosophical considerations about nature of representation show that NCC isn’t genuinely intentional

Genuine intentionality linked to discursiveness

Solution: The Plan

1. Communication theory, the nature of representation, and discursiveness

2. Unpack “knowledge” side of Sellars’s Problem

GriceDistinction between “natural meaning”

(meaningN) and “non-natural meaning” (meaningNN)

(A) Those spots meantN measles vs.

(B) The doctor’s saying “measles” meantNN measles

(A) entails that if there are spots, then there is measles; not so with (B).

Garfield on MeaningN

DretskeA signal r carries the information that s is F

= The conditional probability of s’s being F, given r, is 1.

Call a state a Dretskean vehicle if its occurrence entails the obtaining of an instance of that type of situation which constitutes the vehicle’s informational content

Gricean vehicles

For a state to meanNN that s is F, it must be possible for that state to occur even if it is not the case that s is F

Call this condition detachability (Antony & Levine, 1991)

To be a Gricean vehicle, a state must be detachable

Detachability and the Disjunction Problem

Detachability is required to distinguish meaningNN (genuine representation) from meaningN

Disjunction Problem: get “horse” to have the content horse, even though “horse” tokens are sometimes caused by non-horses

Detachability solving the disjunction problem

Some non-horse-caused tokenings of “horse” are mistakes

Possibility of mistake = correctness

conditions

Having correctness conditions detachability

Dretskean vehicles and the Disjunction Problem

Information requires no equivocation, but:“whether or not a signal is equivocal depends

on how we carve up possibilities at the source”

The informational content of a Dretskean vehicle is the disjunction of its possible causes -- Dretskean vehicles cannot (must not) solve the disjunction problem

Dretskean vehicles cannot have correctness conditions

Only Gricean vehicles can have correctness conditions

Detachability, in paradigm cases, comes from conventionality. Can’t be the case with thought contents.

How to get Gricean vehicles from Dretskean?

Add information: imposition of conceptual structure makes possible assertion, makes possible detachability and correctness conditions

Back to “Knowledge” RequirementNeed to rule out cases of “mere exculpation”(A) Bump on head causes belief that Helena

is the capital of Montana (“Mere causal” process) vs.

(B) Hearing my trusted teacher say “Helena is the capital of Montana” causes belief that Helena is the capital of Montana (“rational causal” process)

Content requirement sufficient to rule out (A) as epistemically improper but not sufficient to distinguish (B) from

(C) Bump on the head causes me to believe that I have a bump on the head

(C) Is a case of “mere exculpation” if the belief is not “based on” (Byrne) the experience of feeling the bump on the head.

Proposal: “Being based on” is a matter of psychological tractability, hence computational tractability formatting requirement

Mere causal processes can be distinguished from rational causal processes by failure of first to satisfy formatting requirement – don’t need satisfaction of content requirement as well

Dretskean vehicles can encode as well as simply carry information. Encoding a matter of match between informational format and demands of computational process

Intelligible Causal Processes:

Information encoded in a Dretskean vehicle is s.t., if information were specified discursively, would provide good evidential basis for subsequent empirical belief