David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Ezio Di Nucci
Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa
Jack Alan Reynolds
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European Journal of Philosophy 14 (3):349-372 (2006)
The view that the content of experience is conceptual is often felt to conflict with the empiricist intuition that experience precedes thought, rather than vice versa. This concern is explicitly articulated by Ayers as an objection both to McDowell and Davidson, and to the conceptualist view more generally. The paper aims to defuse the objection in its general form by presenting a version of conceptualism which is compatible with empiricism. It proposes an account of observational concepts on which possession of such a concept involves more than the ability for perceptual discrimination, but less than the capacity to employ the concept in inferences: it consists in the capacity to perceptually discriminate objects with the awareness that one is discriminating as one ought. This understanding of concept-possession allows us make sense of experiences' having conceptual content without supposing that the subject must grasp the relevant concepts prior to having those experiences
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References found in this work BETA
Gareth Evans (1982). Varieties of Reference. Oxford University Press.
Alva Noë (2005). Action in Perception. The MIT Press.
Jerry A. Fodor (1998). Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong. Oxford University Press.
John McDowell (1994). Mind and World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Citations of this work BETA
Kevin Connolly (2014). Which Kantian Conceptualism (or Nonconceptualism)? Southern Journal of Philosophy 52 (3):316-337.
Colin McLear (2014). The Kantian (Non)‐Conceptualism Debate. Philosophy Compass 9 (11):769-790.
Hannah Ginsborg (2008). Was Kant a Nonconceptualist? Philosophical Studies 137 (1):65 - 77.
Nathan Bauer (2012). A Peculiar Intuition: Kant's Conceptualist Account of Perception. Inquiry 55 (3):215-237.
Michael Luntley (2010). Expectations Without Content. Mind and Language 25 (2):217-236.
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