What Is at Stake in the Debate on Nonconceptual Content?

It is now 25 years since Gareth Evans introduced the distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual content in The Varieties of Reference. This is a fitting time to take stock of what has become a complex and extended debate both within philosophy and at the interface between philosophy and psychology. Unfortunately, the debate has become increasingly murky as it has become increasingly ramified. Much of the contemporary discussion does not do full justice to the powerful theoretical tool originally proposed by Evans and subsequently refined by theorists in the late 1980's and early 1990's – most effectively, I think, by Christopher Peacocke (particularly in his 1992). Even worse, significant parts of the discussion are somewhat confused. This paper makes a start on clarifying what I think ought to be the central issues in debates about nonconceptual content. I begin in §1 by pointing out how narrowly focused contemporary discussion is relative to Evans's original discussion. We are not making as much use as we should of nonconceptual content as a tool for understanding subpersonal information processing and the complexities of its status relative to perception and thought at the personal level. In §2 I turn to what is the central focus of contemporary discussion, namely, the content of perception and identify a " master argument " for nonconceptualism based on the relation between conceptual capacities and capacities for perceptual discrimination. The aim of §3 is to clarify the relation between the claim that perception has nonconceptual content and some superficially similar claims discussed by philosophers of perception. Finally, in §4 I explain why the attention recently 2 focused on what is sometimes called the state version of the nonconceptualist thesis seems to me to be misdirected. I Nonconceptual content at the personal level and at the subpersonal level Nonconceptual content is easily defined (deceptively easily, as we shall see in §IV). Content is nonconceptual just if it can be attributed to a subject without ipso facto attributing to that subject mastery of the concepts required to specify it. This comes across clearly in the following characterization from Michael Tye: To say that a mental content is nonconceptual is to say that its subject need not possess any of the concepts that we, as theorists, exercise when we state the correctness condition for that content. (Tye 2000: 62) i But what is it that has content that can be either conceptual or …