Content, non-conceptual

1. Conceptual and non-conceptual content

Beliefs and other propositional attitudes are individuated in terms of their contents. It is natural to think that having these propositional attitudes involves having concepts, construed here as items in the mind. If someone believes that a is F, then they must have the concept F, and the concept a – whatever concepts may be. This can be summed up by saying that beliefs have conceptual contents (see Propositional Attitudes). Some philosophers, for example Evans (1982) and Peacocke (1993), think that not all intentional mental states have conceptual contents. They hold that some intentional states have ‘non-conceptual’ contents: the contents of these states do not, in some sense, involve concepts.

How can a thinker’s state have the content that a is F without the state ‘involving’ the concepts a and F? The best way to answer this question is to focus on the idea of ‘possessing’ concepts. In the case of states with conceptual contents – like beliefs – we can say that in order for a subject to be in these states, the subject has to possess certain concepts. Likewise, we can say that in order to be in a state with non-conceptual content, a subject does not have to possess certain concepts. But which concepts? It would be too strong to say that being in non-conceptual states does not require having any concepts at all – this issue should not be settled by the very definition of non-conceptual content. Rather, we should say that for a subject S to be in a non-conceptual state with content P, S does not have to possess the concepts which S would have to possess if S were in a conceptual state with content P.

If we call these concepts the concepts which are ‘canonical’ for P, then we can say that a state with non-conceptual content is one of which the following is true:

in order for a subject, S, to be in a state with a content P, S does not have to possess the concepts canonical for P.

The idea of concepts canonical for a certain content is just the idea that there are concepts which essentially characterize a given content (Cussins 1990: 382–3). The content expressed by the sentence ‘snow is white’, for example, is essentially characterized in terms of the concepts expressed by the words ‘snow’ and ‘white’.

Why should anyone be interested in the category of non-conceptual content? Why should it be of any more philosophical interest than the category of non-red things? The reason is that intentionality seems closely bound up with having concepts. So it is a substantial thesis that there can be intentionality without possession of (the relevant) concepts (see Intentionality; Concepts). However, simply defining ‘non-conceptual content’ leaves open the question of whether there actually is any. So are there any states with non-conceptual content?