Content, non-conceptual

3. Problems with non-conceptual content

The notion of non-conceptual content could be criticized on two fronts. First, the application of the notion to a particular kind of mental state (perception, for example) could be criticized. Second, the very notion of non-conceptual content itself could be criticized.

John McDowell (1994: ch. 3) argues that to treat the content of experience as non-conceptual is to commit oneself to the idea which Wilfrid Sellars criticized as ‘the myth of the given’: the idea that experience involves being presented with an unconceptualized ‘given’ which the mind then goes on to conceptualize (Sellars 1956). McDowell argues that accepting this picture renders the relation between mind and world deeply problematic. By contrast, he argues that the content of experience is wholly conceptual. McDowell therefore accounts for the phenomenological richness of experience in a different way: he claims that where we have (for example) discrimination between colours, we may not have a distinct word for each colour, but we do have ‘a recognitional capacity, possibly quite short-lived, that sets in with the experience’ (1994: 57). And such a recognitional capacity is, he argues, fully conceptual.

Scepticism about the very idea of non-conceptual content can arise out of scepticism about the claim that there are concepts one must have if one is to be capable of having certain intentional states. Accepting this claim amounts to accepting a mentalistic version of a sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic statements – a distinction which has proved highly controversial (see Analyticity).