same form of the contents of judgments, he has contended more recently that sensory awareness has what he labels an “intuitional content” that exhibits, now, a non-propositional form. On the other hand, to the extent that McDowell sees intuitional contents as still having a conceptual nature, we can observe that McDowell’s new position has preserved some of its old assumptions. In the face of these complexities, McDowell's overall position on the nature of the conceptual content of sensory awareness deserves a deep examination. And as the aim of Chapter 1 is to clarify some of the basic notions McDowell uses - such as that of “content” - I will not discuss his former and new positions in detail here, though I will discuss them at length in the next chapters.
At the moment, what I want the reader to bear in mind is that despite its specificities McDowell's former and new positions are different expressions of thesame thought, in this case, that “[t]hat experience has content is an implication of the idea that conceptual capacities are operative in experience. (Exactly what content? That depends on the specifics of how conceptual capacities are operative in experience, and there are various options here.)” (RGBS, 394, emphasis added). So above all, for now, the important thing for us is that conceptual capacities entail conceptual content, and that, in this context, what is relevant for Chapter 1 is the thought that conceptual capacities must be operative in sensory awareness, not yethowMcDowell expresses this thought.
That said, let's see in more detail in what sense McDowell ascribes conceptual content to experiences.
A good way to introduce McDowell's understanding of the notion of conceptual content is to clarify it through a look at the long-run debate between representationalist
and Anti-representationalist views on perceptual experience. Especially for my purposes, having this perspective as a background is indeed suitable since the so-called “Travis-McDowell Debate” opposes these two thinkers in the following manner: treated as holding a Representationalist view, McDowell claims that sensory awareness has content; as an Anti-representationalist, Travis argues,contraMcDowell, that experiences do not involve any kind of content52. For the moment, I would like the reader to pay attention to the following provisionally definitions:
Representationalism: The thesis that sensory awareness has content.
Anti-representationalism: The thesis that Representationalism is false53.
I will not discuss Travis's Anti-representationalist arguments against McDowell in Chapter 1 - I will do so in Chapter 5, where I will deal in detail with the “Travis-McDowell Debate”. Nevertheless, I will take a first approximation to Travis here in order to appeal to his understanding on what would be the necessary conditions for representational content in experience.
Before we can grasp what is at stake in the Travis-McDowell Debate, it is crucial to clarify the terminology used in the debate, especially “representation”.
“Representationalism” encompasses a specific notion of representation within the debate. Wilson (2018) nicely frames and presents the kind of representation (p-representation, as Wilson calls it) that authors such as McDowell and Travis have in mind. The type of representation in question does not refer, for example, to the idea that
53 As footnote 3 indicates, I will take Anti-representationalism as different versions of one position that, broadly speaking, denies that perceptual experiences bear any kind of content. I will treat the matter in detail in Chapter 3.
52See Gersel 2018a for an overview of the debate.
a map can represent the city of London54; also, it is not saying that rings on a tree can represent its age55. Moreover, it does not refer to the existence of subpersonal representations described by neuroscience or the psychology of perception56. Now, let us see, through four conditions suggested by Travis (2004:63) and condensated by Wilson (2018:201), the set of characteristics of the so-called p-representation:
(i) Objectivity: “The representation in question consists in representing things as so (thus, truly/veridically, or falsely/non-veridically).”
(ii) Face Value: “It has, or gives perceptual experience, a face value, at which it can be taken or declined (or discounted).”
(iii) Givenness: “It is not autorepresentation [representation-by the subject]. (It is allorepresentation [representation-to the subject], though here, not crucially.)”.
(iv) Availability: “When we are thus represented to, we can recognize that and how, this is so; most pertinently, we can appreciate what it is that is thus represented to us as so”
(Wilson 2018:201).
An important caveat before I proceed. From now on, I will borrow Wilson's term
“p-representation” and its variants (e.g., “p-represented”, “p-representing”, and so on) to
56Cf. Burge 2005. As Wilson 2018:201 points out, although there is a fact that thesubpersonal representations are related to experience, what is at stake for Travis is what would figure as content of personal-level experiences.
McDowell shares this kind of thought with Travis. See, for example,TBD, where McDowell contrasts his position with Burge's.
55As Prinz, for instance, claims “carrying information is not sufficient for representation” (Prinz 2004:53).In effect, rings do not actually represent age, just as smoke does not in fact represent fire. To say thatrings represent a tree's age is merely a way to express something like “the rings indicate the tree's age”. See also Dretske (1981, 1986).
54Cf. Siegel 2010. In her defense of the so-calledContent View, Siegel claims that such a view can be refined into a proposal that finds the following similarity between visual experiences and beliefs: “like beliefs, maps, and newspapers, visual experiences have contents, and just as the contents of beliefs are conditions under which the belief state is true, so the contents of experiences are conditions under which the experience is accurate” (Siegel 2010:30). It should be noted, though, that one might not be misled by Siegel's analogy between the contents of experience and, say, maps. According to Siegel's account, experiences would have the very same content of perceptual beliefs or judgments.
refer to this type of representation, to establish a clear distinction from other notions of representation. It is also noteworthy that there are non-conceptualist notions of p-representation - e.g. Evans (1982) and Peacocke (1992) and. I will discuss such non-conceptualist views on p-representation in section 2.2. For now, let me show how each one of these four conditions for p-representation helps us to clarify McDowell's defense of the notion of conceptual content.
Objectivity suggests that p-representations have correctness conditions, in the sense that a correct perception would be true. McDowell is undoubtedly committed to this idea. Recall his remark: “something that has certain content is correct, in the relevant sense, only when things are such as that something represents. I cannot find any good reason for not calling this correction 'truth'” (MAW, 162). Thus, p-representation, characterized as a representation of “things as such”, must involve conceptual capacities, if we want to establish a properly normative relationship between judgment, truth, and experience. In MAW's terminology, the subject perceives that things are thus and so, where a content manifesting a “that-”clause in sensory awareness enables it to establish a rational relation to perceptual judgments. Even though McDowell has recently abandoned the view that sensory awareness has propositional content, he continues seeing it as having a conceptual nature, since he still recommends that a subject “perceives things to be as she judges them to be”,which implies that sensory awareness still involves conceptual capacities. According to McDowell, the point is that not only perceptual judgments have conceptual content:
experience itself has the same type of content. So his overall position suggests something along the following lines: “A judgment of experience does not introduce a
new kind of content, but simply endorses the conceptual content, or some of it, that is already possessed by the experience on which it is grounded.” (MAW, 48-9).
Face Value's characteristics are also present in McDowell's thought. The idea is that sensory awareness makes available something that has a determinate face value:
for example, a given sensory awareness may p-represent that Maria ran the light. This particular way of being such and such leaves to the subject the acceptance or rejection of the face value of her sensory awareness. To accept sensory awareness at face value would be to judge that things are as they appear; to reject its face value would be, in McDowellian terms, to “refrain” from an initial inclination to judge that a thing is the way it appears. This would be the case of illusions or hallucinations. Müller-Lyer's illusion is a well-known example. This illusion presents us with two segments A and B with identical lengths, which give the impression of having different dimensions. In an illusion of this type, what is given in sensory awareness is defeasible, since there may be circumstances where a subject has reasons to believe that her sensory awareness is misleading, thus being able to judge that the things p-represented are not the way they appear. If, on the contrary, the subject is not aware of these reasons, she tends to judge that things are as they appear. In this regard, McDowell states: “Minimally, it must be possible to decide whether or not to judge that things are as one's experience represents them to be. How one's experience represents things to be is not under one's control, but it is up to one whether one accepts the appearance or rejects it” (MAW, 11).
To the extent that Face Value indicates the possibility of both the rejection and the acceptance of content, p-representation could only be a case where the subject is a consumer and not a producer of the content of her sensory awareness. This is the idea
behind Givenness. Unlike judgment, we cannot, in fact, choose the content of what we perceive. According to a famous dictum of MAW, “[i]n experience one finds oneself saddled with content” (MAW, 10, emphasis added). Whilst perceptual judgments have an active nature, McDowell invites us to presuppose that sensory awareness involves a passive operation of conceptual capacities. This means, according to McDowell's suggestion, that p-representation is not a matter of autorepresentation, that is, content resulting from a representation by the subject, as in the case of judgments, but of allorepresentation, once the content is given to the subject in sensory awareness. For the sake of clarification, take a look at how McDowell explains Sellars's metaphor “of experiences as containing propositional claims” (Sellars 1997:39): “It is not that the subject of an experience claims that things are a certain way, which would imply that she takes them to be that way (...). In the metaphor it is anexperience itself that claims that things are a certain way” (RPR, 240, emphasis added). Travis also says something useful: “presentation here is, perhaps to, or for, but not by us. It belongs to asourceof knowledge, not to enjoying it. The (re)presenter here is, not us, but something McDowell calls 'The Understanding' - in this role a personification of our capacity for thought;
exercised somehow, but not by us”57. More recently, McDowell expressed the same thought in a somewhat different manner, in suggesting that a subject's “experience of perceiving [is not] making a knowledgeable judgment [since] the experience in which it is manifest to her that things are as she judges them to be is not itself a knowing”
(RBGS, 390).Givennesscan also be comprehended through McDowell's understanding
57 Travis 2019:37, original emphasis. Similarly: “For McDowell, one has not said what might make it rational to judge a sheep to be before you merely in saying what object is before you. What makes this rational, if anything, is not just the object, but something about what that object is like. This last, however, is, for him, not itself an object of our visual awareness but simply ‘given’ to us in our enjoyment of that awareness. It is given to us that things are certain ways for them to be (vide McDowell 2018: 34). What gives this to us? McDowell’s answer is something he calls ‘The Understanding’, ‘the faculty of concepts’” (Travis 2018:56).
of the notion of thinkables. To shield his arguments from any accusations of idealism, McDowell, in MAW, brings the notion of thinkables to establish a difference between thoughts understood as thinkables contents (what one can think) and thoughts understood asactsof thinking:
“'Thought' can mean the act of thinking; but it can also mean thecontent of a piece of thinking: what someone thinks. Now if we are to give due acknowledgment to the independence of reality, what we need is a constraint from outside thinkingand judging (...). The constraint does not need to be from outsidethinkable contents. It would indeed slight the independence of reality if we equated facts in general with exercises of conceptual capacities - acts of thinking - or represented facts as reflections of such things; or if we equated perceptible facts in particular with states or occurrences in which conceptual capacities are drawn into operation in sensibility - experiences (...). But it is not idealistic, as that would be, to say that perceptible facts are essentially capable of impressing themselves on perceivers (...). (MAW, 28; original emphasis).
It is noteworthy that McDowell, despite no longer takingthinkablesas items “essentially capable of impressing themselves on perceivers”, still takes thinkables as something that can somehow be included in sensory awareness, if we understand thinkables as something that can figure in perceptual experience. Although the perceiving of a worldly item like a red light run is no longer taken by McDowell as including a sensory awareness of a fact such as “Maria ran the red light”, thinkables could still be contents of perceptual experience, in the sense that the rationality of the judgment that she ran the red light would be intelligible through the way the relevant worldly item appears in perceptual experience itself.
Finally, Availability is an implication of Face Value and Givenness: the content given in sensory awareness is available to be accepted or declined and it is a matter of allorepresentation. What I want to stress is that (i) the content must convey to the subject that o is F, even if she refrains from the initial inclination and judge otherwise -as per Face Value - and (ii) that the content cannot be explained by any non-perceptual state, such as a judgment, as per Givenness. Moreover, the subject must be able to consciously register the content of sensory awareness. Consequently, p-representation cannot be explained by any sub-personal form of representation, as per the standpoint of phenomenology. In other words, it is not enough for sensory awareness to have content: the subject must be able to access and grasp this content from a first-person perspective. Therefore, Availability suggests that what makes it possible to recognize the content of the p-representation is the way things appear in sensory awareness.
Those appearances are what allows one to recognize the contents of one’s sensory awareness, which makes these contents available to the subject from a first-person perspective to serve as reasons for perceptual judgments. In MAW, McDowell states something exactly along the same lines, in arguing that it only makes sense to speak of reasons for a subject's belief if she recognizes these reasons as her reasons, the
“subject's reasons forbelieving something” (MAW, 163, original emphasis).
From the four conditions for p-representation and their relation to McDowell's notions of conceptual content, I propose the following formulations regarding content:
Content1: That sensory awareness E has contentC1is an implication of the idea that E has correctness or accuracy conditions.C1is neutral regarding the nature of the contents ofE58.
Content2: Sensory awareness E is said to have content C2 if E is (i) a case of p-representational Content1, (ii) C2 has a propositional nature, and (iii) p-representations are both objects and contents of sensory awareness [onesees that things are thus and so].
Content3: That sensory awareness E has content C3 is an implication of the thought that conceptual capacities are somehow involved in E. C3 is neutral (i) regarding the nature of the contents of E, (ii) if p-representations are objects or only contents of E, (iii) if C3 may express all the four conditions for p-representational content, and (iv) if C3 combines p-representational and non-p-representational aspects.
So after all, how should one express McDowell's notion of content?
Regarding MAW I believe that a difference between Content1 andContent2must be established, insofar as the notion of Content1 admits the involvement of (auto)representational contents. As the term appears in MAW, “representation” is a matter of p-representation, and “the content of experience” is a case ofContent2, insofar as McDowell is committed to allorepresentration. It is true that McDowell's use of the term “representation” in texts such as MAW could suggest that conceptual capacities are actively involved in sensory awareness. Moreover, McDowell's propositionalist
58I.e., if the content is propositional, conceptual, intuitional, non-conceptual, non-propositional, p-representational, etc.
position also defended in the same book is not that helpful, since he used to claim that the contents of experience were of the form that things are thus and so, that is to say, the same form of the paradigmatic actualization of conceptual capacities, namely judgments. However, he never treated experiences as being a case of representationby the subject, as he highlighted more recently: “since my earliest expressions of the thought that conceptual capacities are in operation in the perceptual experience of rational subjects, I have insisted that in experience itself conceptual capacities are not exercised by the subject (...)” (RBGS, 391). Accordingly, MAW's notion of
“representational content” might be understood as Content2. Nevertheless, for the introductory purposes of Chapter 1, we should rather treat McDowell's view on content as Content3, since he always took “content” as an implication of the involvement of cognitive capacities in sensory awareness, regardless of the distinct ways in which he expresses it throughout his thinking59. As will become clearer in the next chapters, although McDowell, after Travis's objections, no longer takes p-representations as objects of sensory awareness, he still considers p-representations (i.e. things being such and such) as contents of sensory awareness. Roughly, according to McDowell's new position, contents now are non-perceptual aspects of the subject's sensory awareness. As Travis illustrates: “For McDowell, we can, in seeing Sid eating the
59It is somewhat unclear whether McDowell’s version ofContent3is assessable for truth (or correctness) conditions.
On the one hand, because of the non-propositional character of this new kind of content. One can argue, for instance, that non-propositional contents can’t actually determine the face value of an experience, insofar as it can’t have determinate correctness conditions - a content expressed by “that o is F” can’t have a non-propositional form.
Indeed, McDowell's new non-propositionalist position denies that experiences represent “things as so”. In that sense, McDowell’s version of Content3would not admitObjectivity, one of the conditions for p-representation. Besides that, McDowell's recent writings place no special focus on the question of correctness. However, McDowell's new position holds that a subject “perceives things to be as she judges them to be”, which leaves unaddressed the question if this ideia of perceiving a thing “to be as...” still has something to do withObjectivity. Be that as it may, at least for now I will take McDowell as still holding something along the lines ofObjectivity, as McDowell is not clear on the relations between propositional and non-propositional contents. I will discuss that issue in detail in Chapter 5.
chilidog, learnthatSid is eating a chilidog. But such is only thanks to an assistant, which provides us with something more to go on: something not an object of perceptual awareness, though somehow, perhaps, indissolubly, present in our form of enjoying it”
(Travis 2018:36; original emphasis). Accordingly, McDowell's former and new positions are meant to take p-representations as contents of sensory awareness.
Now we are able to address - at least initially - the question “what does McDowell mean by conceptual content?”. Regarding the position defended in MAW, one must take conceptual content as Content2, as he used to be committed to all of the four conditions for p-representation. For the sake of terminological continuity and simplicity, we can identify Content2 with representational-awareness - I just add the letter “p”, according to the specific notion of p-representation. Hence:
p-representational-awareness: thinkables are both contents and objects of sensory awareness [asper Content2].
With respect to McDowell's new position, one must take conceptual content as Content3, since he no longer holds that the notion of content is a consequence of the involvement of propositional contents in experience, but a result of the idea that conceptual capacities imply certain kinds of conceptual contents to experience.
Likewise,Content3can be identified withcontent-awareness. Recall:
content-awareness: thinkables are contents but not objects of sensory awareness [asper Content3].
As I have been stressing, any version of a Cognitive Capacities View must be committed to an attempt to provide a way of expressing the thought that cognitive
capacities - and so conceptual contents - must somehow be included in sensory awareness. That said, what matters for now is that p-representation has always been an aspect of McDowell's notion of conceptual content. This is enough for us to properly start examining McDowell's notion of reasons.