Thesis). However, in a broader sense McDowell says something very similar to Kern:
“To put a Kantian thought in a contemporary idiom, the content of intuitions is of the same general kind as the content of judgments. And of course the content of judgments is conceptual” (CCP, 127). Adapting the definition of “Judgment as a Cognitive Capacity”, I wish to point out that, above all, McDowell holds that conceptual actuality in sensory awareness is explained by conceptual capacities.
We still need to make sense of the idea of a cognitive capacity that can be actualized not only in cognitive activities but also in sensory awareness. However, it is still too early to deal with that. We need first to clarify other notions regarding the philosophical nature of perceptual experience. That is the task of what comes next.
take into account (iii) the first-person perspective in sensory awareness34. That said, I will use the term “perceptual experience” to encompass episodes in which the aspects (i), (ii), and (iii) are somehow relevant in an account of sensory awareness.
It is often said that perceptual experience has a phenomenal character35. The notion of phenomenal character gives voice to the idea that undergoing a perceptual experience involves what is like for you, in a first-person perspective, to have that experience. Consider the example of the phenomenology of foreign languages. Some philosophers, in fact, say that a native speaker and a nonspeaker of a given language hear it differently. The differences in how they hear it amounts to a phenomenal difference, and these differences depend on the first-person perspective of the subject of perceptual experience. Now, one may also plausibly say that there is a sense in which there is no difference between the two perceptual experiences if one takes into account what would be their sensible features.
It is common to treat these distinct approaches in terms of the difference between two standpoints: on the one hand, from a first-person perspective which is sensitive to subjective aspects; on the other hand, from a third-person perspective which is neutral regarding the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. For these reasons, one should note that there can be different senses at stake when one discusses “perceptual experience”. “Perceptual experience”, in one sense, is sensitive to the concepts a subject possesses; in another, it can be treated as bearing a common
35 Hence Tye: “What it is like to undergo an experience varies with the experience. Think, for example, of the subjective differences among feeling a sore wrist, experiencing an itch in an arm, smelling rotten eggs, tasting Marmite, having a visual experience of bright purple, running one's fingers over rough sandpaper, feeling hungry, experiencing anger, and feeling elated. Insofar as what it is like to undergo each of these experiences is different, the experiences inphenomenal character” (Tye 2009:2, original emphasis). Cf. Shoemaker 1994.
34I borrow these three aspects from Siegel 2019a:348.
sensory character that is neutral to the concepts a subject possesses36. I will frame these distinct approaches to “perceptual experience”, depending on the standpoint one adopts, as follows:
The commonality of sensory character: the standpoint that treats the sensory features of perceptual experience as neutral to the concepts a subject possesses.
Concept possession sensitivity: the standpoint that treats the sensory features of perceptual experience as sensitive to the concepts a subject possesses.
I will use “sensation” and its variants - visual sensation, auditory sensation, olfactory sensation, and so on - for experiences taken in the sense of The commonality of sensory character; relatedly, I will use “sensible features” to designate low-level sensations such as that of color, shape, texture, timbre, volume, pitch, a specific odor, etc. In its turn, I will use “sensory awareness” for experiences taken in the sense of Concept possession sensitivity.
Note that although the perceptual experience of, say, the color red can be taken as a sensory awareness of the color red, what I want to emphasize is that at the level of sensory awareness the subject's visual awareness of that color amounts to a first-person perspective experience. So it is in that sense that there is a distinction between thesensationof red and thesensory awarenessof red. Travis helps us see the difference:
36Cf. Bengson, Grube, and Korman 2011:180.
“To deny that that John was walking is a visual phenomenon is thus not to deny that what Pia saw was John, walking (and thus, of course, his walking). It is not as though once we subtract that John was walking from the objects of perception proper, what is left is just some congeries of colours and shapes. What one sees is what was there:
John, walking (etc.)”37.
Travis's point is that even if we treat perceptual experience as having the character of object-awareness to the detriment of awareness-that, according to both views on sensory awareness what we experience is not “merely shapes, colours, movements (etc.)”. To put the point another way, for our concerns, the experience of red in the sense of sensory awareness (i.e., in the sense of the Concept possession sensitivity) can be taken as distinct from the experience of red in the sense of “mere” sensation (that is to say, in the sense of The commonality of sensory character). It is also noteworthy that I will use the term “perceptual experience” for perceptual experiences taken as sensory awareness. I will also use “perceptual experience” and “experience”
interchangeably.
That said, sensation will refer in this Thesis to what can be considered as being common between two (or more) possible perceptual experiences. To make my point, suppose that it is at least potentially possible that two subjects undergo the same perceptual experience. For instance, presume that the American and the foreign subjects in the red light example see the same scene, from the same angle and distance, at the same place, under the same luminosity, and so on. The idea is that
37 Travis 2010:838-9. Here, Travis criticizes Siegel in that he supposes that she offers only a “false choice” for an account of perceptual experience: on the one hand, awareness of “congeries colors and shapes”, on the other hand, awareness-that. In her response to Travis, Siegel claims, however, that she agrees “with him that we could be perceptually related to K-properties, even if the Content View were false” (Siegel 2013:857). Although for Travis it would be impossible for K-properties - such as the property of, say, being a car - to figure in experience, what I want to highlight is that what is at stake in that specific debate is sensory awareness, not sensation.
even if they may undergo the very same perceptual experience regarding its sensible features, sensory awareness still could be different depending on a subject's possession of a given concept. Peacocke (1992) nicely frames the issue as follows:
“Once a thinker has acquired a perceptually individuated concept, his possession of that concept can causally influence what contents his experiences possess. If this were not so, we would be unable to account for differences which manifestly exist. One such difference, for example, is that between the experience of a perceiver completely unfamiliar with Cyrillic script seeing a sentence in that script and the experience of one who understands a language written in that script. These two perceivers see the same shapes at the same positions. The positioned scenarios and the protopropositional contents of their respective experiences can be identical. The experiences differ in that the second perceiver recognizes the symbols as of particular orthographic kinds , and sequences of the symbols as of particular semantic kinds”38.
In this context, contemporary philosophers dispute what would be the best philosophical approach to experience. On the one hand, some advocate that The commonality of sensory character is essential for any philosophical investigation of perceptual experience. From what we might call a standpoint of theory, they contend that third-person or sub-personal aspects involved in experience must be considered.
Here is Tyler Burge on the standpoint of theory: “Science provides a fundamental level of classification that must show up in, and cannot be fudged in, any other serious, correct, explanation-based classification of [perceptual states]. Science is our best guide to determining the basic natures of kinds that it describes and explains”39. The
39Burge 2011:44.
38Peacocke 1992:89-90.
standpoint of theory, then, recommends that the level of sensation must be taken into account if one intends to make a suitable philosophical investigation of perceptual experience. On the other hand, what I will call the standpoint of phenomenology treats experience exclusively from a person-level or first-person perspective. McDowell is a good example. According to him, although “the utility, or even the theoretical indispensability, of cognitive science” (CPE, 198) is uncontroversial, one should not conflate the roles played by philosophy and cognitive science. For an author like McDowell, what is at stake in cases like the foreign language example is the way meaning may be manifest in sensory awareness. In that sense, he believes that it is hard to see how one, from a first-person perspective, could access such a neutral level of auditory perception, something that, according to him, is a subject matter of cognitive sciences. In his own words, the meaning of the utterances of a language is not something to be found “'beneath' the words, to which we are to penetrate by stripping off the linguistic clothing; rather, as something present in the words - something capable of being heard or seen in the words by those who understand the language” (IDM, 99). For McDowell, to treat perceptual experience fromthe standpoint of theoryis, then, to make
“bad epistemology”. In his own words, “since there is no rationally satisfactory route from experiences, conceived as, in general, less than encounters with objects, glimpses of objective reality, to the epistemic position we are manifestly in, experiences must be intrinsically encounters with objects” (CPE, 193). Surelly, one can, from the standpoint of theory, analyze experience within this framework. Nonetheless, such a search for this level of sensation would be, for McDowell, an “off-key phenomenology [that] reflects a serious epistemological difficulty” (CPE, 192). It is noteworthy that Travis also
circumscribes his approach to the scope of first-person experiences. This is so since most of Travis's opponents treat experience at the personal level. As Wilson makes clear,
“Travis does not rule out the existence of sub-personal representations, nor is his view (pace Burge (…)) incompatible with modern psychological or neuroscientific explanations of perception. Rather, [his] argument targets a distinctly philosophical notion of representation that is held by many [McDowell included], though not all, philosophers who advocate representational views of conscious perception” (Wilson 2019:201).
That said, I would like to stress right from the start that one must have in mind that McDowell treats perceptual experience exclusively from the standpoint of phenomenology, in what he believes to be the proper method to describe perceptual experience in philosophical terms. Accordingly, I would like to make it clear that it is not my aim in this Thesis to investigate the metaphilosophical issues regarding what I am calling the standpoints of theory and phenomenology. This dispute over the best approach to experience is, in fact, a very interesting one. But exactly for that reason, it maybe deserves an entire Thesis. With respect to my concerns, however, it will be untenable to cover all the relevant aspects of it. What is relevant for the moment, though, is that for McDowell only contents that share the same nature - in that case, a conceptual nature - can figure in first-person rational relations between a subject and the world, in the sense of them being able to serve as reasons for perceptual judgments. In the next section, we will see in what sense McDowell takes perceptual experience as having a conceptual nature.