cannot judge that something is true. On the other hand, Travis believes that in an instancing relation the particular case does not transmit, butconferstruth instead227. For Travis, the role of the particular case in a perceptual judgment is to give the subject the opportunity to recognize solely on the basis of the objects of her sensory awareness that something is the case. In this case, there would be no need for “an extra help” on the part of cognitive capacities. Awareness-that and sensory awareness would have different natures. In Travis’s words, in fact, they would be “two distinct forms of awareness: perceptual (sensory awareness) and propositional (awareness-that)228. So true thinkables, in bearing a general character, would not be in the business of offering one “access to that of which one judges”. Instead, “that of which one judges” would be accessed by sensory awareness alone.
objects of the one are not the objects of the other; thus, two crucial distinguishing features of each”229.
Travis’s story takes awareness to be a kind of access. In sensory awareness we are able to access its objects. In awareness-that, in its turn, we can access the contents of propositional judgments. McDowell’s mistake, then, would be to argue that sensory awareness is accessed through awareness-that.
In this context, though, I believe that the Representationalist has one way to avoid Travis’s objections: one shall search for another type of contentful access to sensory awareness rather than through awareness-that.
Cussins, for instance, seems to be doing exactly that: he recommends that the normative concept of experience must be taken as radically different from the normative concept of propositional thought. Recall Cussins’s stance on the motorcycle example:
according to him, the speedometer gives access to the propositional content that one is driving, say, at 50mph; the activity of driving fastly gives one access to the non-conceptual content of experience. For Cussins, on the one hand, truth guides our access to propositional content; on the other hand, activity guides our access to the non-conceptual content characteristic of experience. But as we know, an author such as Cussins does not holdCognitive Capacities View. According to theCognitive Capacities View, the capacity for judgment and sensory awareness have a close relationship.
Surely, Cussins would not agree with that. For him, the capacity for judgment - in the present terms, the capacity to access the contents of judgments - cannot be actualized in sensory awareness, since experience and judgment would be irreducibly different types of access to content. Nevertheless, I believe that we can take Travis’s cue of
229Travis 2018:42, original emphasis.
awareness as a mode of access as well as Cussins’s notion of “normative concept” to offer a response to the Argument from Looks - one that is both in line with Cognitive Capacities View and capable of providing an access to the content of experience that is not guided by the normative concept of truth. How could it be so?
My bet is that sensory awareness is wholly perceptual and yet also carries p-representational conceptual content because it reflects not empirical but categorial concepts, such as that of unity. Suppose that the elements involved in Maria’s red light run - Maria, her car, the traffic light, the intersection, and so on - are not perceived by someone as a single event. This could be the case, for instance, of a foreign person who does not have the concept of a red light run. Now suppose that this foreign person gets her driver’s license in San Francisco and becomes disposed to recognize something she sees as being a red light run. One can say that after she learns what is a red light run there is nothing new regarding the objects of her sensory awareness. For instance, being a red light run does not become an object of her sensory awareness of instances of red light runs. Nevertheless, one can say, on phenomenological grounds, that the elements of her sensory awareness appear as arranged in a different way.
What she previously perceived as several distinct elements comes to be perceived as a single element - in this case, as a red light run. Some people call this perceptual phenomenon “unitization”. Goldstone and Byrge (2015), for instance, offers the following examples of worldly items perceived as single units through unitization: “birds, words, grids of lines, random wire structures, fingerprints, artificial blobs, and three-dimensional creatures made from simple geometric components”230. From the insight brought by the notion of unitization, I will propose that, thanks to our cognitive
230Goldstone and Byrge 2015:823.
capacity to give unity to elements in a judgment, the objects of sensory awareness are accessed as single units rather than asthinkables.
Contra Cussins I will argue that a conceptualist framework can show that the access to single units in perception is guided by the normative concept of “significance”
rather than the normative concept of “truth”. My suggestion is that once some worldly item comes to be significant for someone it becomes to be perceived as a single unity.
Contra Travis, I will contend that the sensory awareness of worldly items as single units is wholly perceptual: the way that the capacity of judgment is actualized in sensory awareness at best changes the way wordly elements are arranged in someone’s perceptual experience.
In that sense, I will argue that Looks-indexing and Availability can be reconciled:
from the actualization of cognitive capacities in experience what becomes available to the subject is not “unity” as a new constituent of one’s p-representational content but worldly item in terms of a single units. Consider the visual awareness of a written word, say, “philosophy”. As one becomes disposed to know that word the fact that the letters come to be perceived as a single unit does not imply that some new constituent like
“unit” or “unity” begins to show up in experience. So the idea is that “unity” is not an object of sensory awareness, though wordly items perceived in terms of single units are.
One can contend, however, that Availability implies that the p-representational contents of sensory awareness and perceptual judgments must be the same. In fact, if the perceiving of worldly items reflects the unity characteristic of the contents of judgments this does not imply that it also reflects the contents of perceptual judgments.
Recall Travis’s stance on thinkable looks. He claims that it is “a matter of what can be
gathered from, or what is suggested by, the facts at hand, or those visibly (audibly, etc.) on hand”231. Recall also that according to McDowell’s version of Representationalism, for the rationality of perceptual judgments to obtain sensory awareness must exhibit the same content of perceptual judgments.Thinkables looks, in this sense, are supposed to give expression to the idea, as McDowell stresses, that “[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).
Despite their divergence, one should note that Travis also takes perceptual experience as playing the role of providing non-inferential knowledge. Hence Travis:
“Perception affords awareness of how things around us are. In a favourable case, the awareness thus afforded makes recognizable to us that such-and-such is so. It thus affords us awareness of what is so. To put the point another way, it (sometimes) affords us non-inferential knowledge-that: in seeing the pig we can sometimes come to know that a pig is present. If perception never did this, at the very least we would not be the thinkers we are. Thus far I think John McDowell and I agree”232.
Beyond that, for perceptual knowledge to be non-inferential is also a worry on the part of McDowell’s new position:
“The intuition makes something perceptually present to the subject, and the subject recognizes that thing as an instance of a kind. Or as an individual; it seems reasonable to find a corresponding structure in a case in which an experience enables one to know noninferentially who it is that one is perceptually presented with” (AMG, 266).
232Travis 2018:36.
231Travis 2004:76.
To that extent, one may argue that worldly items perceived as single units cannot provide non-inferential knowledge. In other words, since they would not exhibit the same content, perceptual judgments would have to introduce a new kind of content.
However, the idea behind unitization is that a subject would be capable of perceiving wordly items as single units without having to make inferences to get there. I will argue that here lies the rationality of the perceptual judgment: once unitization is in play, sensory awareness need not be mediated by inferential work233. So there would be a sense in which single units are p-representational contents of perceptual experience:
the red light run perceived as a single unit is what is perceptually informed by experience. Perceptual unit, then, makes the relevant information available to the subject, and it makes the content of the perceptual judgment recognizableinperceptual experience. The idea is that unitization favors non-inferential knowledge. Sensory awareness, say, of a red light run could put one in a position to know non-inferentially that something in front of one is a red light run, even if sensory awareness and perceptual judgments do not share the very same content. It is here that I will borrow Golob’s notion of grammar. I will suggest that one could take sensory awareness and perceptual judgments as having the same content - that is, conceptual content - but different grammar. One can have access to the same information - say, that Maria ran the red light - through two different grammars - in other words, by two different modes of articulation: one characteristic of sensory awareness and the other characteristic of awareness-that.
233 As Goldstone 1998:602 puts it, “unitization involves the construction of single functional units that can be triggered when a complex configuration arises. Via unitization, a task that originally required detection of several parts can be accomplished by detecting a single unit. (...) [U]nitization integrates parts into single wholes”.
In the face of it, my aim in Chapter 6 is to argue for a version of Cognitive Capacities Viewwhere there is a sense in which the actualization of cognitive capacities reflects the unity characteristic of judgments, just as Same Function Thesis indicates.
And from these critical readings of McDowell and Travis, I hope to offer a contribution to those willing to holdCognitive Capacities View.