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Contents of Experience
Abstract
In this paper I aim to situate the Naiyayika theory of perception in contemporary philosophy of mind. Following the ancients,
I suggest we reconsider the taxonomy and the assumed interactions between kinds of perceptual content. This reclassification
will lead us to reconsider some aspects of the Cartesian conception of mind that continue to influence the work of contemporary
theorists. I focus attention on different accounts of sensory perception favoured by ancient Indian Naiyayika philosophers
and Descartes as a starting point for reconsidering contemporary accounts of perceptual content.I show that Descartes' account
of sensory perception provides the impetus for a causal-explanatory account of conceptual content in terms of its non-conceptual
counterpart. Though contemporary philosophers claim to have cast off their Cartesian heritage, my discussion reveals that
some of its tenets continue to influence the work of contemporary philosophers. I offer reasons for rejecting yet another
Cartesian influence and recommend that we follow the Nyaya taxonomy of perceptual states.
... See Chakrabarti (2000,Phillips (2001Phillips ( , 2011; andChadha (2004Chadha ( , 2006Chadha ( , 2009Chadha ( , 2014Chadha ( , 2016.Bronkhorst (2011) andMaitra (2017) also weigh in on the debate. ...
This paper analyzes the incisive counter-arguments against Gaṅgeśa’s defense of non-conceptual perception (nirvikalpakapratyakṣa) offered by the Dvaita Vedānta scholar Vyāsatīrtha (sixteenth century) in his Destructive Dance of Dialectic (Tarkatāṇḍava). The details of Vyāsatīrtha’s arguments have gone largely unnoticed by subsequent Navya Nyāya thinkers, as well as by contemporary scholars engaged in a debate over the role of non-conceptual perception in Nyāya epistemology. Vyāsatīrtha thoroughly undercuts the inductive evidence supporting Gaṅgeśa’s main inferential proof of non-conceptual perception, and shows that Gaṅgeśa has no basis for thinking that non-conceptual perception has any necessary causal role in generating concept-laden perceptual awareness. He further raises a number of internal inconsistencies and undesirable consequences for Gaṅgeśa’s claim that non-conceptual states are introspectively invisible. His own causal theory of perception is more parsimonious than the Nyāya account, and is equally compatible with direct realism. I conclude by noting several striking parallels between Vyāsatīrtha’s views and the conceptualism of John McDowell, while also suggesting that Vyāsatīrtha own conceptualism is not unduly constrained by some of McDowell’s limiting assumptions about concepts and perceptual contents.
In this paper I use the Naiyāyika distinction between determinate (conceptual or qualificative) and indeterminate (non-conceptual or nonqualificative) awareness to show why a causal-explanatory account of conceptual content in terms of non-conceptual content fails. The Naiyāyikas, like Peacocke and other contemporary philosophers, believe that non-conceptual content is a cause of conceptual content, but it is only a cause in the sense of being a necessary condition. This point is clearly brought out by J.L. Shaw in his paper on “Sources of Knowledge: Perception, Inference and Testimony: Some Contemporary problems and their Solutions from the Indian Perspective” (2005). Non-conceptual content is not a sufficient condition for conceptual content, according to the Naiyāyikas. Therefore, any attempt to offer a causal-explanatory account of conceptual content in terms of non-conceptual content is doomed to fail.
I argue that perceptual experience provides us with both phenomenal and factive evidence. To a first approximation, we can understand phenomenal evidence as determined by how our environment sensorily seems to us when we are experiencing. To a first approximation, we can understand factive evidence as necessarily determined by the environment to which we are perceptually related such that the evidence is guaranteed to be an accurate guide to the environment. I argue that the rational source of both phenomenal and factive evidence lies in employing perceptual capacities that we have in virtue of being perceivers. In showing that both kinds of evidence have the same rational source, I provide a unified account of perceptual evidence and its rational source in perceptual experience.
The paper distinguishes four basic notions of one assumption or proposition being a reason for (or justifying) another: a deductive notion, a computational notion, a causal notion, and a positive relevance notion (as first defended by me in Spohn (1983) "Deterministic and Probabilistic Reasons and Causes"). After setting these notions within three important distinctions of present-day epistemology - knowledge vs. belief, internalistic vs. externalistic, and normative vs. naturalized epistemology - and after explaining why I tend to be a normative internalist belief theorist, I compare the four notions and argue that the positive relevance notion is the most adequate and fruitful one.
Mode of access: World Wide Web. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2004. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 183-186). Electronic reproduction. Also available by subscription via World Wide Web xii, 186 leaves, bound 29 cm
After prolonged exposure to their reflected images in mirrors, chimpanzees marked with red dye showed evidence of being able
to recognize their own reflections. Monkeys did not appear to have this capacity.
This book provides a detailed, systematic, and accessible introduction to an original philosophical theory of concepts that Christopher Peacocke has developed in recent years to explain facts about the nature of thought, including its systematic character, its relations to truth and reference, and its normative dimension.
Philosophers from Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein to the recent realists and antirealists have sought to answer the question, What are concepts? This book provides a detailed, systematic, and accessible introduction to an original philosophical theory of concepts that Christopher Peacocke has developed in recent years to explain facts about the nature of thought, including its systematic character, its relations to truth and reference, and its normative dimension.
Particular concepts are also treated within the general framework: perceptual concepts, logical concepts, and the concept of belief are discussed in detail. The general theory is further applied in answering the question of how the ontology of concepts can be of use in classifying mental states, and in discussing the proper relation between philosophical and psychological theories of concepts. Finally, the theory of concepts is used to motivate a nonverificationist theory of the limits of intelligible thought.
Peacocke treats content as broad rather than narrow, and his account is nonreductive and non-Quinean. Yet Peacocke also argues for an interactive relationship between philosophical and psychological theories of concepts, and he plots many connections with work in cognitive psychology.
Bradford Books imprint
The nature of perception has long been a central question in philosophy. It is of crucial importance not just in the philosophy of mind, but also in epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of science. The essays in this 1992 volume not only offer fresh answers to some of the traditional problems of perception, but also examine the subject in light of contemporary research on mental content. A substantial introduction locates the essays within the recent history of the subject, and demonstrates the links between them. The Contents of Experience brings together some prominent philosophers in the field, and offers a major statement on a problem central to current philosophical thinking. Notable contributors include Christopher Peacocke, Brian O'Shaughnessy and Michael Tye.
2001 by University of Hawai‘i Press of Nya ¯ ya in contrast to revealing a deficiency, as he appears to be doing here. He does this to make us think broadly about Nya ¯ ya in a contemporary context. And at the end I join him in making some very general comments about Nya ¯ ya’s realism. First, Gan˙ges ´ a’s argument and a rebuttal of Chakrabarti’s seven reasons from Gan ˙ ges ´ a’s point of view. There is no direct, apperceptive evidence for nirvikalpaka pratyaks ˙ a; rather, it is posited by force of the following inference as the first step of a two-step argument. ‘‘The perceptual cognition, ‘A cow’ (for example), is generated by a cognition of the qualifier, since it is a cognition of an entity as qualified (by that qualifier appearing), like an inference.’’ The second step takes a person’s first perception of an individual (Bessie, let us say) as a cow (i.e., as having some such property) as the perceptual cognition figuring as the inference’s subject (or paks ˙ a) such that the cognizer’s memory not informed by previous cow experience could not possibly provide the qualifier, cowhood. The qualifier has to be available, and the best candidate seems to be its...
2001 by University of Hawai‘i Press experiences are, at least potentially, objects of cognition or awareness. After all, the whole point of introducing the notion of the content of perceptual experiences is to explain a perceiver’s capacity to gain knowledge of perceived objects. This minimal claim is beefed up by the Nya ¯ ya philosophers by adding that all cognition, and thus perceptual cognition, requires conceptualization. This is the focus of the controversy between Buddhists and Naiya ¯ yikas. The Buddhist, in contrast, insists that perceptual cognition must be totally devoid of conceptualization. Perception is conception-free awareness of a particular-as-such. 2 This radical thesis is based on a plausible intuition: perceptual experiences, unlike other cognitive episodes, must be constrained by causal interaction between the sense faculty and the given. For the Buddhist, conceptualization requires ‘‘imaginative construction’’ by the mind that is unconstrained by the given. In the first section, we shall consider the central arguments offered by the Nya ¯ ya against such a conception-free awareness of a particular. In this section, I will extend the Nya ¯ ya arguments to reveal the incoherence in the very idea of a conception-free awareness of particulars. This does not mean that I reject the plausible intuition that guides the Buddhist: the content of perceptual experiences must be constrained by the causal interaction between the senses and the given. What I do reject is the stronger claim that the Buddhist defends on this basis, namely that the content of perceptual experiences must, therefore, be restricted to particulars. There is nothing new to this response, it is just a restatement of the famous Kantian dictum: intuitions without concepts are blind...
2001 by University of Hawai‘i Press sense to talk about a bare, raw, unstructured perceptual acquaintance with qualification or inherence! Logically and structurally one could argue that unless you have ‘‘got’’ a, b, and R first, you cannot have the complex aRb. But this is admittedly a process of logical postmortem dissection of a whole piece of direct qualificative perception. And the point of my metaphorical warning—‘‘You need to have ‘L’ and ‘O’ and ‘D’ and ‘N’ to spell ‘London,’ but you do not need to spell ‘L’ or ‘O’ or ‘D’ or ‘N’ first. Single letters simply cannot be spelled!‘‘—was this: there are all sorts of different ways of ‘‘getting.’’ You need to ‘‘get’’ the qualifying feature somehow in order to see or hear or taste something as qualified by that feature, but you do not therefore need to see or hear or taste that feature alone first in a bare, raw, unqualified manner! I do believe, like a good Naiya ¯ yika, that high-pitchedness (or fifthness, in the octave) can be heard although it is a sound-universal. But I refuse to admit that before I can hear a sung note as high-pitched or (the fifth) I must somehow hear that universal directly without hearing it in any note! The central point, once again, is this: all...
This note aims to clarify which arguments do, and which arguments do not, tell against Conceptualism, the thesis that the representational content of experience is exclusively conceptual. Contrary to Sean Kelly's position, conceptualism has no difficulty accommodating the phenomena of color constancy and of situation-dependence. Acknowledgment of nonconceptual content is also consistent with holding that experiences have nonrepresentational subjective features. the crucial arguments against conceptualism stem from animal perception, and from a distinction, elaborated in the final section of the paper, between content which is objective and content which is also conceived of by its subject as objective.
Two major functions of the visual system are discussed and contrasted. One function of vision is the creation of an internal model or percept of the external world. Most research in object perception has concentrated on this aspect of vision. Vision also guides the control of object-directed action. In the latter case, vision directs our actions with respect to the world by transforming visual inputs into appropriate motor outputs. We argue that separate, but interactive, visual systems have evolved for the perception of objects on the one hand and the control of actions directed at those objects on the other. This 'duplex' approach to high-level vision suggests that Marrian or 'reconstructive' approaches and Gibsonian or 'purposive-animate-behaviorist' approaches need not be seen as mutually exclusive, but rather as complementary in their emphases on different aspects of visual function.
Perception: An essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge Scenarios, Concepts and Perception A Study of Concepts Non-conceptual Content Defended
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Non-Particular Individuals The Philosophy of P.F. Strawson
- A Chakrabarti
Representationalism and the Content of Experiences Representation in Mind: new approaches to mental representation
- F Jackson
Tattvacinamani, Part I
- Gangesa
Non-conceptual Content Defended
- C Peacocke
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Non-Particular Individuals
- A Chakrabarti
- A. Chakrabarti
Representationalism and the Content of Experiences
- F Jackson
- F. Jackson