Here is a paper that might be helpful in clarifying the ontological issues raised in recent posts by
@Michael Allen. I'll link it below after posting the first few pages:
"Preconceptual intelligibility in perception" by Daniel Dwyer
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Abstract: This paper argues that John McDowell’s conceptualism distorts a genuine phenomenological account of perception. Instead of the seemingly forced choice between conceptualism and non-conceptualism as to what accounts for perceptual and discursive meaning, I provide an argument that there is a preconceptual intelli-gibility already in the perceptual field. With the help of insights from certain non-conceptualists I sketch out an argument that there is a teleological directedness in the way in which latent order and structure can be discriminated at the level of perceptual content. This content can then be brought to discursive, conceptual clarity by understanding in such a way that it is guided by the order already discovered in perception. With the help of Husserlian phenomenology of perception, I argue that the fundamental roots of epistemic normativity lie in the discriminating intelligence or mindedness operative below the level of the explicitly conceptual. By preconceptual is meant the directedness of explication of the structures present in the sensory manifold toward fully explicit conceptual judgments.
Keywords: Perception, John McDowell, Conceptualism, Husserl, Kant
I Introduction: Conceptualism, nonconceptualism, and preconceptualism
John McDowell’s
Mind and World has set the tone of the contemporary debate about whether human perception is possible only to the extent that the perceiver has acquired the appropriate conceptual capacities available to specify perceptual content. He argues that conceptual capacities are that in virtue of which sensations represent the intelligibility of the perceptual world.1 The main question in this debate is whether our perceptual discriminations outrun the recognitional categories available to us. Otherwise put, the question is whether perception is a distinct form of human intentionality different in kind from cognition, or whether it is continuous in some sense with conceptual knowledge insofar as cognitive processes in some form are actualized all the way down in passive perception. In short, are concepts relevant to the intentionality of perception and its basic world-directedness? What is at issue is whether a world-presenting passive perceptual state is of a different species from a mental state in which one actively makes conceptual distinctions, identifications, and judgments. To frame the question in the terms McDowell sets out in
Mind and World, at what point in the move from (1) sensibility to (2) judgment are (3) spontaneous conceptual capacities (4) passively actualized? Conversely, at what point, if at all, does judgment as the paradigmatic case of conceptual capacities become actualized in the very act of perception? And if McDowell is prepared to recognize non-paradigmatic cases of conceptual articulation within perception, how are they to be understood?2 I argue in this paper that the four notions above remain unclear and call for phenomenological clarification broadly construed. For McDowell’s presupposed neo-Kantian interpretations of these key concepts are not sufficient to make clear how helpful his defense of intelligibility in perception in this ongoing debate really is. Furthermore, without phenomenological clarification of the Neo-Kantian roots of the debate, the views of McDowell’s nonconceptualist opponents are equally unclear insofar as they take for granted McDowell’s insufficiently elaborated neo-Kantian framework. Within this framework, according to which conceptual spontaneity and sensible receptivity remain two fundamentally different faculties, there is no room to highlight the gradual and developmental way in which conceptual capacities emerge from and are guided by higher-level perceptual discriminations. The best way to defend a limited version of conceptual content in
[1 Mark Tanzer (2005) has convincingly argued that McDowell and Heidegger come to divergent conclusions about Kant’s predicament about (non)conceptual content precisely because they each see the major unresolved problem in the first Critique as Kant’s notion of subjectivity as spontaneous receptivity.2 The influence on McDowell of Wilfrid Sellars’ inferentialist account of justification of perceptual judgments is manifestly evident all the way from McDowell (1996) to (2011). See Sellars (1997).McDowell claims that ‘‘the point of invoking spontaneity is to suggest that the paradigmatic or central cases of actualization of conceptual capacities are in judgment, and that is free, responsible cognitive activity.’’ See McDowell (2004, p. 194). Because it involves freedom and cognitive responsibility, the act of ‘‘judging can be singled out as the paradigmatic mode of actualization of conceptual capacities.’’ See McDowell (1998, p. 434). Although McDowell argues that experiences are to be modeled on acts of judgment, because they capture the synthetic togetherness of a perceptual state of affairs, he nonetheless admits that this conception ‘‘leaves room for conceptual capacities…to be actualized in non-paradigmatic ways, in kinds of occurrence other than acts of judging.’’ See McDowell (2000a: pp. 10–11) McDowell maintains that ‘‘the occurrence of an experience, on the conception I urge, is to be distinguished from the occurrence of an act of judgement, but it would be quite another matter, and quite wrong by my lights, to say that there is experience, as I conceive it, in the absence of the capacity to judge. It is a pity English has to make do here with one word, ‘judgement,’ where (German, say) has both ‘Urteil’ and ‘Urteilskraft .’’’ See McDowell (2000b, p. 335). Furthermore, the argument is such that ‘‘the paradigm exercise of a conceptual capacity is precisely the free act of judgement, and on that basis I speak, in a Kantian vein, of conceptual capacities as capacities of spontaneity. What is true…is that not all actualizations of these capacities are exercises of them.’’ (McDowell 2000b, p. 342–43).D. Dwyer 1 3
perception, what I shall call preconceptual content, is to incorporate certain insights from the phenomenology of perception as articulated best by Husserl. Doing this will achieve two goals. First, I will show how the debate about nonconceptual content turns on the elaboration of the presence of salience and preconceptual meaning in normal, optimal, and teleologically-directed perception. Second, I will argue that the fundamental roots of epistemic normativity lie in the higher-level discriminating intelligence or mindedness operative below the level of the explicitly conceptual. I thus agree with McDowell in locating the grounds of rationality within the realm of receptive sensibility but disagree with his contention that normativity is merely a matter of the linguistic-discursive conceptualization allegedly needed to specify sensible content. In this paper, I will argue that we must understand pre-conceptual in terms of an argument, in broadly Husserlian terms, that one must consider the teleological directedness of pre-predicative grasp of objects and their properties to an eventual fulfilled judgment that discursively and fully conceptually articulates that pre-predicatively registered state of affairs. It is only by focusing on preconceptual and intelligible content in perception that we can do justice to the widest notion of intelligence and articulation implied in the phenomenological interpretation of logos, in its three related senses as discrimination, recognition, and judging. Husserl helpfully analyzes the meaning of logos from the point of view of the original meanings of the verb lego: first, a discriminative and synthetic gathering together or explicative synthesis ( zusammenlegen), second, a recognitional exposition (darle-gen), and third, the conceptual exposition by means of words in discourse.3 Thus not all registering of synthetic togetherness in the perceptual domain is an act of Kantian discursive understanding. There is a certain kind of intelligibility at play in perception that lies below the level of discursive judgment. The wrong sort of gloss on this kind of relational articulation of states of affairs is non-discursive, for in its most basic sense perception is a pre-discursive relating and explicating of states of affairs in various modes of passively synthetic combination. The emphasis on pre- as opposed to non-conceptual is straightforward: the former signifies a ‘noetic-teleological directedness’ at work when conceptual explication is guided by perceptual explication of a state of affairs. For example, the association of sensuous data in the perceptual field and the registering of homogeneity of perceptual content against a heterogeneous background are two ways in which the perceiver can detect the synthetic togetherness of perceptual phenomena, a togetherness that is not the result of Kantian synthesis performed by discursive judgment. Characterizing nonconceptual content strictly as non-objective as opposed to pre-objective, however, does not do justice to the fact that there is a developmental continuity in registering states of affairs that present themselves already from themselves in forms of synthetic togetherness. Thus, as I will argue throughout the paper, there is order in the sensory manifold, contra Kant, and the registering of this order is preconceptual, contra McDowell. This order will, furthermore, be seen to constitute what Dominique Pradelle has recently called ‘‘a sortof intelligible architectonic underlying all discursivity.’’4
[3 See Husserl (2001, p. 356, and 1978: §§1 and 3).
4 See Pradelle (2012, p. 19).]
2 Intelligibility in perception: A phenomenological prelude
Meaning and intelligibility must be conceived as spanning the traditional divide between understanding and sensibility, between cognition and perception. This wide notion of meaning, which avoids the reduction of normative rationality to Kantian conceptual discursivity, captures both the way in which (1) the domain of the conceptual goes all the way down into perception via sedimentation and that dynamic which phenomenologists call Einstromen 5 and (2) the way in which perceptual meaning goes all the way up to conceptual articulation.6 McDowell proposes to expand the conceptual space of reasons downward to incorporate the domain of the perceptual. But we need to move in the opposite direction as well to recognize that the domain of the conceptual goes all the way up in the sense that it captures the same meaning more determinately in propositional form via judgment. The one-sided conceptualist focus on judgmental synthesis prevents us from seeing its very condition of possibility, namely, that conceptual or recognitional capacities are themselves acquired in a way that is dependent on how preconceptual discriminatory capacities can in the best cases—under normal and optimally disclosive perceptual conditions—lead to cognitive recognitional capacities. In other words, perceptual recognition can in the best cases lead to conceptual articulation. Conceptual unclarity about the givenness of a state of affairs is often a case of not having that state of affairs given to oneself with sufficient perceptual clarity. It is not that cognitive lack involves an empirical Given which fails to present itself clearly. It is rather that the mode of perceptual givenness is not optimally disclosive of the way in which things are thus and so in the world. Our perceptual sensitivity to fineness of grain in the phenomenal field is or at least can be registered in a suitable way for subsequent cognitive articulation. By thematizing this suitability condition of preconceptual content, the way in which pre-cognitive capacities are operative in motivating perceptual discrimination toward conceptual articulation can best be demonstrated. With this as yet undeveloped contribution to the debate, one can avoid the alleged forced choice between conceptualism and nonconceptualism. . . ."
[5 ‘‘Flowing-into,’’ a phenomenon described by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty to account for the way in which previous theoretical accomplishments recede into the givens of the life-world.
6Joseph Rouse in a sense rightly argues that ‘‘Perception is conceptual ‘all the way down’ only because discursive conceptualization is perceptual ‘all the way up.’’’ See Rouse (2005, pp. 38, 40 and 58).]
https://www.academia.edu/5779058/Preconceptual_intelligibility_in_perception
raying hands: