Concepts and predication from perception to cognition

Abstract

One popular doctrine in 20 th -century philosophy was conceptualism about perception.The core idea was that perceptual awareness is structured by concepts possessed by the perceiver.A primary motivation for conceptualism was epistemological: perception provides justification for belief, and this justificatory relation is only intelligible if perception, like belief, is conceptually structured (Brewer, 1999;McDowell, 1994;Sellars, 1956).We perceive that a is F, and thereby grasp perceptual evidence that justifies the belief that a is F and inferentially integrates with premises like If a is F then a is G to produce the belief that a is G.Conceptualism is less popular today (cf.Bengson, Grube, & Korman, 2011;Mandelbaum, 2018;Mandik, 2012).The a priori justification for conceptualism has crashed face-first into a wall of empirical evidence.For instance, children and non-human animals possess perceptual capacities despite lacking many hallmarks of conceptual cognition (Bermudez, 1998; Burge, 2010a; Block ms).Meanwhile, in adults, mental imagery and related phenomena implicate iconic rather than conceptual/propositional formats (Carey, 2009;Fodor, 2007; Quilty-Dunn, 2019a).A growing contingent of theorists thus regard perception as a natural kind marked by its proprietary nonconceptual representations (Burge, 2014; Burnston, 2017a;Carey, 2009; Kulvicki, 2015a;Toribio, 2011; Block, ms; see also Evans (1982); Hopp (2011); Peacocke (2001) for other nonconceptualist arguments).Though opinion has shifted strongly in favor of nonconceptualism, it may be time for the pendulum to swing back.Putting the traditional normative motivations for conceptualism aside, it makes sense even from a purely descriptive, naturalistic perspective that at least some of the vehicles of perception should be conceptual.Many cognitive operations make use of concepts; thus

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