Concepts, Attention, And The Contents Of Conscious Visual Experience

Abstract

The basic question motivating my dissertation is whether it is possible to consciously perceive objects in the world without possessing any concepts for those objects. Standard phenomenological and epistemological approaches to the issue of non-conceptual perceptual content have presumed that concept-possession entails mastery of a concept's linguistic and inferential usage. I depart from these approaches by developing a naturalized account of perceptual concepts, one which is further informed by theories of perception in the Nyāya tradition of Indian philosophy. Perceptual concepts on a revised conceptualist account can be understood as attention- and memory-based capacities for predicating sensory features to objects. With this account in place, I draw upon recent scientific models of visual processing to argue that essentially non-conceptual, pre-predicative perceptual contents do not phenomenally appear in conscious visual experience. To make plausible the idea that perceptual contents can be both conceptual and nonlinguistic in nature, I demonstrate in Chapters 1 and 2 how perceptual contents can have a compositional, predicative structure in the absence of linguistic formatting. Similarly, I advance several criteria for perceptual concept possession in the absence of explicit linguistic or inferential mastery. I further support my revised account of perceptual concepts by drawing upon insights from Buddhist and Nyāya philosophers, developed in their centuries-long debates over the relation between perception, concepts, and language. In Chapter 3, I then offer a reconstructive reading of Immanuel Kant and the Navya Nyāya philosopher Gȧgesa, which extracts from their theories of perceptual concepts and apperception a thesis to the effect that intentional, object-directed perceptual representations must be conceptually structured in order to have a subjective phenomenal character. Kant and Gȧgesa broadly agree on a set of reasons why we lack any phenomenological evidence for the existence of perceptual states with exclusively non-conceptual content. I take these reasons to be pointing toward several conditions responsible for the integration of perceptual contents into a subject's unified conscious experience. The fourth chapter reframes my reading of Kant and Gȧgesa in naturalized terms, by demonstrating how phenomenally accessible perceptual contents arise through the conceptually modulated activity of attention and visual memory. I show how a unified theory of perceptual attention and conceptualization undercuts the phenomenological intuitions underlying both classical Buddhist and contemporary defenses of non-conceptualism, and further resolves several dilemmas facing recent theories of consciousness. Lastly, the fifth chapter shifts to a discussion of classical Chinese epistemology and psychological studies of perceptual expertise, in order to further characterize perceptual concepts as capacities for allocating attention which we can actively and skillfully exercise in experience. Ultimately, a theory of perceptual concepts as attentional skills allows us to understand perceptual experience itself as an activity which is both skillfully absorbed and permeated with rationality.