Demonstrative Concepts and Experience

Some or all of the material in this paper was presented to audiences at Stanford, Berkeley, Birkbeck, Princeton, and the International Society for Phenomenological Study at Asilomar. I am grateful to all of these audiences for the opportunity to present the material and for helpful comments on it. I have also had fruitful discussions about this material with and/or comments on it from Bill Brewer, Liz Camp, Cheryl Chen, Paul Coppock, Hubert Dreyfus, Eddie Cushman, Mark Greenberg, Gil Harman, MarkJohnston, Alva N6e, Mark Okrent, Christopher Peacocke, Philip Pettit, John Searle, Roger Shepard, Scott Soames, Dmitri Tymoczko, and two anonymous reviewers for the Philosophical Review. I would like to thank Bill Brewer in particular for a series of very fruitful and informative e-mails on the topic. I hope and expect that my criticisms of his and McDowell’s views will be taken in the constructive vein in which they are intended. Financial support for this research was provided in part by the James S. McDonnell Project in Philosophy and the Neurosciences and by Princeton University through a Supplemental Support Award for Honorific Fellowship Recipients. I would like to thank both of these institutions. Finally, as always, I’m especially grateful for help and support from Cheryl Chen. ‘To say that the content of the experience is characterized in conceptual terms is to say that the content of the experience is constituted entirely by concepts possessed by the subject of the experience. These concepts precisely capture, therefore, both the substance of, and the level of detail in, the experience. The principle proponent of this view is John McDowell. He first articulates the position explicitly in McDowell 1994, especially Lecture III and Afterword, Part II. He defends the view further in McDowell 1998, where he takes on some criticisms leveled by Christopher Peacocke in Peacocke 1998. (I have criticized Peacocke’s view, and offered a different analysis of the issues, in Kelly 2001; Peacocke has responded to this criticism in Peacocke 2001.) Bill Brewer argues for a position very similar to McDowell’s in his recent book Brewer 1999, especially in chapter 5. And a related view is defended in Sedivy 1996. As we will see, a central issue in McDowell’s presentation of the view has to do with the connection between perception and memory. Other relevant discussions of this relation occur in Martin 1992, Raffman 1995, and Jolley and Watkins 1998. The general issue also seems to be discussed in Heck 2000, which, unfortunately, appeared too late for me to be able to take it into account in this paper.