TITLE:
A Critique of Mcdowell’s Demonstrative Thought in the Cognitive Process of Perception
AUTHORS:
Emmanuel Ola Akintona
KEYWORDS:
Perception, Cognition, Conceptual Experience, Non-Conceptual Experience and Demonstrative Thought
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Philosophy,
Vol.4 No.3,
August
20,
2014
ABSTRACT: The
recent trend in epistemology is the consideration about the possibility of
non-conceptual content in the cognitive process of perception. This has ever
been generating serious polemics amongphilosophers
of perception on the true nature and character of the content of our perceptual
experienceat perception. Two groups eventually emerged: the non-conceptualists
and the conceptualists. The non-conceptualists on one hand advocate that mental
representations of the world do not necessarily presuppose concepts by means of
which the content of these representations can be specified, hence, cognizers
can have mental representation of the world that are non-conceptual. They argue
that creatures without conceptual capacity can be in a content-bearing state
even though they lack concept, memory or linguistic ability. The conceptualists
on the other hand claim that non-conceptual content neither exists nor is
representationally significant to perception because they are mere qualitative
content of sensation i.e. purely sensory content. For them, cognizers can only
have mental representations of the world if they possess adequate concepts by
means of which they can specify what they represent else their experience is
unavoidable conceptual.John McDowell (1994),
a leading conceptualist, therefore introduced the concept “demonstrative thought”
to counter non-conceptuality. For him, no perceptual experience is
indescribable or indemonstrable: a demonstrative concept like “that shade” is
also a demonstrable concept. This paper adopts the philosophical conceptual
analytic tool to argue that the introduction of demonstrative concepts by McDowell
does not in any way hinder the possibility of non-conceptual content in
perception.