## 1. Introduction



Although some of the themes in current discussions of nonconceptual
content have surfaced at various times in recent philosophical
thinking (within the philosophy of perception, see, e.g., Dretske
1969, 1981. Within philosophy of cognitive science, see, e.g., Stich
1978), the notion of nonconceptual content was explicitly introduced
into analytical philosophy by Gareth Evans (Evans 1982). As part of
his general discussion of the role of information-links in making
possible demonstrative and other types of identification, Evans
develops the idea that the information yielded by the perceptual
systems (including somatic proprioception) is nonconceptual. This
nonconceptual information, he argues, is initially unconscious but
becomes conscious when it serves as input to a thinking,
concept-applying, and reasoning system.



Evans is not always clear whether he understands nonconceptual content
to be a personal level or a subpersonal level phenomenon. And, in
fact, it seems that Evans's conception of nonconceptual content
is in at least one important way deeply antithetical to that currently
discussed. Whereas much contemporary discussion of nonconceptual
content is focused on the content of *conscious* perceptual
states, it looks very much as if Evans understands perceptual states
with nonconceptual content as being *non-conscious* until the
subject's conceptual abilities are brought to bear on them
(Campbell 2005). Nonetheless, the general idea that there might be
ways of representing the world independent of the thinker's
conceptual capacities has inspired other philosophers. An early,
personal level application of the notion is Tim Crane's paper on
the waterfall illusion (Crane 1988a. An illustration of the waterfall
illusion, also known as the motion aftereffect illusion, can be found
 here).
 Crane argues that the waterfall illusion presents an experience with
a contradictory content that hence cannot have a conceptual
content--since conceptual contents must be consistent. This claim
has provoked some debate (Mellor 1988, Crane 1988b).



Early development of the notion of nonconceptual content came
primarily from philosophers connected with the University of Oxford
and working within a broadly Fregean tradition. Christopher Peacocke,
in a series of papers and then in his book on concepts (Peacocke
1992), argued that the fineness of grain of perceptual experience
outstrips the conceptual capacities of the perceiver (more on the
fineness of grain argument in section
 4.1).
 He offered a detailed theoretical framework for understanding the
nonconceptual content of perceptual experience, which he termed
*scenario content*. A rather different account of the nature of
perceptual experience in nonconceptual terms was provided by Adrian
Cussins (Cussins 1990), who suggested that we should understand the
nonconceptual content of experience in essentially ability-based
terms. Cussins argued that this personal level notion of nonconceptual
content is naturally complemented at the subpersonal level by a
connectionist cognitive architecture. Michael Martin applied the
notion of nonconceptual content to the study of memory (Martin 1992).
Recent applications of the notion of nonconceptual content have
focused on the relation between perception and action (Hurley 1998)
and the analysis of conscious experience (Tye 1995, 2000).



One thesis that might be held about nonconceptual content is that a
thinker can represent the world nonconceptually without possessing
*any* concepts at all. This was termed the Autonomy Thesis by
Peacocke, who offers an argument against it in his (1992). This
argument was challenged by Jose Luis Bermudez
(Bermudez 1994) in favor of a notion of *autonomous
nonconceptual content* that can be used to explain the behavior of
nonlinguistic creatures. Peacocke was initially unconvinced by this
line of argument (Peacocke 1994), but subsequently changed his mind
(Peacocke 2002). Bermudez further deployed the notion of
autonomous nonconceptual content in exploring primitive nonlinguistic
forms of self-consciousness (Bermudez 1998). (More on the
Autonomy Thesis in section
 6.)



The notion of nonconceptual content has also been utilized in
specifying the representational contents of subpersonal states, such
as those involved in the early stages of visual processing. Such
states, it is suggested, have representational contents and yet it is
unlikely that the subject undergoing those states has the concepts
utilized in a theoretical description of the contents of those states.
(More on the nonconceptual character of subpersonal states in section
 4.2.)
 Additionally, the notion of nonconceptual content has been utilized
in the explanation of the behavior of nonlinguistic creatures or those
that do not employ concepts. Since, *ex hypothesi*, such
organisms do not have conceptual capacities, if we are to attribute to
them states with representational contents at all the only contents
available to us are nonconceptual representational contents. (More on
the explanation of the behavior of nonlinguistic creatures in section
 4.3.)



The most extensive discussion of the notion of nonconceptual content
has been in the philosophy of perception. Many have suggested that a
correct specification of the representational contents of perception
need not be limited to concepts possessed by the perceiver. In other
words, a specification of the content of perception can be sensitive
to how an organism perceptually represents its environment even though
it utilizes concepts the organism need not possess. This claim is
supported by a variety of different considerations, some of which
concern the distinctive features of the phenomenology of perception
and some which concern perception's distinctive epistemic role.
(See section
 4.1
 for the debate about the nonconceptual content of perception.)



Some have objected to Evans's original characterization of the notion
on the grounds that whether or not a correct specification of the
representational content of some mental states is constrained by the
concepts possessed by the subject speaks only to the conditions a
subject must satisfy in order to undergo such states, rather than to
the nature of the state's representational content (e.g., Heck
2000). This has led to a distinction between two forms of
nonconceptualism--"state"-nonconceptualism and
"content"-nonconceptualism. The former is concerned with the
conditions one must meet in order to undergo a state with a given
content, i.e., whether or not one must possess the concepts involved
in specifying that content, whereas the latter is concerned with the
nature of a mental state's content. Nonetheless, as we discuss below,
there is good reason to suppose that the distinction collapses, and
that the two forms of nonconceptualism are mutually-entailing. (See
section 3 for the purported
distinction between state and content nonconceptualism.)


## 2. Nonconceptual content: An initial characterization



The notion of nonconceptual content is fundamentally contrastive. In
elucidating it we need to start with the notion of conceptual content.
The paradigm case of a state with conceptual content is a
propositional attitude such as a belief or desire. Having a
propositional attitude involves standing in a certain relation to a
content (a *thought* or a *proposition*). The content is
what it is that is believed, desired, hoped for etc. Although
propositional attitudes are ultimately directed at certain objects,
properties and/or relations (which yield their
*truth-condition*, and in terms of which their
*truth-value* is to be determined), it is clear that only
certain ways of characterizing those objects/properties/relations can
serve to specify the content of the relevant propositional attitude.
It would be incorrect, for example, to characterize the content of my
current belief that my car is parked in the driveway by using the
concepts of particle physics to describe the state of affairs that
would make it true. This would be incorrect because it completely
fails to capture how I think about the state of affairs of my car
being in the driveway. The obvious question to ask, once this
preliminary point is in play, is 'What constraints are imposed
upon specifications of the content of propositional attitudes by the
requirement to respect the way the subject thinks about the
truth-condition of the relevant attitude?'



Different theories of content will respond to this question in
different ways, but the following is widely held to impose a minimal
constraint upon any such response.



> 
> **The conceptual constraint:**
>   
> 
> Specifications of the content of a sentence or propositional attitude
> should only employ concepts possessed by the utterer or thinker.
> 



Certain theories of content and concepts directly entail the
conceptual constraint. Within a broadly Fregean tradition, for
example, the contents of propositional attitudes (and the meanings of
sentences) are taken to consist of concepts--and it is hard to
see how one can have a propositional attitude whose content is a
complex of concepts without possessing each of
 them.[1]



But the conceptual constraint does not depend upon adopting any
particular theory of content. Its plausibility stems, rather, from the
conjunction of two thoughts.


1. In specifying what a thinker believes, what a perceiver perceives
or what a speaker is saying by uttering a certain sentence in a
particular context one has to be as faithful as possible to how that
thinker, perceiver or speaker apprehends the world.
2. How a thinker, perceiver or speaker apprehends the world in having
beliefs about it, perceiving it or speaking about it is a function of
the concepts he possesses.



This way of motivating the conceptual constraint has been explicitly
put forward by several authors who argue forcibly for the second
thesis (see, for example, Peacocke 1983, McDowell 1994a, Brewer 1999,
and Noe 1999). Theorists of nonconceptual content, in contrast,
accept the first constraint without the second. They hold that
specifications of content must respect the way a thinker, perceiver or
speaker apprehends the world and *because of this* they cannot
be circumscribed by the concepts possessed by the thinker, perceiver
or speaker. Theorists of nonconceptual content postulate the existence
of ways of representing the world (and hence the existence of a type
of content) that outstrip the concepts possessed by the thinker.



The conceptual constraint can be lifted in two different ways. It can
be lifted globally by simply denying that any content specifications
need confine themselves to the concepts possessed by the
utterer/thinker. The currently popular identification of propositions
with functions from possible worlds to truth values involves a
*global* lifting of the conceptual constraint. Possible world
semantics is intended to apply to all propositional attitudes and it
is obvious that few believers who are not also professional
philosophers will have any grip at all on the central theoretical
concepts of possible worlds semantics. All content comes out as
nonconceptual content in this sense (Stalnaker
 1998).[2]
 In terms of the two motivations identified earlier for the conceptual
constraint, this approach to specifying content appears to repudiate
the first. It holds that specifications of content need not be
sensitive to how the speaker or thinker apprehends the world, at least
if one thinks that such sensitivity requires a degree of aspectuality
that possible worlds semantics explicitly
 rejects.[3]



It is more interesting to think about what might happen if we retain
the first motivation, but question the second, looking for ways in
which thinkers/perceivers/speakers represent the world that are not a
function of the concepts they possess. There are three different
representational domains for which such a *local* lifting of
the conceptual constraint may be plausible:


1. Perceptual states (see further
 4.1
 below)
2. Representational states at the subpersonal or subdoxastic level
(see further
 4.2
 below)
3. Representational states of non-human animals and human infants who
do not seem to be concept possessors (see further
 4.3
 below)



Of course, the plausibility of a local lifting of the conceptual
constraint will be a function of how concepts are understood. In the
following we make two assumptions about concepts. These assumptions do
not fix a single notion of concept, but they do however determine the
logical space within which accounts can be developed of the
correlative notions of conceptual and nonconceptual content.



The first assumption is that concepts are semantic entities rather
than psychological entities. Concepts are constituents of contents.
Attitudes towards contents are psychological occurrences, but the
contents themselves are not psychological entities. They, and the
concepts they contain, are abstract
 entities.[4]
 The second assumption is that, although concepts are abstract
entities, mastering a concept is a psychological achievement. We need
a cognitive account of what it is to master a concept, even though
concepts are not psychological entities.


## 3. An important distinction: State vs. content nonconceptualism



Heck (2000) introduces an alternative conception of the debate over
nonconceptual content. This conception arises from an ambiguity he
finds in Evans (1982) and other proponents of nonconceptual content.
He notes that these proponents appeal to the thesis that while the
beliefs a person can have depend on the concepts she possesses, the
perceptual states she can have do not. However, this thesis does not
immediately establish a conclusion about the *contents* of
perception. It establishes only a conclusion about the conditions a
subject must satisfy to be in a perceptual *state* with some
content. Prima facie, this conclusion appears to be compatible with
the claim that perceptual states and belief states have the same type
of content.



Heck distinguishes two different ways of drawing the
conceptual/nonconceptual distinction. According to the
*content* view, there is a fundamental difference between the
type of content that perceptual experiences can have and the type of
content that beliefs and other propositional attitudes can have.
According to the *state* view, in contrast, there need not be
more than one type of content. Perceptual experiences and
propositional attitudes could have contents of the same type (in both
cases content could be given in terms of sets of possible worlds, for
example). What distinguishes perceptions from propositional attitudes
on the state view is that the latter are concept-dependent while the
former are concept-independent. A state-type is concept-dependent just
if it is content-bearing and it is impossible for a thinking and
perceiving subject to be in a token state of that type without
possessing the concepts required to specify the content of that token
state. In contrast, a subject can be in states of a
concept-independent state-type even if she lacks all or some of the
concepts required for an accurate specification of the relevant
 contents.[5]



Several reasons have been proposed for considering *state*,
rather than *content*, nonconceptualism as of primary
importance in the nonconceptual debate. First, as many have noted
(Byrne 2003, 2005, Speaks 2005, Crowther 2006, Heck 2007), keeping the
state/content distinction in mind suggests that much of the recent
debate purportedly aiming at the *content* of perception in
fact only concerns *state*-nonconceptualism. Arguments for the
nonconceptual content of perception usually proceed via demonstration
of the concept-independence of perception. However, this is a
characteristic of state-nonconceptualism; it does not seem to entail
content-nonconceptualism directly. In section
 4.1,
 after reviewing the arguments that have been proposed for the
nonconceptual *content* of perception, we will return to this
concern.



A second reason offered for discussing nonconceptualism at the level
of state type rather than at the level of content is that it allows
for a meaningful debate about nonconceptualism even if one holds that
all content is nonconceptual. Stalnaker (1984, 1998), for example,
argues that all content should be understood in terms of sets of
possible worlds. If that is the case, then the difference between the
propositional attitudes and perception should be elucidated in terms
extrinsic to the type of content involved in these states. This can be
achieved if we think that the propositional attitudes, but not
perceptual states, are concept-dependent; that is, if we think that
having propositional attitudes but not perceptual states requires the
subject of those attitudes to possess certain concepts. This reasoning
holds equally well if one thinks that all content is conceptual. In
such a case, one is forced to explain the difference between different
types of content involving states in terms extrinsic to the nature of
their contents; the state-view is one way of explaining this
distinction, by appeal to the capacities required of a subject if she
is to undergo such states.



An additional reason that the "state" view might be found
appealing is that it allows for the commonsensical notion that the
contents of perception can be taken at face value to produce beliefs
that have *the same content*. If, on the other hand, one holds
that the content of perception is of a fundamentally different
*kind* than that of belief, it is less easy to see how one can
respect the intuition that one believes the same thing that one
perceives (Byrne 2005, Speaks 2005). Furthermore, it has been argued
that perception can play a justificatory role in the production of
perceptual beliefs only if belief and perception involve the same kind
of content (McDowell 1994a, 2006, Brewer 1999, 2005). This claim has
been disputed (e.g., Heck 2000, Peacocke 2001a, Lerman 2010, Cahen
2019. For more on the justificatory role of perception see section
 4.1).



The "state" view attempts to make the
conceptual/nonconceptual distinction a distinction between types of
states, those that are concept-dependent and those that are
concept-independent. Bermudez (2007) argues that such a
distinction is implausible when considered independently of the
distinction drawn by the "content" view. The difficulty he
identifies with the "state" view is that it is unclear
what basis there might be for a distinction between concept-dependent
and concept-independent state types other than the distinctive
contents of these states. That is, the "state" view owes
us some account of why some states, such as the propositional
attitudes, are concept-dependent, whereas other states, such as
perceptual states, are concept-independent. It seems that a natural
explanation for why perceptual states, but not propositional
attitudes, are concept-independent is that perceptual states differ
from propositional attitudes in the type of contents that are
involved (which determines, for example, the particular inferential relations in which they can stand). This explanation is not available if we hold that perception
and the propositional attitudes have contents of the same type.



It is open to the "state" view theorist to attempt to
explain the "state" view distinction in terms of the
functional roles of the different state types. She might argue for the
distinction by pointing out that the functional role of belief depends
on an organism's conceptual capacities and the functional role
of perception does not depend on its conceptual capacities (since,
arguably, an organism's perceptual discriminations can outstrip
its conceptual capacities). However, there is a sense in which this
would be a mere restatement of the problem rather than a solution to
it, since we still need some account of the concept-(in)dependence
*of these functional roles*. Again, an appeal to the different
kinds of contents involved in these different states seems to be a
straightforward explanation. The "state" view theorist
might also attempt to explain the "state" view distinction
by appeal to the phenomenological differences between the
propositional attitudes and perception. However, this too seems
problematic, since it is unclear why the lack of phenomenology should
make a belief concept-dependent or why the phenomenology of perception
should make it concept-independent (Bermudez 2007).



In a recent article, Toribio (2008) places further pressure on the
plausibility of the state/content distinction. She argues that
arguments couched in "state" terms--appealing to the
conditions the subject must satisfy in order to undergo states with
certain representational contents--do entail conclusions about
the contents of those states. The entailment is established by noting
the first motivation for the conceptual constraint, mentioned above
(section 2), regarding the proper specification of content. When
specifying the representational content of some mental state one has
to be as faithful as possible to how the creature undergoing that
state apprehends the world. Yet, how the creature apprehends the
world, she argues, depends on what cognitive capacities it has. Thus,
a creature that lacks conceptual capacities cannot be properly
attributed states with conceptual contents. Arguments to the effect
that perception is *state*-nonconceptual--that a creature
can undergo perceptual states without having the concepts utilized in
specifying the content of those states--thus also amount to
arguments that the content of those states are nonconceptual. See Van
Cleve (2012) and Schmidt (2015) for further arguments supporting the
interdependence of the state and content views of nonconceptualism. For responses to these arguments against the state/content distinction, see Duhau (2014)


## 4. Applying the notion of nonconceptual content



Theorists of nonconceptual content have primarily deployed the notion
in the service of three different explanatory projects: (a) the
project of characterizing the content of perceptual experience, (b)
the project of characterizing the content of subpersonal
representational states, and (c) the project of explaining the
behavior of certain non-human animals and of pre-conceptual human
infants.


### 4.1 Perceptual experience and nonconceptual content



We can think about the content of perception in conceptual terms. When
someone has a visual experience, for example, it will seem to that
person as if something is seen. One way of specifying the way things
appear to the subject is in terms of the perceptual belief the subject
would form on the basis of perception had he taken his perception at
face value. Such a way of specifying the representational content of
perception gives us the propositional content of perception. Theorists
of nonconceptual content have canvassed several types of reasons for
thinking that this propositional content does not exhaust the
representational content of perception (see the entry on
 the contents of perception).[6]



First, it has been argued that the contents of perception exhibit
certain features that cannot be exhibited by the contents of the
propositional attitudes. In particular, perception is capable of
representing impossible or contradictory states of affairs, as is the
case when viewing certain Escher drawings and when undergoing various
perceptual illusions. In contrast, it is argued that conceptual
content must be consistent--one cannot have a belief with a
contradictory content. Thus, Crane argues that reflecting on the
waterfall illusion shows that the contents of perception cannot be
conceptual (Crane 1988a). Since one cannot undergo a state with
contradictory *conceptual* contents, and yet the waterfall
illusion is a perceptual state with contradictory content--the
object perceived seems to be both moving and not moving--it
cannot be the case that perception involves conceptual contents (for
more on this argument see, e.g., Mellor 1988, Crane 1988b, Crane 1992,
and Gunther 2001).



Second, it has been argued that the content of perception is analog in
nature, unlike the conceptual content of propositional attitudes which
is more plausibly seen as digital. The distinction between analog and
digital representations has (for our purposes) been most perspicuously
put by Fred Dretske (1981, Ch.6). Let us take a particular
fact or state of affairs, say the fact or state of affairs that some
object *s* has property *F*. A representation carries
the information that *s* is *F* in digital form if and
only if it carries no further information about *s* other than
that it is *F* (and whatever further facts about it are
entailed by the fact that it is *F*). But whenever a
representation carries the information that *s* is *F*
in analog form it always carries additional information about
*s*. Nonconceptualists argue that, while propositional
attitudes represent the world in digital form, perceptual states
represent the world in analog form. Beck (2012) argues that analog
magnitude states are nonconceptual because they lack the
recombinability necessary for concepts (as articulated, for example,
in Evans's Generality
 Constraint).[7]



Third, it has been suggested that the content of perception is
unit-free (Peacocke 1986). If I perceptually represent an object as
being a certain distance from me, I do not usually represent that
distance in terms of a particular unit (in inches, say, as opposed to
centimeters), even though what I represent is a perfectly determinate
distance. I simply represent it as being *that* distance, where
the content of my perception specifies the distance. Peacocke (1986,
1989) argues extensively against the possibility of accommodating such
unit-free representations in purely propositional terms.



Fourth, nonconceptualists argue that the content of perception is more
fine-grained than the content of propositional attitudes. This
argument can be traced back to Evans, who asks, rhetorically,
"Do we really understand the proposal that we have as many color
concepts as there are shades of color that we can sensibly
discriminate?" (Evans 1982, p. 229). Arguably, I can
perceptually discriminate many more colors and shapes than I currently
have concepts for. Although I may be capable of discriminating between
two color chips of very similar shades of red, red27
and red29,
not being an expert on colors I will not have the concepts
*red27* and *red29*.
With my limited conceptual repertoire,
I will correctly judge both color chips to be red. However, I will so
judge on the basis of experiences whose contents are much more
specific and fine grained in a way that cannot be captured by my
conceptual capacities. (The same is true, *mutatis mutandis*,
of shape concepts.) My ability to perceive and discriminate the
determinate shades and shapes that I do outstrips my conceptual
capacities. As such, my experiences do not seem to depend on my
conceptual repertoire. Thus, in specifying the content of perception,
its accuracy conditions, we need not limit ourselves to the concepts
available to the subject--hence, perceptual content is
nonconceptual (e.g., Peacocke 1992, Heck 2000, Tye 1995, 2006.
DeBellis 1995, and Luntley 2003, argue on similar lines for the
nonconceptual content of music perception).



Of these, the argument from the fine-grained nature of perception has
generated the most discussion. Opponents of the idea that perceptual
content might be nonconceptual argue that the fineness of grain of
perceptual experience can in fact be accommodated at the conceptual
level. John McDowell, for example, suggests that the considerations
Evans raises have force only if we limit the types of concepts
expected to figure in the content of perception to such general
concepts as *red27*,
*red29*, etc., but, he
argues, there is no reason to suppose that the conceptual content of
perception needs to be limited in this way. Rather, the conceptual
content of perceptual experiences is given by demonstrative concepts,
such as *that shade* (McDowell
 1994a).[8]
 He claims that our conceptual capacities *are* capable of
representing colors with the same fineness of grain with which they
are perceptually represented. The information loss in the transition
from perception to perceptual belief is not a sign that there are two
different types of content in play, but should rather be understood as
a transition from a more determinate type of conceptual content (e.g.,
*that is colored thus*) to a less determinate type of
conceptual content (e.g., *that is red*).



Several objections have been raised against attempts to account for
the contents of perception in terms of demonstrative concepts. First,
for a capacity operative in perception to count as a genuine
conceptual capacity it must be possible for that same capacity to be
employed in thought. As such, it must be the case that such
demonstrative concepts as are arguably involved in the content of
perception are retained long enough for the possibility of their
remobilization--they cannot be reserved only for the particular
instance in which the sample is perceived. Although the appearance of
the demonstrative concept expressible by the phrase '... is
colored thus' can exploit the presence of the red27
color chip and account for the
person's fine-grained experience of the chip, the demonstrative
concept's applicability cannot be limited to the presence of
this sample. As McDowell says, the capacity for employing
demonstrative concepts in perception is a recognitional capacity
(McDowell 1994a p. 57, Brewer 1999 also holds that a conceptual
capacity must be available in the absence of the sample to which it
was initially applied). Kelly (2001a) calls this constraint 'the
re-identification condition' on concept possession.



However, the objection goes, it is evident that our capacities for
perceptual discrimination far outstrip our capacities for recognition.
Regardless of how short the interval between two presentations of a
specific shade it is reasonable to suppose that an organism is capable
of perceiving the shade in all its fineness of grain without being
capable of recognizing it as the shade presented earlier. There simply
does not seem to be a dependence between our fine grained perceptual
capacities and our memory capacities. But since the recognitional
demonstrative concepts the conceptualist appeals to do depend on such
memory capacities (according to the re-identification condition), it
cannot be the case that our having such demonstrative concepts is
necessary for our enjoying fine grained perceptual discriminations.
(For discussion of empirical support for the claim that memory is
coarser grained than our capacities for perceptual discrimination, see
Raffman 1995. See also Kelly 2001a, Peacocke 2001a, 2001b, Tye 2006,
Wright 2003, Dokic and Pacherie 2001 for arguments on similar
grounds).



One response to this objection would be to revise (Brewer 2005) the
re-identification constraint on the possession of demonstrative
concepts, or perhaps retract it altogether (Chuard 2006 explores
various versions of the re-identification condition and argues that
none are necessary for the possession of demonstrative concepts).
Kelly (2001a), and Dokic and Pacherie (2001), however, argue that the
re-identification condition is essential to concept possession.



Two potential challenges to the appeal to demonstrative concepts have
been highlighted. The first can be termed the priority argument. It
holds that we cannot take demonstrative concepts as explanatorily
basic. The demonstrative concepts I possess are a function of my
demonstrative capacities and part of what explains my having a given
demonstrative capacity is my having certain associated experiences;
the experience must be prior to the possession of the demonstrative
concept if the former is to explain the latter (Heck 2000). Various
formulations of this argument have been developed (see Ayers 2002,
Hopp 2009, Roskies 2008, 2010, and Levine 2010). For example, Levine
(2010) argues that "[w]hen you see a color and think 'that
color', the seeing is prior to the demonstrating, or else you
really don't know what you're demonstrating... But if
the seeing, the perceptual experience, is prior to the demonstrating,
then the demonstrating can't be what captures, or brings into
existence, the content of that experience" (p. 191). Brewer has
provided a response to this kind of objection, following a suggestion
rejected by Heck (2000), on the grounds that the form of explanation
that we should look for is not a *causal* explanation, which
would indeed require the priority of the experience, but a
*constitutive* one. Thus he says that "On the
conceptualist view, experience of a colour sample, R, just is a matter
of entertaining a content in which the demonstrative concept
'thatR shade' figures as
a constituent" (Brewer 2005, p. 221, see also Brewer 2002).



A second challenge comes from the so-called argument from
non-veridical experience (Heck 2000). Suppose that a subject has a
non-veridical experience as of a shade of color that does not exist in
nature and that has never previous appeared in her experience. Then
the subject cannot have an appropriate demonstrative concept, as there
is nothing to fix the reference of that concept. For a response to
this argument see Bengson, Grube, and Korman 2011.



Before moving to other arguments that have been advanced on behalf of
nonconceptualism it is worth remarking that the conceptualist appeal
to demonstrative concepts in response to the fineness of grain
argument is a response to a challenge to their position, rather than
an argument for conceptualism. The point of the fineness of grain
argument is to put pressure on the possibility of a subject possessing
all the concepts required for a correct specification of the contents
of perception. If the subject *cannot have* these concepts and
yet is capable of undergoing the perception, then it follows that the
content of perception is nonconceptual. However, showing that the
subject *does* have these concepts is not yet an argument for
the conceptualist position. For the conceptualist claim to follow,
they must show not that the content of perception is in fact
conceptualizable by the subject undergoing the experience in all of
its fine grain, as the availability of demonstrative concepts
suggests, but rather that the subject *cannot* undergo the
experience *without* possessing these concepts. Thus even if
the conceptualists manage to show that subjects do possess all the
concepts involved in the correct specification of the content of
perception, it still does not show that the content of perception is
conceptual, it only undercuts the motivation the nonconceptualist can
obtain from the fineness of grain argument (Coliva 2003,
Bermudez 2007).



A fifth argument, related to the priority argument against the appeal
to demonstrative concepts above, pertains to the possibility of
concept acquisition or learning. Presumably what explains our coming
to possess the observational concepts that we do is our undergoing
appropriately related perceptual experiences (see, e.g., Peacocke
1992, 2001a, Ayers 2004). If this is so, it cannot be the case, on
pain of circularity, that undergoing a particular perceptual
experience depends on possessing the very concepts the acquisition of
which the experience explain. Roskies (2008) argues that if we reject
the claim that perception with nonconceptual content plays an
essential role in concept acquisition, we cannot account for our
acquisition of observational concepts without being committed to an
unacceptable form of nativism. (See also Forman 2006 for a different
argument purporting to show the necessity of perception with
nonconceptual content to concept learning.)



A sixth argument for the nonconceptual content of perception derives
from Kelly (2001b). He argues that the central reason perception must
be nonconceptual is that the experience of a property depends on the
situation in which it is perceived and depends on the object which it
characterizes in a way that demonstrative concepts do not. An example
of the first sort of dependency is given by the phenomenon of color
constancy. In this case we can see two samples of the same color
property illuminated differently (e.g., when looking at a wall that is
partially exposed to the sun) and experience both to be of the same
color but because of the different illumination we experience them
differently (one is better illuminated than the other). The problem is
that since the color is the same regardless of the illumination,
demonstrative concepts such as *that color* cannot be
sufficient to capture the experiential difference between the
differently illuminated samples; though the experiences differ, the
contribution of the demonstrative concept *that color* to the
content of the experience is the same, given that the property
perceived, that color in both demonstrations, is the same.
Demonstrative concepts, Kelly argues, refer to situation independent
features of the world (e.g., the actual color of the wall) and thus
are not capable of capturing the situation dependence of perceptual
content. The argument from the situation dependence of perceptual
content has been subject to several criticisms on behalf of the
conceptualist. One such criticism (Peacocke 2001b) is that, contrary
to Kelly, it seems reasonable that the difference in experience
*can* be captured by concepts regarding the illumination of the
different samples (see also Ablondi 2002).



Finally, there is the argument from infant/animal cognition, which
Peacocke now considers the most important motivation for thinking that
perception has nonconceptual content (Peacocke 2001a, 2001b, referring
to Evans 1982, Dretske 1995, Bermudez 1994, 1998).
Considerations of phylogenetic and ontogenetic continuities in nature
suggest that animals and infants can have experiences very similar to
our own. They too perceptually represent the brown tree amidst the
lush green grass. However, since they lack concepts appropriate for a
correct specification of the contents of their perception, their
perceptual representation of this state of affairs must be
nonconceptual. If we share these perceptual capacities with such
animals and human infants then it is reasonable to suggest that the
content of our experiences is also, at least in part, nonconceptual
(see also Schellenberg 2013, 2018). Of course, it may be the case that
our experience is richer than that of animals and that we are capable
of many more perceptual discriminations than they are capable of, but
to the extent that we share our perceptual representations with such
animals, the content of our perceptual representations should be
equally nonconceptual. (See more on this in section
 4.3)



A crucial aspect of the debate is whether theorists of nonconceptual
content can account for the rational role of perceptual states in
belief formation. Although much of the discussion of whether
perceptual content can be nonconceptual has focused on precisely how
the manifest differences between perceptions and beliefs should be
described (see, e.g., Kelly 2001b, Sedivy 1996, 2006), the important
issue is whether those differences can be captured at the level of
content in a way that explains how perceptions can justify beliefs.
McDowell's central claim is that there can be appropriate
rational relations between perceptions and beliefs only if perceptions
have conceptual contents, on the grounds that such rational relations
can hold only between conceptual states (McDowell 1994a, 2006). This
is a powerful challenge to defenders of nonconceptual content. It is
far from clear, however, that they do not have the resources to meet
it. This is an issue that has been much discussed in the philosophy of
perception (most recently in Lerman 2010 and Cahen 2019).



Millar (1991), for example, offers a sophisticated account of how the
representational content of perceptions can justify beliefs formed on
the basis of those perceptions, even though the relevant contents are
not conceptually individuated. One obvious strategy for the defender
of nonconceptual content would be to argue that a nonconceptual
content can stand in logical or evidential relations (such as the
relation of being consistent with, or making more probable) to another
state even though it is not conceptually articulated (see, e.g., Heck
2000, Vision 2009). Another possibility would be to follow Peacocke
(2001a, 2004a, 2004b) who argues that the rational role of a
nonconceptual way of representing some X is guaranteed when the
observational concept *X* is partially individuated by its
relation to such a way of nonconceptually representing X. So, a
subject may rationally judge *that is a square* when taking her
experience at face value not only *because* her perception
involves a nonconceptual way of representing a square but *for that
reason*, since such a nonconceptual way of representing squares is
part of the individuation conditions of the concept *square*.
Furthermore, the subject is capable of reflecting on her reasons for
so judging by asking herself whether the way things (nonconceptually)
look to her is reason for her to make the judgment that she does.
Brewer (2005) argues against such proposals on the grounds that they
do not manage to account for the subject's appreciation of her
perception *as a reason* for a given judgment without being
committed to a form of foundationalism with its various difficulties.
If, however, perception does involve conceptual content, then
according to Brewer, we can account for the subject's
appreciation of her perception as a reason for a given judgment
straightforwardly, since the subject's having a perception with
conceptual content already requires that she grasps the rational
relations perception with such a content stands to other states with
conceptual contents.



Advocates of the state/content distinction, discussed in section
 3,
 point out that although arguments for the nonconceptual nature of
perception are typically aimed at articulating the nature of the
*contents* of perception, that is, whether perception is
content-nonconceptual or content-conceptual, the premises of these
arguments seem to support at most a "state" conclusion
(Byrne 2003, 2005, Speaks 2005, Crowther 2006, Heck 2007). For
example, the argument from the fine grained nature of experience
generally begins by arguing that one need not have the concepts
involved in the correct specification of the content of perception in
order to undergo a perception with that content, e.g., one need not
have the concept *red27* in
order to have a perception correctly specifiable in terms of such a
concept. But though this is merely reason to hold that perception is
state-nonconceptual, the conclusion drawn from such an observation is
that the *content* of perception is nonconceptual. (Heck 2007
also points this fault in the standard forms of the fineness of grain
argument and proceeds to develop a form of the argument which he
thinks avoids this problem and is genuinely directed at the
"content" view.) However, if the distinction between
concept-dependent and concept-independent state types ultimately rests
on a distinction between the types of content involved in these
states, as suggested in section
 3,
 then the transition from
state-nonconceptualism to content-nonconceptualism (and from
state-conceptualism to content-conceptualism) is a legitimate one. We
would, then, have good reason to consider the arguments above as
directly relevant to the nonconceptual *content* of perception
even though they often proceed via claims about the capacities
required of a creature for having perceptual states.


### 4.2 Subpersonal computational states and nonconceptual content



The dominant paradigm within cognitive science involves postulating
representational states at the subpersonal or subdoxastic levels (for
philosophical discussion see Stich 1978, Davies 1989). Examples are
the representational states implicated in tacit knowledge of the rules
of syntax. It is a fundamental tenet of a broadly Chomskyan approach
to syntax that speakers are credited with tacit knowledge of a grammar
for their language and that this tacit knowledge is deployed in
understanding spoken language. Yet when linguists give theoretical
specifications of the syntactic rules contained within the grammar
they frequently employ concepts that are not in the conceptual
repertoire of the language-user. That is, the language-user is
ascribed knowledge of rules formulated in terms of concepts that he
does not possess. A similar point holds for the representational
states postulated in computational theories of vision such as that put
forward by Marr (1980). The contents of such states are formulated in
terms of concepts (such as the concept of a zero-crossing) that are
clearly not possessed by the average perceiver.



Why should it be thought that the language-user does not possess the
relevant concepts? How could he grasp the rule if he did not possess
the concepts required to spell it out? The point is not just that
language-users are not aware of the beliefs in question. Not all
unconscious mental states are nonconceptual, e.g., my having the
belief that the earth revolves around the sun, often unconsciously,
requires that I possess the concepts of which its content is composed.
The point, rather, is that their representations of the linguistic
rules are inferentially insulated from the rest of their beliefs and
propositional attitudes, in a way that is fundamentally incompatible
with the holistic nature of conceptual contents. This is also the case
for representations at the early stages of visual processing. The
representations whose function is to register zero-crossings for
subsequent perceptual analysis, for example, operate independently of
the person's propositional attitudes, and so their content does
not depend on the person's conceptual repertoire.



Recently such a view of the nature of representational content has
been explored by Raftopoulos and Muller (2006). They suggest that
what makes the content of a representation nonconceptual is precisely
the fact that its content is insulated from other knowledge structures
available to the person. Indeed, according to Raftopoulos and
Muller, "the existence of cognitively impenetrable
mechanisms is a necessary and sufficient condition for nonconceptual
content" (Raftopoulos and Muller 2006, p. 190). They review
evidence to the effect that various early stages of visual processing,
e.g., those responsible for attending to, and tracking, objects in
space and time, operate in purely bottom-up fashion. As such, they
argue, the representations underlying such capacities are produced in
a conceptually unmediated way and hence their content is
nonconceptual. Thus, they say, "[t]he content of the states of
zero-crossings is nonconceptual ... because that content is
retrieved bottom-up from a visual scene. To justify the nonconceptual
character of the contents of either phenomenal and subdoxastic stages
[*sic*] ... it suffices to invoke the fact that these
contents are retrieved from visual scenes in conceptually unmediated
ways" (Raftopoulos and Muller 2006, p. 215).



However, though Raftopoulos and Muller attempt to argue that
insulation from the propositional attitudes of the person is a
necessary and sufficient condition for *any* representation to
have nonconceptual content, this does not seem to be the case with
representations in general and certain *personal* level
representations in particular. At least with regards to
*personal* level representations, Tye (1995) argues that
one's conceptual capacities often are involved in determining
the content of a perceptual representation, and yet that the content
of that representation is nonconceptual. This is the case, for
example, in the process of perceptually disambiguating an ambiguous
figure (e.g., the two faces/vase figure). Though the production of a
disambiguated perceptual representation (e.g., experiencing the figure
as a vase) might involve more than merely information recovered
bottom-up (e.g., it might employ the concept *vase*), it does
not follow that the resulting perception is conceptual. This is so
since for the content of a representation to be nonconceptual it
merely needs to be the case that one *can* undergo a state with
such representational content without possessing the concepts that
enter into a correct specification of its content, and it seems
reasonable that one can undergo the same disambiguated experience of
the figure without possessing any concepts (and in particular, without
possessing the concept *vase*).



A similar suggestion concerning cognitive penetrability and its
potential impact on the nonconceptual status of the penetrated states
is explored by Macpherson (2012, 2015). One of her favorite examples
comes from Delk & Fillenbaum (1965), who demonstrate that
familiarity with exemplars of a standardly colored category, e.g.,
familiarity with (red) apples or (yellow) bananas, influences the
perceived color of instances of that category. In a more recent study,
Hansen et al. (2006) obtained the same effect by presenting subjects
with a picture of a banana on a uniform grey background and asking
them to adjust the color of the fruit until it appears grey. Their
results show that "...subjects adjusted the banana to a slightly
bluish hue--its opponent color--in order for it to appear neutral
gray. At the point where the banana was actually achromatic, at the
origin of the color space, it still appeared yellowish."(p. 1367) In
this case, it appears that one's knowledge of bananas
'penetrates' one's experience of bananas. She calls this form of
cognitive penetration, cognitive penetration 'lite', where
possession of some concepts may causally influence the type of
experience one undergoes. Yet she argues that in these cases, though
the token-experience of the banana's color is influenced by one's
prior knowledge - one undergoes a deeper yellow type of experience -
it is an experience-type that one who does not have concepts
pertaining to such colors can nonetheless undergo.



Thus, it is consistent with the notion of nonconceptual content that
the representation in question is in fact produced in what Raftopoulos
and Muller would call a conceptually *mediated* way,
whereby concepts in the subject's possession influence the
content of a personal level representation, without the content of the
representation being specifiable in terms of concepts available to the
subject. That is, it does not seem to be a *necessary*
condition on the nonconceptual content of representations in general
that they be insulated from the propositional attitudes; at least in
the case of *personal* level representations this necessity
condition fails. Furthermore, Toribio (2014) argues that even in the
case of early vision, the specific target of Raftopoulos and Muller
(2006), the claim that cognitive impenetrability is a necessary and
sufficient condition on the contents of early vision being
nonconceptual is false. (However, see Raftopoulos 2014a, 2014b, 2017
for possible replies.)



Still, it is open to a critic of nonconceptual content to deny that
ascriptions of content at the subpersonal level should be taken
literally. John McDowell takes this view (McDowell 1994b), suggesting
that subpersonal content is merely "as if" content (an
argument for the same conclusion is offered in Searle 1990).
Alternatively, it might be argued (as in Connolly 2010) that the
subpersonal information processing actually involves concepts.
However, these lines of argument fly in the face not just of the
practice of cognitive scientists, but also of some important
philosophical analyses of the notion of subpersonal representation
(Burge 1986, Egan 1992, Bermudez 1995).


### 4.3 Psychological explanation



In explaining the behavior of nonlinguistic and prelinguistic
creatures cognitive ethologists and developmental psychologists often
appeal to representational states. Spelke, for example, attempts to
explain the development of the ability to perceptually organize the
visual array into unitary, persisting objects by appeal to an
infant's capacity to form a representation of the visual surface
layout and the presence of mechanisms following basic principles of
cohesion, boundedness, rigidity, and no action at a distance (Spelke
1990). These capacities are claimed to explain the infant's
rudimentary physical reasoning, underlying, for example, its ability
to track the motion of particular objects and exhibit certain
expectancy responses regarding the persistence of objects behind
occlusions (as exhibited, for example, in Baillargeon's (1987)
famous drawbridge experiment, in which an infant is habituated to see
a screen rotate 180deg, and is dishabituated when the screen
'passes through' an object placed behind it. The
dishabituation reflects the infant's expectation that the
screen's rotation will be blocked by the occluded object). Such
research suggests that an explanation of the infant's behavior
should appeal to the way the infant is perceptually aware of the
world, as segmented into objects that exhibit certain predictable
regularities.



According to Spelke (1988), the content of those representations
appealed to in explaining the infant's responses in tasks as
those mentioned above is conceptual content. The manifest behavior
reflects the infant's incipient object concept and its capacity
to utilize this concept in a primitive form of physical reasoning.
However, if one has an account of what it is to possess a concept that
makes it inappropriate to attribute mastery of the corresponding
concept to the creature whose behavior is being explained, then the
appeal to representations in the explanation of its behavior is also
motivation for the notion of nonconceptual representational
content.



One such understanding stresses the relation between possessing
concepts and being able to justify certain canonical judgments
involving that concept, going on to argue that providing
justifications is a paradigmatically linguistic activity--a
matter of identifying and articulating the reasons for a given
classification, inference or judgment (McDowell 1994a). If this is the
case, then nonlinguistic and prelinguistic creatures will not be able
to possess concepts and those representations we attribute to them in
explaining their behavior will have to be nonconceptual. However,
there is a variety of possible responses to this argument. It might be
objected, for example, that possessing a given concept simply requires
being able to make *de facto* justified judgments involving
that concept rather than being able to justify judgments involving
that concept. Or it might be objected that the ability to justify
judgments involving some concept is not necessarily linguistic, since
it is possible to identify the justification for a judgment without
engaging in communication.



However, the argument from the need to provide psychological
explanations of the behavior of nonhuman animals and human infants to
the existence of nonconceptual content does not stand or fall with the
thesis that concepts are necessarily linguistic. It has been argued
that there is a distinction between two different types of thinking
(Mithen 1996). Many students of the type of cognition engaged in by
animals and infants view it as being domain-specific and modular in
important respects, best understood in terms of bodies of
"knowledge" closely focused on particular aspects of the
natural and social worlds. An example of such domain-specificity is
found in the perceptual module Spelke suggests is responsible for the
segmentation of the visual array into objects according to certain
basic physical principles (Spelke 1990, 1994, Carey and Spelke 1996).
These domain-specific modules are thought to have evolved separately
and for specific purposes and are not integrated with each other
(Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994). In contrast, many philosophers have
suggested that the type of conceptual thought engaged in by
language-users is essentially domain-general, systematic and
productive. Concept-possessors can generate an indefinite number of
new thoughts from the concepts they possess and their thoughts obey
what Evans (1982) has termed the generality constraint. As Evans says,
"We cannot avoid thinking of a thought about an individual
object *x*, to the effect that it is *F*, as the
exercise of two separable capacities; one being the capacity to think
of *x*, which could be equally exercised in thoughts about
*x* to the effect that it is *G* or *H*; and the
other being a conception of what it is to be *F*, which could
be equally exercised in thoughts about other individuals, to the
effect that they are *F*" (Evans 1982, p. 75).



If the generality constraint is taken to be an essential
characteristic of conceptual thought (as it is by Evans 1982, Peacocke
1992, and Heck 2007, for example) then it seems to follow that many
(if not all) non-linguistic creatures are not capable of engaging in
conceptual thought. For illustration we can look again at
infants' object perception. Though the infant is capable of
representing its environment in a particular way that explains its
expectations regarding object motion and object persistence, the fact
that such representations are domain-specific suggests that this
characteristic of conceptual thought is violated. In particular, the
domain-specificity of this type of cognition makes it the case that
capacities operative in constructing object representations are not
ones that can be engaged generally in contexts falling beyond the
domain of operation of the module. Thus, we have a violation of the
generality constraint with respect to these representations. This
suggests that the kinds of capacities that are involved in the
infant's representation of the environment are not conceptual.
So, if they are correctly described as representing the world at all,
their representations must be nonconceptual. See also the discussion
of analog magnitude representations in Beck (2012).



Of course, the plausibility of this way of motivating the notion of
nonconceptual content is a hostage to fortune in two important senses,
one empirical and one philosophical. The argument rests upon an
empirical claim about the appropriate way to explain the behavior of
non-linguistic and pre-linguistic creatures--and in particular
upon the assumption that it will not turn out to be possible to
explain such behavior in non-psychological terms. But the argument
also depends upon the thesis that the domain of behavior explicable in
psychological terms extends further than the domain of concept
possession--and this in turn depends upon a substantive
philosophical account of what it is to possess a concept. If, for
example, possessing the concept of an F simply requires being able to
discriminate Fs from the rest of the perceptual environment and/or to
act on them in a suitable manner, then it is hard to see how any
evidence that animals and young infants represent the world will not
also be evidence that they represent the world conceptually.


## 5. Specifying nonconceptual content



We have so far been talking about nonconceptual content in very
general terms. If the notion of nonconceptual content is to be useful,
however, we need to have a substantive account of what nonconceptual
content consists in and how it is to be ascribed--an account that
will be the equivalent at the nonconceptual level of, for example, the
Fregean account of concepts and concept possession.



Theories of nonconceptual content can be either *global*
accounts or *local* accounts of content. To say that they are
global accounts is just to say that they purport to be accounts of
content *tout court*, rather than specifications of content
circumscribed to a particular representational domain (such as the
three domains mentioned in the section above). What is central to
global accounts of nonconceptual content is that they deny that even
the paradigmatically conceptual propositional attitudes ever involve
conceptual contents. As a result, such accounts of content are
particularly amenable to proponents of the "state" view of
the nonconceptual debate (discussed above, section
 3).
 If all content is nonconceptual, the nonconceptual debate can only be
meaningfully carried out at the level of state types, not at the level
of content. Furthermore, since these accounts of nonconceptual content
are fundamentally non-contrastive, they are of limited use in
formulating the debate about nonconceptual *content*. As a
result, in what follows we will be more interested in *local*
accounts of nonconceptual content. However, before attending to the
various local specifications of nonconceptual content we will briefly
discuss two popular *global* accounts of nonconceptual
content--possible world semantics and Russellian semantics (as we
shall see, in discussing Tye's account of the content of
perception, these global views can be modified so as to apply only
locally).



The first global account of nonconceptual content, which was already
mentioned above, is possible world semantics (see, e.g., Stalnaker
1984, 1998, Lewis 1979, 1986). According to proponents of this view,
the content of a mental representation consists of a proposition,
where propositions are taken to be functions from possible worlds to
truth values, or alternatively the set of possible worlds in which the
proposition is true. Beliefs and other propositional attitudes are
then attitudes a person might hold towards such sets of possible
worlds. For example, if one believes that Norman shot Susan, one has
the belief attitude towards those possible worlds in which Norman
actually did shoot Susan. This is merely to say that one takes the
actual world to be a member of the set of possible worlds in which the
proposition is true. Similarly, having a perception is having a
representational state the content of which is the set of possible
worlds in which the perception is correct.



The second global account of nonconceptual content is the
*Russellian* account. Proponents of this view also hold that
the content of a mental representation should be understood as a
proposition. However, they follow Russell, broadly, in arguing that
propositions are ordered *n*-tuples of objects and properties.
Propositional attitudes are then relations between a person and an
ordered *n*-tuple that is the proposition that is the content
of the attitude. For example, to have the belief that Norman shot
Susan is to stand in the belief relation towards the proposition
<<Norman, Susan>, being shot by>. (Theories falling under
this heading differ greatly; as representatives, see Salmon 1986,
Soames 1987, Perry 1979, 1980, and other various articles in the
collection edited by Salmon and Soames 1988.) Similarly, the contents
of a perceptual representation are just the objects that are
represented and the properties that appear to characterize them. To
perceive a blue carpet is to have a representational state the content
of which is the carpet and the property blueness, that is, <carpet,
blueness>. (Some Russellians, e.g., Tye 1995, 2000, 2005, hold that
only the *properties* things appear to have constitute the
content of perception.)



Both possible world semantics and Russellian accounts of content are
considered to be *coarse grained* accounts of content (in
contrast to the Fregean *fine grained* account of content). For
example, it seems to follow from the possible worlds account that a
thinker who entertains the thought expressed by the sentences
'bachelors are unmarried men' and 'unmarried men are
unmarried men' is related in both cases to the same set of
possible worlds, and hence is having thoughts with the same content.
Similarly regarding the Russellian account of content. A thinker who
entertains the thought expressed by the sentences 'Jocasta is
beautiful' and 'Oedipus' mother is beautiful'
is related in both cases to the same objects and properties (since
Jocasta *just is* Oedipus' mother), and hence is having
thoughts with the same content. Some have argued that this implication
and other related ones are detrimental to any coarse-grained account
of content, in particular when applied to the propositional attitudes.
We will not review these arguments here, since they are elaborated
elsewhere. (For more detailed discussion of these global accounts of
content, see the entries on
 structured propositions,
  propositional attitude reports, and
 belief.)



Turning now to the *local* accounts of nonconceptual content,
we can expect that a substantive account of nonconceptual content will
be tailored to a specific explanatory task--and each of the three
motivations discussed in the previous section for introducing the
notion will lend itself to a different such account.



The most developed proposal has come from Christopher Peacocke who has
proposed a radically externalist conception of nonconceptual content
aimed explicitly at explaining the nonconceptual content of perceptual
states (Peacocke 1992). Peacocke suggests that a given perceptual
content should be specified in terms of the ways of filling out the
space around the perceiver that are consistent with the
content's being correct. For each minimally discriminable point
within the perceiver's perceptual field (where these are
identified relative to an origin and axes centered in the
perceiver's body) we need to start by specifying whether it is
occupied by a surface and, if so, what the orientation, solidity, hue,
brightness and saturation of that surface are. This specification
gives us the way the perceiver represents the environment. The content
of that representation is given by all the ways of filling out the
space around the perceiver in which the minimally discriminable points
have the appropriate values. The representation is correct just if the
space around the perceiver is occupied in one of those ways. Peacocke
calls this type of nonconceptual content positioned scenario
content.



However, such a specification of the content of perception does not
completely capture the way the world perceptually appears to us. Two
representations may have the same positioned scenario contents and yet
differ in the way they represent the world to us as being. As an
example, upon looking at a 45deg tilted square one might perceive it
as a tilted square or as an upright diamond. In both cases of
perceiving the square *as a square* and *as a diamond*
the positioned scenario content is the same; that is, in both cases
the ways of filling out the space around the observer that are
consistent with the correctness of the scenario content are the same.
However, there is still a phenomenal difference between these two ways
of representing the square.



To account for this difference in the way in which the same object is
perceptually represented Peacocke argues that there is an additional
layer of nonconceptual content that he calls proto-propositional
content, which involves objects, properties, and relations rather than
concepts (Peacocke 1992). This level of content accounts for the way
in which the square is perceived. When it is perceived as a square one
perceives a symmetry about the bisectors of the sides, and when it is
perceived as a diamond one perceives a symmetry about the bisectors of
its angles. The content is nonconceptual since the observer need not
have the concepts of symmetry, or angle, or side, that are mentioned
in specifying the content of his perception.



This proposal provides an attractive way of capturing the distinctive
features of the phenomenology of perception highlighted in the
previous section (see
 4.1
 above). Peacocke's account of nonconceptual content is analog,
unit-free and possesses the appropriate fineness of grain.
Nonetheless, as Cahen (2019) has recently argued, such an externalist
account of nonconceptual content, though it may capture the
phenomenology of perception, is in tension with internalist
commitments pertaining to the rational role of perception. Another
source of difficulty is that it is not so clear how such an account
can be applied beyond the domain of perception. It may well be that
certain subpersonal states have such nonconceptual
contents--those associated with the subpersonal underpinnings of
vision are obvious candidates. But the representational states
implicated in tacit knowledge of syntactic theory, for example, do not
fit this model.



Tye suggests a different notion of robustly nonconceptual content of
perception (Tye 2005). According to Tye, perception involves
Russellian nonconceptual content. This is supposedly in conflict with
Peacocke who, in discussing the experience of perceiving the tilted
square, claims at one point that "We must, in describing the
fine-grained phenomenology, make use of the notion of the *way*
in which some property or relation is given in the experience"
(Peacocke 2001a, p. 240). Appealing to a *way* in which the
property of being a square is perceived is in conflict with
Tye's coarse-grained account of the content of perception which
is required for his broader representationalist account of conscious
perception (see the entry on
 the contents of perception
 (section 7) and the entry on
 representational theories of consciousness).
 Thus, Tye proposes that in perceiving the tilted square, perception
doesn't represent the property of being a square in two possible
*ways*, but rather that in addition to representing the
property of being square it represents various other properties; which
additional properties are represented will determine the way the
square appears. One suggestion is that when the figure is perceived as
a square, the property of being tilted is represented, and when it is
perceived as a diamond the property of being upright is represented.
These are represented properties of the *object*, not ways in
which the *property*, being square, is represented.



Some theorists concerned with nonconceptual content at the subpersonal
level have favored a broadly teleological account of what this content
consists in (drawing upon the teleological theory of content developed
in Millikan 1984). This approach can be extended to cover
content-bearing states such as those implicated in linguistic
understanding (see the entry on
 teleological theories of mental content).
 The key notion here is the proper function of, for example, the
mechanisms underlying a particular stage in visual information
processing (construed normatively in terms of what those mechanisms
*should* do, and usually underwritten by evolutionary
considerations). Proper functions are *relational*, where this
means that they are defined in relation to features of the
environment. According to teleological theories, content can be
specified in terms of relational proper functions. So, for example,
the content of a state in early visual processing might be specified
in terms of the edges in the perceived environment that that stage has
evolved to identify. Given the particular features that a processing
mechanism has been 'designed' or 'selected' to
detect, it is functioning correctly when it responds appropriately to
the presence of those features, and incorrectly when it responds in
their absence (for example, to a sudden contrast in light intensity
not due to the presence of an edge). Correctness conditions are fixed
with reference to evolutionary design and past performance.



Turning to the third motivation for the notion of nonconceptual
content, one might expect the notion of nonconceptual content involved
in psychological explanation to be essentially perceptual. Some
authors have argued, for example, that the representational states of
non-linguistic creatures are essentially perceptual and tied to the
creature's possibilities for action and reaction in the
immediate environment (see, for example, Dummett 1993 and Campbell
1994, although neither of these two authors puts the point in terms of
nonconceptual content). This thought might be developed in conjunction
with an ability-based understanding of nonconceptual content along the
lines proposed by Adrian Cussins (Cussins 1990). The central feature
of Cussins's account of experiential content is that it should
be understood not in terms of notions such as truth and
truth-conditions, but rather in terms of the organism's
abilities to act upon the perceived environment. What the organism
perceives (the content of its perception) is a distal environment
structured in terms of the possibilities it affords for action. This
conception of an ability-based conception of content yields a sharp
distinction between the success-governed level of proto-thoughts and
the truth-governed level of full-fledged thought. Proto-thought does
not involve experience of an objective world.



Other authors concerned with explaining the behavior of non-linguistic
and pre-linguistic creatures have proposed applying a richer notion of
nonconceptual content that is not essentially pragmatic and that can
be deployed in a style of explanation analogous to propositional
attitude explanation. Nonconceptual contents in this richer sense are
properly assessable for truth or falsity (rather than simply pragmatic
success or failure) and can serve as the objects of beliefs and
desires (or proto-beliefs and proto-desires). Bermudez (1998)
offers an account along these lines developing certain aspects of
Peacocke's scenario content. In later work he extended this
approach to the ascription of thoughts to non-linguistic and
prelinguistic creatures, developing a model based on a version of
success semantics and integrating what he termed proto-logical
inferential capacities (Bermudez 2003).


## 6. The autonomy of nonconceptual content



One question that arises when thinking about nonconceptual content is
whether a thinker can be in states with nonconceptual content despite
not possessing any concepts at all. That is, can nonconceptual content
be completely autonomous of conceptual content? The possibility of an
affirmative answer to this question is important for many theorists
who wish to employ the notion of nonconceptual content to explain the
behavior of nonlinguistic and prelinguistic creatures (depending, of
course, on how demanding their notion of a concept is). Similarly for
those theorists who hold both that subpersonal computational states
possess nonconceptual content and that the relevant modules can exist
in creatures not capable of any conceptual thought.



However, Christopher Peacocke offers an argument against the autonomy
thesis; concluding that "... nonconceptual content is not a
level whose nature is completely explicable without reference to
conceptual contents ... At the most basic level, conceptual and
nonconceptual content must be elucidated simultaneously"
(Peacocke 1992, pp. 90-91). His argument is based on a
neo-Kantian understanding of the relation between experience of an
objective world and self-consciousness. In essence he suggests that no
creature can properly be attributed states with genuine spatial
contents unless it grasps the distal environment in a minimally
objective way. A condition on grasping the distal environment in this
way is that the organism is capable of utilizing such states in
forming and updating an integrated representation of the layout of its
environment and is thus able to reidentify particular locations within
it. The requirement of concept possession comes in because these
capacities essentially involve an ability to represent both the
spatial configuration of the environment and one's own changing
position within that environment--and, he suggests, this would be
impossible for a creature lacking a rudimentary concept of the
first-person.



This argument is powerful, but can be challenged. Supporters of the
autonomy thesis, beginning with Bermudez (1994), have suggested
that the interrelated capacities to represent the spatial
configuration of the environment and to represent one's own
location within the environment need not depend on the possession of a
primitive first-person concept. Rather, these capacities can be
understood at the nonconceptual level. In particular, Bermudez
(1995, 1998) appeals to the notion of a nonconceptual point of view to
explain the interdependence of spatial awareness of the distal
environment and awareness of one's own location within that
environment at the nonconceptual level. For further discussion of this
type of nonconceptual self-consciousness see section
 7.



Peacocke himself eventually accepted the Autonomy Thesis on the
grounds that the capacities mentioned in the conditions for a state to
have genuine objective spatial content do not necessitate a conceptual
notion of the first-person; indeed, he agrees with Bermudez
that these capacities can be accounted for nonconceptually and without
involving *any* first-person notion (Peacocke 2002).


## 7. Nonconceptual content: Problems and prospects



It should be clear from the preceding sections that the basic idea of
nonconceptual content provides a promising tool for tackling a range
of problems in the philosophy of mind and cognition. Allowing that a
creature's representational capacities can outstrip its
conceptual capacities makes it possible for philosophers and cognitive
scientists to study aspects of cognition and behavior that remain
outside the scope of more traditional approaches--from
subpersonal computational mechanisms to the psychological states of
non-human animals and human infants to the nature of perceptual
experience.



It should be recognized, however, that there may well not be a unitary
notion of nonconceptual content applicable to these various domains.
We need to distinguish between the formal notion of nonconceptual
content (the idea of a way of representing the world that is not
constrained by conceptual capacities) and the different concrete
proposals for developing this basic idea (such as Peacocke's
notion of scenario content). There is potential for serious confusion
if it is assumed that a specific theory of nonconceptual content
proposed for one area can be unproblematically applied to another
area. It may well turn out, for example, that fundamentally different
notions of nonconceptual content are required for subpersonal
computational states and perceptual experiences.



Indeed, recent work on nonconceptual content has expanded beyond its
origins in visual perception to other modalities and even beyond
perception. Thus, Young (2015, forthcoming), drawing on a broad
empirical literature, argues that olfactive representations, unlike
conceptual representations, are not concatenatively compositional. As
such they are best understood as representational but nonconceptual.
Others, have moved beyond perception and have argued for a
nonconceptual account of the contents of emotions (see e.g., Gunther
2003, Tye 2008, Doring 2009, Wringe 2015, Tappolet 2016) and
possibly other affective-evaluative experiences (Mitchell 2018).
Finally, Beck (2012) has argued that certain cognitive states with
analog magnitude content (primitive representations of spatial,
temporal, numerical, and other magnitudes) are best understood as
nonconceptual, as they do not satisfy Evans' Generality Constraint,
discussed above (but see replies by Gillett 2014, Grey 2014, and
Beck's further replies in his 2014).



While the philosophy of perception has been the area where the
conceptual/nonconceptual distinction has been most discussed, the
theory of nonconceptual content has been fruitfully employed in other
areas of philosophy. A case in point is the study of
self-consciousness (see the entry on
 self-consciousness).
 In 1998 two books independently developed theories of nonconceptual
self-consciousness (Hurley 1998 and Bermudez 1998).
Bermudez and Hurley both emphasized prelinguistic forms of
self-consciousness, arguing that linguistic self-reference and
associated modes of conceptual self-consciousness both emerge from,
and need to understood in terms of, much more primitive forms of
self-specifying information. For Bermudez these include:


* information in visual and other exteroceptive perceptual
modalities specifying the perceiver's own spatial and kinematic
properties
* information via affordances that specify the perceiver's
capacities for acting upon the distal environment
* information through somatic proprioception, kinesthesia, and
active touch about both the disposition of body parts and the limits
of the bodily self.
* self-locating information about the subject's changing location
in objective space exploited in navigation involving cognitive
maps



Several of these forms of nonconceptual self-consciousness have been
discussed more recently by Kristina Musholt (2013, 2015), who argues
that though such forms of awareness provide necessarily
self-specifying information, they should not properly be considered
modes of self-conscious, as they contain no explicitly self-referring
component. Rather than thinking of the self as being part of the
(explicit) representational contents of perception and proprioception,
she argues it should be thought of as being implicit in the mode of
presentation (Musholt 2015).



Christopher Peacocke's recent work on consciousness and
self-consciousness identifies what he terms a "nonconceptual
parent" of the first-person concept (Peacocke 2014). What he calls
Degree 1 of subject involvement "is exhibited by a subject who
enjoys states with nonconceptual content that is objective, and which
represents the subject as standing in spatial relations to other
objects and events in the spatial world" (2014, p. 35). Like
Bermudez and Hurley, Peacocke sees Gibson's analysis of
vision as illuminating a basic form of nonconceptual
self-consciousness. Unlike them, however, he does not think that
nonconceptually self-conscious subjects are necessarily embodied.



Primitive, nonconceptual, forms of self-consciousness are also
critical for the acquisition of the first-person concept and for
grounding thoughts whose contents have an important property
introduced in Shoemaker (1968). This is the property of being immune
to error through misidentification relative to the first-person
concept, defined so that properties attributed in such thoughts must
be properties of the thinker, if they are instantiated at all. Cahen
and Musholt (2017) argue that it is precisely because certain
representational states with nonconceptual content, e.g., perception
and proprioception, do not contain an explicitly self-referring (or
self-identifying) component, but do supply necessarily self-specifying
information that, while such modes of awareness are not themselves
immune to error through misidentification, they can serve as the basis
for first-personal judgments that are so immune.



Finally, it should be reiterated that the notion of nonconceptual
content is essentially contrastive--and the significance of the
notion depends upon the particular way of understanding concepts with
which it is contrasted. Some psychological states that would count as
nonconceptual for a theorist with a rich and demanding notion of what
it is to possess a concept would be conceptual for a theorist with a
more relaxed view of concepts. Before we can plausibly claim to have a
full understanding of the possibilities of the notion of nonconceptual
content, we need to have a much clearer view than we currently have of
what it is to possess a concept. As we saw earlier, on the most
minimal view of concepts, a thinker can be credited with a concept of
*F*s provided that he can discriminate things that are
*F* from things that are not *F*. A richer view of
concepts might demand that the thinker have a full appreciation of the
grounds on which one might judge something to be an *F*. The
most demanding view of concepts might require the thinker to be able
to justify and defend the judgment that something is an *F*.
Clearly, different locations on this broad spectrum will generate
different ways of thinking about what is to count as nonconceptual
content--as well as different assessments of the overall
significance of the notion.