Modest Nonconceptualism by Eva Schmidt

Author:Eva Schmidt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

6.1.4 Content and Cognitive Appreciation

Even so, this strong stance on the range of Mary’s concepts leads to other problems for the nonconceptualist. Let’s assume that Mary does not originally possess any concepts for the dodecahedron other than many-faced die or a generic that die. The conceptualist can now point out that this assumption entails a very strong claim about the content of experience. Not only does this strategy entail that Mary as a child did not actually notice, in thought, that there was a dodecahedron in front of her. It also entails that there are parts of young Mary’s experience content that she cannot in principle notice or appreciate or take up in a belief. As a child, she does not have—and cannot yet acquire—any concepts for the dodecahedron, so she cannot be cognitively aware that one of the dice is a dodecahedron, not even in a rudimentary way. Still, her experience presumably represents one of the dice to be a twelve-faced die.

This nonconceptualist strategy entails that it is possible that the content of an experience is in principle cognitively inaccessible to the subject. Any argument for nonconceptualism that works with a scenario in which a subject has an experience, even though she is unable (at the time) to acquire the concepts to fully specify the content of her experience, forces the nonconceptualist to claim that some aspects of the content of an experience cannot be cognitively grasped by the subject. This view might appear counterintuitive—for, in Peacocke’s words,

the representational content is the way the experience presents the world as being, and it can hardly present the world as being that way if the subject is incapable of appreciating what that way is. (Peacocke 1983, 7)12

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