The Normativity of Nature: Essays on Kant's Critique of Judgement by Hannah Ginsborg

Author:Hannah Ginsborg [Ginsborg, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2014-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

III

I now want to consider two lines of objection to the account I have proposed. The first is that it suffers from what Tyler Burge calls ‘hyper-intellectualization’: it portrays perception as requiring an implausibly high degree of intellectual sophistication. My account appears to imply that, in order to have the kind of experience which can make available a relatively simple observational concept like green or cube, a subject must already be able to make judgements involving the concepts of appropriate and of perception. But it seems absurd to suppose that my capacity to perceive something as green or as a cube depends on my first having a grasp of these more esoteric concepts. Perception, at least on the face of it, is a much simpler and less demanding affair, and does not require the subject to make the kind of sophisticated judgements which my account appears to invoke.43

While I will not here try to address this objection in full, I want to make two points in response to it, one clarificatory, the other more substantive. First the clarification: the subject’s awareness of the appropriateness of her way of perceiving, on my account, is not to be understood as requiring antecedent possession of, say, the concepts appropriate and perceive. Relatedly, it does not presuppose that the subject is in a position to formulate explicit judgements in which these concepts figure. The kind of awareness I have in mind is different, in this respect, from that which is involved in the kind of case I mentioned two paragraphs ago, where the subject reflects on whether her perception is veridical given what she knows about her perceptual circumstances. In that kind of case the subject’s judgement that she is perceiving as she ought does require sophisticated intellectual skills. The subject must explicitly distinguish her perception from what it is perception of, and compare the content of her perception with other facts available to her about what she is perceiving and about the circumstances under which she is perceiving it. But this kind of reflection is not required for what I have been calling the ‘primitive’ awareness of normativity which I take to be involved in perception itself. Such an awareness can be ascribed to a subject without the supposition that she herself is capable of articulating it in the form of an explicit judgement involving the concept of normativity.44 Now it remains true that the account of perception which I am offering is still relatively demanding. In particular, I think it doubtful, although not impossible, that a non-human animal could have the awareness of a normative fit between its perception and the object it is perceiving. However—and here I come to a more substantive response to the objection—I do not think that it is implausible to ascribe this kind of awareness to children, even children in the beginning stages of language-learning and concept-acquisition. Even without supposing that a child already possesses the concept of normativity, we can take a child to be aware

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