Kant and Non-Conceptual Content

Dietmar Heidemann, Dietmar H. Heidemann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415623056
• eBook ISBN: 9781317981558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Conceptualism is the view that cognizers can have mental representations of the world only if they possess the adequate concepts by means of which they can specify what they represent. By contrast, non-conceptualism is the view that mental representations of the world do not necessarily presuppose concepts by means of which the content of these representations can be specified, thus cognizers can have mental representations of the world that are non-conceptual. Consequently, if conceptualism is true then non-conceptualism must be false, and vice versa. This incompatibility makes the current debate over conceptualism and non-conceptualism a fundamental controversy since the range of conceptual capacities that cognizers have certainly has an impact on their mental representations of the world, on how sense perception is structured, and how external world beliefs are justified.

Conceptualists and non-conceptualists alike refer to Kant as the major authoritative reference point from which they start and develop their arguments. The appeal to Kant attempts to pave the way for a robust answer to the question of whether or not there is non-conceptual content. Since the incompatibility of the conceptualist and non-conceptualist readings of Kant indicate a paradigm case, hopes have risen that the answer to the question of whether Kant is a conceptualist or a non-conceptualist might settle the contemporary controversy across the board. This volume searches for that answer.

This book is based on a special issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.

Introduction

Kant and Non-conceptual Content: The Origin of the Problem

Dietmar H. Heidemann

1. Conceptualism and Non-conceptualism

Conceptualism is the view that cognizers can have mental representations of the world only if they possess the adequate concepts by means of which they can specify what they represent, i.e., the content of their worldly representations. By contrast, non-conceptualism is the view that mental representations of the world do not necessarily presuppose concepts by means of which the content of these representations can be specified, i.e., cognizers can have mental representations of the world that are non-conceptual. Hence, whereas conceptualism denies the possibility of non-conceptual mental representations of the world, non-conceptualism is not disputing that mental representations of the world can in principle involve concepts. However, according to non-conceptualism, cognizers do not, as a matter of fact, have any conceptual mental representations of the world such that these representations bear phenomenality and intentionality.¹ Consequently, if conceptualism is true, then non-conceptualism must be false, and vice versa. This incompatibility makes the current debate over conceptualism and non-conceptualism, which has come to centre on the possibility of non-conceptual content, a fundamental controversy with far-reaching philosophical consequences. Theory of knowledge and philosophy of mind are particularly interested in the make-up of our mental representations of the world since the range of conceptual capacities cognizers clearly has an impact on their mental representations of the world, on how sense perception is structured, and how external world beliefs are justified.

One of the most striking aspects in this context is the fact that many conceptualists and non-conceptualists alike refer to Kant as the major authoritative point of reference in developing their arguments. The appeal to Kant is not just an interesting historical flashback. It rather attempts to clarify the problem from a paradigmatic point of view and to pave the way for a robust answer to the question of whether or not there is non-conceptual content. Kant’s distinction between sensibility and the understanding, or intuition and concept, seems to offer a particularly apt theoretical basis for demonstrating what mental representation of the world amounts to. Both conceptualists and non-conceptualists have taken Kant’s well-known claim ‘Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’ (CPR A51/B 75) as their major landmark. For McDowell, who traces conceptualism directly back to Kant, intuition ‘already has conceptual content’ since sensibility is not just passive but an actualization of conceptual capacities.² This understanding reflects Sellars’ influential idea of Kantian intuition as ‘Janus-faced’, i.e. as equally determined through sensibility and spontaneity.³ Non-conceptualists, by contrast, emphasize that Kant’s empty thoughts and blind intuitions rather support the view that there is mental content that is non-conceptual since the cooperation of concept and intuition is indispensable only for cognition in the narrow transcendental sense of the word ‘cognition’, not for sense-perception as such.⁴ Since the incompatibility of the conceptualist and non-conceptualist readings of Kant indicate a paradigm case, hopes have risen that the answer to the question of whether Kant is a conceptualist or a non-conceptualist might settle the contemporary controversy across the board. For this reason, to conceive of Kant as a conceptualist or a non-conceptualist is not merely a historical detail of Kant scholarship but an issue of systematic philosophical relevance.

2. The origin of the problem

For Kant, non-conceptualism is not a minor issue. In a way the seeds of the debate on whether or not Kant subscribes to non-conceptualism are already present in his semi-critical essay ‘Concerning the Ultimate Foundation of the Distinction of the Directions in Space’ ([1768] 2003). There he lays the foundation of his critical account of intuition and concept. For, in order to claim that thoughts without content are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind, an argument is required that demonstrates the ultimate difference between intuition and concept. In the first place, Kant’s claim that intuition and concept are not of the same representational kind must be understood as a fundamental critique of Leibniz and the Leibniz–Wolff school. According to the Leibnizian doctrine, sensibility represents in an obscure (confused) way whereas the understanding’s representations are clear. This doctrine forms the critical background of Kant’s radically new conception of intuition and concept. The crucial point is the distinction between obscure and clear cognition. In his Meditationes de Cognitione, Veritate et Ideis (1684), Leibniz argues that the latter can either be confused or distinct, and distinct cognition can be inadequate, adequate, symbolic or intuitive. When cognition is both adequate and intuitive, it is most perfect.⁵ For Leibniz, obscure representations, for example, memory images, are those ideas that are not sufficient for recognizing something that I have represented before. The same goes for concepts that I cannot adequately define; these too are obscure concepts.⁶ The opposite of obscure representation is clear cognition, which Leibniz conceives in terms of our ability to recognize that cognition. There are two kinds of clear cognition: (i) clear cognition is confused if the object of cognition possesses or exhibits a greater number of distinct features than I can capture in a corresponding conceptual description of it, for instance, in the case of sense-perception where we are unable to sufficiently discriminate sensations; and (ii) clear cognition is distinct if it enables us to distinguish one thing from another similar thing with the help of a sufficiently great and precise number of marks.

In the Nouveaux Essais, Leibniz emphasizes that the characterization of distinct ideas in terms of an ability to clearly distinguish ideas from one another by means of differentiating marks is unsatisfactory since it does not allow us to distinguish distinct ideas from clear ideas, of which they are a subspecies. Leibniz argues (like Descartes in the Meditationes) that obscure ideas are representations that are insufficient to distinguish one thing from another. Ideas we receive from sensible objects are therefore to be considered obscure, since even if sensible objects appear to be identical, differences may nevertheless emerge, of which we are not conscious in our perception of the object. By contrast, clear ideas enable us to unambiguously discriminate things.⁷ Clear but confused representations are those clear ideas that cannot be defined, and that we can only come to know by way of specific instances, for example, a particular texture, shape or feeling.⁸ Although confused ideas enable us to distinguish between things, only the distinct ones make it possible to discriminate things and give definitions of their ideas. Confused ideas do not since they lack conceptual clarity.⁹ Leibniz’s argument for clear but confused ideas touches upon what in the current debate has been termed the ‘Fineness of Grain Argument’ for non-conceptualism. According to this argument, we are able to discriminate between even highly fine-grained perceptual content even though we do not possess adequate concepts for the description of the fine-grained content we represent. Since we are able to discriminate (clearly though in a confused way) between even highly fine-grained perceptual content independently of concepts, there must be non-conceptual content.¹⁰

To a greater or lesser extent, the Leibnizian doctrine was the dominant view in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German philosophy. The vast majority of philosophers of that time subscribed to the idea that the distinction between sensibility and understanding is to be spelled out as the difference between obscure and clear representations according to the presence and absence of conceptual distinctness of representations. This view implies that the difference between sensibility or non-conceptual intuition, and understanding or conceptual thinking is merely one of degree, rather than a difference in kind. For just by increasing and diminishing the degree of conceptual clearness in our representations, sensible ideas can in principle be transformed into ideas of the understanding. Although Leibniz and his followers, for instance, Baumgarten and Wolff, do not merge sensibility and understanding as such, they maintain that the major reason for the divergence between sensibility and understanding, or intuition and concept respectively, is nothing more than the obscurity and clearness of ideas. Intuitive and conceptual representations only differ by degree on the common spectrum between obscurity and clarity that characterizes the mind’s representational capacity. Above all, the Leibniz–Wolff school does not hold that sensibility and understanding are fundamentally distinct in the Kantian sense. Strictly speaking, they reject the view that there are sources of knowledge, i.e. stems of knowledge from which intuition and concept derive, since the mind can be said to have intuitive or conceptual ideas only with respect to their corresponding to the mode of representation as obscure/confused or clear/distinct.

Kant is fundamentally opposed to this conception. For him, intuition and concept are two opposite kinds of representation that cannot be conceived in terms of degrees of clarity since they stem from different sources of knowledge. The critical discussion of the Leibnizian distinction between sensibility and understanding according to degrees of clearness of representations is the origin of the problem of non-conceptual content in Kant and beyond.

Kant is the first to fundamentally question Leibniz’s theory of ideas. His critique basically follows two lines of argument: on the one hand, he objects that with respect to representations the distinctions ‘obscure–clear’ and ‘distinct–confused’ are mistaken; on the other, he demonstrates that it is therefore mistaken to distinguish between sensibility and understanding or intuition and concept by reference to the representation’s degree of clarity. To be sure, in the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant agrees with Leibniz that there are obscure as opposed to clear, ideas or representations. Obscure representations are representations we have without knowing that we have them. Clear representations are representations we are directly conscious of, and ‘when their clarity also extends to the partial representations that make up a whole together with their connection, they are then called distinct representations, whether of thought or intuition.’¹¹ One major difference between Kant and Leibniz with respect to the theory of representation is that, for Leibniz, sensible ideas cannot be distinct, whereas, for Kant, they can. This is not to say that Kant does not agree with Leibniz that in sense-perception there can be obscure representations. From my conscious perception, e.g. of ‘a human being far from me in a meadow, even though I am not conscious of seeing his eyes, nose, mouth, etc.’, I can conclude that I have obscure representations of what I cannot actually see or discriminate from the distance.¹² However, Kant disagrees with Leibniz with respect to the differentiation of ‘clear representations’. His criticism is that one cannot contrast distinct representation with confused representation since the opposite of ‘distinct’ is ‘indistinct’. Clear ideas must be analyzed in terms of their distinctness or indistinctness, not as Leibniz does in terms of distinctness and confusion. According to Kant, every confused cognition is indistinct but not every indistinct cognition is confused, for simple cognition is non-composite and can, as such, exhibit neither order nor confusion.¹³ Consequently, simple representations that never become distinct are indistinct not because they are confused but because they are non-composite. Correspondingly, the indistinctness of composite representations, i.e., representations that do contain a manifold of marks, does not arise from confusion but from consciousness itself. For I can be conscious of the order of the manifold of a representation while the degree of consciousness diminishes.¹⁴ Thus Kant’s point is that distinctness or confusion of ideas does not necessarily inform us about the clearness of representations as Leibniz believes. Further, contrary to what Leibniz argued, there are distinct representations in sensibility (see below).

Kant’s critique of the Leibnizian distinctions ‘obscure–clear’ and ‘distinct–confused’ in favour of the distinction between distinct and indistinct representations has far-reaching consequences for the determination of sensibility and understanding or intuition and concept, respectively. Kant disagrees with the rationalists that sensibility must be conceived in terms of indistinct (confused) representations whereas the understanding as such has distinct (clear) representations. For the opposition ‘distinct–indistinct’ is ‘formal’ rather than ‘real’. Since the difference between sensibility and understanding also concerns ‘the content of thought’ it cannot merely be formal or logical. Kant writes: ‘[It] was a great error of the Leibniz–Wolffian school … to posit sensibility in a lack (of clarity in our partial ideas), and consequently in indistinctness, and to posit the character of ideas of understanding in distinctness.’¹⁵ Intuitive (sensibility) and conceptual (understanding) representations are rather distinct in that cognition is a composite of two independent elements. In ‘Concerning the Ultimate Foundation’, Kant argues that the directions of space cannot fully be grasped merely by conceptual descriptions since spatial directions are represented through intuition, and intuitional representation cannot be reduced to conceptual representation: ‘Our considerations make it plain that the determinations of space are not consequences of the positions of the parts of matter relative to each other. On the contrary, the latter are the consequences of the former.’¹⁶ It follows that intuition and concept are independent elements of cognition rather than confused and distinct representations. In his Inaugural Dissertation, ‘On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World’, Kant puts this critique of the Leibniz–Wolff school in the following way:

One can see that the sensitive is poorly defined as that which is more confusedly cognized, and that which belongs to the understanding as that of which there is a distinct cognition. For these are only logical distinctions which do not touch at all the things given, which underlie every logical comparison. Thus, sensitive representations can be very distinct and representations which belong to the understanding can be extremely confused.¹⁷

For Kant, this point is crucial. Even in the Critique of Pure Reason he continues to argue that it is a ‘falsification of the concept of sensibility’ to maintain that ‘our entire sensibility is nothing but the confused representation of things, which contains solely that which pertains to them in themselves but only under a heap of marks and partial representations that we can never consciously separate from one another’. This explanation is mistaken since the opposition ‘distinct–indistinct’ is ‘merely logical, and does not concern the content’(CPR A 43f/B 60f). As Kant shows with the help of the following example, the difference between sensibility and understanding is a difference in the content of representation:

Without doubt the concept of right that is used by the healthy understanding contains the very same things that the most subtle specu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Kant and Non-Conceptual Content: The Origin of the Problem
• 2 Beyond the Myth of the Myth: A Kantian Theory of Non-Conceptual Content
• 3 Kant’s Non-Conceptualism, Rogue Objects, and The Gap in the B Deduction
• 4 A Conceptualist Reply to Hanna’s Kantian Non-Conceptualism
• 5 Hanna, Kantian Non-Conceptualism, and Benacerraf’s Dilemma
• 6 Is there a Gap in Kant’s B Deduction?
• 7 Non-Conceptual Content and the Subjectivity of Consciousness
• 8 Was Kant a nonconceptualist?
• Index