Modelo de negocio

Kant’s great contribution was to call to our attention the ways in which what we perceive is dependent on what we conceive. For example, to perceive—in the sense of recognizing the fact that— one event hap-pened later than another requires possessing the notion of an objective time order, and that notion, Kant claimed (I believe rightly), is depen-dent on (or rather interdependepen-dent with) such conceptual resources as the notions of cause and effect. It is not enough that I experience events in a certain subjective order; I must also know that in certain cases I could have perceived them in a dif fer ent order (I could have walked around the house in the reverse direction, for example, and still perceived the front, the sides, the chimney, etc.), and in other cases I could not have perceived them in a dif fer ent order (I could not have perceived that boat sailing away from the bridge before I perceived it approaching the bridge).

Conceptualization is a precondition for full- blown perception.

In Mind and World, McDowell, however, takes Kant’s point to be that all experiences are apperceptions (recognitions that something is so and so). This may have been Kant’s view too; at least, he writes that an “in-tuition” to which we do not prefi x the “I think” would “be nothing to us,” and this could be interpreted as meaning that, as far as we can know, our whole mental life is apperceived by the ego. If so, I believe that Kant made a mistake, and that McDowell makes the same mistake.¹⁸ I think we are aware that there is a great deal of detail in the scene presented to our eyes at any given moment that we do not apperceive, and some of that detail can be recalled by us a moment or two later. But one does

18. I also have problems with McDowell’s “minimal empiricism.” I quote from Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994): “Empirical judgments in general— whether or not they are justifi ed at all, perhaps less substantially than knowledge requires— had better have content of a sort that admits of empirical justifi cation, even if there is none in the present case (say in a quite unsupported guess)” (6). As it stands, this reads like a “verifi ability” requirement, and if that is not how McDowell understands it, it is noteworthy that he does not feel it necessary to explain why it does not mean that every

“empirical judgment” must be confi rmable or disconfi rmable by experience.

not have to speculate about this; there is good experimental work to support the view that what we attend to in experience is far from being the whole of experience. The idea that what is presented in experience outruns what is attended to, conceptualized, and so on, is not simply an illusion, as some have tried to claim. (Of course the point applies also to senses other than vision.)

The point is not trivial, because claiming that only creatures capable of fully conceptualized apperception— that is, of apperception whose content they can formulate in language— can have experiences of the sort we have posits an enormous, and I believe untenable, gulf be-tween our experiences and those of animals and even those of children who are not yet masters of a language.

Seeing apperceptions and not bare qualia as the basis of empirical judgment involves a fundamental shift in perspective.

The fact is that when we have an apperception (or a seeming- apperception— think of the Müller- Lyer illusion!), no par tic u lar “im-pression” is essential. Block and others have pointed out that there is considerable empirical evidence that dif fer ent subjects experience dif-fer ent qualia when they look at a par tic u lar color; but, unless they are color blind, they can all be truly said to see (apperceive) that the traffi c light is red, when it is. The apperception or seeming- apperception that the traffi c light is red is not the same as an “impression” in the sense of a sensation. Nor is it the same as a perceptual belief. ( There is no such thing as it seeming to me that I believe something when I know that I don’t believe any such thing, but there is such a thing as seeming to apperceive something when I know that I don’t.) When we look for a justifi cation for a par tic u lar empirical judgment, apart from the very special case in which the judgment is about qualia, what we cite as ob-servational support are apperceptions and not qualia (or “sense data”).

Of course, McDowell also does not think we do cite sense data (in the sense of qualia) as empirical support for our judgments; he thinks there are no such things as qualia, and that visual impressions, for ex-ample, are simply takings-in of properties of the objects we see. If I see a red book, the “impression” that the book is red is just a taking-in of the fact that the book is red. This is not idealism, as some critics of Mc-Dowell have charged; however, it is simply wrong. What it is is an at-tempt at an account of perception without any reference to sense data at all. I agree with McDowell that qualia cannot do the epistemic work

of supporting our empirical judgments. In my view, that work is done by our apperceptions and seeming- apperceptions. In fact, perceiving something is sometimes not accompanied by any special qualia. Per-ceiving that I raised my arm intentionally (as opposed to its just “ going up”) is something I often do, but there is no “quale” of “voluntariness.”

Moreover, there are—as Alva Noë has stressed— many forms of “amodal”

awareness. The awareness that I am seeing a tomato includes both the awareness that the side toward me has a certain color and the aware-ness that it has a soft interior and a side I do not see.¹⁹ But the fact that knowledge is grounded in apperceptions and seeming- apperceptions and not in unconceptualized sense data does not imply that the latter do not exist. For our experience is rich in qualia, most of which we do not conceptualize, although many of them can be conceptualized to some extent both when they occur and after they occur. Qualia can even play an epistemic role, when they are what we apperceive. But so can tables and chairs and cats when they are what we apperceive. I am arguing that qualia, as opposed to apperceptions, play no special epistemic role, but disjunctivists are wrong to deny their existence.

To summarize, the Kantian picture of perception that McDowell defends in Mind and World is simply this: our impressions are already conceptualized.²⁰ Also, disjunctivism guarantees that our

“impres-19. See Alva Noë, Action in Awareness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004). While Noë perhaps overemphasizes the role of sensorimotor expectations in such “amodal” awareness, they are without doubt a signifi cant part of the story.

20. In John McDowell, “Avoiding the Myth of the Given,” in Having the World in View:

Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), he gives up the requirement that experiences must be “articulated” or at least “articulable” like propositions, and sums up some key elements of his current view as follows:

Even though the unity- providing function is a faculty for discursive activity, it is not in discursive activity that these capacities are operative in intuitions. With much of the content of an ordinary visual intuition, the capacities that are in play in one’s having it as part of the content of one’s intuition are not even susceptible of discur-sive exercise. One can make use of content’s being given in an intuition to acquire a new discursive capacity, but with much of the content of an ordinary intuition, one never does that. (Think of the fi nely discriminable shapes and shades of color that visual experience pre sents to one.) Nevertheless an intuition’s content is all concep-tual, in this sense: it is in the intuition in a form in which one could make it, that very content, fi gure in discursive activity. That would be to exploit a potential for discur-sive activity that is already there in the capacities actualized in having an intuition with that content. (265)

sions” are not mental entities (“qualia”) common to veridical perceptual experiences and certain illusions and hallucinations. Instead, they are simply takings-in of how it is in the environment (in the case of vision, for example). If I see a white rabbit, that there is a white rabbit there is a fact about the world, and it is the conceptual content of some of my visual impressions. Naive realism is the personal level account of per-ception we need. The only task for philosophy is to explain that this is the case. Neural science is fi ne in its place, but what it studies is merely subpersonal mechanisms, and phi los o phers don’t need to know any-thing about them. (A view that understandably infuriates some phi los-o phers, whlos-o think that phillos-oslos-ophy los-of mind needs tlos-o be scientifi cally informed.)

If you are like me, it will seem to you that none of these models can suffi ce. The empiricist model was deeply infected with Berkeleyan ide-alism from the start; the surface- irritation model does express our need to understand the mechanisms of perception, but it ignores the envi-ronment outside the skin (except for those “gavagai,” what ever they are) and says nothing about the nature of the subpersonal pro cessing as well as the specifi c nature of the environment– organism transactions. The Kantian model, as “naturalized” by McDowell, purports to defend com-monsense realism, but it embraces a “disjunctivism” that is anything but commonsensical. And all three models ignore a point (stressed by both Dewey and Wittgenstein—an unlikely couple!) that what we per-ceive depends on what we do. Action and perception are interdependent.

(Not that any of these models deny that, to be fair. But their authors evidently didn’t think it impor tant.)