Philosophy Compass 2/3 (2007): 445–460, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00075.

Nonconceptual Content
Josefa Toribio*
University of Edinburgh

Abstract
Nonconceptualists maintain that there are ways of representing the world that do
not reflect the concepts a creature possesses. They claim that the content of these
representational states is genuine content because it is subject to correctness
conditions, but it is nonconceptual because the creature to which we attribute it
need not possess any of the concepts involved in the specification of that content.
Appeals to nonconceptual content have seemed especially useful in attempts to
capture the representational properties of perceptual experiences, the representational
states of pre-linguistic children and non-human animals, the states of subpersonal
visual information-processing systems, and the subdoxastic states involved in tacit
knowledge of the grammar of a language. Nonconceptual content is also invoked
in the explanation of concept possession, concept acquisition, sensorimotor behaviour,
and in the analysis of the notion of self-consciousness. The notion of nonconceptual
content plays an important role in many discussions about the relationships between
perception and thought.

Content: Conceptual vs. Nonconceptual

The content of a mental state is the way it represents the world as being.
Although there is no general agreement as to exactly how to characterise
the notion of content, it has become standard practise among philosophers
of mind and language to portray it as an abstract object of some kind, usually
a proposition. Propositions are mind- and language-independent objects to
which we assign truth conditions. On a broadly Fregean account of proposi-
tions, the basic components of such complex entities consist of concepts
(see Caveat B below for alternative accounts). Typical examples of mental
states with conceptual content are thus propositional attitudes. To have a
propositional attitude – such as a belief, desire, or hope – is to stand in a
cognitive relation to a proposition. The content of the proposition is what
is believed, desired or hoped for. On this Fregean account, how a subject
takes the world depends on the concepts she possesses.
Conceptual content – it is generally agreed, but see Travis – is subject to what
Evans dubbed ‘the Generality Constraint’, according to (a version of ) which
if a subject can be credited with the thought that a is F, then he must have the
conceptual resources for entertaining the thought that a is C, for every property
of being C of which he has a conception. (Evans 104)
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In the above statement ‘a’ refers to an object, e.g. a cat. ‘F’ refers to a
property, such as being white. An instance of the Generality Constraint
would thus be: a subject can entertain the thought that Lolo (my cat) is
white, only if she can also entertain the thought that Lolo has some other
property such as being fat, of which she has a concept. Evans also states the
constraint in a slightly different fashion. According to this other version, a
subject can be credited with the thought that a particular object – such as
Lolo – has a property – such as being white – only if she can also think
about other objects – let’s say this piece of paper on my desk – as having
this very same property. The Generality Constraint is usually understood as
the union of these two theses and thus reads as follows: the attribution to a
subject of contentful states of the form a is F and b is G commits us to the
idea that that system should also be able to represent a as G or b as F (104
n21). The content of all propositional attitudes is said to be subject to this
constraint. Meeting the Generality Constraint is widely regarded as a
sufficient condition for conceptual content. It is against the background of
this general picture of conceptual content that we need to elucidate what
is essentially a contrastive notion: nonconceptual content.
Conceptualists defend the view that the way a subject represents the world
can be fully specified by using concepts she possesses, where these repre-
sentations obey the Generality Constraint. Nonconceptualists maintain that
there are ways of representing the world that do not reflect the concepts a
creature possesses. On their view, these mental states qualify as having
genuine content for two reasons. The first is that they are semantically
evaluable information-bearing structures, i.e. they are subject to correctness
conditions. This means that they are the sort of states that can be correct
(true) or incorrect (false). The second reason for counting such states as
genuinely contentful, according to the nonconceptualist, is that they enter
into rational – and not merely causal – explanations of why a creature acts
in the way it does. Yet such content is nonconceptual because the creature
to which we attribute it need not possess any of the concepts involved in
the specification of that content. Without needing to possess, for example,
the concepts of SQUARE and FITTING (we use capital letters in what
follows whenever talking about concepts), a creature may nonetheless
correctly represent the square peg as fitting into the square hole and may
indeed fit the peg through the hole for this reason.
The following two features are sometimes presented as substantiating
the idea that a particular content is nonconceptual: the content eludes
linguistic expression or – unlike the content of beliefs – it is not revisable
on the basis of any other inferential or evidential relations (Crane,
‘Nonconceptual Content of Experience’). Perceptual illusions illustrate
nicely the second type of phenomenon. Our perception of a straight stick
partially submerged in water remains a visual experience as of a bent stick,
even after we learn that a straight stick partially submerged in water will
appear bent.
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Compared to conceptual content – content that is subject to the Generality

Constraint, linguistically expressible, and revisable on the basis of inferential
and evidential relations – nonconceptual content appears to be a distinctive
kind of content (but see below). The notion of nonconceptual content seems
especially apt to capture the representational properties of perceptual and
aesthetic experiences, and to describe the representational states of pre-
linguistic children and non-human creatures. It is also the kind of content
that some philosophers and cognitive scientists ascribe to the states of
subpersonal visual processing systems and to the subdoxastic computational
states involved in the tacit knowledge of the grammar of a language, i.e.
the rules of syntax. Such tacit knowledge is meant to explain how we can
follow rules of grammar which we cannot articulate. It is important to keep
in mind, though, that nonconceptual content can be, and indeed has been,
characterised in many different ways. Some versions have specifically been
developed to account for the special properties of just one of these domains
and don’t apply equally well to all of them. In what follows I briefly describe
some of the most prominent versions.
Cussins’s notion of nonconceptual content targets the perceptual domain
and has a developmental and ability-based flavour. Cussins’s idea is to specify
the content of our perceptual experiences by referring to the set of skills
and know-hows that an agent deploys to negotiate a domain (‘Content,
Embodiment and Objectivity’ 655 –6). His account provides a theoretical
tool for understanding the emergence of an objective world – represented
in conceptual terms – from a non-objective one – represented noncon-
ceptually –, a world structured in terms of the possibilities that it offers to
the agent for acting in particular ways.
Peacocke’s detailed analysis of nonconceptual content is specifically aimed
at developing an account of the representational content of perceptual
experiences. In particular, his notion of scenario content is introduced to
explain the possession conditions of some very basic concepts, such as the
first person concept. Scenario content is determined by ‘specifying which
ways of filling out the space around the perceiver are consistent with the
representational content’s being correct’ (A Study of Concepts 61). This space,
considered as a type, is in turn determined by the labelled fixing of an origin
(usually one of the perceiver’s bodily parts, e.g. the centre of the chest),
axes (e.g. directions with respect to the centre of the chest), and the
assignation of a time. Scenario content is said to have correctness conditions
that are primitively compelling, that is, they appeal to us in a way that is
direct and pre-theoretical. Peacocke believes that having a perceptual
experience with such-and-such nonconceptual content can thus constitute
a primitively compelling reason for the formation of a belief based on that
perceptual experience (6–7, 80).
Bermúdez (Paradox of Self-Consciousness) draws on Peacocke’s notion of
nonconceptual content, but he focuses on explaining the behaviour of
pre-linguistic children and non-human creatures – relying heavily on
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empirical results in developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Bermúdez (‘Nonconceptual Content’) argues that the notion of noncon-
ceptual content is suitable not only for the personal level domain of perceptual
experiences, but also, and importantly, for the domain of subpersonal
computational states posited by information-processing accounts of vision. A
subpersonal system is a physical mechanism – usually a part of an organism’s
brain – that processes information in ways that are not available to the
organism itself. Bermúdez finds plausible the idea that, if subpersonal
information-processing mechanisms do indeed process information, then
the states of those mechanisms must have content and that content cannot
be conceptual. Bermúdez’s notion of nonconceptual content plays an
important role in the analysis of primitive non-linguistic forms of self-
consciousness manifested in, among others, the domains of somatic
proprioception, spatial reasoning and interpersonal psychological interactions
(see also Hurley, ‘Non-Conceptual Self-Consciousness and Agency’;
Consciousness in Action ch. 4). He maintains (Paradox of Self-Consciousness;
‘Nonconceptual Self-Consciousness’) that we need to posit some
nonconceptual form of self-consciousness in order to explain (full-fledged)
self-consciousness without running into a paradox.

Two Caveats
A. CONCEPTS

Since much of the discussion involving the notion of nonconceptual content

hinges on the idea of whether or not a subject possesses a given concept,
any view on the matter of conceptual vs. nonconceptual content will depend,
at least partially, on what we have to say about (i) what concepts are; and
(ii) what it is to possess a concept. With a variety of theories addressing these
two different, but intertwined, issues in the philosophical arena, assessing
how each proposed form of argument would help support or undermine
claims concerning nonconceptual content is not an easy task. For the
purposes of the present discussion, and regarding issue (i), we have followed
the Fregean tradition of considering concepts to be semantic, and hence
abstract – as opposed to psychological – objects (see e.g. Peacocke, A Study
of Concepts; Zalta). Frege defined concepts as functions which map every
argument to either the truth-value True or the truth-value False. For
example,‘is a philosopher’ denotes the concept BEING A PHILOSOPHER,
which maps e.g. the object Aristotle to the truth-value True. Frege thus
considered concepts to be the referents of predicates. Concepts, in the
Fregean tradition, however, are characterised as the senses of predicates such
as ‘is a philosopher’. (For a detailed account of the divergence between
Frege’s own view and the traditional interpretation of that view, see
Wiggins.) Together with the senses of singular terms such as ‘Aristotle’, they
are considered to be the constituents of propositions. The sense (Sinn) of a

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predicate or a singular term is the meaning – as opposed to the referent

(Bedeutung) – of that term and is thus an abstract entity.
Regarding the second issue, i.e. theories of concept possession, and how
to establish what thoughts subjects are capable of having, the following may
be considered a good guide for assessment: the more minimalist a view of
concept possession is, the less theoretically interesting the distinction between
conceptual and nonconceptual content becomes. If possessing the concept
X only required the subject’s ability to discriminate X’s from non-X’s – a
position only defended by some psychologists for whom concepts may be
said to be ‘essentially pattern-recognition devices’ (Smith and Medin 8) –
then almost all mental content would be conceptual. The theoretical space
for nonconceptualism would then be almost nonexistent, even though
conceptualism would be trivially true. The distinction between conceptual
and nonconceptual content becomes philosophically interesting only when
we assume more demanding theories of concept possession. According to
such theories, concept possession requires not only that the agent have
certain discriminative abilities – e.g. the ability to sort X’s from non X’s –
but also that the agent be capable of reflectively recognising something to
be an X (see e.g. Peacocke, A Study of Concepts). In the most demanding
ones, the ability to justify the resulting classification may also be a requirement
(see e.g. McDowell, Mind and World). It is against these richer theories that
nonconceptualism appears as a challenging and appealing position. The
challenge is to show that a creature need not be a full-blooded reasoner in
order to count as a full-blooded representer.

B. PROPOSITIONS

From a broadly Fregean perspective, we have characterised propositions as

abstract entities that have concepts as their constituents. This is not, however,
the only possible understanding of the notion. One could, for instance,
identify propositions with functions from possible worlds to truth-values –
as it is done in possible worlds semantics. However, adopting such a view
involves de facto giving up the requirement of connecting specifications of
content to reasons for action. This is because, thus characterised, the content
of propositions need not be sensitive to the way in which an agent takes the
world to be. Since both conceptualists and nonconceptualists hold this
requirement as essential to the very notion of content, we can easily see
that, in opting for this approach, we abandon the logical space of discussions
about nonconceptual content (Bermúdez,‘Nonconceptual Mental Content’).
We could instead adopt a Russellian approach and identify the constituents
of propositions with the objects and properties themselves, rather than the
concepts under which they fall. Russellian propositions are indeed sometimes
invoked to characterise the content of perceptual experiences. When
restricted to this realm, the nonconceptualist can avail herself of a picture
of the process of conceptualisation that helps justify the claim that conceptual
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and nonconceptual contents are different in kind. Conceptualizing would

consist in subsuming objects and properties themselves (entities of one kind)
under concepts (entities of another kind). However, taking ‘proposition’ to
mean ‘Russellian proposition’ in this debate would prevent the noncon-
ceptualist from availing herself of that kind of picture on purely stipulative
grounds, and would thus eliminate one of the main motivations for
distinguishing between conceptual and nonconceptual content in the first
place.
Under any of these alternative interpretations to the Fregean model of
propositions, the debate between nonconceptualists and conceptualists
becomes theoretically uninteresting. That’s why, for the purposes of this
article, we take propositions to be abstract objects whose constituents are
concepts.

Nonconceptual Content: Reasons for Believing and Acting

Conceptualists, such as McDowell (Mind and World; ‘Content of Perceptual
Experience’) and Brewer (Perception and Reason; ‘Perceptual Experience’),
argue that, even if we granted that the content of perceptual states were
nonconceptual, it would not follow that those states provide reasons for a
subject’s belief or behaviour. Enjoying a perceptual experience with a
particular content can provide a subject with a reason for believing or acting
only if the content is conceptualised. McDowell’s key move consists in
drawing a distinction between reasons for which and reasons why a subject does
something. States with nonconceptual content can play a role in the
explanation of why a subject behaves in a particular way from the point of
view of a rational external observer. However, he argues, that in itself does
not guarantee that such states provide a reason for the subject. It doesn’t
even guarantee that the subject has any reasons at all (Mind and World 163).
On this kind of account, nonconceptual content plays a role only at the
level of our cognitive machinery (55), i.e. at the subpersonal level of brains
and events in the nervous system, where the states and events receive causal
explanations in purely mechanistic, and not rational, terms. McDowell’s
position is thus that there cannot be an intelligible notion of nonconceptual
content at the personal level, because personal-level explanations are
characteristically non-causal and do not appeal to the neurological
mechanisms underpinning a subject’s behaviour.
Brewer (‘Perceptual Experience’) argues that if perceptual states could
figure as reasons for a subject’s empirical beliefs, they’d have to be able to
figure as premises and conclusions in inferences. The content of such states
would thus have to be propositional and hence – given the way propositions
are usually characterised in this debate – conceptual. Furthermore, since
reasons here should be reasons for the subject, these propositions must be
propositions that the subject already understands and hence their constituents
must be concepts that the subject already possesses.
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Nonconceptualists such as Heck and Peacocke (‘Does Perception have a

Nonconceptual Content?’) reply that perceptual experiences can and do
provide reasons for a subject’s beliefs about the external world even though
the content of such experiences is nonconceptual. But this happens only in
cases where the subject has the ability to reflectively recognise this noncon-
ceptual content at the conceptual level. An interesting angle on this debate
comes from the literature on sensorimotor knowledge. Susan Hurley claims
that even if we had managed to show that reasons for a subject’s empirical
beliefs must be conceptual, it wouldn’t necessarily follow that her reasons
for action must be. This would be the case only if we had an overintel-
lectualised view of the mind and assumed that practical rationality is just a
form of theoretical or inferential rationality. However, she argues, ‘reasons
for action are not reasons for belief about what should be done. If they were,
it would be very difficult to understand how there could be truths about
conflicting reasons for action’ (‘Animal Action’ 232).

Nonconceptual Content: Why Do We Need It?

The arguments for nonconceptualism vary according to the explanatory job
philosophers assign to the notion of nonconceptual content. Here we rehearse
some of the central motivations for the nonconceptualist view.

NON-CIRCULARITY OF THE EXPLANATION OF CONCEPT POSSESSION AND ACQUISITION

The desire to provide a non-circular account of concept possession is

prominent in Peacocke’s work (see especially A Study of Concepts). He
believes that the explanation of what it is to possess a concept – to be in
states with conceptual content – would be circular if we had to use the
concept whose possession conditions we are trying to explain in the
specification of such content. Concept-involving behaviour needs, Peacocke
claims, to be explicable in terms of the nonconceptual content of more basic,
yet still representational, cognitive states. Peacocke’s non-circularity constraint
also applies to the acquisition of new observational concepts. The idea is
that when a subject is presented with e.g. a pyramid for the first time, the
subject’s perceptual experience is sufficient for her to acquire the concept
PYRAMID. But, if this is the case, he claims, the content of that perceptual
experience cannot include the concept PYRAMID to begin with. Hence,
the content of the original perceptual experience is nonconceptual (Peacocke,
‘Does Perception have a Nonconceptual Content?’). This motivation also
seems present in Evans, according to whom the process of making a
perceptual judgement is a process of conceptualisation.

EXPLANATION OF SENSORIMOTOR BEHAVIOUR AND KNOW-HOW

Another reason to endorse some notion of nonconceptual content turns on

the idea that the action-controlling aspects of perceptual experience require
a more behaviourally oriented explanatory tool than those allowed by a
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purely conceptual model of representation. To take one of Evans’ examples,

consider the experience of hearing a sound as coming from ‘over there’.
What makes it the case that a subject hears the sound in that way is, according
to Evans, the subject’s particular ability to negotiate the domain in which
she is embedded (154). To have an experience with such nonconceptual
content is to possess a set of skills that will enable the subject to carry out a
particular task. Such skills need not involve the deployment of any concepts
relevant to the performance of the task. The subject need not have, for
example, the concept NORTH to be able to have an experience of a sound
as coming from that direction.
For those with this motivation (e.g. Bermúdez,‘Nonconceptual Content’;
‘Ecological Perception’; Paradox of Self-Consciousness; Cussins,‘Connectionist
Construction of Concepts’;‘Content, Embodiment and Objectivity’), noncon-
ceptual content is invoked to explain the relation between perceptual
experiences and the array of sensorimotor skills that enable us to act in the
world we perceive. Within this domain, nonconceptual content is often placed
at the subpersonal level, as it is used to characterise the content of states of
visual information-processing systems (see e.g. Bermúdez, ‘Nonconceptual
Content’). Nonconceptual content seems especially well suited for this task
since it is considered to be unmediatedly and intimately connected to the
subject’s abilities to act upon an object or to perform a particular task (Evans
146). Among these skills are the abilities to adjust one’s grasping actions to
suit different kinds of object, or to recognise similarities and/or dissimilarities
in shape and structure. These abilities ‘are not available to the subject as the
content’s referent, but they are available to the subject as the subject’s
experience-based knowledge of how to act on the object, and respond to
it’ (Cussins,‘Content, Embodiment and Objectivity’ 655–6). Clark explores
such views in the light of neuroscientific models of perception and action.
The rationale for appealing to the notion of nonconceptual content seems
to draw here on Ryle’s (‘Knowing How and Knowing That’; Concept of
Mind) claim that knowledge of how to do something (‘knowledge-how’)
is irreducible to knowledge that something is the case (‘knowledge-that’).
Interestingly, some recent arguments in epistemology (e.g. Stanley and
Williamson) attempt to show that all knowledge-how (Ryle, ‘Knowing
How and Knowing That’; Concept of Mind) is just a species of propositional
knowledge. If these arguments were sound, then Ryle’s original distinction
between knowledge-that and knowledge-how would be undermined and
nonconceptualism would have lost one of its main pillars of support.
However, many philosophers maintain that knowledge-how is irreducible
to knowledge-that (see e.g. Hawley; Koethe; Noë, ‘Anti-Intellectualism’;
Rosefeldt; Rumfitt; Schiffer; Snowdon).

EXPLAINING THE RICHNESS OF PERCEPTUAL EXPERIENCES

Among Evans’ original reasons for introducing the notion of nonconceptual

content was the idea that the richness and grain of perceptual experience
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 Nonconceptual Content . 453

cannot be unpacked using the standard notion of belief (125 n9, 229). More
recently, both Tye (Consciousness, Color, and Content) and Heck have used
this idea in defending nonconceptualism.
Colour experiences . . . subjectively vary in ways that far outstrip our colour
concepts. For example, the experience or sensation of the determinate shade,
red29, is phenomenally different from that of the shade, red32. But I have no such
concept as red29. So, I cannot see something as red29 or recognise that specific
shade as such . . . My ordinary colour judgements are, of necessity, far less
discriminating than my experiences of colour. (Tye, Consciousness, Color, and
Content 61)
For the conceptualist (McDowell, Mind and World; Brewer, ‘Perceptual
Experience’), by contrast, the richness of our perceptual experiences is best
accounted for, not in terms of their possessing nonconceptual contents, but
by appeal to demonstrative concepts. Given, for example, a colour
experience, the subject can simply articulate its content by saying that
something looks that way. The visual experience will thus involve the
demonstrative concept of that (shade). According to Brewer (‘Perceptual
Experience’), the subject’s possession of this concept involves her standing
in appropriate attending and tracking relations to that shade, and she acquires
it in virtue of standing in these attentional and tracking relations. That is,
the subject
must have some ability to keep track of the shade in question over certain
variations in viewing conditions: some changes of perspective, lighting, the
presence or absence of shadows and so on. Given that she is tracking the colour
of something which she is looking at in this way, then her experience of it consists
in her entertaining the conceptual content ‘that is coloured thus’, which is indeed
bound to be true. (224)
One of the arguments against this view (Peacocke, ‘Nonconceptual
Content Defended’) is based on the idea that demonstrative-perceptual
concepts are just too fine-grained to be considered appropriately applicable
to perceptual experiences, since there are many kinds of properties and
objects which can be the referents of a demonstrative concept, yet cannot
themselves be perceptually discriminated.
Sean Kelly addresses the role of demonstrative concepts in two different
and interesting ways. On the one hand, discussing the topic of colour
perception, Kelly argues that our perceptual experience of colour does not
satisfy a necessary condition for the possession of demonstrative colour
concepts. The ‘re-identification condition’ – as he calls it – asserts that a
subject’s possession of a demonstrative concept for an object or property x
is warranted only if the subject is able consistently to correctly re-identify
an object or property as falling under the demonstrative concept X
(‘Demonstrative Concepts and Experience’, 403). However, since our ability
to discriminate colours exceeds our ability to re-identify the colours

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discriminated, the content of our colour perceptions cannot involve

demonstrative concepts.
On the other hand, Kelly has also argued that considerations about
the fine-grainedness of perceptual experience are not as relevant to its
nonconceptual nature as ‘the dependence of a perceived object on the
perceptual context in which it is perceived and the dependence of a perceived
property on the object it is perceived to be a property of ’ (‘Non-conceptual
Content’ 601). Take the first kind of dependency. The way I experience
the colour of an object, the way the colour of the object looks to me, depends
on the lighting conditions – whether the object, for example, is in the sun
or in the shade. However, I experience the object to be the same colour
whether it is in the light or the shade. This phenomenon is called perceptual
constancy. If this is the case, then no colour demonstrative concept could
describe the content of my colour experience because the demonstrative
would always pick up the colour itself, not the colour as it depends on my
experiencing it under certain lighting conditions. Now take the second kind
of dependency. When I perceive, for example, the brown of the carpet in
my office, I don’t perceive it just as some abstract colour of brown, but as
a woolly brown. The same shade of brown on a different object – e.g. a
piece of fudge – may look different. I certainly may wonder whether they
are in fact the same colour. These two types of dependency show, Kelly
concludes, that the relevant differences in the corresponding perceptual
experiences are not differences regarding the colour itself and hence that no
colour demonstrative concept could be used to distinguish them.

EXPLAINING THE BEHAVIOUR OF PRE-LINGUISTIC CHILDREN AND NON-LINGUISTIC

ANIMALS

There seems to be a certain continuity in the way creatures with different

conceptual repertoires represent the world in their perceptual experiences.
The same continuity also seems present in the case of a creature before and
after she acquires a particular perceptual concept. This idea was already
present in some of Evans’ arguments for nonconceptual content (124), but
Peacocke has provided the canonical formulation of the so-called ‘continuity
argument’.
While being reluctant to attribute concepts to the lower animals, many of us
would also want to insist that the property of (say) representing a flat brown
surface as being at a certain distance from one can be common to the perceptions
of humans and of lower animals . . . If the lower animals do not have states with
conceptual content, but some of their perceptual states have contents in common
with human perceptions, it follows that some perceptual representational content
is nonconceptual’ (‘Phenomenology and Nonconceptual Content’ 613 –14; see
also Bermúdez, Paradox of Self-Consciousness ch. 3, 4; McGinn 62).
So, if both non-human animals and humans can have perceptual experiences
with some of the same representational content, and only humans can be
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in states with conceptual content, then the content of some human perceptual
experiences is nonconceptual.
Appeals to the notion of nonconceptual content to explain the behaviour
of non-linguistic animals and pre-linguistic children need not depend
upon the continuity argument, though. Bermúdez (Paradox of Self-
Consciousness) draws on current research into object perception in infancy
to argue that infant perception is structured by a fundamentally different
‘naïve physics’ from that structuring adult human perception and thus that
the content of infants’ representational states is not continuous with that of
the adults. Yet he holds that infants’ mental states have nonconceptual
content.
Can creatures with no concepts at all be in states with nonconceptual
content? The so-called ‘Autonomy Thesis’ states that there are, or could be,
creatures that possess no concepts at all but are in states with nonconceptual
content. The Autonomy Thesis has been contested in a number of ways.
In Evans’ account, nonconceptual content attributions require that the
representational content of perceptual experiences feed into a concept-
possessing creature, a creature already capable of deploying the conceptual
apparatus of reasoning. Otherwise, such perceptual states would be considered
just the informational states of subpersonal mechanisms (Evans 124, 158).
Peacocke (A Study of Concepts;‘Nonconceptual Content’) defended a similar
position against the Autonomy Thesis that he now rejects (see below). He
claimed that only creatures that possess a first-person concept can also be in
states with nonconceptual content and thus that the Autonomy Thesis was
false. The attribution of states with scenario content to a creature is justified
– Peacocke argued – only if the creature can re-identify places over time.
Such re-identification involves the construction of some sort of cognitive
map of the environment over time. However, he concluded, none of these
conditions could be met if the creature didn’t possess at least a rudimentary
form of first-person concept.
Many nonconceptualists, however, support the Autonomy Thesis (see,
e.g. Bermúdez, ‘Peacocke’s Argument’; ‘Nonconceptual Content’; ‘Ecological
Perception’; Paradox of Self-Consciousness; Bermúdez and Macpherson; Davies,
‘Perceptual Content’; ‘Externalism and Experience’; McGinn). As we have
just said, even Peacocke himself has recently changed his mind about this
issue. His most recent account (‘Postscript to Peacocke 1994’) provides two
reasons for the failure of his original (A Study of Concepts; ‘Nonconceptual
Content’) argument against the Autonomy Thesis just rehearsed. First, he
claims, even if the argument were sound, nothing in it shows that either
the first-person notion or any of the other contents involved in the creature’s
construction of its spatial cognitive map must be conceptual – a line of
argument already pursued by Bermúdez (Paradox of Self-Consciousness).
Second, he concedes, the argument is not sound, because, although the
creature’s ability to re-identify spatial locations over time is a necessary
condition for building up a spatial cognitive map,‘[i]t is wrong to hold that
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this can be done only by use of a first-person notion, even a nonconceptual

one’ (‘Postscript to Peacocke 1994’ 319).

Nonconceptual Content:‘The Content View’ vs.‘The State View’

It has recently been pointed out (Byrne, ‘Perception and Conceptual
Content’; Heck; Speaks) that nonconceptualism admits two different
interpretations. On the first interpretation or ‘content view’ (Heck), also
called ‘the absolute nonconceptualist thesis’ (Speaks), the nonconceptualist
advocates a difference in kind between the content of conceptual states like
beliefs and the content of other representational states such as perceptual
experiences. The difference lies in the nature of the content of the
representational states, considered as a monadic property of the content
itself. The absolute nonconceptualist thus maintains that the content of a
mental representation is either conceptual or nonconceptual, but not both.
On the second interpretation or ‘state view’ – also called ‘the relative
nonconceptualist thesis’ – the relevant distinction for the nonconceptualist
is not a distinction between two kinds of content, but between two kinds
of representational states. Here the content of, for example, beliefs – however
characterised – and the content of, for example, perceptual experiences are
of exactly the same kind. It’s just that beliefs and perceptual experiences are
different types of states, and hence involve different types of relations between
the subject and the content. While the former are concept-dependent or
conceptual, the latter are concept-independent or nonconceptual. It would
thus be perfectly possible for a perceptual state and a belief to have the same
kind of content. It is just that the content of a subject’s perceptual state can
include concepts the subject does not possess, while the contents of a subject’s
belief has to include only concepts that the subject possesses. On the state
view, nonconceptualism is a thesis not about a monadic property, but about
a relation that holds between the content of a certain representational state
and the subject who is in that state.
Some philosophers (Byrne,‘Consciousness and Nonconceptual Content’;
‘Perception and Conceptual Content’) have attempted to show that the state
view should be ranked as basic in the debate about nonconceptual content.
However, Heck (fn. 6) suggests not only that such a view should not be
considered more basic, but that it may ultimately be indefensible. I have
focused here on the content view, since this is the target of the conceptualist’s
counter-arguments, especially McDowell (Mind and World) and Brewer
(‘Perceptual Experience’). Speaks’s recent article usefully displays the logical
relationships between these two characterisations of nonconceptualism.

Summing Up
The notion of nonconceptual content lies at the centre of a number of
important debates in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Despite
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 Nonconceptual Content . 457

its negative or contrastive nature, its problematic characterisation (since

‘nonconceptual content’ has received a variety of formulations), and the
diversity of the philosophical motivations behind its introduction, the core
idea remains simple and attractive. It is that an agent can represent the world
in ways that do not depend on her conceptual repertoire. The notion has
been used to clarify the relationship between perception, thought and action
– a relationship as philosophically central as it is puzzling.

Short Biography
Josefa Toribio’s research is located at the intersection of philosophy of mind,
philosophy of science and cognitive science. She has published papers in these
areas for, among others, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Synthese,
Consciousness and Cognition, Philosophical Issues, Philosophical Papers, Pragmatics
and Cognition, Minds and Machines, Philosophical Explorations, Theoria, and
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. She has also made contributions to
edited volumes, and is co-editor of Conceptual Issues in Artificial Intelligence
and Cognitive Science, a four-volume reading series. The focus of her most
recent research has been on the notion of nonconceptual content, the debate
between internalism and externalism, and the problematic assumptions
underlying certain naturalistic approaches to meaning. Currently she is
exploring the conceptualism vs. nonconceptualism debate as it arises at the
barely explored intersection between scientifically informed Philosophy of
Mind Cognitive Science and what might be dubbed the ‘normative image’
of mind, according to which a proper account of the mental cannot be
developed without attention to matters concerning value and responsibility.
She has held fellowships from The British Council and the Royal Society
of Edinburgh. Josefa Toribio holds a Ph.D. from Complutense University,
Madrid. She joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of
Edinburgh in August 2004, having previously held positions at the School
of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex, Washington
University in St. Louis, and Indiana University.

Note
* Correspondence address: Department of Philosophy,The University of Edinburgh, David Hume
Tower, George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JX, Scotland, UK. Email: j.toribio@ed.ac.uk.

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