The conclusion that seems most plausible to me is that, in order to be experience at all, experience must have logical content; a content which is not reliant on language, but which is, on the contrary, the very phenomenon that makes symbolic language possible. — John

Not phenomena. How could there be meaningful unknowns if logical content was phenomena? Unknowns need a logical content (that which someone is unaware of) to be defined. Considering logical content to be phenomena (a thing experienced) makes this impossible.

Logical content is closer to noumenon. It is given without the physical senses. We imagine all sorts of logical significance without being in contact with a relevant object. It logic, which phenomena (existing states) are not. And it is given regardless of what phenomena are present.

Of course, this means it basically the opposite of the noumenon envisioned by Kant: it is utterly knowable. All it takes is the right instance of phenomena (the existence of someone experiencing a concept).

Perhaps it is a confusing, even poor, choice of terminology. I did not intend to suggest that the logical content of experience is itself a phenomenon in the sense of being 'an object of the senses'; something we can actually see and identify like an ordinary object. I meant it more in the sense of it being an actuality; it is what acts to enable us to see and identify ordinary objects in the first place. (Of course I am not suggesting that it is all that is act-ual in this sense, either).

Does what we say about our experiences correspond to those experiences? Surely it must or else we cannot be speaking about anything. — John

It may, or it may not. Depends on the experience, and depends on what one says about it.

You have perhaps heard someone describe their experience and thought, "That can't be what they experienced. What they say doesn't make sense." I think this happens... somewhat? often. Not very often. I know that I have misrepresented experiences. I don't mean that I was deliberately deceiving anyone; just that, on reflection, what I said about an experience was off the mark.

I have had only a few experiences where I couldn't account for an experience logically--as it was happening or later. (It involved way-finding. I was on my way home, walking on very familiar streets, and reached a corner where it seemed like the avenues and streets had been turned 90 degrees.) I actually had this experience twice in the same vicinity. It was not at all "logical". I wasn't day-dreaming, I wasn't on drugs, wasn't hallucinating, etc. It was just that -- "This doesn't make sense." It seemed spooky, but I don't believe in spooky goings on, but I can't account for it, either.

I've had experiences like this under the influence of alcohol or drugs, but that is logical: drink and drugs in combo can lead to totally illogical perceptions of what is happening.

The world makes sense almost all of the time. It is predictable, reliable, constant, knowable (up to a point), and all animals seem to be able to exist and interact in this world. At least, that seems to be our perception. Flowers bloom, bees pollinate them. Birds lay eggs, the eggs hatch, the birds sing, then they fly away. We wake up, the world is not one vast buzzing confusion, and we get on with our day.

It's possible that we are victims of a monstrous hoax perpetrated by superior but devious beings, and actually the world IS one vast buzzing confusion. If so, the hoax works very well.

It may, or it may not. Depends on the experience, and depends on what one says about it. — Bitter Crank

Yes, you're right; I probably should have written "Can what we say about our experiences correspond to those experiences".

You have perhaps heard someone describe their experience and thought, "That can't be what they experienced. What they say doesn't make sense."

Yeah I am pretty familiar with those kinds of experiences ;). But for it to be possible for what someone says not to correspond with what they experienced, it must be possible that what they said could have corresponded to what they experienced, I think.

I have had only a few experiences where I couldn't account for an experience logically--as it was happening or later. (It involved way-finding. I was on my way home, walking on very familiar streets, and reached a corner where it seemed like the avenues and streets had been turned 90 degrees.) I actually had this experience twice in the same vicinity. It was not at all "logical". I wasn't day-dreaming, I wasn't on drugs, wasn't hallucinating, etc. It was just that -- "This doesn't make sense." It seemed spooky, but I don't believe in spooky goings on, but I can't account for it, either.

I've had experiences like this under the influence of alcohol or drugs, but that is logical: drink and drugs in combo can lead to totally illogical perceptions of what is happening.

I have also had weird experiences like you describe; many of them with drugs and a few without. I guess when you consider that if all the drugs are doing is altering brain chemistry, it is not so implausible that similar alterations, producing 'glitches in the matrix', can sometimes occur due to transient unknown causes.

The world makes sense almost all of the time. It is predictable, reliable, constant, knowable (up to a point), and all animals seem to be able to exist and interact in this world. At least, that seems to be our perception. Flowers bloom, bees pollinate them. Birds lay eggs, the eggs hatch, the birds sing, then they fly away. We wake up, the world is not one vast buzzing confusion, and we get on with our day.

It's possible that we are victims of a monstrous hoax perpetrated by superior but devious beings, and actually the world IS one vast buzzing confusion. If so, the hoax works very well.

That sounds so cozy and lovely, I wish I was there! :’( . Actually, I know what you mean exactly and I agree...

John McDowell has an account of the conceptually structured content of perceptual experience -- Kantian in spirit -- whereby he speaks of experiences as involving the passive actualization of conceptual abilities (the very same abilities that are actively actualized in judgments -- Kantian acts of spontaneity). In that sense, since they are actualized rational capabilities, they are a priori (i.e. conceptual, or 'logical', in a broad sense) features of experiences that are indeed acts, as John suggests. But since those acts are acts of receptivity, their conceptually structured contents still are constrained by what is there to be perceived in the world. This properly accounts for experiences affording a rational constraint on judgment (albeit a constraint that is somewhat holistic, and comes short from being compelling in singular cases of perceptual experience, since they ground defeasible perceptual judgments).

Coming back to John's inquiry about the 'logical' (e.g. conceptual) component of experience without which, it would seem, non-rational creatures such as dogs or cows, would be blind, on a Kantian account: I think we can indeed acknowledge that, in a quite definite sense, dogs and cows are blind to the world. They can't make any objective judgments that are warranted by their experiences (such that they could defend or genuinely question them). This is not to deny that they have perceptual experiences. They indeed have. But those aren't experiences of an objective world, but rather of an immediate environment consisting in (Gibsonian) affordances, that is, consisting in features that can immediately engage primitive forms of behaviors that belong to an animal's passively inherited form of life. Non-rational animals are (mostly) unable to distance themselves from their natural needs and impulses, and hence can't either distance themselves reflectively from features of their environment such as to constitute them as objective items (including properties) that can be questioned, reshaped or inquired about (beyond what mere appearances present to them).

I think most of the primitive features of our perceptual experiences also are Gibsonian affordances that reflect features of our animal form of life, that is, of our essentially embodied mode of existence. This is what our perceptual experiences can be analysed into, rather than, say, sense data. Our acquisition of language, and linguistically mediated conceptual abilities, reshape those (forms of) affordances such that we can responsibly ground or question our plans, intentions, or our conceptions of the empirical world, on the basis of our perceptions of them. In that way, we come not only to question the warrantedness of immediately acting as the environment (and our matching needs/desires) incline us to, but also to (sometimes directly) discern possibilities for rational (and delayed) action that we were formerly blind to. On that view, we could say that the primitive (forms of) affordances that non-rational animals (and human infants) can discern in their environments are proto-concepts and, as such, indispensable features of the contents of animal experiences just as much as conceptual forms comes to be indispensable features of our own experiences, not just contingently, but a priori.

We and other animals share the ability to understand ' sameness and difference', an essential survival skill for both of us. Our understanding of what is aesthetically similar and different leads us, I think, to the logical ideas of equality and negation, from which all of logic can be derived (I think).

I am limping my way through Deleuze's "a thousand plateaus". He seems to be saying that it is by repetition of similar sets of experiences, with similar contents that we form structure/codes for our qualification of those experiences. The contents have already been arranged by nature in a certain manner, and which can only appear in a certain manner because of the way things are constituted. Ice forms at 0 degrees Celsius and becomes water vapor at 100 degrees at sea level, physically emergent properties such as these are formed in nature. Similarly, language also appears to be an emergent stage in our development. The complex interactions of form and matter and the relationship between the various strata of our experience already contain a lot of information which we sort through by recognizing similarities and differences among the particulars in our experiences.

Thanks for your erudite response Pierre, it elaborates the issue in ways that I find myself in complete agreement with, except...I am not sure about the notion of a 'proto-concept'. If proto-concepts have conceptual content, then perhaps it would be better to think of them as pre-linguistic concepts as distinct from linguistically mediated concepts.

I agree with you that it makes sense to think of animals as being 'blind to the world' in the sense they are not capable of making linguistically mediated judgements, or indeed of forming such notions as 'world'. But, insofar as it seems obvious that (at least some) animals can pick out the same features in environments as we do (think of tossing the ball for your dog, for example, and there are countless others) and respond to them in ways that seem logically appropriate to us, I think it does not make sense to think of at least those kinds of animals as lacking much the same kind of experience as we do in our silent non-reflective moments.

I am also impressed by Damasio's controversial idea ( documented in The Feeling of What Happens) that the narrative self exists pre-linguistically, based on the brain's ability to form images of the body's interactions with environments, and the capacity of neural functions to link these images in the form of associated memories. Damasio argues that these kinds of activities go on independently of the human-unique language centers in the brain, and continue to operate even if the parts of the brain that enable linguistic function are damaged to an extent that results in inability to form linguistically mediated thoughts.

I like the idea of affordances; it reminds me of Heidegger's phenomenology.

Cavacava, I agree with much of what you say, but would like to stress a categorical difference between the way in which non-rational animals spontaneously mark differences in their perceptual worlds and the way we (rational, language users) do.

Birds may, in part instinctively, and in part through learning -- largely thanks to unthinking conditioning, but also, granted, through active and motivated exploration -- come to perceive some fruits as edible and others (which may have made then sick) as non-edible. What if, though, a bird sees another bird eat some prima facie 'toxic fruit' (that is, a fruit that this first bird is disinclined to eat) with no ill effect, or, conversely, sees another bird eat a prima facie 'edible fruit' and then drop dead? For the most part, nothing happens. That's because the bird lacks self awareness, knowledge that he is one individual among many individuals of the same kind, and that similar causes often have similar effects etc. The edible, and non-edible, are perceived by the bird as immediately affording eating, or not, respectively, (and in the later case, the toxic fruits are scarcely perceived at all, and mostly go unnoticed as part of the perceptual background to more immediately appealing affordances).

This discriminatory ability may be a proto-conceptual ability with quite a bit of aesthetic sub-structure, but what makes it categorically distinct from the full blown conceptual ability of a language using creature is that anomalies can only be perceived by us as such (i.e. as troublesome occurrences calling for some rational explanation) and thus may serve as ground for questioning appearances, and challenging some of our beliefs, concepts, laws and/or causal categories. Full-blown conceptuality enables mastery of the appearance/reality distinction and thus also the grounding of objective judgment together with responsible concept use. Aesthetic judgment still makes relevant differences salient in the perceptual world of whoever has been suitably trained and encultured into a rational form of life. This is the extension of an ability also possessed by non-rational animals. But challenges to, and rationally motivated revisions of, perceptual categories (extent systems of similarity and difference) are enabled by linguistically mediated concept use, as are our correlative abilities to withhold judgment about what merely appears to be thus and so when we have reason to think it isn't as it appears to be.

Hi John,

I don't think Damasio's inference from the observation of brain damaged patients is conclusive. It would be conclusive if we could fully ascribe all of our linguistic abilities to definite regions of the brain that are, for all we know, merely crucially involved in their acquisition and normal actualization. Localized brain damage occasion all sorts of dissociative behavior and degradation of performances that don't necessarily challenge the view that linguistic skills are central to the development of full-blown conceptual abilities. (See Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, by Max Bennett and Peter Hacker, for more on this, including some discussion of Damasio). Also, what is crucial to linguistically mediated conceptual skill is grasp of logical grammar (including the recombinant structure of general and singular terms), something that implicates people and their brains much beyond mere abilities to verbalise things fluently. Verbal behavior is one main locus of the embodiment of logical grammar, but so are activities such practical reasoning, dance, music, etc., that are narratively structured.

I don't think animals pick out the same items that we normally do, though the items that they do pick out, we can also empathetically pick out for them in a different manner, since we, unlike them, can conceptualize what their animal needs, and, correspondingly, their perceptually salient 'categories' (affordances) are. Those categories, as picked up by us, have a much higher grade of objectivity, as it were, since they rest on individuation criteria (i.e. criteria that determine what is numerically identical with what). The ball, for instance, if it goes hidden for a time and then emerges back (say, it is thrown over a fence and then thrown back to us) may be the same ball or a different though qualitatively identical one. This distinction is intelligible to us but unintelligible to a dog. The ball thrown back either still affords playing for the dog or doesn't. But a dog never would fathom that it might be a different ball that smells and looks just the same or, indeed, the same one. If two balls, instead of one, are thrown back, the dog may be indecisive (better, conflicted) for an instant about what to do, but he won't be puzzled.

Very many years ago there was a British TV show where they decided to prank passing dogs through lifting up with a crane the tree that the dogs were attempting to pee on. This turned out to be rather unfunny because as soon as the tree was being raised in the air, and didn't afford peeing on anymore, the dogs would immediately move on to the next tree to pee on and never look back for so much of a second to inquire about the peculiar flying tree. I think this tells us something about the categorical distinctness of the items that we pick up as trees (and that we conceptualize as enduring re-identifiable beings of specific sorts) and the items that dogs pick up merely as affording peeing on at that very instant.

I tend to agree that at least some animals share our ability to understand sameness and difference. This "understanding" though would be something along the lines of Heidegger's pre-reflective understanding of the world that he characterizes as 'presence-to-hand', and which Pierre-Normand refers to with Gibson's analogous idea of "affordances". I'm not sure that Heidegger imputed such an understanding to animals, because for human being (Dasein or 'there being'), according to him, 'being-in-the-world' is the phenomenological and hermeneutic 'background' against which its affordances are understood as the 'to be used' and the 'ways to be used' are made sense of within that whole context, like equipment and its use makes sense within the context of a whole workshop. According to Heidegger, animals are "world poor"; they do have an environment with its affordances, but their 'environment' is vastly narrower than our 'world', and not susceptible of a similar explication, due to their lack of symbolic language.

I think language would be impossible without that primordial 'understanding' of sameness and difference, or put another way without the ability to pick out 'gestalts' which stand out against the background of the environment.

Insofar as I understand Deleuze's philosophy, ontological primacy is ascribed by him to difference rather than identity, which was traditionally thought to be primary. I don't think I fully have my head around the relation between difference and repetition; traditionally it was thought that repetition relies on sameness (identity), but it seems that Deleuze emphasizes that each repetition must be different in order to be a repetition.

The puzzle is how differentiation could be entirely reliant on our linguistic practices, as some seem to believe. Nature itself, if not always already differentiated, surely constrains the ways in which we can "carve it up", and to get it right is to "carve it at the joints" it would seem. Its seems plausible to think that animals as much as humans, must 'get it right' in order to survive in complex, dangerous environments.

I don't disagree that language is plausibly thought to be necessary for "full-blown conceptual abilities"; Damasio also acknowledges this with his notion of the self of "extended consciousness" which for him is the step beyond the merely "autobiographical consciousness" and its 'self' of unreflective pre-linguistic memory.

The book you cite sounds interesting. I have Hacker's Wittgenstein book which I read and enjoyed a few years ago. I downloaded a PDF, here: https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/naive.pdf (since I can't afford the book at the moment) and when I have found the time to read it I will ( hopefully) be able to comment on its critique of Damasio and other neuroscientists. From a cursory glance at the Amazon reviews I have the impression that it raises questions of the justifiability of any co-option of 'ordinary language' by neuroscientists in the conclusions about the nature of human consciousness, cognition and perception they assert in their conceptual schemes. This puts me in mind of Paul Churchland's question about whether or to what degree that "folk psychology" will be reduced to the terms of a mature neuroscience, and the different reasons for asserting that it could not by the identity theorists, functionalists and eliminative materialists. Churchland seems to think that folk psychology will not be reduced, but rather eliminated due to its being a radically mistaken theory. I don't have a well-formed opinion about this yet, as I need to do a lot more reading in order to fully grasp the issues. If Churchland is right, then 'ordinary language' philosophy would seem to be more or less equivalent to "folk psychology" and will need to be discarded in order to gain a proper understanding of consciousness, cognition and perception.

Hi John,

Very nice post. The world/environment distinction that I use is borrowed from John McDowell who himself borrowed it from Gadamer... who himself, of course, is very close to Heidegger. In my thinking about objectivity, I was also influenced by John Haugeland who himself was much indebted to Heidegger. I also thought about drawing on the notion of readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) -- which is what you probably want to refer to rather than presence-[at]-hand (Vorhandenheit) -- as not quite the equivalent of animal affordances, but as basic, though rational, forms of engagement with the world that animal affordances are the primitive or pre-linguistic forms of. The idea of a totality-of-involvements (Bewandnisganzheit), as exemplified by our mastery of items that are part of, and have circumstantial functions, within a whole workshop, indeed singles out what is distinctive of our own world of 'affordances' as distinguished from the mere environmental affordances immediately graspable (and exploitable) by non-rational animals.

Animals also have some mastery of some of the primitive links that tie up elements of (what would genuinely be for us) a totality-of-involvements. That is, they can pursue affordance A (e.g. walking along some path) because pursuing affordance A is an effective means to pursuing affordance B (e.g. drinking water). But they are passively drawn into those links and can't pull back from them, as it were, to reflect on them as mere practical or theoretical options -- unactualized possibilities -- that can be generalized, problematized, systematized, etc. Hence they can't found a mode of readiness-to-hand (on the basis of which to freely theorize) on their basic 'world' (i.e. environment) of affordances.

I don't have much to say about Paul Churchland, who seems to have inherited the worst from his much more interesting teacher, Wilfrid Sellars. Sellars was committed to a form of scientism -- the project of articulating the scientific image of man -- but could recognize this conception as problematically articulated with the equally indispensable manifest image of man ("the framework in terms of which, to use an existentialist turn of phrase, man first encountered himself...") Being skeptical of any area of philosophy that can't be 'naturalized', Churchland has seemingly turned an already questionable project into a form of unabashed scientism. That seems to be a rebellion against philosophy; which is not to say Churchland doesn't have anything interesting to say, of course. It's just that I can't muster much sympathy for his overarching project.

Thanks for your great responses, Pierre. Unfortunately I am pressed for time at the moment; I will try to respond further as soon as possible, particularly about Churchland's project (which I am just beginning to explore, having for the longest time being put off by the very idea of 'eliminative physicalism', and feeling that it could not possibly be coherent or have anything to offer). I purchased a cheap kindle version of Neuroscience and Philosophy ( the PDF I referenced earlier only contained Dennett's response), and I will hopefully have more to say about that debate after familiarizing myself with all sides.

I have encountered some references to Haugeland and would like to do some reading of him as well. There always seems to be so much to read and do and so little time! And you are right that I meant to reference Zuhandenheit and mistakenly referred to Vorhandenheit. :-# .

I have just finished reading Hacker's and Bennett's criticisms of the "mereological fallacy" they contend is routinely committed by many neuroscientists and by Dennett and Searle, as well as Dennett's response to the criticisms. I am about to begin with Searle's response. I have to say thus far I find myself more in sympathy with Dennett's response that Hacker's and Bennett's criticisms.

A thought that came to mind is that when reading Hacker is that in saying that we do not know what it could be for a brain to decide, perceive, believe etc., whereas as we do know what it is for a person to do those things, Hacker seems unjustified, because I am not convinced that we do know what it means for a person to do those things. We hear people say they are considering what to do or we catch ourselves thinking about what to do, for example, and then we see people or find ourselves doing one thing or another. I don't think this entails that we know what it means for a person to decide. What is the person anyway? Is it the body? Does the whole body decide? What could it mean for a body to decide? Do all the body parts participate? Is the person something apart from the body? If so, what?

There is a suggestive polarity between the notions of 'ordinary language' and 'folk psychology', with the first implying that all our understandings must be grounded in what we already (believe we?) know, and the second implying that folk psychology (ordinary language) may be merely pseudo or quasi-understandings based on 'intuitive' acts of linguistic reification. on bad theories that is, that serve practical purposes of coping with 'ordinary' events in common with others. The question this polarity raises for me is whether we can learn to use ordinary terms in novel and illuminating ways based on greater understanding of neural processes, an understanding which is admittedly probably still in its infancy. (I write "probably" because I do not think I am in a position to have a firm opinion about the status or scope of current neuroscientific knowledge).

Hi John,

You don't need much acquaintance with the current state of neuroscience in order to follow this debate. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience provides a useful survey of the evolution of the field (with significant contributions by Max Bennett), but the meat of Hacker's arguments (because it's mainly Peter Hacker who argues the philosophy) are found in the detailed elucidations of various psychological concepts. Did you read the selections from Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience provided in pp.3-48 of Neuroscience and Philosophy? Maybe those excerpts are too short to display the full power of Hacker's Wittgensteinian approach.

Hacker is, however, such a devoted and orthodox Wittgensteinian that he is liable to make tantrums when some philosopher (or scientist) deviates, by his lights, from Wittgensteinian orthodoxy and promulgates some doctrine that Hacker diagnoses (often rightfully) and denounces (with excessive fervor) as "nonsense". This explains the harsh tone of his attacks against Searle and Dennett (in the appendixes of PFoN), and the little interpretive charity that he accords them. Nevertheless, much of the substance of his criticism of them, and of a majority of practitioners of modern cognitive sciences, seems to be on target (or so I would be prepared to argue on his behalf).

What it is useful to be acquainted with in order to fully appreciate Hacker's criticisms, I think, besides the philosophy of the late Wittgenstein (roughly from The Blue and Brown Books up to The Philosophical Investigations), and Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind, is the variety of relatively new paradigms in cognitive sciences (and robotics) that are variously labeled externalist, embodied, situated, dynamical, anti-representationalist, etc. J.J. Gibson's Ecological Approach to Visual Perception also belongs to this movement. Many books on the topic of embodies cognition have appeared in recent years, but none of them, to my knowledge, surpasses the deep and insightful survey and commentary by Robert A. Wilson's Boundaries of the Mind published in 2004. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are much more than forerunners to those approaches. Cognitive science has not caught up with them, in my view. But the representationalist and internalist paradigms still dominate the scientific fields (where 'Cartesian materialism' reigns), and much of the recent analytic philosophy of mind (with several notable exceptions including, of course, John Haugeland).

Interestingly enough, Dennett was Ryle's student at Oxford, while Ryle's The Concept of Mind was very much indebted to Wittgenstein (and Wittgenstein himself who, like Hacker, was prone to making tantrums, was quite angry at Ryle for 'stealing' his ideas). This indirect influence is manifest in some of Dennett's early philosophical papers about the intentional stance and the personal/sub-personal distinction. Some of those are ideas that Hacker could have stressed as areas of agreement. In later years Dennett has moved away from Wittgenstein, and, strangely, lost touch with some of his own best early philosophical insights. Jennifer Horsby chides him for one such retreat in her paper Personal and Sub-Personal: A Defence of Dennet's Early Distinction.

I just wanted to provide some context to the debate. I'll respond to specific points that you raises separately. The paper by Hornsby that I linked to is a much easier read that her paper on the Identity Theory of Truth. It is interesting because it could be used to harnesses Dennett's own arguments in allying him with Hacker against Dennett and Searle!