b try John Searle's Social Ontology

Lacan is best read through secondary sources unless you are taking a course. I like Bruce Fink's interpretation, Fink is very clear.

Awesome. Thank you.

Been reading the SEP article on mental representation and started pondering on the section about conceptual vs non-conceptual. The main difference is that conceptual representation is not supposedly accompanied by qualia. Non-conceptual representation is exactly what it sounds like: sensation lacking concept.

Is it possible to eliminate the conceptual element altogether? The SEP article gives an example of a (possibly) hybrid MR (mental representation): seeing that something is blue. How would we eliminate the conceptual part of that? — Mongrel

I have the impression this remains a hotly contested region of philosophical discourse in the schools.

I'm inclined to say that perceptual experience like ours involves both sensory and conceptual activity or "content". I presume there are "layers" of nonconscious sensory processing that can be construed as involving sensory "representation" without any contribution from conceptual capacities. But on my view such representations are always already conceptualized by the time they manifest in conscious perceptual experience.

Presumably the question of non-conceptualism starts with the semantic intuition that we each have only a finite number of linguistic categories at our disposal that we must somehow apply to a potentially infinite number of experiences without any public guidance beyond what we have learned crudely through a small number of supervised presentations.

For example, while in a forest a person might experience thousands of shades of green but only have words to communicate a very small number of shades, hues and textures. Yet at the same time, the person might also demonstrate a far richer non-verbal capacity to discriminate hundreds or even thousands of shades of green.

So with respect to any given class of stimulus that has a clear public definition, "non-conceptualism" is presumably the relative extent to which a person's reactive behaviour can discriminate instances of that class of stimulus, compared against their ability to verbally discriminate that class of stimulus.

my understanding of "non-conceptualism" begins and ends with the behaviour I observe of other people. I don't think that it is directly meaningful to apply this term to first-person experience per-se. However, i would guess that Wittgenstein's "picture theory" of language vs "meaning as use" are analogous concepts that are therapeutically applicable to first-person experience .

You can have everything above the brain stem removed, and no one (including yourself) would even notice. The only difference is that you'd loss all inhibition, become super exploratory, and couldn't learn anything new. — Wosret

This is almost certainly untrue.

Thought is made of hope and fear. It directs you towards desirable possibilities that are not ready at hand, and away from possible dangers that are not ready at hand. — Wosret

Are you suggesting that human cognition is restricted to these functions exclusively?