CONSCIOUSNESS

1. Philosophy 85
its properties, any more than a mental process can be the same thing as a physical process,
only without the physical stuff. The reductive representationalist is guilty of advancing an
absurd Paraphenomenal Hypothesis. C1
90 When are the Contents of Experience Mulitmodal? Susanna Siegel
(Philosophy, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA)
Suppose you carefully unzip a pouch, watching your hand as it pulls open the zipper. Since
you can both see and feel the unzipping, it is natural to think of your experience as jointly
visual and kinesthetic. But what about its contents? In what sense, if any, does your experience
have distinctly visual and distinctly kinesthetic contents? I discuss a new argument that some
contents are irreducibly multimodal. C16
91 Conceptualism and the Richness of Perceptual Content John Spackman
(Philosophy Department, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT)
This paper presents an argument for conceptualism about conscious human perceptual
experience, the view that the conscious contents of human perception are similar in kind to
belief contents in being constituted by concepts. There has recently been what might be seen
as a second wave of arguments for nonconceptualism, arguments for what has sometimes
been called content nonconceptualism as opposed to state nonconceptualism. State nonconceptualism
is the view that it is not necessary, in order for a subject to have a given perceptual
experience, that she possess the concepts used in a canonical account of it. Content nonconceptualism,
on the other hand, holds that perceptual content is nonconceptual just in case it is
different in kind from belief contents, in that it is not constituted by concepts. Proponents of
content nonconceptualism such as Michael Tye and Richard Heck have suggested, rightly I
think, that even if state nonconceptualism is true, this does not establish content nonconceptualsm,
and they have thus offered stronger arguments to show that in fact perceptual contents
are not constituted by concepts. I argue, however, that the conscious perceptual content of
adult humans, at any rate, is constituted by concepts in the sense that its nature is determined
by them. My argument has the following form: 1. It is a necessary condition of an item being
a constituent in the conscious content of a given perceptual experience that the subject recognize
it as a token of some type. 2. If a subject recognizes an item of perceptual experience as
a token of some type, and perhaps satisfies certain other general conditions on concept possession,
she satisfies the minimal conditions on possessing a concept of that type. 3. The kind
of content which any conscious perceptual state has is determined by concepts possessed by
the subject. 4. Content conceptualism is true of conscious perceptual content. My support for
the first premise derives from considerations of the richness of perceptual experience, and in
particular of studies of change blindness and inattentional blindness. I argue for a middle path
in the interpretation of such studies, between those such as Alva Noe and Kevin O’Regan who
view them as showing that visual experience is much less rich than we suppose, and those like
Michael Tye, who take them to show only that subjects’ memory of the detailed content of
their experience is of limited duration. What the studies show, I suggest, is that it is a necessary
condition of an item belonging to conscious perceptual content that the subject recognize
it as a token of some type, however general. Finally, I maintain that what this conception of
perceptual content supports is not just state conceptualism but content conceptualism. On this
view, concepts are not merely correlated with conscious perceptual content. Concepts determine
the nature of that content, for it is part of the nature of the constituents of such content
that subjects’ recognize them as tokens of some type, and this is precisely to possess concepts
of them. C1
92 What Role for the Brain in Vehicle-Externalist Theories of Perceptual
Experience? Pierre Steiner (Compiegne University of Technology,
Compiegne, France)
Up to now, a crucial flaw of recent vehicle-externalist or enactive theories of (qualitative)
perceptual experience (Noe 2004, 2009; Hurley, 1998; O’Regan and Noe, 2001) is their
inability to provide a clear account of what the brain is specifically doing when perceptual