Conceptualism and Perceptual Knowledge

Abstract

Brief accounts of the motivation and form of some pre-Kantian conceptualist theories and of Kant’s transcendental idealism lead into discussion of the source of the conceptualist assumptions of much twentieth-century analytic philosophy. The arguments of a currently leading exponent, John McDowell, are critically examined, and his emphatic endorsement of two main conclusions of Chapter II are noted—that perception is direct cognitive contact with the world, and that perceptual knowledge is perspicuously so to the subject. But according to the phenomenological analysis in Chapter II these features are intrinsic to the content of preconceptual perceptual awareness, whereas McDowell sees concepts, coming only with language, as a necessary means to the former, and assigns the latter, in effect, to reason and the capacity for second-order reflection. Epistemological and logico–linguistic considerations relating to the identity, individuation and classification of material things present a further, arguably decisive challenge to conceptualist theory.