The CogPhil Reading Group meets to dicsuss, at a post-graduate level and above, recent papers in the areas of the Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Mind and Artificial Intelligence.

SPRING 2005: Non-conceptual content

The Spring Term meetings will be in Pevensey 1 2A1, on Mondays, from 5-6:30.

In the first two sessions Ron Chrisley will give an introduction to non-conceptual content (NCC): what is, why care about it, arguments for and against it, etc. Thereafter, at each meeting we will discuss a particular, recent (last 5 years or so) paper on NCC (the latter meetings may be only an hour long, if going on until 6:30 turns out to be too onerous).

All are welcome; please forward this on to any member of the University whom you think might be interested.

Briefly, people interested in NCC are interested in states or experiences which register the world some way, but do not do so in terms of systematic, objective, re-identifiable objects and properties. It is thought that the notion of NCC might help in trying to understand aspects of perception, cognition, emotion and language that are difficult to capture by traditional means. NCC may be especially crucial for explaining the mental lives of animals and infants. Schedule:

• Week 1: No meeting
• Week 2: Introduction to NCC
  • "Nonconceptual mental content", by Jose Luis Bermudez, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-nonconceptual).
  • Discussion will also be based on an unpublished (and unfinished!) introduction to NCC written by Ron.
• Week 3: Activity-based notions of NCC
  • Adrian Cussins, "Content, Conceptual Content, and Nonconceptual Content". This can be found as Chapter 6 of York Gunther's "Essays on Nonconceptual Content", but in fact comprises section 4 of "The Connectionist Construction of Concepts" (http://www.haecceia.com/FILES/c3_kings_london.htm) and (all?) of "Experience, Thought and Activity" (http://www.haecceia.com/FILES/york.htm).
• Week 4: McDowell's argument against non-conceptual content
  • John McDowell, pp 46-65 of "Mind and World" (reprinted as Chapter 3 in Gunther).
  • Christopher Peacocke, "Nonconceptual Content Defended", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1998.
  • Sean Kelly, "The Nonconceptual Content of Perceptual Experience: Situation Dependence and Fineness of Grain", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2001, reprinted as chapter 9 of Gunther.
• Week 5: The Autonomy Thesis
  • Peacocke (1992). "Scenarios, Concepts and Perception", From Crane, T. (ed) The Contents of Experience. Reprinted as chapter 5 in Gunther, and largely the same as chapter 3 of Peacocke's A Study of Concepts.
  • Bermudez: Chapter 15 in Gunther
  • Peacocke: Chapter 16 in Gunther
• Week 6: Perspectival self-consciousness
  • Hurley, S. (1998) "Introduction: The Reappearing Self" from Consciousness in Action. http://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field/hurleysymp_intro.htm; (Especially the part on "perspectival self-consciousness")
  • Noë, A. (2002) "Is perspectival self-consciousness non-conceptual?" Philosophical Quarterly 52. http://people.ucsc.edu/~anoe/perspectival.pdf
  • Hurley, S. (2000) "The Space of Reasons vs. the Space of Inference: Reply to Noë" http://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field/hurleysymp_replytonoe.htm
• Week 7: Motor control vs. action-selecting notions of NCC
  • Clark, A. (2001) "Visual Experience and Motor Action: Are The Bonds Too Tight?". Philosophical Review 110:4, October 2001. http://www.cogs.indiana.edu/andy/eafinal.pdf.
  • Clark, A. and Toribio, J. (2001) "Sensorimotor Chauvinism?" Commentary on J.K O'Regan and A Noe, "A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24:5: 2001 http://www.cogs.indiana.edu/andy/noecomm.pdf.
• Week 8: Kant and NCC
  • Background: McDowell, J. (1994) Mind and World. If you can't read the entire book, you can revisit the reading from Week 4, and/or look at McDowell, J., "A Precis of Mind and World", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LVIII, No. 2, June, 1998, pp. 365-68.
  • Hanna, Robert (in preparation) "Kant and Non-conceptual content". To be distributed.
  • Allais, Lucy (in preparation) An as-yet untitled manuscript. To be distributed.
• Week 9: Does NCC go far enough?
  • Bermudez, J. L. (2003) "Minimalist Approaches to Nonlinguistic Thought", from Thinking Without Words, OUP.

Ron's NCC bibliography (http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/ronc/ncc-bibliography.html) is very out of date, but Ron would like to revise it to make it current. Please email him any omissions you might come across.