Perception, Content and Conceptual Engagement: Is there any non-conceptual content?

This thesis aims to compensate for the defects in the forms of conceptualism which John
McDowell (1994a) and Bill Brewer (1999) hold: it does this by analysing the conceptual
structure of the content of experience using colour experience as the central case.
First, the root of the debate between conceptualism and non-conceptualism, as I shall
argue, is the different notions of concept and experience used by the two sides. The nonconceptualists’
notion of a concept, or conceptual capacity, has been defined very
narrowly, satisfying very restricted conditions, whereas their notion of experience is
much wider and more flexible, ranging from a subpersonal state to a personal level. By
contrast, conceptualists are quite open to broad notions of a concept, or conceptual
capacity, but seem to define the content of experience as belonging only to the personal
level.
Second, in order to build a bridge between these two different notions of both concept
and experience respectively, I will argue that three major types of conceptual capacities
can operate in experience. I call this ‘conceptual engagement’. I then suggest that we
need to consider two perspectives on colour experience: namely, the functional and the
expository. The former concerns ‘how experience physically works’, whereas the latter
concerns “what experience has.” Both perspectives will prove useful for explaining
perceptual content at the sub-personal and personal level. This distinction is required
because what we call the ‘content’ of experience does not belong to just one particular
stage of experience.
Last, as a final supplementation of previous conceptualism, I will consider the
discrimination abilities involved in perception as being themselves a type of conceptual
capacity. At this point, I will adopt the notion of receptivity as used by McDowell
(1994a), but deny that a conceptualist is committed to spontaneity being involved in
receptivity. I will further propose that understanding discriminative abilities as
perceptual receptivity could prepare the ground for taking over perceptual contents into
the contents of thought. I will argue that perception could be passive and conceptual,
hence separate from spontaneity.