Concepts, Attention, and the Contents of Conscious Visual Experience
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CONCEPTS, ATTENTION, AND THE CONTENTS OF CONSCIOUS VISUAL EXPERIENCE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MANOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN PHILOSOPHY MAY 2018 By Amit Chaturvedi Dissertation Committee: Arindam Chakrabarti, Chairperson Roger T. Ames Masato Ishida Jonardon Ganeri Scott Sinnett ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation has been made possible first and foremost through the dedicated and patient support of my teachers, dissertation committee members, and faculty at UH-Mānoa. I am grateful to Scott Sinnett, Masato Ishida, and George Tsai for their involvement in my committee and dissertation defense. Ron Bontekoe has been a steadfast advocate on behalf of myself and many other graduate students during his time as graduate and department chairs. My Sanskrit teachers have contributed greatly to this dissertation by enabling me to discover new insights from classical texts. Rama Nath Sharma instilled in me what will be a lifetime love for Sanskrit language. His guidance prepared me to undertake a summer course of intensive Sanskrit study through the American Institute of Indian Studies, for which I received financial support from the Watumull Foundation. My teachers at the AIIS program, Madhura Godbole and Meenal Kulkarni, in turn prepared me for more extensive study at Jagadguru Ramamandacharya Rajasthan Sanskrit University and Karnataka Sanskrit University, with the support of the Freeman Foundation and the Jagdish P. Sharma Memorial Scholarship. I am immensely grateful to Prof. Veeranarayana Pandurangi of Karnataka Sanskrit University and Prof. D. Prahladachar of Poornaprajna Samshodhana Mandiram for patiently teaching me several texts related to my dissertation research. I owe special debts of gratitude to three of my teachers, each of whom has given me a model of exemplary scholarship and humanity to strive toward. Roger Ames has unfailingly supported my career from the very earliest stages, and opened my mind to new ways of doing Chinese and comparative philosophy. It has been a great privilege to receive Jonardon Ganeri’s ii generous feedback on my dissertation – his work best embodies the sort of cross-cultural philosophy that this dissertation attempts to practice. Most of all, I am indebted to Arindam Chakrabarti, to whom I have owed, directly or indirectly, most every philosophical insight contained in this dissertation. The central ideas of this work originate from an idea for a term paper he gave me a decade ago, which sparked a slow-burning fire in my mind that he has stoked continuously ever since. His unmatched combination of philosophical creativity and clarity will never cease to inspire me. To him, I dedicate the following artless gurustuti: य एव ससिंहनदं ममिहहिनमययिन यि ह सवशहसदयशनह यदह वहचयव्वरनं ॥ यतदजममयब#ददश &#त(जह&#यल+जकह ह मिमंय.पयवदहस1 मिनमयिसमैिधन ॥ यद मद य5त्म नदष9वह ययह ध;मय नशंहन। ह वैन=>यमयप यंरंिय#नहं। ज#?नaयम सवनह ॥ Finally, I am deeply grateful to my parents and family for their patient support all these years; and to Nada for being an inexhaustible source of joy, and for reminding me of what is most important. iii ABSTRACT The basic question motivating my dissertation is whether it is possible to consciously perceive objects in the world without possessing any concepts for those objects. Standard phenomenological and epistemological approaches to the issue of non-conceptual perceptual content have presumed that concept-possession entails mastery of a concept's linguistic and inferential usage. I depart from these approaches by developing a naturalized account of perceptual concepts, one which is further informed by theories of perception in the Nyāya tradition of Indian philosophy. Perceptual concepts on a revised conceptualist account can be understood as attention- and memory-based capacities for predicating sensory features to objects. With this account in place, I draw upon recent scientific models of visual processing to argue that essentially non-conceptual, pre-predicative perceptual contents do not phenomenally appear in conscious visual experience. To make plausible the idea that perceptual contents can be both conceptual and non- linguistic in nature, I demonstrate in Chapters 1 and 2 how perceptual contents can have a compositional, predicative structure in the absence of linguistic formatting. Similarly, I advance several criteria for perceptual concept possession in the absence of explicit linguistic or inferential mastery. I further support my revised account of perceptual concepts by drawing upon insights from Buddhist and Nyāya philosophers, developed in their centuries-long debates over the relation between perception, concepts, and language. In Chapter 3, I then offer a reconstructive reading of Immanuel Kant and the Navya Nyāya philosopher Gȧgesa, which extracts from their theories of perceptual concepts and iv apperception a thesis to the effect that intentional, object-directed perceptual representations must be conceptually structured in order to have a subjective phenomenal character. Kant and Gȧgesa broadly agree on a set of reasons why we lack any phenomenological evidence for the existence of perceptual states with exclusively non-conceptual content. I take these reasons to be pointing toward several conditions responsible for the integration of perceptual contents into a subject's unified conscious experience. The fourth chapter reframes my reading of Kant and Gȧgesa in naturalized terms, by demonstrating how phenomenally accessible perceptual contents arise through the conceptually modulated activity of attention and visual memory. I show how a unified theory of perceptual attention and conceptualization undercuts the phenomenological intuitions underlying both classical Buddhist and contemporary defenses of non-conceptualism, and further resolves several dilemmas facing recent theories of consciousness. Lastly, the fifth chapter shifts to a discussion of classical Chinese epistemology and psychological studies of perceptual expertise, in order to further characterize perceptual concepts as capacities for allocating attention which we can actively and skillfully exercise in experience. Ultimately, a theory of perceptual concepts as attentional skills allows us to understand perceptual experience itself as an activity which is both skillfully absorbed and permeated with rationality. v Table of Contents Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………...ii Abstract…………………………………….……………...……………...………………………iv Chapter 1: Perceptual Content as Non-Linguistic but Conceptual……………...…….…………..1 1.1 Setting the Bar for Perceptual Concept Possession……………...………………...….3 1.1.1 Restrictive Views of Concept-Possession: Peacocke and McDowell……….4 1.1.2 Noë’s “Vacuous” Conceptualism……………………………………………8 1.2 Non-Conceptual Contents: Scenarios and Protopropositions…….……..….……..…14 1.2.1 The Incoherence of State Non-Conceptualism.……..…..……..…..…….....17 1.2.2 Protopropositional Content is Non-Essentially Non-Conceptual…..…..…..20 1.3 The Propositional Structure of Perceptual Content……..………………….…….…..24 1.4 Perceptual Concept Possession.…….…….…….…….…….…….…….…….……...29 1.5 Conclusion.…….…….…….…….…….…….…….…….…….…….…….…….…..34 Chapter 2: Language and Concept-Laden Perception in Classical Indian Philosophy…..……...36 2.1 Language and Conceptualization in Indian Buddhist Philosophy…….…….……….39 2.1.1 Dignāga – Perception is Essentially Non-Conceptual, and Concepts are Essentially Linguistic….……….……….……….……….……….……….……..41 2.1.2 Vasubandhu – Non-Linguistic Conceptualization is Inherent to Perceptual Awareness………………………………………………………………………...43 2.1.3 Dhamakīrti – Non-Linguistic Creatures Have Implicitly Linguistic Concepts………………………………………………………………………….49 2.2 Classical Nyāya Views on the Non-Linguistic Nature of Perception………………..54 2.2.1 Vātsyāyana – All Perception is Non-Linguistic (Avyapadeśya)……………54 2.2.2 Jayanta Bhaṭṭa – Non-Conceptual and Concept-Laden Perceptions Share the Same Contents……………………………………………………………………59 2.2.3 Vācaspati Misra – Non-Conceptual Perceptions Are Non-Propositional….67 2.2.4 Concept-Laden Perception Can Be Propositional and Non-Linguistic…….71 2.3 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………73 Chapter 3: Concepts and Conscious Perceptual Content: A Revised Nyāya/Kantian Approach...76 3.1 Introduction – Phenomenal Character and Non-Conceptual Perception…………….76 3.2 Navya Nyāya on the Contents of Non-Conceptual and Concept-Laden Perception...81 3.2.1 Pre-Gȧgesa Views on the Purported Phenomenology of Non-Conceptual Perception………………………………………………………………………...88 3.2.2 Gȧgesa on the Attentional Inaccessibility of Essentially Non-Conceptual Perception………………………………………………………………………...92 3.2.3 Nirvikalpaka Pratyakṣa as Subpersonal Perception………………………101 3.2.4 Chadha's Kantian Reading of Navya Nyāya on Perception and Concepts 105 3.3 Kant on Concepts and Conscious Perceptual Experience…………………………..116 vi 3.3.1 Conscious Subjective Character and the Unity of Apperception…………122 3.3.2 Objections From Kantian Non-Conceptualism………………………...…131 3.3.3 Responding to the Kantian Version of Essentialist Content Non- Conceptualism……………….……….……….……….……….……….………137 3.4 Conclusion: Apperception, Attentional Access, and Consciousness…………….….151 Chapter 4: Undercutting Buddhist Non-Conceptualism…….………….………….…………...155 4.1 The Buddhists’ Essentialist Non-Conceptualism…….………….………….………158 4.2 The Phenomenological Intuitions of Buddhist Non-Conceptualism…….…………166 4.3 Concepts, Attention, and Conscious Visual