Abstract

Consider two of the central debates in the contemporary philosophy of mind: the debate between representationalism and anti-representationalism about phenomenal character, and the debate between conceptualism and nonconceptualism about the content of experience. The former, the qualia debate, centers on whether the phenomenal character of conscious experience is exhausted by its representational content. The latter is about whether conceptual capacities are constitutive of the representational content of perceptual experience such that the only kind of content that perceptual experience possesses is conceptual content. Most philosophers consider these two debates as unrelated, or at least should be treated separately. In this paper, I argue that there is an obvious and important sense in which the two issues are related. More specifically, if one accepts conceptualism, it would impose a significant constraint on what position one is allowed to take in the qualia debate. First, I suggest that once it is made clear that conceptualism can be considered as a particular version of representationalism, the conceptualist would have to take a certain stance on whether there are nonintentional qualia. The reason why the conceptualist needs to worry about the qualia issue is that if in addition to intentional content perceptual experiences also contain nonintentional qualia as constituents, then perceptual experiences cannot be fully conceptual. Second, I argue that although in McDowellian conceptualism the content of perceptual experience is construed in terms of Fregean sense rather than internal mental representation, it still faces challenges from the Inverted Earth argument against representationalism. My goal is not to show that conceptualism fails, but to show that it is a serious issue that the defenders of conceptualism have to take into consideration.