The idea of nonconceptual contents proposes that there are mental contents at the level of the experiencing person that are individuated independently of ‘anything to do with the mind.’ Such contents are posited to meet a variety of theoretical and explanatory needs concerning concepts and conceptual mental contents which are individuated in terms having to do with the mind. So to examine the idea of nonconceptual content we need to examine whether we really need to posit such content and whether (...) there is a coherent, viable way of doing so. I will examine the idea of nonconceptual contents by considering Christopher Peacocke's attempt, in his Study of Concepts, to posit such contents.Three principal kinds of considerations motivate positing non-conceptual content: epistemological, phenomenological, and explanatory-psychological. A theory of knowledge might posit nonconceptual content in order to show that our experience contains the justificatory base for empirical thought as its own proper part. Non-conceptual content might also be posited in order to account for the finely detailed or determinate phenomenological character of perceptual experience. (shrink)

Aesthetic properties figure prominently in our daily lives, our conversations and many actions we take. Yet theoretical disagreement prevails over their nature, their variety, their epistemic and metaphysical status. This overview highlights the heterogeneity of aesthetic properties and examines repercussions for explanation. Aesthetic properties belong to natural objects or scenes, to artworks in any medium, to artefacts and built environments across historical eras; and they draw a wide variety of responses such as our perceptions, emotions or imaginative thought. Historicism about (...) artworks carries over to at least some aesthetic properties that depend on facts of their broader historical context just as works do. One issue is whether aesthetic properties can be demarcated solely in terms of non-aesthetic properties. If not, explanations of aesthetic properties need to draw on other aesthetic notions such as aesthetic experience, attention, judgement or value. The paper examines several accounts of aesthetic value to show how they extend to aesthetic properties. The paper concludes with an overview of the current metaphysical debate between realists and non-realists about aesthetic properties. (shrink)

If artworks and their aesthetic properties stand in constitutive relationships to historical context and circumstances, so that some understanding of relevant facts is involved in responding to a work, what becomes of the intuitive view that we see artworks and at least some of their aesthetic properties? This question is raised by arguments in both aesthetics and art history for the historical nature of works of art. The paper argues that the answer needs to take philosophy of perception into account. (...) The principal development that has shaped philosophy of perception in the last thirty years—explaining perceptual experience in terms of contents that represent that such-and-such is the case—is directly relevant to key arguments for the historical nature of art because contents can represent complex kinds and properties. Conceptual realism is especially well-suited for explaining perception of artworks and aesthetic properties because it emphasizes that forms of understanding—in the sense of capacities, abilities and techniques—are involved in perceptual engagement with individual objects and instances of properties. To make this case, the paper examines influential arguments for the historical nature of art and aesthetic properties by Arthur C. Danto and Kendall L. Walton; and examines art-historical discussions by Michael Baxandall, Linda Nochlin and T. J. Clark. The paper argues that the aesthetic properties of an artwork depend on human intentional uses of properties, colours and contours among them, and such uses may themselves be aesthetic. The Wittgensteinian notion of use is contextual and historical, and uses are perceptible. (shrink)

This paper argues that perception is a mode of engagement with individuals and their determinate properties. Perceptual content involves determinate properties in a way that relies on our conceptual capacities no less than on the properties. The “richness” of perceptual experience is explained as a distinctive individual and property involving content. This position is developed in three steps: (i) novel phenomenological description of lived experience; (ii) detailed reconstruction of Gareth Evans’ proposal that we are capable of genuinely singular thought that (...) involves individuals under modes of presentation; (iii) re-consideration of the re-identification condition on conceptual contents. (shrink)

This paper explores a new understanding of mind or mental representation by arguing that contents at the personal level are not carried by vehicles. Contentful mental states at the personal level are distinctive by virtue of their vehicle-less nature: the subpersonal physiological or functional states that are associated with and enable personal level contents cannot be understood as their vehicles, neither can the sensations or the sensory conditions associated with perceptual contents. This result is obtained by first extending the interpretationist (...) ideas of Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett to show that subpersonal physiological or functional states cannot be construed as the vehicles of personal level contents. Then the anti-foundationalist arguments of Wilfrid Sellars are extended to show that sensory states cannot stand as vehicles to perceptual contents. The line of argumentation extended from Sellars also provides a critique of the current trend to posit non-conceptual contents. (shrink)

Beauty and the End of Art shows how a resurgence of interest in beauty and a sense of ending in Western art are challenging us to rethink art, beauty and their relationship. By arguing that Wittgenstein's later work and contemporary theory of perception offer just what we need for a unified approach to art and beauty, Sonia Sedivy provides new answers to these contemporary challenges. These new accounts also provide support for the Wittgensteinian realism and theory of perception that make (...) them possible. -/- Wittgenstein's subtle form of realism explains artworks in terms of norm governed practices that have their own varied constitutive norms and values. Wittgensteinian realism also suggests that diverse beauties become available and compelling in different cultural eras and bring a shared 'higher-order' value into view. With this framework in place, Sedivy argues that perception is a form of engagement with the world that draws on our conceptual capacities. This approach explains how perceptual experience and the perceptible presence of the world are of value, helping to account for the diversity of beauties that are available in different historical contexts and why the many faces of beauty allow us to experience the value of the world's perceptible presence. -/- Carefully examining contemporary debates about art, aesthetics and perception, Beauty and the End of Art presents an original approach. Insights from such diverse thinkers as Immanuel Kant, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Arthur Danto, Alexander Nehamas, Elaine Scarry and Dave Hickey are woven together to reveal how they make good sense if we bring contemporary theory of perception and Wittgensteinian realism into the conversation. (shrink)

This article argues that conceptual realism offers an important alternative to naïve realist, purely relational approaches with which ‘disjunctivism’ has come to be readily associated. I argue that John McDowell’s account of perception as both contentful and relational tends to go unnoted when the options for disjunctive theories are laid out. But McDowell’s approach is important because it comes up the middle between ‘intentional’ and ‘relational’ views of perception. In doing so, it offers theoretical resources for explaining perceptual experience and (...) its epistemic standing that purely relational views associated with naïve realism do not have. McDowell’s work opens a unified approach to perception and its epistemic potential that turns on the claim that it is contents and the broader context of capacities in which such contents figure that secure the perceiver’s relation to what she sees. I call views of this kind conceptual realism, though commonsense realism might be more apt. Following comparison of the explanations that conceptual and naïve realism can provide of various difficult scenarios, the paper concludes with an example of how conceptual realist theories might disagree or diverge from the detail of McDowell’s approach. My criticism draws on aesthetics to discuss experience of aesthetic properties. (shrink)

This paper aims to show how some of Wittgenstein's considerations in the Philosophical Investigations speak to the neo-empiricist tendency to give sensation a purely causal, non-epistemic role. As the foil for Wittgenstein's criticisms, I outline the way Wilfred Sellars rehabilitates sensory impressions from his own diagnosis of the Myth of the Given by construing them as purely causal episodes. Sellars' work shows how it is possible to have a keen appreciation of the incoherence of the empiricist model yet to believe (...) that we ought to maintain that model by modifying our account of the role that sensations play in perception. Sellars and Wittgenstein have the same understanding of what a non-epistemic conception of sensations must involve. Wittgenstein articulates the way this conception manifests itself in ordinary thinking while Sellars gives it a sophisticated theoretical elaboration designed to retain what is key for sensory episodes while avoiding traditional problems of givenness. The instructive difference between Sellars and Wittgenstein is that while Sellars believes we can develop a coherent non-epistemic conception, Wittgenstein’s work suggests that we cannot. (shrink)

This article offers a detailed textual reexamination of the ‘family resemblance’ passages to reconsider their implications for understanding art. The reassessment takes into account their broader context in the Philosophical Investigations, including the rule following considerations, and draws on a realist interpretive framework associated principally with the work of Cavell, Diamond, McDowell, and Putnam. Wittgensteinian “realism with a human face” helps us discern that the primary issue is not whether certain concepts are definable, posing a stark opposition between essentialism and (...) its denial about kinds such as language or games. What is at issue is keeping uses of language in view in their variety and their broader life contexts. Focus on rules suggests more broadly that norms and values inhere in practices and play a constitutive role in determining the entities integral to those practices. From this perspective, a Wittgensteinian framework explains art as locally overlapping practices, each with their own constitutive norms and values for the works integral to them. What makes something art has normative force specific to a practice. This recognizes the historically contingent nature of art practices in a way that relational definitions or disjunctive ‘cluster’ explanations do not. (shrink)

In this article I argue that there are metaphoric pictures and that pictures have propositional content; but, I also argue, it does not follow that metaphoric pictures are to be explained in terms of metaphoric content. I develop a "comparison" or "predication" approach that stresses that metaphoric pictures depend on their use in contexts that invoke relevant background knowledge. Our competence with metaphoric pictures is a nonsystematic, nonspecifiable competence because it consists in our ability to harness any variety of relevant (...) background knowledge on the basis of contextual factors. It follows that insofar as our competence is not systematic, it is not possible to have a theory of metaphoric pictures, in the sense of a systematic specification of the types of factors or principles that allow one to grasp that a picture is metaphoric and what the metaphor is. (shrink)

Robert Hopkins’s Picture, Image and Experience aims to provide an account of pictorial representation that vindicates the intuitions of the many, namely that pictorial representation is a deeply visual phenomenon, that an explanation of pictorial representation needs to be based on an explanation of our experience of pictures, and that there must be some sense in the idea that pictures resemble their objects. Hopkins proposes that we can show what is correct in these intuitions by explaining pictures as representations that (...) depend on a distinctive sort of perceptual experience: experienced resemblance in outline shape between a picture and its object. Experienced resemblance in outline shape is the experience of sameness of the solid angle subtended by the contours on the pictorial surface and the solid angle subtended by the actual depicted objects. Pictures don’t resemble their objects but they are experienced as such and it is sameness of outline shape or sameness of subtended solid angles that secures this experience. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between beauty and aesthetic properties to argue that aesthetic properties are connected to a work’s content, to what a work conveys or expresses. I turn to Kant’s Critique of Judgement to make the case. My argument highlights two parts of Kant’s approach. Kant argues that pure aesthetic judgements of beauty are grounded in a harmonious yet free play of the imagination and understanding. Such free play is pleasurable and intimates that the power or capacity of (...) imagination is suitable for and can be brought within the conditions of the capacity for conceptual understanding. Within this broader frame, Kant’s account of artistic beauty specifies the relationship of aesthetic properties to the beauty of a work: aesthetic attributes help convey the aesthetic ideas that beautiful works express. I examine how Kant’s view helps us appreciate that aesthetic properties of artworks are integral to conveying the content of a work, and that the pleasure we feel has the potential to make us aware of the experience, its nature and value. (shrink)

John Carvalho’s Thinking with Images, an Enactivist Aesthetics argues that puzzling artworks can draw us into a special activity – thinking when we don’t know what to think – which is valuable because it takes us beyond our skills and understanding. Enactivism is the theory of mind that best explains such thinking. The book illustrates this proposal with four chapters that detail Carvalho’s highly personal or individual encounters with enigmatic works of art. I raise two concerns. First, the four illustrative (...) chapters say that they are enactivist, but they do not show this. The illustrative chapters detail considerations about the works that are not distinguished by a particular theory of mind and might fit with any number of approaches to works of art. The suggestion that the thinking presented in each chapter is skillful is not explained. Second, the book does not just focus on thinking when we don’t know what to think, it also claims that such thinking frees us from mere looking. But enactivism does not require us to deny that our engagement with particular works in their ‘concrete singularity,’ to use Carvalho’s term, is perceptual. If perception is richly integrated or even continuous with what we understand skillfully or cognitively – and enacted in one’s circumstances – this does not erase differences between perception and thought or between their functions. When we ‘think with’ an individual so that we are engaged with it in its concrete singularity, perception is involved either in the present or the past. There is no need to shunt perception or looking aside as life activities that are just rule-bound, just part of knowing what to think rather than part of our response when we don’t know what to think. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical reconstruction of Thomas Nagel’s principal arguments in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics and political philosophy.

This chapter reconstructs the neo‐Wittgensteinian proposals, and re‐examines the “family resemblances” passages from the Philosophical Investigations. Arthur Danto chooses to explain the historically contextual nature of art in some of the same terms as Wittgenstein sketches for language. The neo‐Wittgenstein view is typically reconstructed as a conjunction of two claims about the concept of art: the concept is not definable and it needs to be understood along the lines of Wittgenstein's discussion of “family resemblances.” The concept of art evolves historically (...) with different uses and conditions of application in different historical contexts. Wittgenstein briefly invokes resemblances among family members to characterize such networks of overlapping similarities and immediately proceeds to apply the idea to numbers. Danto's considered view is that the diversity of art is a matter of the historicity of both meaning and embodiment. (shrink)

This paper proposes that pictures are functional objects which figure in norm‐governed practices of usage yet whose specific function is to present the world as it looks to acculturated perceivers. Pictorial content presents the way the world looks to a subject's acculturated perceptual grasp. Hence, pictorial content needs to be explained in terms of a theory of perceptual content, but a novel theory which departs from the two‐stage sensation‐based approach to perception and the polarization between naturalism and conventionalism that it (...) engenders. Following a diagnosis of this polarization, I invoke a novel theory of perception that explains perceptual content as conceptually articulated and determinate in character. I show that (1) pictures present content of the same distinctive determinate type as perceptual content; and that (2) pictures do so by invoking perceptual experience and perceptual processes that are of the same kind as those invoked by actual scenes. This perceptualist approach considers and explains the role of norms as well as of the nature of our visual processes, allowing us to allocate the insights of both conventionalism and naturalism to their proper theoretical roles. (shrink)

The Introduction provides an overview of Kendall Walton’s make-believe framework for a variety of representations and his arguments that such representations are dependent on their social or historical context. Walton argues that diverse representations involve our capacities for imagination and make-believe with props; they overlap with the fictional. Focusing on make-believe with props explains paradigmatic representational arts such as paintings and novels, theater and film. But this perspective reaches beyond the arts: it explains pictures and photographs in general not only (...) artistic ones; stories in general as well as literary and performing arts; music; metaphors, and even the claims we make about fictional entities and existence. The first section explains the main points of the make-believe framework in Mimesis as Make-Believe, and it reconstructs Walton’s argument in “Categories of Art” that some aesthetic properties depend on the perceptible and historical categories of art to which a work belongs. The second section outlines Walton’s specific proposals about literary fiction, fictional characters, poetry, pictures, photographs, music and negative existential claims. These explanations are integrated with summaries of the papers. The third section examines Walton’s implicit view of two much-discussed issues: the ontology of art and definitions of art. This discussion clears away some misunderstandings of Walton’s contextualism or historicism and relates Walton’s work to Arthur Danto’s and Frank Sibley’s. (shrink)

This is the first collection of essays focused on the many-faceted work of Kendall L. Walton. Walton has shaped debate about the arts for the last 50 years. He provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the arts in terms of the human capacity of make-believe that shows how different arts--visual, photographic, musical, literary, or poetic--can be explained in terms of complex structures of pretense, perception, imagining, empathy, and emotion. His ground-breaking work has been taken beyond aesthetics to address foundational issues (...) concerning linguistic and scientific representations--for example about the nature of scientific modelling or to explain how what we say is mostly quite different from the literal meanings of our words. Contributions from a diverse group of philosophers probe Walton's detailed proposals and the themes for research they open to provide an overview of important debates that have Walton's work at their core. This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working on aesthetics across the humanities, as well as those interested in the topic of representation and its intersection with perception, language, science, and metaphysics. (shrink)

The paper argues that Daniel Dennett’s reductive account of consciousness in Consciousness Explained goes against theoretical commitments driving much of his previous work. I focus on considerations for the plurality of distinctive explanation of ourselves, as they have been articulated in Dennett's earlier work, and argue that Dennett's reductive framework is not adequately supported in the face of these considerations. The paper details tensions in Dennett’s work and shows how Consciousness Explained departs from the diagnoses of the mind/body problem offered (...) by Ryle, Wittgenstein and Sellars with which Dennett casts it as continuous. (shrink)

This article argues that conceptual realism – the view that conceptual capacities secure the perceiver’s relation to what she sees – strengthens the appeal of a disjunctive approach to perception. The paper argues for a ‘fresh start’ that takes an explanatory approach to perception – asking for the best explanation of the perceptual capacities of mobile organisms – in place of the first person perspective of the argument from illusion. An explanatory perspective indicates that perception is a form of engagement. (...) The paper addresses two explanatory hurdles for disjunctive approaches. First, it argues that the relational nature of perceptual experience is indicated phenomenologically by the fact that one cannot retain the determinate character or content of a perceptual experience. Second, the paper sketches a realist approach to ‘what’ we perceive. (shrink)

This paper discusses Wittgenstein understood the language of the dimensions of the human form of life point of view, we oppose the idea and the text is the interpretation of the relationship between the nature of the argument. Move to reposition Wittgenstein language, means the direct meaning of the moment, rather than explain, and not because of our shortage of facts and work to a standstill. The main thrust of this significance and the fact that a direct interaction between the (...) current text of the practice of continuing involvement, the text was able to express the meaning of the moment between the facts and narrative unity. In other words, Wittgenstein on the rules, customs, or life in the form of reflection, allows us to claim the author intended meaning of the text depends on the point of view, and negative with the intention of the author of a variety of relativism between the interpretation of , the transfer can be prudent to try to speculate Huan room. For example, Stanley Xu fee claim, meaning diverse, according to the interests of our interests, goals and assumptions of the "default" of the "premise" and different. But Wittgenstein's writings, pointed out that the rules in order to grasp the meaning of such person does not involve the "premise" of the argument. Is a form of life on our training the next day, and thus to control of both the immediate and direct facts and meaning. This allows us to re-confirm, indeed, does not rely on the text to explain the fact that there is, in fact and thus understand the text for further explanation for the fact that between the true distinction. Meaning and truth of the "total structure" does not eliminate the practice of interpretation, but will be classified as appropriate Field, is the world we start to go beyond the immediate text directly taken to the open practice. • We will be reading Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park", for example, to influence our thinking about changing the form of text to read way to view this view. This paper argues that a Wittgensteinian understanding of language as an integral dimension of human forms of life speaks against the view that our relationship to texts is interpretive in nature. Wittgenstein's re-orientation to language entails that meaning is immediate rather than interpretive, and that our works don't stop short of the facts. The aim of this paper is to show that the immediate mutuality of meanings and facts carries over to our textual practices so that our texts make available immediate unities of meanings and narrative facts. That is, Wittgenstein's reflections on following rules, customs or forms of life allow us to steer a careful course between the view that a text is determined by the author's intentions and a relativism of variable interpretations that results from denying the relevance of authorial intentions. For example, Stanley Fish holds that meanings vary insofar as they are "predetermined 'by our" presuppositions "-our interests, goals and assumptions. But Wittgenstein's work suggests that following rules, and hence grasping meanings, does not involve something as variable as individual" presuppositions. "Rather , our training into forms of life opens up a second-nature where grasp of both facts and meanings is immediate. This allows us to re-affirm the view that there are textual facts that do not depend on interpretation; that there is a difference between apprehending the facts of a text and going on to provide further interpretations of those facts. The 'co-constitution' of meanings and facts does not foreclose interpretive practices but allocates them to their proper sphere-as practices that we may wish to undertake in order to go beyond the initial immediate openness of the world of a text. We can test this view by considering the way our changing forms of forms affect the way we read a text such as Jane Austen's Mansfied Park. (shrink)

Kendall Walton explains pictures in terms of games of perceptual make-believe. Pictures or depictions are props that draw us to participate in games of make-believe where we imagine seeing what a picture depicts. Walton proposes that one imagines of one’s perceptual experience of the coloured canvas that it is a different perceptual experience. The issue is whether perception and imagination can combine the way Walton suggests. Can one imagine a perception to be different? To get a clearer understanding of the (...) unified perceptual-imaginative experience Walton posits, the paper turns to competing theories that explain perceptual experience in terms of contents, relations to objects, or both contents and relations. Walton appeals to theories of perceptual content and cognitive penetration. But it is also important to examine whether his view fits with recent theories that explain perception only in terms of relations or in terms of both contents and relations. The paper argues that Walton’s view is compatible with content theories of perception and can be defended from some objection once we look at the detail these theories offer. Walton’s view is not compatible with pure relational theories of perception but it can be explained by hybrid content-relational theories of perception that posit de re senses. (shrink)

This paper argues that a Wittgensteinian understanding of language as an integral dimension of human forms of life speaks against the view that our relationship to texts is interpretive in nature. Wittgenstein’s re-orientation to language entails that meaning is immediate rather than interpretive, and that our works don’t stop short of the facts. The aim of this paper is to show that the immediate mutuality of meanings and facts carries over to our textual practices so that our texts make available (...) immediate unities of meanings and narrative facts. Wittgenstein’s reflections on following rules, customs or forms of life allow us to steer a careful course between the view that a text is determined by the author’s intentions and a relativism of variable interpretations that results from denying the relevance of authorial intentions. For example, Stanley Fish holds that meanings vary insofar as they are “predetermined’ by our “presuppositions” – our interests, goals and assumptions. But Wittgenstein’s work suggests that following rules, and hence grasping meanings, does not involve something as variable as individual “presuppositions.” Rather, our training into forms of life opens up a second-nature where grasp of both facts and meanings is immediate. This allows us to re-affirm the view that there are textual facts that do not depend on interpretation; that there is a difference between apprehending the facts of a text and going on to provide further interpretations of those facts. The ‘co-constitution’ of meanings and facts does not foreclose interpretive practices but allocates them to their proper sphere – as practices that we may wish to undertake in order to go beyond the initial immediate openness of the world of a text. We can test this view by considering the way our changing forms of forms affect the way we read a text such as Jane Austen’s Mansfied Park. (shrink)