GROUNDED CONCEPTUALISM: A PHYSICALIST PHENOMENOLOGY

Christopher Diak

MAY 19, 2017 PHIL 0435: CONCEPTS: THE STUFF OF THOUGHT

MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE

Christopher James Diak

Professor John Spackman

PHIL 435: Concepts: The Stuff of Thought

5/19/17

Grounded Conceptualism: A Physicalist Phenomenology

Introduction

The overall topic I am going to consider in this paper is the nature of concepts. I will

focus our discussion in terms of a familiar philosophical outlook, McDowellian conceptualism as

presented in Mind and World, and argue by way of a grounded cognition approach that concepts

are necessarily experiential and embodied. Given the implication of McDowellian conceptualism

that the world itself is conceptually structured, I suggest that the world is therefore experientially

structured. That concepts are necessarily experiential is argued for using a conceivability

argument. That concepts are embodied is argued for on ontological and empirical grounds, with a

brief overview of the embodied cognition program in cognitive science and a token approach, the

perceptual symbol systems (PSS) approach taken by Lawrence Barsalou and colleagues.

I will address the ontology of concepts in this grounded cognition framework and

suggest, along the lines of Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language, that experience is a multi-

modal isomorphic relation connecting thought (concepts) to the world (states of affairs). The

relation is not like two balls connected by a chain, but more like the relation of a whirlpool to a

stream, where the physical events in the world (the stream) form a concept (the whirlpool) which

is of course an abstraction of the complex physical event in that part of the stream. Along the

way, I appeal to Hilary Putnam’s defense of McDowell’s conceptualism from charges of neutral

monism and show how the grounded cognition approach to conceptualism, or grounded

conceptualism, is compatible with a physicalist ontology if we accept what Galen Strawson calls

“real physicalism.”

Grounded Cognition and Modal Representation

Traditional theories of cognitive science assume knowledge is represented differently

than perception, action, and introspection. The latter are modal systems, whose outputs are

thought to be transduced, on the standard model, into amodal symbols. Cognition is thought to

involve computation over these amodal symbols, which are stored in semantic memory

(Barsalou, 2008). Put more formally, “redescriptions of [modality-specific systems for

perception] in amodal representational languages [represent knowledge],” (Barsalou, 84, 2003).

A crucial task for McDowell, in Mind and World, is to describe the justificatory relation between

experience and knowledge. A full description of the relation will require a discussion of the

nature of perceptual representations, as McDowell’s central thesis, that “when we enjoy

experience conceptual capacities are drawn on in receptivity, not exercised on some supposedly

prior deliverances of receptivity,” depends on the the character of conceptual capacities

(McDowell, 10). If perception is modal and cognition (the representation of knowledge;

conceptual capacities) is amodal, then there is a problem in McDowell’s formulation of

conceptualism: the same faculty cannot be drawn on passively in receptivity and exercised

spontaneously. Or, at the very least, the a priori route McDowell takes to move from amodal

cognition to modal perception would be invalid and in need of empirical verification. This is not

to say that McDowell argues for amodal cognition – as we will see, amodal cognition is implicit

in McDowellian conceptualism because the faculty of spontaneity is taken to be the only rational

modality of thought – the point is simply that the validity of McDowell’s argument entails the

modality of conceptual capacities. From a revised, modality-respecting McDowellian

conceptualism, we will see that concepts are necessarily embodied.

There are several advantages to the embodied approach to concepts, which I’ll call

grounded conceptualism. Chiefly, grounded conceptualism entails minimal ontological

commitments and is compatible with physicalism. The embodied and experiential nature of

concepts (and the world) is a coherent and elegant formulation of what Galen Strawson has

called “real physicalism,” or “realistic monism.” No world of universals, or reified facts, or deep

monist commitments are necessary to give a plausible account of the nature of the relation of the

mind and world. David Chalmers (2002) has written extensively on the problem of experience,

and how the “hard problem of consciousness” is handled in various physicalist philosophies.

Like Chalmers, I am concerned with how the problem of experience can be reconciled with

physicalism, but unlike Chalmers, I haven’t given up on physicalism. In Consciousness and its

Place in Nature, Chalmers describes 6 philosophical positions with respect to consciousness:

Types-A-C materialism, Type-D dualism, Type-E epiphenomenalism, and Type-F monism (for

fundamental). Perhaps we can call this approach, in homage to Chalmers, Type-G conceptualism.

Type-G conceptualism, by virtue of its necessarily experiential and necessarily embodied

concepts, doesn’t solve the “hard problem,” but it does nullify Chalmers’ conceivability

argument against physicalism with respect to consciousness.1 But I digress.

The second reason to seriously consider grounded conceptualism is the empirical

evidence for embodied accounts of cognition and modality-specific systems for storing

knowledge in the brain. The functionalist program in cognitive science is chiefly attractive

1 The conceivability argument aims to demonstrate that consciousness is nonphysical by arguing for the conceivability of philosophical zombies. If concepts are necessarily experiential, and necessarily embodied, where embodiment is taken to mean physically embodied, then a philosophical zombie becomes an incoherent concept.

because of the multiple realizability of mental states in diverse physical systems and the

implications of this for artificial intelligence (machine functionalism) (Kim, 2011).

Unfortunately, this system of thought is premised on the existence of amodal representational

symbols in the brain, and empirical evidence for the existence of such symbols is scant

(Barsalou, 2003, 2008). In this paper, Barsalou’s (2008) theory of perceptual symbol systems is

considered as one possible physicalist model for grounded conceptualism, but the idea

generalizes and is open to empirical investigation. Ultimately, I aim to explicate McDowell to

show that a true understanding of the nature of concepts, on a conceptualist framework, gives a

satisfying account of the justificatory relation between the world, experience, and knowledge,

and that the physical world itself embodies experience.

McDowellian Conceptualism

In the first three lectures of Mind and World, John McDowell characterizes the confusion

surrounding the relation of thought and reality as an unsatisfactory dichotomy between, on one

side, coherence theories of truth which provide no justificatory relation between experience and

knowledge, “and on the other side a vain appeal to the Given,” where the “Given” is taken to

mean nonconceptual sense data which somehow structures our thoughts, as it were, from outside

the space of concepts (McDowell, 24). In response, McDowell draws on Kant’s discussion of the

faculty of spontaneity (rationality, understanding) and suggests the same faculty is “drawn on

passively in receptivity.” In other words, perceptual experience itself is rational understanding,

and therefore conceptual.

McDowell begins his first lecture by appealing to Donald Davidson’s criticism of the

relation between thought and reality posited by dualism of “conceptual scheme and content”

(McDowell, 3). According to McDowell, Davidson falls prey to a “coherentism that threatens to

disconnect thought from reality,” by virtue of the way in which he rejects the dualism of scheme

and content. A conceptual scheme is a system for rationally conceiving of the world, and is taken

by both Davidson and McDowell to be an important part of the justificatory role of thought in

epistemology (McDowell, 3). Davidson’s mistake, according to McDowell, is that he believes

experience can only provide a causal, and not a rational role, in determining the justifications for

our beliefs. This causal role of experience suggests we should accept a coherence theory of truth,

on Davidson’s conception, because it is incoherent to suppose that the causal role of experience

in shaping beliefs could shape different people’s conceptions of the world to such an extent that

they would be untranslatable. Considering the coherence of conceptual schemes as various

“points of view” on reality, Davidson writes, “different points of view make sense, but only if

there is a common co-ordinate system on which to plot them; yet the existence of a common

system belies the claim of dramatic incomparability,” (Davidson, 184). McDowell is largely

sympathetic to this project, and he sees how, if it were the case that the outer boundary of the

conceptual sphere was somehow nested within the sphere of reason, then “any impingements

across such an outer boundary could only be causal, and not rational,” (McDowell, 34).

Davidson has dodged the “myth of the Given,” the idea that the “Given” (nonconceptual,

empirical sense data) somehow structures thoughts, as it were, from outside the space of

concepts, but he has done so at the expense of a justificatory relation between rational thought

and the world (McDowell, 24). Thus, McDowell writes, “we seem to need rational constraints on

thinking and judging, from a reality external to them, if we are to make sense of them as bearing

on a reality outside thought at all,” (McDowell, 25).

How are we to know that our thoughts are meaningful, or “reach up to reality” to borrow

a phrase from Wittgenstein, given that we cannot trust the Given? McDowell’s answer is to

claim experience itself is rational by virtue of being conceptual. “The idea of the Given is the

idea that the space of reasons, the space of justifications or warrants, extends more widely than

the conceptual sphere,” writes McDowell, but this idea precisely fails because it must be

considered from within the conceptual sphere (McDowell, 7). The idea of the Given is itself an

idea. “When we make out that the space of reasons is more extensive than the conceptual

sphere… the result is a picture in which constraint from outside is exerted at the outer boundary

of the expanded space of reasons,” (McDowell, 8). McDowell is aware of the looming specter of

idealism implicit in a world where the space of reason is identical with the space of thought.

Without an external constraint on thought, it seems reasonable to pursue the internal coherence

that Davidson suggests, until we consider that “the Davidsonian response seems to be that if one

were a brain in a vat, it would be correct to interpret one’s beliefs as being largely true beliefs

about the brain’s electronic environment…. The response does not calm the fear that our picture

leaves our thinking possibly out of touch with the world outside us. It just gives us a dizzying

sense that our grip on what it is that we believe is not as firm as we thought,” (McDowell, 16-

17).

To settle this intellectual dizziness, McDowell revisits Kant’s thought “that empirical

knowledge results from a co-operation between receptivity and spontaneity,” where receptivity is

one’s perceptual capacity and spontaneity is the active engagement of “conceptual capacities,”

(McDowell, 9). When we consider our ability to make sense of the world, according to

McDowell, “the relevant conceptual capacities are drawn on in receptivity,” meaning that the

very act of perception is itself conceptual (McDowell, 9). In order to effectively demonstrate that

reality is conceptual without redefining “conceptual” to fit this picture, McDowell needs to show

that the same kind of rationality is at play in active, rational thought which is caused by the

subject and passive perceptivity which is caused by the world. To this end, he writes, “we would

not be able to suppose that the capacities that are in play in experience are conceptual if they

were manifested only in experience, only in operations of receptivity,” (McDowell, 11). It is the

fact that we can reason about the deliverances of experience that reveals their conceptual nature.

From this, McDowell concludes that there is no ontological gap between the kind of content one

can think and the kind of content that exists in the world. Responding to the possibility that this

threatens idealism, McDowell replies “we might just as well take the fact that the sort of thing

one can think is the same as the sort of thing that can be the case the other way around, as an

invitation to understand the notion of the sort of thing one can think in terms of a supposedly

prior understanding of the sort of thing that can be the case” (McDowell, 28). In other words,

because there is no ontological gap between thought and the world, we can think of conceptual

capacities as part of the natural world. It is this thought which motivates my use of Strawson’s

“real physicalism” as the ontological framework for grounded conceptualism.

Ontology of Concepts in McDowellian Conceptualism

At this point, it may seem that McDowell has made unnecessary ontological

commitments that pull his picture toward some form of neutral monism. Namely, if the sort of

thing one can think is the sort of thing that can be the case, then mental content is presumably

numerically identical with content in the world and mental representations are identical with

facts: neutral monism. Here, Hilary Putnam offers a passionate defense of McDowell by showing

how (in his words), “worries about ‘ontological commitment to abstract entities’ are, as a rule,

bunk,” (Putnam, 2002). Putnam’s contention, contra Quine, is that quantification over facts

doesn’t amount to reification and that we can quantify over abstractions without positing them as

further entities. Quine’s doctrine of ontological commitment, according to Putnam, is that “to

quantify over Xs, where Xs may be, in the present context, ‘facts,’ is ipso facto to ‘commit

oneself to the existence of Xs,’ where committing oneself to the existence of Xs is to think of

them as objects,” (Putnam, 2002). Rather cleverly, Putnam uses one of Quine’s principle

achievements (the obfuscation of the concept of synonymy; see: Two Dogmas of Empiricism) to

show how quantification over “facts” would involve establishing the synonymy of facts, and

given the difficulty of this (as Quine himself showed) we lack “an ‘identity criterion,’” for facts,

and thus should avoid “bloating our ontology” with reified intangible objects (Putnam, 2002).

“What McDowell is saying is simply that what is involved in cases of successful perception is

nothing other than the taking in of the fact that things are thus and so,” (Putnam, 2002). Thus,

Putnam concludes, the same proposition can describe a state of affairs in the world and the

content of an experience.

What has happened here is quite remarkable. Working backward from the faculty of

rationality, McDowell has found a perfectly plausible reason for why such a faculty exists:

reality is rational. I’m sympathetic to McDowellian conceptualism largely because of this

conclusion. I often wonder whether there is some sense in which a photon “knows” all the laws

of physics, because after all if the photon did not perfectly obey those laws we would not see the

regularity we see in nature. It may be a metaphor to say that my body knows it is one with the

Universe, but on the other hand, if the sort of things which can be the case are the sort of things

which one can think, then in a physicalist model of conceptualism there is a real sense in which

the knowledge of all the physical structure and function of the Universe is somehow embodied

within the physical components which do make up my body. “The fact that experience is

passive, a matter of receptivity in operation, should assure us that we have all the external

constraint we can reasonably want. The constraint comes from outside thinking, but not from

outside what is thinkable,” writes McDowell, but until we can draw a principled distinction

between what is thinking and what is not thinking, there is no reason to suppose that in some

sense, one’s physical organism is “thinking” all the components of one’s experience (McDowell,

28). McDowell’s argument for conceptualism comes, as we’ve said, from the faculty of

spontaneity, and for this reason he supposes that animals which do not have a faculty of

spontaneity do not have the same kind of perceptual capacities that we do. I differ with

McDowell on this point, because of the grounded, physicalist framework guides my thinking. If

our faculty of spontaneity exists because reality itself has a rational structure, then there is no

reason to think any other mode of thinking is not also rational. This is McDowell’s great blunder.

Cognition is implicitly amodal in McDowellian conceptualism, because the faculty of rationality

as it manifests in humans is taken to be the only true faculty of spontaneity that exists. On a

modality-specific approach to perceptual knowledge, the kinds of thinking which could be

embedded in much simpler and much stranger systems (such as sonar in bats) could also be

viewed, coherently, as spontaneous. To help me formulate this picture, I’ll work through an

analogy inspired by Wittgenstein.

Concepts are Necessarily Experiential

In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Ludwig Wittgenstein proposes that propositions

can “picture” reality, that is, construct a model of it, by virtue of sharing a logical form with

reality. “In order to be a picture a fact must have something in common with what it pictures. In

the picture and the pictured there must be something identical in order that the one can be a

picture of the other at all. What the picture must have in common with reality in order to be able

to represent it after its manner—rightly or falsely—is its form of representation,” (Wittgenstein,

TLP 2.16-2.17). My proposal is that perception shares a logical form with reality: the

experiential form, and thus, all concepts, which are the contents of perception, are intrinsically

experiential.

This “form” is an abstraction, like a whirlpool is an abstraction of the motion of water

molecules in a stream, but my hope is that the idea speaks to the nature of the event of

perception, just as a whirlpool speaks to the nature of the motion of water. I am not positing an

ontologically further fact (the existence of a whirlpool of experience) on top of the physical facts

about the stream (the world). The whirlpool, the experiential form, is a concept which allows us

to understand the nature of reality. Here we see why I propose “real physicalism” as the proper

ontological framework for grounded conceptualism. As Strawson describes the position:

“Full recognition of the reality of experience, then, is the obligatory starting point for any remotely realistic version of physicalism. This is because it is the obligatory starting point for any remotely realistic (indeed any non-self-defeating) theory of what there is… Real physicalism, then, must accept that experiential phenomena are physical phenomena,” (Strawson, 2006). This is itself a variation on Kant’s thought that “our nature is so constituted that our

intuition can never be other than sensible,” and seems to be how McDowell thinks about the

nature of experience (McDowell, 4). Mental content, for McDowell, even the nonconceptual

content of “mere animals” is experienced content. A “non-experiential concept” is an incoherent

concept because the experiential form of concepts structures the space of concepts.

The Conceivability Argument for the Experiential Nature of Concepts

(1) A concept must be conceivable to be a concept.

(2) The act of conceptualization is experiential.

(3) It is impossible to conceive of non-experiential concepts, because the very

conceptualization of “non-experiential concept X” is experiential, so whatever is

conceived will necessarily be experiential, and will not be a “non-experiential concept.”

(C) Concepts are necessarily experiential.

The debatable premises are (1) and (3), but I can’t conceive of a viable counterargument

that doesn’t rely on a “bloated ontology” which views concepts as objects (intangible, universal,

abstract etc.) that have an intrinsic nature which is either experiential or non-experiential to

refute this argument. It would be better, by Ockham’s Razor, to posit the least number of

ontological commitments necessary. The first question we should ask of this argument is: what is

the nature of conceptualization? Must we use our pre-frontal cortices for a mental act to count as

conceptualization? Would a certain phenomenological characteristic define conceptualized

thoughts? Contra McDowell, the grounded conceptualism approach acknowledges that all

mental phenomena are conceptualizations.

This may seem like “mere word-play,” as McDowell would say, because for him, the

defining feature of conceptual capacities is that they are drawn on using one’s rational faculties,

but for McDowell’s argument to hold, the same faculties must be drawn on passively in

receptivity as are used actively in spontaneity. Therefore, formal computation over amodal

symbols, the kind of rationality McDowell seems to have in mind, must be the same faculty that

is drawn on in receptivity. Empirical evidence from neuroscience, as we will see, suggests this

cannot be the case. So, if McDowell wants his argument to hold in the light of empirical

research, he must submit that the various modalities which constitute perception, and which

constitute various modalities of knowledge, must be rational.

We can do this by supposing concepts are necessarily experiential, as I’ve argued, and

necessarily embodied and therefore physical, as I will now argue. The physicality of concepts, in

addition to the experiential nature of concepts, would suggest, along the lines of the Strawsonian

real physicalism, that the physical world is experiential. “Realistic physicalists, then, grant that

experiential phenomena are real concrete phenomena — for nothing in life is more certain —

and that experiential phenomena are therefore physical phenomena… [Strawson takes] ‘physical’

to be a natural-kind term whose reference [one] can sufficiently indicate by drawing attention to

tables and chairs and — as a realistic physicalist — experiential phenomena,” (Strawson, 2006).

Reiterating McDowell: the kinds of things that can be the case are the kinds of things one can

think.

Grounding Conceptualization

Empirical evidence that this is the case, given a physicalist ontology, has exploded in the

cognitive sciences as a result of a new program of research broadly known as “grounded

cognition.” In a review on the subject, Grounding Conceptual Knowledge in Modality-specific

Systems, Lawrence Barsalou et al (2003) discuss a physicalist framework for conceptualization

called the “perceptual symbol systems,” approach. Rather than review the empirical research in

support of the modality-specific perceptual systems, I leave that work to Barsalou et al (2003)

and another excellent review, Grounded Cognition, (Barsalou 2008).

I will take for granted that some sort of modality-specific perceptual system exists, and

will discuss Barsalou’s perceptual symbol system to give a sense of the kind of solution that will

follow from the arguments in this paper. Considering the case of vision, Barsalou and colleagues

discuss the classic cognitive science approach: neural representations of objects begin with a

sensory-specific system, such as vision, but the information about the stimulus is then transduced

into an “amodal representational language.” “Once established, these amodal descriptions

provide the knowledge used in cognitive processes, such as memory, language and thought,”

(Barsalou et al 2003). In the perceptual symbol systems (PSS) approach, “neural representations

similarly represent objects in vision,” initially, but “rather than being transduced into amodal

descriptions, however, visual representations are partially captured by conjunctive neurons in

nearby association areas. Later, in the absence of sensory input, activating these conjunctive

neurons partially re-enacts the earlier visual states,” (Barsalou et al, 2003). Thus, the specific

neural networks which are activated “in receptivity” form a physical basis for the realization of a

concept during conceptualization – “re-enactment” by a “simulator” of a “simulation” is the

standard formation on Barsalou et al’s approach. “A simulator is a distributed collection of

modality-specific memories captured across a category’s instances … [and develops] for any

component of experience (or configuration of components) processed repeatedly by attention,”

(Barsalou et al, 2003).

Conclusion

This approach entirely coheres with McDowell’s conceptualism, if we take whatever

physical arrangement of the neurons (or whatever brain/body/physical mechanism is involved in

receptivity) to be the concept itself. McDowell showed how the world itself could be seen as

rationally, conceptually structured, if the same conceptual capacities are operative in receptivity

that are characteristic of rationality. To reconcile McDowell’s argument with modern cognitive

science will require a conception of rational thought that acknowledges various modalities of

rationality and conceptualization.

REFERENCE Barsalou L. 2008. Grounded Cognition. Annual Review of Psychology. 10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639 Barsalou L, Simmons WK, Barbey AK, Wilson CD. 2003. Grounding conceptual knowledge in sensory systems. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.7 No.2 February 2003. Davidson D. 1984. On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme. Clarendon Press. McDowell J. 2003. Mind and World. Cambridge MA. Harvard University Press. Putnam H. 2002. McDowell's mind and McDowell's world. In Reading McDowell: On Mind and World. New York: Routledge. Wittgenstein L and Ogden DK. 1999. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Mineola, N Y.: Dover Publications.