Undercutting Buddhist Non-Conceptualism

Abstract

A central debate in both contemporary analytic and classical Indian philosophy of mind concerns the existence of non-conceptual content in perception, i.e., whether there are perceptual states that represent the world without the subject of those states possessing any concepts of what is being represented. In this paper, I first discuss how the 5th- and 6th-century Buddhist philosophers Dignāga and Dharmakīrti anticipate both the arguments and phenomenological intuitions that underlie contemporary defenses of perceptual non-conceptualism. In particular, they defended a type of 'essentialist content non-conceptualism,' which some scholars have argued is the most defensible version of the non-conceptualist thesis. According to these Buddhists, perceptual contents are essentially different in kind than the contents of conceptual cognitions – perceptual contents are essentially non-propositional, pre-predicative, and linguistically inexpressible. In responding to the Buddhists, I then look to the 13th-century Navya Nyāya philosopher Gaṅgeśa, who also posited a form of essentially non-conceptual perceptual content, but claimed instead that we never have any phenomenological evidence for its existence. I argue that this claim can be corroborated by contemporary psychological models of the stages of visual processing. A naturalized version of Gaṅgeśa's account can therefore undercut the phenomenological intuitions supporting Buddhist non-conceptualism: On Gaṅgeśa's account, the conscious perceptual experience of stable and mind-independent objects, which both Buddhist and contemporary non-conceptualists typically reflect upon in offering phenomenological defenses of their views, is actually generated through a conceptually modulated process of visual classification and predication.