Conceptualism and the Myth of the Given

Content Conceptualism is the view that all representational content, including the content of perceptual experiences, is conceptual content. The main motivation for this view is that it alone intelligibly explains how perceptual experiences justify beliefs. Underlying this position is what I will call 'Epistemic Conceptualism', according to which only conceptual contents can provide reasons for, and thus justify, beliefs. McDowell's commitment to some such position comes out quite clearly in his discussion of the 'Myth of the Given', which he characterizes as 'the idea that the space of reasons, the space of justification or warrants, extends more widely than the conceptual sphere' (McDowell 1994: 7). In order to disabuse of this idea, he assures us that 'We cannot really understand the relations in virtue of which a judgement is warranted except as relations within the space of concepts: relations such as implication or probabilification, which hold between potential exercises of conceptual capacities' (McDowell 1994: 7). Bill Brewer has also argued for Content Conceptualism on this basis—though his position has changed in important ways since. (See Brewer, 2006) In what follows, I will argue that Epistemic Conceptualism is flawed. In particular, I will argue that we cannot account entirely for the reason-giving role of experiences in terms of their conceptual content, or the conceptual content of other mental states to which they are related in reason-giving ways. We must, rather, credit them with something besides or in addition to conceptual content if we are to explain the distinctive contribution they make to the epistemic status of beliefs. 2 I. One of the most important motivations for Content Conceptualism is that it alone intelligibly accounts for the fact that perceptual experiences justify beliefs. One of the most lucid arguments for Content Conceptualism is due to Brewer (2005: 218), and runs as follows: (1) Sense experiential states provide reasons for empirical beliefs. (2) Sense experiential states provide reasons for empirical beliefs only if they have conceptual content. (CC) Therefore, sense experiential states have conceptual content. Before explaining exactly how and whether this argument supports Content Conceptualism, let me examine each of the premises in turn. The first thing to note about Brewer's first premise is that it is incompatible with a purely externalist account of the relation between experience and belief, according to which experiences provide warrant for beliefs, but that such warrant stems solely from the fact that experiences reliably cause true …