Comment on Richard Schantz, “The Given Regained”

Abstract

Richard Schantz gives a concise and effective rehearsal of the background against which I find it liberating to see our experience as structured by our conceptual capacities, at least insofar as experience figures in the transcendental framework within which alone we can make sense of our having the world in view. Given how attractive that background makes the idea, I cannot see that Schantz makes the opposed conception he undertakes to defend even comparably compelling, let alone more compelling. Schantz undertakes to do two things: first, to defend the claim that there is a nonconceptual element in the content of experience; and, second, to vindicate the capacity of experience, conceived as having nonconceptual content, to serve as evidence for beliefs about the world. Under the first head, Schantz says at one point that his aim is to save appearances. He may mean to imply that the conception I recommend flies in the face of appearances, so that saving appearances encapsulates a motivation for attributing nonconceptual content to experience. Perhaps his approving citation of C. I. Lewis belongs with this implication. Lewis said: There is in all experience that element which we are aware we do not create by thinking and cannot, in general, displace or alter. Of course Lewis thought this remark was both an expression of sheer common sense and an affirmation of a nonconceptual given. But the unquestionable character of what Lewis says is not threatened by taking experience to be conceptually structured. In seeing experience as actualization of conceptual capacities in sensory receptivity, I accommodate the palpable fact Lewis insists on, that the shape of our experience is not up to us (once we have decided such things as whether to open our eyes and what direction to look in). I myself exploit the fact which Schantz appeals to in a different context that the MullerLyer illusion persists, at the level of how things look, even in subjects who know it is an illusion. The question how many color concepts we have belongs in the context of the question I am raising, whether the aspiration to save appearances consti-