Experience, Thought and Activity:: Their Content, Their Normativity and Their Characteristic Kinds of Commitment

Experience, Thought and Activity 1
Experience, Thought and Activity:

their content, their normativity and their characteristic kinds of
commitment
Adrian Cussins
(somewhat distinct — longer! — version from that published in York Gunther (ed)
Essays on Nonconceptual Content, MIT Press, 2002
Copyright Adrian Cussins
Abstract
The very name “nonconceptual content” suggests that it should be characterised
negatively in relation to conceptual content. Most discussions have followed this
suggestion. In this paper I give a symmetric discussion of the characteristic content of
thought and the characteristic content of experience. I explain how we might think of the
generic type of mode of presentation which is distinctive of the nonconceptual content of
experience, and how it contrasts with the the generic type of mode of presentation which
is distinctive of the conceptual content of thought. I describe the normative conditions
(“correctness conditions”) that govern the content of experience, and how they contrast
with the normative conditions that govern thought contents.
Any attempt to provide a symmetric discussion must deal with what we might call the
“judgement problem for nonconceptual content”. A theory of thought is as it is because it
is part of a theory of judgement: thoughts are the kinds of things that are judged by
persons to be true or false. Judging true is the kind of commitment which is appropriate
to thoughts. What, then, stands to the content of experience as judgement stands to the
content of thought? The answer turns out to help in understanding how it is that
Adrian Cussins

committed content use is not trapped in a ‘circle of content’ but, rather, makes an
independent world available to subjects of thought and experience.
Sections
§1 A (Too) Quick Argument for Nonconceptual Content
§2 Two Ways of Knowing about Speed
§3 Thoughts Present the World as Truth-Maker. And their conceptual constituents

have Referential / Objectual structure
§4 Experiences Present the World as Mediator. And their nonconceptual constituents

are structured as Activity Trails: forms of guidance through environments of
activity.
§5 Experiential Warrant and the Space of Commitments
***
§1 A (too) quick argument for nonconceptual content

Let us understand ‘content’ as: presentation of the world in experience or in
thought such that, when things are working well, subjects of experience and thought have
knowledge of the world. Distinctions amongst kinds of content are distinctions amongst
kinds of presentation of the world; and they are distinctions amongst kinds of
Adrian Cussins

knowledge1 . (Not that all presentations entail knowledge; but only when things are
working well). For example, the distinction between the way in which an object is made
present to a language-user through mastery of a name of the object, and the way in which
the same object is made present through a unique description of the object is a distinction
amongst kinds of content. The same object is presented in two different ways—as Φ and
as Ψ—and this provides for two different kinds of knowledge: the knowledge that the
murderer is Φ does not entail, nor is it entailed by, the knowledge that the murderer is Ψ,
if Φ is what is fully expressed by a definite description—the left-handed person with
blood group O captured briefly on the security camera—and Ψ is what is fully expressed
by a singular term —Hermione Granger—. Here Φ is a descriptive content and Ψ is a
singular content. I am concerned in this essay with a more generic distinction amongst
kinds of content: between a kind of content which is sometimes held to be characteristic
of experience (“nonconceptual content”), and a kind of content which is sometimes held
to be characteristic of thought (“conceptual content”). A subject’s cognitive relation to
the world, in some particular situation, may consist in either kind of content, but usually
in some combination of both. We will be able to explore this distinction between kinds of
content through an exploration of different kinds of experience-based knowledge about
the world.

It is both a Fregean and an Husserlian idea that a theoretical specification of a
content is given in terms of two different attributes. Frege, focusing exclusively on the
content of thought because of his interest in the logic of truth and judgement, called these
1 What about the content of faculties that are not, under ordinary conditions, sources of knowledge, such as
the faculty of imagination? Imaginative content is not tied to knowledge in the way in which the content of
perception or of memory is. My view is that the content of such apparently non-epistemic faculties is
derivative on the content of epistemic faculties, so that the content of imagination is explained in terms of a
theory that is developed in the first instance to account for the content of faculties like perception and
memory. But nothing in this paper hangs on this view. A cautious reader might qualify the starting
definition to read like this: a content is a presentation of the world in experience or in thought such that
when it is taken up within an epistemic faculty, and things are working well, subjects of experience and
thought have knowledge of the world.
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two different attributes of content ‘sense’ and ‘reference’. Husserl had a more general
interest in the content of mental acts, including perception, memory and imagination as
well as judgement. We need to follow Husserl in this if we are to make sense of our
generic distinction between kinds of content.2 So let us attempt a more general

description of sense and reference: we may say that an adequate content specification
must specify both its mode of presentation and its normative conditions (often its
correctness conditions). Any act or state that has intentionality will have a mode of
2Follesdal (1969) introduced this reading of Husserl. Michael Dummett has argued that Husserl’s
generalisation of sinn is a philosophical mistake; see, for example, chapter 4 of Dummett (1981) and much
of Dummett (1990) and Dummett (1993). Wayne Martin (forthcoming) provides a useful critique.
Adrian Cussins

presentation3 and will be answerable to some normative conditions 4. Senses are modes of
presentation of the world in thought. And reference conditions (for example, truth
conditions) are the normative conditions of thoughts. A defender of nonconceptual
content must then show that there is a distinctive kind of presentation of the world in
experience, and a distinctive kind of normative condition that governs experiential
presentations of the world.

Thoughts are contents which are truth-evaluable. That a thought content be
evaluable as true or false puts strong constraints on the kinds of mode of presentation
which can make up thought content. Any content which is fitted for truth-evaluability
3 Some, especially in the US, reading “Nonconceptual content” as content which is not conceptual, and
taking the neo-Kantian, neo-Fregean idea of mode of presentation to go with “concept” rather than with
“content”, have offered interpretations of “nonconceptual content” as something which is specified directly
in terms of referents. Consider Stalnaker (ms), for example: “One might define complex objects, nested
ordered sequences that reflect the recursive structure of the sentences with which the structure is associated.
The ultimate constituents of such structures might consist wholly of senses or concepts. Maybe
*conceptual* content is an object of this kind ... Alternatively, one might take the ultimate constituents of
such structures to be individual objects and properties and relations (the referents of names and the
properties and relations expressed by the predicates in the relevant sentences). Perhaps this is a kind of
*nonconceptual* content.” But Stalnaker’s approach belongs to a very different project than that which
makes critical use of the work of Gareth Evans; Stalnaker adopts what McDowell once called “the
sideways on” perspective on relations between mind and world, whereas for the neo-Kantian / neo-Fregean
tradition it is the idea of how the world is made available to subjects’ cognition which is central. Mode of
presentation of the world is built into “content”, and distinctions between conceptual and nonconceptual
contents are distinctions between different kinds of modes of presentation, where the typing for these
‘kinds’ is on the level of the distinction between experience and thought.
4 Brandom (1994) argues, in effect, that it is a Kantian idea that a theory of content (in contemporary terms)
is a theory of normativity: “For Kant the important line is not that separating the mental and the material as
two matter-of-factually different kinds of stuff. It is rather that separating what is subject to certain kinds of
normative assessment and what is not. ...what matters is being the subject not of properties of a certain
kind but of proprieties ofa certain kind. The key to the conceptual is to be found not by investigating a
special sort of mental substance that must be manipulated in applying concepts but by investigating the
special sort of authority one becomes subject to in applying concepts—the way in which conceptually
articulated acts are liable to assessments of correctness and incorrectness according to the concepts they
involve. …The attempt to understand the source, nature, and significance of the norms implicit in our
concepts … stands at the very center of Kant's philosophical enterprise. The most urgent question for Kant
is how to understand the rulishness of concepts, how to understand their authority, bindingness, or
validity. ..” (pp. 9-10)
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must have conceptual structure5. Evans (1982) has attempted to capture a constraint on
the conceptual structure of thought as the generality constraint. We may express the
generality constraint as the conjunction of two constraints: (1) closure under conceptual
recombination and (2) the structured explanation of closure. For present purposes, let’s
not worry about condition (2) because anything which fails (1) will thereby fail the
generality constraint.
(1) Closure under recombination of contents:
Thoughts are such that:

(a) For any two atomic thoughts, Fa and Gb, and for any thinker T, if T
understands both Fa and Gb then T also understands the thoughts Fb and

Ga; and,
(b) For any complex thought containing some atomic thought Fa, and for
any atomic thought Gb, and any thinker T, if T understands both the
complex thought and Gb then T also understands the thoughts in which Fb
or Ga or Gb are substituted for Fa in the complex thought.
5 An objection: what about model theory?:- a content may be truth-evaluable not in virtue of having
conceptual structure but in virtue of having set-theoretic structure. Thus, a representation may be assigned
a set of possible worlds as its content, in which case the representation is true iff the actual world is a
member of that set of possible worlds. Response: set theory provides mathematical resources for
characterising all sorts of things, including conceptual structure. Species relations amongst potted plants
have set-theoretic structure; it doesn’t follow that they don’t also have botanical structure, nor that their
botanical structure isn’t essential to their species relations. So, in particular, it does not follow from the fact
that truth conditions can be specified set-theoretically without reference to concepts that a content may be
truth-evaluable without having conceptual structure. I suggest below that conceptual structure just is the
structure of the normativity of truth.
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(2) Structured Explanation of Closure: ... 6
There had better be some restrictions on (1), because, for example, if we instantiate Fa as
Pythagoras’s theorem is a universal truth and Gb as Jones is bald, it will not follow that a
thinker who understands Fa and who understands Gb will understand Fb (Jones is a
universal truth) or Ga (Pythagoras’s theorem is bald). But given some restrictions for
semantic anomaly, something like the closure condition must govern thought contents at
least for Chomskyan reasons (transposed from language to thought): thought is
essentially productive. We are in a position to understand an infinite number of thoughts
that we have never entertained before.
One strategy for an argument for the nonconceptual content of at least some
experience is to consider failures of the generality constraint for experiential contents.
Animal cognition and infant human cognition are natural examples. We need only
suppose that thought content is essentially governed by the generality constraint.

A cat sees (as we might report the seeing) how far away is its prey. That is, the
cat’s perceptual experience carries representational content about the distance of its prey.
The content can be correct or incorrect, and the success of the cat’s leap is in part
explained by the correctness of the content of the cat’s experience. To say this much is
not yet to say anything about the type of mode of presentation of the distance, or the kind
of correctness conditions that govern the content of the cat’s perceptual experience.
Therefore, it is not yet to say anything about whether the cat’s content is conceptual or
nonconceptual. But consider this: For the cat it might well be that the content is
6 T is able to understand both Fb and Ga because T’s understanding of Fa and Gb is conceptually

articulated; thus, T’s understanding of Fa consists in part in T’s knowledge of what it is for something to be
F and in T’s knowledge of which object is a, and likewise for T’s understanding of Gb. It follows, then,
that T knows what it is to be F and knows which object is b. So long as F and b are not semantically
anomalous in combination (‘green ideas’) it follows that T is in a position to understand Fb. Likewise for
T’s understanding of Ga.
Adrian Cussins

egocentric and activity-dependent in quite a strong sense. That is, it does not follow from
the fact that the cat sees its prey as being a certain distance from it in this prey-related,
experiential way, that the cat knows what distance that is as a distance in which any two
other objects could stand. The cat might have no clue, for example, what it would be for
the distance between the sofa and its mistress to be the same as *that* [prey-type]
distance. The distance is not given to the cat as a distance in which other objects that the
cat is capable of cognizing could stand.

The cat’s content fails the closure condition and therefore fails the generality
constraint. (Cat ‘understands’ Prey is *blah*-away and cat ‘understands’ Mistress go-
walk, but cat does not ‘understand’ Mistress is *blah*-away or Prey go-walk ). Hence the
cat’s experience is not conceptually structured, and therefore does not carry the same kind
of content that is characteristic of thoughts. But the experience does carry content. The
experience presents to the cat an aspect of how the world is, and the experiential
presentation can be correct or incorrect. That is, the cat’s experience has both a mode of
presentation of the world and is governed by normative conditions (correctness
conditions). It satisfies both parts of the Husserlian account of content. Moreover, it has
the kind of functionality that we expect of contents: it can play a crucial role in action
explanations. Not only is it a partial cause of the cat’s leaping as it does but also the
success or failure of the cat’s leap may be explained in part by the correctness or
incorrectness of the cat’s perceptual experience. We have seen that the content which is
the presentation to the cat of the distance of its prey fails the generality condition, and
hence is not given conceptually in the cat’s experience. Therefore there must be some
sense in which the distance to the prey is made available to the cat nonconceptually.

In short, the cat’s experience carries content, but it’s not conceptually structured
and so is not thought content. Let us then call this content nonconceptual content.
Adrian Cussins


A quick argument has its virtues. But also its defects. Prominent amongst the
defects is that the argument really tells us very little about the character of the content of
the cat’s experience. The argument hinges on the content’s failure of the generality
constraint, or rather, on its failing a constraint which is weaker than the generality
constraint—closure under recombination of contents. So we don’t get to learn anything
very positive about what the experiential content is like. Another defect is that this kind
of argument is too vulnerable to a philosopher who characterizes, in part, their interest in
content as being an interest in the objects of reason. Cats cannot reason and so
conclusions about cat-contents may have no bearing on the objects of such philosophers’
interest. Arguments like this one from the perception of cats encourage a widespread
misconception about nonconceptual content: that nonconceptual content must be a

primitive kind of content best exhibited in non-human animals and in human infants, or—
in some versions—that nonconceptual content is sub-personal7. The explanatory
demands of development—both ontogenetic and phylogenetic—may provide a
compelling case for a theory of content which is distinct from the theory of conceptual
content. Hence a compelling motivation for a robust notion of content which is not
7 Having connected the idea of nonconceptual content in Evans (1982) with the idea of the informational
system, McDowell claims that “it is central to Evans’s view that ‘the operations of the informational
system’ are ‘more primitive’ than the rationally interconnected conceptual skills that make room for the
notion of judgement and a strict notion of belief” (p. 48 in McDowell 1994, and p. 124 in Evans 1982).
McDowell’s argument against the idea that nonconceptual content has a role to play in an account of
empirical knowledge hinges on the supposed primitiveness of nonconceptual content; in particular that any
such content, were it to exist, would be “more primitive than the operations of spontaneity” (p.48). And
many of those who favor the notion of nonconceptual content also take its supposed ‘primitiveness’ to be
central. For example, Bermudez (1998) claims that “It is animal behavior and the behavior of prelinguistic
infants which paradigmatically raise the problems for which, so I believe, theoretical appeal to states with
nonconceptual content is the only solution” (chapter 2). For the distinction between the personal and the
sub-personal, see Dennett (1968), pp. 93-94 and Dennett (1978), pp. 101-2, 153-4 and 219. One example
of the idea that nonconceptual content—if it makes any sense at all—must be sub-personal is Child (1992),
at pp.302-3. That nonconceptual content, if it is to be viable, must be sub-personal is also in McDowell
(1994): “it is a recipe for trouble if we blur the distinction between the respectable theoretical role that non-
conceptual content has in cognitive psychology, on the one hand, and, on the other, the notion of content
that belongs with the capacities exercised in active self-conscious thinking …” (p.55).
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conceptual content, but if we focus exclusively on such cases then nothing will follow
about the content of rational thought and judgement, or about rational relations between
experience and judgement. We will be unable to establish more interesting but equally
true claims: for example that nonconceptual content is essential for normal, adult human,
personal-level cognition. Nonconceptual content should not be understood as providing a
cognitive ladder to be kicked away once climbed.

A third defect is that the argument relies on accepting the constraint on conceptual
content of closure under content recombination. For those who do not take closure under
recombination to be a motivated, proper constraint on conceptual content, the argument
will not be persuasive because it will fail to establish a distinction between two kinds of
content. Such sceptics about closure may point to phenomena like this: one who
understands what it is for Flitter the butterfly to be large and who understands what it is
for Humph the elephant to have a trunk may not understand what it is for Humph to be
large or for Flitter to have a trunk. There appears to be no issue of semantic anomaly
here, at worst only biological anomaly. And cognitive grammarians8 can provide a large
range of examples of this sort. Or consider the sorts of Wittgensteinian examples of
family resemblance concepts that Charles Travis discusses. 9 It is clear that a range of
kinds of recombination of contents which preserve understanding must be possible but it
is not clear how to delimit this range, nor is it clear whether the restrictions on the
recombination of cat-contents are of a different kind from the restrictions on the
recombination of adult human contents. The distinction would start to look more like a
spectrum of cases.
8 See, for example, Fauconnier (1985), Langacker (1990) and Goldberg (1995).
Adrian Cussins
Apr 17, '00, 8:36 PM 9 Travis (1994). I don’t endorse the analysis of the Wittgensteinian examples that Travis gives.
Added Text
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Apr 17, '00, 8:36 PM
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A fourth reason why the short argument is less than satisfactory obtains even if we
take the closure condition to be motivated. For there is a reading of the argument which
encourages the view that nonconceptual content is content which is defective. This is the
reading of the Generality Constraint as an ideal, which is approximated more or less well
by human cognition. The ideal is well approximated in many human cases, especially in
cases where our knowledge of the world is more formal. But much of the rest of human
content provides only poor approximations to the ideal, and this is the part that the
argument treats as nonconceptual. Nonconceptual content would be distinctive only in
that it failed to be conceptual content: nonconceptual content would be defective
conceptual content. There would only be a single theory of content — a theory of
conceptual content — governed by a constraint like generality or closure, which applies

more or less well to different ranges of examples. On this view, the proper conclusion to
the argument would not be that there are two distinct kinds of content (the content of
primitive animals and the content of rational persons) but rather that the animal examples
are poor examples of content because the constitutive conditions on content apply only
weakly to them. (In other words, constraints like the generality constraint would still be
understood as constraints on content, and not as constraints on just conceptual content).
A robust defence of nonconceptual content requires motivating distinct explanatory
theories: one theory whose paradigmatic examples are examples of thought-based
cognition, and a distinct theory whose paradigmatic examples are examples of

experiential cognition. For this we need to understand the characteristic virtues of
experiential cognition; virtues which are not characteristic of thought-based cognition. I
shall argue that nonconceptual content is as cognitively vital as conceptual content, and
has its own positive functionality.
Adrian Cussins


It may then be a better strategy to focus first on cases of adult human cognition,
and to see whether we can provide a more symmetric treatment of the motivations for
conceptual content and for nonconceptual content.
§2 Two Ways of Knowing about Speed

Many years ago I used to ride a motorcycle around London. And I would often
exceed the speed limit. One time I was stopped by a policeman, who asked me the
following question: "Do you know how fast you were travelling?" He didn't mean it to
be a difficult question; really just a preamble to his telling me how fast I was going. But,
lost for a moment somewhere inside my full-face motorcycle helmet, it dawned on me

that it was in fact a difficult philosophical question. I was unable to tell the policeman
my speed, yet surely I did know whilst I was riding, and know very well, how fast I was
travelling. I was knowingly making micro-adjustments of my speed all the time in
response to changing road conditions. These micro-adjustments weren't simply
behaviors, the outputs of some unknown causal process. They were, instead,
epistemically sensitive adjustments made by the subject, and for which the subject was as
epistemically responsible as he was for his judgements. Indeed he was now being held
accountable by the policeman who was intent on probing our subject's epistemic state
with his question, "Do you know how fast you were travelling?"

It is also clear that I did not know how fast I was travelling in the sense of the
question intended by the policeman. Certainly I was unable to give, in any epistemically
responsible way, any answer of the form, "50 miles per hour". My knowledge wasn't
structured in that kind of way. I knew what my speed was, but not as *a* speed. The
speed was presented to me as a certain way of wiggling through and around heavy traffic
and past the road dividers and traffic bollards of a London street. This kind of knowledge
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of speed does not entail that I be able to recognize it as the same speed again as I rode
down an uncluttered motorway outside the city, or even that I would know what it would
be for the uncluttered motorway speed to be the same speed as that which I knew myself
to be travelling at when I was stopped by the policeman. In short, the speed was not
given to me as a referent, an object, that I could present to the policeman, to myself, to
the traffic court, to other drivers, in other driving conditions, OBJECTIVELY, as the very
same object, the very same speed in all of these different contexts or perspectives 10.

The speed of my motorcycle was not made available to me, in other words, as that
which would render true certain propositions, and false certain others. The speed was
given to me not as a truth-maker -- for example, a truth-maker of the proposition that I

was exceeding the speed limit -- but as an element in a skilled interaction with the world,
as a felt rotational pressure in my right hand as it held the throttle grip, a tension in my
fingers and foot in contact with brake pedals or levers, a felt vibration of the road and a
rush of wind, a visual rush of surfaces, a sense of how the immediate environment would
afford certain motions and resist others; embodied knowledge of what it would take to
make adjustments in these felt pressures and sensitivities. This knowledge was a
moment-by-moment practical manifestation of my competence as a motorcyclist, and in
this respect was wholly unlike knowing that I was travelling at 50 mph, because any
incompetent could know that, just by reading the dial on the policeman's speed gun. My
knowledge was directly and non-inferentially useful for how I rode, and consisted in the
knowing capacity to guide my motorcycle riding -- again, wholly unlike a speed given to
10I shall persist with the ontology in which speeds can figure in someone’s cognition as objects. One might
object that speeds are properties of objects in motion, and so not themselves objects. Whether speeds are
objects or properties is irrelevant to the argument here. Both objects and properties, as used by the objector
and in the text, are referents, and thus constituents in truth-makers. The distinction that is relevant to the
argument is between figuring in cognition as a referent (or truth-maker) and figuring in cognition in some
other way.
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me as an object: as the truth-maker, 50 mph, or as what would be presented on the
instrument dial of the speed-gun.
This latter objectual knowledge can be used to guide a motorcyclist, but its links
to activity must be established by taking up the objectual knowledge into propositionally
structured forms of practical reasoning. For example, if I know that the speed limit is
30mph, that I desire not to be stopped by a policeman, and so forth, then knowledge that I
am travelling at 50 mph can be a causal factor in my slowing down. The objectual
knowledge can cause a change in activity, but that is a link which must be mediated by
propositions standing in the truth-governed relations of practical reasoning. I don't need
to be a skilled motorcyclist to know that I or someone else is travelling at 50mph, but

instead I require some propositional contexts in order to establish the motorcycling-
relative significance of the object, 50mph; for example in the proposition 50mph exceeds
the speed limit of 30mph. The motorcycling-relative significance of the object is given
by a subject’s mastery of the inferential relations amongst a bunch of propositional
contexts for the object, 50mph. Whereas the significance of the speed as it is available
experientially to the motorcyclist who does not look at his speedometer is given via the
subject’s skilled competence in the activity of getting about by motorcycle. The speed-
content has in one case a cognitive significance characteristic of propositional judgement,
whereas in the other case it has a cognitive significance characteristic of experience-

guided activity. (We do not normally think of activity as a mode of cognition —rather as
a kind of output— but is that any more than a prejudice?)
My knowledge of my speed was not readily expressed in language —that’s a part
of what stymied me when faced with the policeman’s question— but it is no less real or
important for that. Some kinds of knowledge are well expressed in the language of an
objective world, and others in experience-guided activity; two different content media:
language and the body-in-the-environment. It is true for each kind of content that there is
Adrian Cussins

a medium in which that kind of content is well captured, and that it is typically hard to
capture instances of that kind of content in the other medium. It is, for example, just as
hard to express the content 50 mph in the medium of the body as it is to express my
motorcyling speed content in the medium of language. (It’s this difference that the parlor
game charades relies on; although sometimes in acting out a particularly difficult title etc.
the actor resorts to bodily motions which are parasitic on language.)

I have suggested that there is a double disconnection between two ways in which
a subject may know about his or her speed. Faced with the policeman’s unanswerable
question, I exemplified a subject who possessed the experiential, activity-based
knowledge but who did not possess the objectual, propositional judgement-based
knowledge, even though both forms of knowledge are knowledge of the same speed.
And the incompetent motorcyclist who reads off the speed from the instrument dial
exemplifies the disconnection in the reverse direction.

Not only does possessing one kind of knowledge not entail possessing the other
kind of knowledge, but there is also a tension between the two kinds of knowledge. They
are taken up in very different, sometimes competing, cognitive orientations to the world.
For example, consider the following: I don't need to be a skilled motorcyclist to know in
the objectual way (“50 mph”) how fast I am travelling, but if I rely on this objectual kind
of knowledge to ride the motorcycle, then I will not only not need to be a skilled
motorcyclist, I won't be a skilled motorcyclist. If I ride by repeatedly looking up at road
signs that mark the speed limit, then looking down at the speedometer, forming the
conclusion that the actual speed exceeds the legal speed by 20 mph, and calculating a
braking motion on the basis of this difference in speed, then my riding will be unskilled
and characteristic of a novice. A more competent rider constantly makes assessments of
how fast they are travelling, of how fast it is safe to travel in these road conditions (as
they rush by) without looking at the speedometer.
Adrian Cussins

In cases like this the characteristic functionality of conceptual knowledge
interferes with the characteristic functionality of experiential knowledge, but the
interference can also go in the other direction. The great advantage of experiential
content is that its links to action are direct, and do not need to be mediated by time-
consuming—and activity-distancing—inferential work; work which may at any point be
subject to sceptical challenge. Experiential knowledge of the kind possessed by the
skilled motorcyclist may be subject to RESISTANCE, but not to sceptical challenge.
That's its great cognitive virtue, but it also suffers from an equally great cognitive vice: it
is situation-specific and context-dependent. Thus, if my only knowledge of the speed
consisted in this particular, vehicle and road specific, hands-on knowledge of speed, then
I would have no basis for even understanding what it would be for others to ride at this
speed, or for me to travel at the same speed in a car or a boat. Because of its context-
dependence, this kind of content cannot by itself provide what we have come to regard as
the constitutive requirements on thought content: generality, objectivity, standardisation,
transportability of knowledge from one embodied and environmentally specific situation
to another. The cognitive virtues of experiential content are in tension with the virtues of
thought content because experience’s direct connection to action entails the situational
specificity of experiential content, and situational specificity is in conflict with the
generality of thought content.

I want now to ask how this picture of a commonsense distinction between kinds
of everyday knowledge might be represented within the theory of content. In a neo-
Fregean / neo-Husserlian theory of content a distinction between kinds of content is a
distinction between kinds of modes of presentation and between kinds of normative
conditions. Let’s think first about conceptual modes of presentation and conceptual
normative conditions.
Adrian Cussins

§3 Thoughts Present the World as Truth-Maker. And

their Conceptual Constituents have Referential /
Objectual Structure

THOUGHTS are those things about which it makes sense to ask, 'Is this true or
not?'. Thus, thoughts include the contents of judgement, but exclude the characteristic
contents of paintings, dances and many experiential states. To put this another way: truth
is the governing norm for the kind of content that is thought content. There are two sides
to this. First, that truth is the standard against which a thought is primarily assessed (its
normative condition). But secondly, that in judging or entertaining a thought a subject is
conceiving of the world as that which would render true the thought. If truth is the
governing norm of thoughts, then a subject who conceives the world through thinking the
thought conceives the world in terms of the structure which is necessary to characterize
the truth of the thought or its truth-governed relations—inferential relations—to other
thoughts.11 This is conceptual structure. We may say that conceptual content is a way of
conceiving the world in terms of the structure necessary to characterize truth; that is, in
terms of the conceptual structure of thoughts. (Conceptual modes of presentation have a
structure which is fixed by the normative conditions that govern thoughts).
11 Allthis involves a view about the explanatory relations between governing normativity, modes of
presentation and the world that is presented; assumptions that are not universally shared. Most of what I
need is the kind of view that McDowell has emphasised in pressing the Wittgensteinian claim that content
does not stop short of the world. For example: ... “there is no ontological gap between the sort of thing one
can mean, or generally the sort of thing one can think, and the sort of thing that can be the case. When one
thinks truly, what one thinks is what is the case. So since the world is everything that is the case ..., there is
no gap between thought, as such, and the world. Of course thought can be distanced from the world by
being false, but there is no distance from the world implicit in the very idea of thought. But to say there is
no gap between thought, as such, and the world is just to dress up a truism in high-flown language. All the
point comes to is that one can think, for instance, that spring has begun, and that very same thing, that
spring has begun, can be the case.” (McDowell 1994, p. 27). There is, though, a little more in the text’s
view of the relation between governing normativity of content and the world that is presented in such
content than can be gotten out of the Wittgensteinian truisms. Certainly what else one needs would be
available were we were to accept Dummett’s view that logic is prior to metaphysics. (See also the
footnoted reference to Haugeland below).
Adrian Cussins


To repeat: Fixing the governing norm for a kind of content not only fixes the
normative conditions for contents of this kind, it also fixes the type of mode of
presentation of the world which is characteristic of contents of this kind. (1) For thought
content the world is that which would render thoughts true . But, (2), conceptual
structure just is whatever structure is required to specify both the semantic conditions
under which a thought is true and the truth-governed relations between thoughts.
Therefore, ((1)+(2)), the world is given in thought as having conceptual structure. (A
generic distinction between kinds of content is a distinction between conceptions of what
the world is. Thus the task for a defender of nonconceptual content is in part to motivate
an account of what the world is other than the truth-maker. If the world-given-in-thought
has the conceptual structure of a truth-maker, then what structure does the world-given-
in-experience have?)

What is it for the world to be given as having conceptual structure? Consider the
following elementary inference:
(1) Fido is a dog

(2) All dogs are mammals
________________
(3) Fido is a mammal
In order to interpret these expressions as a valid inference we treat (1), (2) and (3) as
sentences which express thoughts. About each of these it makes sense to ask, 'Is it true or
not?’ But we must also recognize that there is a common constituent in two of the
thoughts, expressed by the word 'Fido', which refers to the same object when it occurs in
the conclusion as it refers to when it occurs in the premise. Recognition of this common
constituent is required in order to characterize the truth-relations of thought (1): for
unless there is a common constituent with the same referent the inference will not be a
valid one. Hence recognition of this common referring constituent is required in order to
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capture the inferential relations between this thought and others. Therefore this
constituent is part of the conceptual structure of the thought and either is or carries
conceptual content .
Two things follow: reference to an object is a conceptual relation because we are
forced to appeal to it in order to capture the rational structure of truth. And, a
presentation of the world as that which renders thoughts true may often be presentations
of the world as containing particular objects. So, if the world is presented to one as that
which would render true an atomic thought (let’s say, thought (1)), then the world is
given as containing a particular object (Fido, in this case). It is because thoughts present
the world as the truth-maker that thoughts present the world conceptually as consisting
of, for example, particular objects: the necessity to refer to particulars arises within the
conception of the world as truth-maker.12

Even if we adopt a Fregean semantics which bottoms out in the possession of a
truth value by atomic statements, we need to recognize elements which refer to
particulars in order to do the semantics of multiply quantified statements, like 'everyone
loves someone'. Here, too, we are forced to recognize elements, expressed by words like
'John' and 'Mary', which refer to particular objects. Hence these elements will be, or will
carry, conceptual content, and if a subject grasps them in cognizing the world then the
world will be presented to her as consisting in part of these particular objects. Similar
points can be made for other aspects of conceptual structure.
12 There are two sides to this. First, that the explanatory theory which governs particular objects, qua
particular objects, is part of the theory of content, or part of the theory of normativity. It’s good that the
notion of particularity of objects finds an explanatory home here because the natural sciences cannot
provide one (See Brian Cantwell Smith On the Origin of Objects, chapter 3 “Physics”. But note that Smith
uses “individuality” for what I’m here calling “particularity”.) Secondly, if there is a notion of content for
which the governing norm is other than truth then it may be that particular objects are not part of the
structure of the world as it is given in that kind of content. (And no more than for thought content is there
an explanatory gap between nonconceptual content and the world. See again the quote from McDowell in
the footnote above). ...
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(Is this an anti-realist position on particular objects? -- No; it is neutral on the
question of realism. It is no more—and no less—anti-realist than is the notion of truth
which governs thoughts. Are there other (generic) ways in which the world might be
given? That depends on whether there are any kinds of normativity which, like truth, can
play a generative role in a theory of content, and yet which are explanatorily independent
of truth and its derivatives).

Thought content presents the world as truth-maker but because the truth-governed
relations between thoughts require conceptual structure within thoughts we may say that
thoughts present the world as truth-maker by presenting the world in terms of the
referents (objects and properties, etc.) of this conceptual content. Once conceptual
structure is given, representations may carry conceptual contents which are not thought
contents, though any proper explanation of these conceptual contents must tie them back
to the theory of thought, and the governing norm of truth (no content could be
conceptually structured unless it could be a thought constituent). Let’s use the term
“conceptual content” to include conceptually-structured contents which are thoughts as
well as conceptually structured contents, and their conceptual constituents, which are not
thoughts. Since those that are not thoughts are not truth-assessable we need a way to
describe the type of mode of presentation which is characteristic of conceptual content in
general. I shall say that conceptual content presents the world as a realm (or as realms) of
reference. A realm of reference can include particular objects because, as we have seen, a
theorist of content needs to refer to particulars in order to characterize the semantics and
the inferential relations of thoughts. For the same kind of reason, a realm of reference
may include properties, relations, events, situations, states of affairs and so forth,
depending on the proper analysis of the structure of truth. A realm of reference is a realm
of objects, properties, states of affairs, ..., with respect to which the truth of thoughts is
determined.
Adrian Cussins


Conceptual contents, then, are contents which are constitutively governed by the
norm of truth, and which present the world as realm of reference. A proper content
specification should specify both normative conditions and mode of presentation. The
normative conditions of conceptual contents are specified by specifying truth conditions,

or satisfaction conditions. Both truth and satisfaction conditions are specified by
referring to the semantic determinants of truth conditions which are elements in the realm
of reference. The type of mode of presentation which is characteristic of conceptual
contents is to present the world as realm of reference. Hence both the normative
conditions and the mode of presentation of conceptual contents can be specified by
referring to the realm of reference.13

For example, consider the conceptual content in your current visual experience.
How should a theorist of content specify the way in which your visual experience
presents the world conceptually to you? Normally we should say something like this:
experience presents the world to you as a room filled with particular people, all more or
less facing the same direction, many of whom are holding a piece of white paper. This is
to specify the content of your experience by reference to a realm of reference and, by
doing so, simultaneously captures both the veridicality conditions of the experience and
the modes of presentation in the experience. In the present case the realm of reference is
held to consist of various particular objects—the room, the people, sheets of paper—and
various properties—the property of being white, the property of facing towards the front
—because the veridicality conditions of the experience concern these objects and
13 At a finer grain of typing of contents, reference to a realm of reference is insufficient to fix the mode of
presentation: which Fregean sense is in question cannot depend only on which referent is in question (this
is part of the very motivation for the sense / reference distinction). But at the grain of typing of contents
that I am concerned with here, that a content is canonically specified by reference to the realm of reference
does fix such a (gross) type of mode of presentation. At this gross level there is a distinction between the
type of mode of presentation which is characteristic of conceptual content, and the type of mode of
presentation which is characteristic of nonconceptual content. The former type is picked out by saying that
it presents the world in terms of its referential structure, as a truth-maker.
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properties. That is, what fixes the constituents in the realm of reference for your visual
experience is that your experience is veridical if and only if you are in fact in a room
containing lots of people who are facing towards the front and are holding sheets of white
paper, etc. But reference to this realm of reference also captures the modes of
presentations involved because the world is now presented to you as a room etc ...
Reference to the realm of reference does double duty.

(A clarification: I spoke, at the start, of conceptual content as the characteristic
content of thought, and nonconceptual content as the characteristic content of
experience. Experience, often, also carries conceptual content, but that is not the content
which is distinctive of experience. In ordinary human cognition, thought and experience

are interweaving strands. But as theorists we can pull them apart and look at what is
distinctive of each kind of strand: thought as contrasted with experience, and experience
as contrasted with thought).

I have recommended an explanatory strategy in the theory of content: First we
fix a kind of normativity. If there is a kind of content which is governed by this kind of
normativity, then we can explain how the world is presented in this content in terms of
the structure which is necessary for explaining the norm-governed relations between
these norm-governed contents. 14 The abstractness of this formulation is useful because it
allows us to ask about kinds of content other than thought content. It shows us what we
would have to do, and to explain, if we are to motivate one or another notion of
nonconceptual content. Thoughts are constitutively governed by the norm of truth and so
what is characteristic of thought is content that presents the world as the truth-maker.
Thought constituents—concepts—present the world as having referential structure
14The strategy is, I admit, a little unfamiliar. I draw support from the account of the objects of perception
given by Haugeland in his article “Objective Perception” in Haugeland (1998). Haugeland argues that it is
the constitutive normativity of governing standards that fixes the objects of perception. I also draw support
from a number of strands in Dummett’s writing.
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because referential structure is the structure necessary to characterise the semantics of
thoughts, and to characterise truth-governed (inferential) relations between thoughts. If
we are to motivate a distinct kind of content it will be a kind of content which does not
present the world as truth-maker, and which therefore is a kind of content which is not
constitutively governed by the norm of truth.

What other kinds of norms can function as the governing norms of contents? This
is the question to ask if we are to pursue the possibility of nonconceptual content. Given
a candidate for such a norm (norm φ, let’s say) we can explore the structure of the norm
—the structure required to characterize norm-φ-governed relations between norm-φ-
governed states—and thereby explore whether this structure can provide for a type of
mode of presentation of the world, and whether that type is distinctive of contents
governed by this norm.
§4 Experiences Present the World as Mediator. And

their nonconceptual constituents are structured as Activity
Trails: forms of guidance through environments of activity.

Central to an account of normativity is guidance. In judgement we are guided by
truth, and truth is the governing norm for judgement (judgement aims at truth). In
understanding a meaning we are guided by the rules that govern the meaning, but these
same rules fix the normativity of meaning: the distinction between correct and incorrect
applications of a term with that meaning. Artists are guided by beauty, and beauty is the
governing norm for art (that by which art is assessed). Technologists are guided by
efficiency and effectiveness, and it is efficiency and effectiveness that distinguishes good
from bad technology. (Not that, in any of these cases, we are exclusively guided by the
governing norms, nor that any of these activities are exclusively assessed by their
governing norms. Nevertheless, the governing norms play a constitutive role in making
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these activities what they are: judgement, meaning, art, and technology). That the
functionality, and the general form, of norms is to provide guidance allows us to explore
normativity by exploring guidance.
A norm may guide us by being both explicit and propositional, but there are many
forms of guidance which are neither explicit nor propositional. Social codes are often not
explicit and may not be propositional. But let’s consider a form of guidance which is so
ubiquitous and so everyday that we rarely pay any attention to it.

Think of entering an unfamiliar room, and finding one’s way from one side of the
room to another. A subject is guided here by the positioned solidity of the furniture, as
one’s body — or one’s informational systems — gently bump up against the materialities
of the environment. These ‘bumpings’ are forms of guidance, and so they manifest
candidate norms, not with the status of the norm of truth but fully normative nonetheless.
The material structures of the room are linguistically mute, but they are nevertheless not
mute: salient spaces call to us, drawing us towards them or away from them: Go here!
Don’t go there! (Like this (as one moves) is right! Like that is wrong!15 ) Such mundane
norms are situated in the environment, they are changed by the environment and by the
flow of activity through it, and they change the environment and its flow of activity.
When I say, “think of entering a room and finding one’s way from one side of the
room to another” I don’t mean that one enter with the intention to get to the other side of
the room (although one might). I just mean: consider your activity as you enter the room,
15 Don’t be mislead by the demonstrative expression! The bearer of the content, here, is the activity; the
demonstrative functions to direct our attention towards the activity – it does not itself say what the content
is. Suppose one is interested in the content of a dance movement on the stage. In response to a question
about what the dance expresses, you say “Look there! That’s what the dance expresses”. That the
linguistic demonstrative word often expresses a concept tells us nothing, in this context, about the nature of
the content expressed by the dance movement. The demonstrative functions here as a pointer towards the
expressive item (which is then allowed to “speak” for itself), and so nothing can be deduced about the
content of the dance from the content of the demonstrative.
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whatever your intentions might be, and whether or not you have any. You might, for
example, find the room full of people who are mingling and moving around, and so you
fall into step with what you find, and you too mingle and move around. There need be no
intention here; you may just be adapting to the activity in the room – going along with it.
Now we ask, what is the normativity that nevertheless governs your activity? (What you
do is niether random nor unknowing). The normativity that guides your activity is not
given by your intention because even if you have one—and you may not—there is also a
structure to your activity which would be the same whatever was your intention. It is this
intention-free normativity that I am here calling “mundane normativity”: the gentle
bumpings of one’s body and informational systems; the cognitive affordances and
resistances of the environment. (I don’t like the formulation of this point which runs:
‘Mundane normativity resides in the environment and not in the mind’. Better, though
still problematic, would be: ‘Mundane normativity resides in the environment and not in
the space of intentions or propositional judgements’.)

“There is a structure to your activity which would be the same whatever your
intention”. This structure is the structure of the afforded paths or trails through the
environment of the room: the activity trajectories that are afforded and which are
bounded by regions of increased resistance (the edges of the trail). The pattern of trails
fixes a distinction between skilled and unskilled, or competent and incompetent, activity
in the environment, whatever one’s intention or propositional goal may be in moving
through the space. So when you enter the room, let’s say without intention, you confront
a space that mediates whatever you will do in the room. You might not think about any
object in the room, but the room mediates your activity as you pass through it. As you
move you are not, or need not, be guided by truth, but you are, nevertheless, guided; you
are guided by the mundane structure of the activity-space around you. (So here we start
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to explore mundane normativities by exploring mundane structures of guidance-in-
activity).
The trail-structured environment of the room stands to any intentional task you
may wish to carry out in the room somewhat as a tool stands to some construction task: it
does not fix the task; it can subserve many different tasks; it is not itself the goal or
‘object’, but carrying out the task depends on it; it mediates the task. Just as—when
things are functioning well—the tool is not given to the builder as an object of thought, so
the structured space of the room is not typically an object for subjects in the room (it is
not part of the subjects’ realm of reference). Nevertheless, it, like the tool, is still
cognitively accessible: it is accessible not through thought, but through the subject’s
skilled and knowing competence in getting about. I will say that, in such cases, the
environment is given to the subject as a realm of mediation.
Presentations of the world as realm of mediation provide for a distinctive kind of
world-knowledge. As in the motorcycle example, thought-free—but intensely cognitive
—passage through the environment may manifest the subject’s personal-level knowledge
of what it is to be a competent agent in an environment like this. (The knowledge need
not be available to the subject under this description, but only as a mediation of activity).
Likewise, passages through the environment may manifest failures in this knowledge:
from fine-grained infelicities of movement to coarse crashes into furniture and walls.
Content which is governed by mundane normativity is content which presents the
world as an environment which mediates activity in the environment. When the world is
given to one as such an environment the world presents itself as a realm of mediation. (It
may or may not also be present as a realm of reference). Typically, the realm of
mediation in an environment is not itself a realm of reference. Suppose my goal is to
greet the visitor at the other side of the room. My goal or intention involves a content
Adrian Cussins

with truth conditions: I intend to make it true that I greet the visitor. In such a case there
is a realm of reference which includes particular objects (the visitor, myself), the relation
of one person greeting another, … Whereas the realm of mediation consists of the trails
which distinguish patterns of afforded activity from patterns of resisted activity, and
which guide me—a skilled traverser of rooms—as I cross to the other side. The network
of trails is not, typically, part of the realm of reference in the environment because the
truth of thoughts such as I greet the visitor does not depend semantically on the structure
of activity trails. (In a philosophical discourse, trails might form part of a realm of
reference. But that is not the usual case). A single part of the world given as a realm of
reference AND as a realm of mediation: two quite distinct ontological structures, and two
quite distinct modes of access to the world. (Two ways of knowing about the world and
two notions of the world-as-known). 16
Or think again of the motorcyclist’s phenomenology: I knew the speed not as a
particular object, 50mph, but as an activity dynamic within a space for motorcycling.
The object, 50mph, is a referent, and belongs to the realm of reference for thoughts about
the motorcycle’s speed (it is a truth-maker or breaker for some of these thoughts). But
the activity dynamic is not a referent of these thoughts because the truth of thoughts like I
am travelling faster than the speed limit is not semantically determined by the dynamic
forms of my skilled engagement with, and adjustment to, throttle, road surface and other
moving vehicles. A specification of the truth conditions of the thought does not refer to
skilled practice, to felt rotational pressures or to patterns of resistance. The truth of these
thoughts is fixed only by whether the objectual speed that I am travelling at is greater
16This distinction between two ways of knowing and two notions of the world-as-known is important in a
consideration of the relations between judgement and experience, and between judgement and the world.
Adrian Cussins

than or less than the legal speed. 17 Therefore the activity dynamic is not part of the realm
of reference for the speed-relevant contents. The activity dynamic is not presented as the
realm of reference, and therefore is not presented conceptually. Yet it is presented in the
motorcyclist’s experience. It is presented as a mediation of motorcycling activity.

Perhaps as theorists we could use sophisticated concepts of trails to characterize the
structure of the realm of mediation, and that would be to characterize the content
nonconceptually in the good old fashioned sense of a characterisation that uses concepts
that the subject of the content need not possess. 18

Mundane normativity is the normativity of activity guidance. In judgement we
are guided by truth, but truth is not a mundane norm. Why? How are we to characterise
the distinction between mundane normativity and the “elite” normativity of truth,
veridicality, accuracy and related norms? One way to begin to think about this question
goes like this: In judgement, any guidance available to the one who judges is responsible
to the norm of truth. If uncertain about whether to go this way or that in judgement, one
must ask oneself: what does truth demand be done? So in the case of judgement it is the
norm of truth which is explanatorily prior to the forms of guidance which govern the
practice of judging: the forms of guidance are answerable to the norm of truth. But with
mundane normativity it is the other way about. There is structured activity within some
domain, and perhaps, as observers, we can track the local guidances—resistances and
affordances—that characterise the environment of activity. What is the norm here? Even
though there are perhaps no intentions involved, there is normativity nonetheless, but our
17The dynamic forms of activity are the referents of some of my philosophical thoughts in writing this
paragraph. Entities that are not part of the realm of reference for one class of thoughts may be part of the
realm of reference for a different class. The entities are presented conceptually only in the latter class of
thoughts. The key to avoiding confusion here is to avoid doing the philosophy of content whilst riding
one’s motorcycle!
18 See Cussins (1990)
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grip on the shape of the normativity comes only through our understanding of the spatio-
temporal trails of environmental pushes and pulls, both actual and virtual. The forms of
guidance in activity are explanatorily prior to the mundane norms of activity; this is what
makes them mundane norms.19

“There is structured activity within some domain, and perhaps, as observers, we
can track the local guidances…” Bodily comportment, for example:
My sense of myself, of the footing I am on with others, is in large part also

embodied. The deference I owe you is carried in the distance I stand from you,
in the way I fall silent when you start to speak, in the way I hold myself in your
presence. Alternatively, the sense I have of my own importance is carried in the
way I swagger. Indeed, some of the most pervasive features of my attitude to
the world and to others is encoded in the way I project myself in public space;
whether I am macho, or timid, or eager to please, or calm and unflappable.
(Charles Taylor (1992) p.170.
(See also “Throwing Like a Girl” Iris Young (1990)). Or the construction of gender
(Garfinkel, 1967, chapter 5), or laboratory practice (Lynch, 1985 and 1991; Shapin 1988),
or the shared workspace of an airline operations room (Suchman, 1996). What are the
norms in any of these cases? Ask: what forms of activity are fitting and so in place, and
what forms are ‘out of place’. Which ways of acting flow well, and which stutter? To
understand the norms is to follow the trails of activity; to get a sense of how the local
environments of activity are structured. If we ask: what are the norms of my
19 In Constructions of Thought, and in the essay “Norms, Networks and Trails” I consider the distinction
between elite normativity and mundane normativity in connection with the practice of anthropologists. It is
essential to anthropology that the field method of participant-observation allows the anthropologist to
investigate the normativity of a social activity system whilst not knowing about—or concealing from
themselves their knowledge of—elite normativity: what it is to be a ‘brilliant’ person in this society, what
truth is in this system, what nature is, what rationality, and so forth. This is possible only because mundane
normativity does not presuppose elite normativity, and the anthropologist can proceed through an
investigation of mundane normativity.
In Constructions of Thought I also consider the elite / mundane distinction in connection with objectivity:
elite norms are norms which presuppose a mind / world or subject / object distinction.
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comportment?, then we must look at how my environments of social activity are
structured; at how they mediate my self-presentation. Concepts of ‘macho’ and ‘timid’
may play a role, but the normativity of my self-presentation goes far beyond what can be
captured by these general terms of the language. (That the individuality of my social
comportment consists in the expression of some such conceptual complex is a conception
of self of comparable sophistication to the avatars of computer-mediated MUDs). The
forms of guidance in activity are explanatorily prior to these ordinary norms and
proprieties of social interaction. 20

The structure of a realm of mediation is the structure of the trails through the
environment in which activity is mediated. Trails simultaneously guide those who follow
them, and in the very act of guidance are themselves shaped. (Unlike elite norms such as
truth: truth guides those who follow truth, but truth is not shaped by this act of guidance).
Trails are contingent, historical, embodied and fully local entities, but they establish
normative boundaries: this is right, this is wrong; this lies on the path, this lies off the
path; this is where you are and this is where you are going.
Trail-norms are not like the rules of rational method, the rules of a Bayesian
maximiser, or the rules of chess. Rules such as these are given as necessary, whereas
trails are contingent norms. Trails can be global, extending to the limits of some space,
yet they are built and maintained locally. Trails vary, are responsive to haphazard local
20Compare Brandom “The conclusion of the regress argument is that there is a need for a pragmatist
conception of norms—a notion of primitive correctnesses of performance implicit in practice that precede
and are presupposed by their explicit formulation in rules and principles”, (Brandom, 1994, p.22). Where
the text differs from Brandom is (a) in the idea that there is anything ‘primitive’ about mundane
normativity, (b) in the idea that “an explicit formulation in [presumably linguistic] rules and principles”
might capture the content of ‘correctnesses of performance’ any better than a linguistic description captures
the content of a painting or a dance, (c) in the idea that there is anything especially ‘implicit’ about the
modes of presentation made available through mundane normativities, and (d) in the idea in the text that
there is direct connection between the content of experience and the ‘correctnesses of performance’.
(Sometimes being explicit is a way of being primitive. Consider delicate inter-personal relations, or the
explicitations of a dog when he demands his food.)
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configurations, provide choice points and multiple routes, yet make the difference
between arriving and being lost. Trails are fully material entities, constituted out of
patterns of disturbance within some material medium. Yet trails are also artefacts.
(Perhaps trails are the first artefacts). Thus, trails are simultaneously human and non-
human, or animal and non-animal. People and animals gather on trails, follow trails
because of the droppings of other animals, because of the increased likelihood of finding
other animals (mates or prey or colleagues), or in order to get to go where they are going
only because others have been there. Thus trails are simultaneously natural and social
and historical. Trails are purely physical, yet they also carry content, having a
significance that goes beyond the natural laws that govern their embodiment. They
represent directions of movement, places to go, places to be, and places where one has
come from; yet they are not part of any symbol system. Trails are technologies of
reproducibility; for bringing one home again, for getting back to the water hole that has
been out of sight for so many months, for keeping activity ‘on track’, for reliably
reproducing the art of the master craftsman in the blacksmith’s ironwork shop 21, or for
reproducing the social, political and economic order within a business. This re-
producibility or re-presentation is gained in the face of changing and nonconforming
environments: because trails flexibly skirt obstacles, and provide work-arounds for the
unpredicted, they can provide a robust reliability in returning to the same place again and
again.
Trails can exist in ontologically distinct kinds of region: forest and savannah
certainly, but also social, theoretical, linguistic, biological, psychological, and historical
regions. Typically, an environment is ontologically heterogenous: activity through the
environment is structured by many of these ‘factors’. What activity trails there are may
depend on the varied embodiments of subjects, learned skills, individual and collective
21 See Keller and Keller (1996)
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dispositions, social taboos, symbolic systems and practices of their use, the material
environment—both built and found—, chance encounters, legal restrictions and historical
constraints. But none of these are distinguished as separate ‘factors’ within the trails: the
theorist of content is concerned with matters material, social, psychological, biological,

and historical only insofar as they express themselves as potential local effects on
activity; as shapings of activity-trails. Trails within the skilled space of a scientific
laboratory, for example, are structured by the skilled routines of maintaining the
cleanliness of pipettes and beakers as much as by the physical space of the laboratory; the
skilled routines involved in maintaining the ‘data-trails’ in which test-tube labels are
marked, kept up to date, transferred to logs and computer, and transformed into graphs
and statistics (the guidance of laboratory practice that is the reproduction of the order
necessary for science)22. It includes skillful hand and eye coordination, local
coordination of communication across representational interfaces, expertise in navigating
complex social, class-based, gendered and material environments. Getting around,
getting about, getting up and getting through are the domains of these commonplace trail-
norms of everyday, mundane activity.

There is a general distinction, then, between two kinds of guidance: the kind of
guidance which is provided by propositional judgement, which is employed, for example,
in practical and theoretical reasoning. And more mundane kinds of guidance employed in
everyday getting-about. The former is guidance-in-judgement and the latter is guidance-
in-activity. If guidance is the general form of normativity, then we should distinguish
between norms of judgement and norms of activity.

Remember §3: to fix, within a theory of content, the modes of presentation for a
range of contents, analyze the structures necessary for characterising the norm-governed
22 See, for another kind of example, Michael Lynch’s (1999)
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relations between these norm-governed states. Thus, corresponding to the distinction
between two kinds of normativity (elite norms of judgement and mundane norms of
activity) is a distinction between two kinds of mode of presentation of the world: as realm
of reference and as realm of mediation. Just as truth norms generate the referential
structure of objects and properties, so norms of activity guidance generate the
mediational structure of activity trails. The presentational structure of experiential
content is the structure of the realm of mediation: the normative boundaries in the space
of activity which are given as trails through an environment. Both the norms and the
mode of presentation which are characteristic of experience may be specified within the
theory of content by referring to the realm of mediation. Reference to the realm of
mediation does double duty in the theory of content: as a specification of normative

conditions and as a specification of modes of presentation.

When asked the policeman’s question I knew my speed, but not as an object, not
as a referent, not as a truth-maker. How then? If we heed the advice of §3 there is no
need for us theorists (or, if you prefer, we quietists) to be as stumped by this question as I
was by the policeman’s question: in figuring out what the content is, ask about the kinds
of normativity involved; and to figure out this, ask about the kinds of guidance. And, as
we saw, the forms of guidance in the motorcycle example were the environmental
resistances and affordances that shaped my constant re-adjustments of body and

motorcycle. As the normativity that governs the practice of judgement provides a way in
which the world is made cognitively present to subjects who think and judge, so the
normativity that governs mundane activity provides a way in which the world is made
present to active subjects of experience. We can say that speeds and distances were
presented to me in terms of the structure of activity trails through the road-scape around
me: activity trails that afford certain bodily motions (perhaps easing up on the throttle),
and resist others; locally guiding me in my hands-on micro-adjustments of the
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motorcyle’s passage through the environment. (“But such an activity-trail doesn’t
separate out speed and distance as speed and distance.” Of course not; speed and
distance are concepts, and activity-trails are nonconceptual structures of the world).

The distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual content as the distinction
between referential and mediational content is summarised in Figure 1.
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CONCEPTUAL NONCONCEPTUAL
CONTENT CONTENT
Norms Activity Guidance
(Governing Normativity) Truth

(& Skill / mastery &
(& other elite norms) other mundane norms)
World given as …
Realm of Reference Realm of Mediation
(content specified by
reference to …)
Modes of Presentation Referents: particular objects, Activity Trails
properties, etc.
(Constituent Structure)
Figure 1: Distinguishing Two Kinds of Content
Consider an objection. It serves to remind us not to mistake the granularity of the
distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual content. Suppose someone objected to
using the motorcycle example to provide both phenomenological and epistemological
support for the idea of nonconceptual content, like this: Look, a demonstration that (1) is
not sufficient for a demonstration that (2), below. It is sufficient only to show that (3).
That is, a demonstration that:
(1) S knows that S is travelling at Φ does not entail, and is not entailed by, S
knows that S is travelling at Ψ,
does not show that:

(2) Φ and Ψ are different kinds of content.
Premise (1) shows only that:
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(3) Φ and Ψ are different contents
So, in particular, if Φ is a conceptual content the argument doesn’t show that Ψ is a
nonconceptual content. As in the example with which the paper opened, the knowledge
that the murderer is Φ does not entail, nor is it entailed by, the knowledge that the
murderer is Ψ, if Φ is a descriptive concept and Ψ is a singular concept. Yet Φ and Ψ
would both be conceptual contents (one a descriptive concept the other a singular
concept).

The objection would be forceful only if the only argument were from double
dissociation: that a subject can possess each kind of knowledge without possessing the
other. But the discussion has also tried to make the case that the two different ways of
knowing the motorcycle’s speed corresponded to two quite different cognitive
orientations to the world, each with its own epistemic vices and virtues, and each in some
tension with the other. The policeman asked me to manifest a kind of knowledge whose
virtues are those of theoretical and practical reasoning. I did not possess this kind of
knowledge, but rather a kind of knowledge whose virtues are those of skill and practical
expertise. There are two distinct cognitive functionalities here. Since all those contents
which are characteristic of thought have the former kind of virtue but score less well on
the latter, and all those contents which are characteristic of experience have the latter kind
of virtue but score less well on the former, the distinction in kinds of content pointed to
by examples of this sort is as generic as the distinction between experience and thought.

This same point can be made by noticing that we needed a distinction between
kinds of normativity to do justice to the example: norms of judgement and norms of
activity. Since it is the governing norm of a content which determines the kind of mode
of presentation of the content, and the governing norm for these experiential contents has
a quite different kind of normativity from the norm of truth (‘mundane’ normativity as
opposed to ‘elite’ normativity), it follows that the kind of mode of presentation for these
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experiential contents is very different from referentially-structured modes of presentation.
I suggested that the structure of contents governed by mundane normativity differs from
the structure of contents governed by elite normativity as the realm of mediation differs
from the realm of reference: that which is structured as trails of activity from that which
is structured as the truth-maker or breaker: objects, properties, states of affairs, etc.
Content which is characteristic of experience therefore presents the world in a different
way from any knowledge which presents the world as the realm of reference. What’s
being shown is not just a difference in content, or even in kind of content, but a very
generic difference in kind of content.
§5 Experiential Warrant and the Space of Commitments

I have been recommending a view according to which both experience and
thought are modes of cognitive access to the world, but that they differ in the kinds of
cognitive access that they provide, and in the kinds of normativity that govern them. In
both experience and thought subjects are “open to the layout of the world”, although in
the case of experience the world characteristically shows up as a realm of mediation and
in thought the world characteristically shows up as a realm of reference. Those influenced
by an argument of McDowell’s might suppose that something must have gone wrong
with the account up to this point. Seeing why a central argument of McDowell (1994)
against nonconceptual content does not apply to the account given here turns out also to
explain how to overcome what otherwise would be a fatal objection to McDowell’s way
of understanding epistemic relations between content and the world.
McDowell (1994) has argued that the content of experience cannot be
nonconceptual. His influential argument has been reproduced by, for example, Brewer
(1999) and Sedivy (1996), amongst others. The argument has the form of a challenge: it
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is essential to perceptual experience that it can provide warrants for, or justify, judgement.
The content of judgement is conceptual content. If experience is to provide warrants for
judgement then it must be possible for the contents of experience to stand in relations of
warrant to conceptual contents. But the only warranting relations to conceptual contents
that we understand are conceptual relations: for example, relations of implication such as
deductive or inductive relations 23. Therefore the contents of experience must be able to
stand in conceptual relations to conceptual contents and so must themselves be
conceptual. McDowell’s challenge is this: explain to me how there can be contents
which are not conceptual but which can stand in relations of warrant to the conceptual
contents of judgement.

In thinking about possible responses to McDowell’s challenge, a natural place to
look is within the empiricist tradition in philosophy. But that is only discouraging:
Sellars, Davidson, McDowell, amongst others, are effective in showing that notions of
the Given, or mere ‘impressions’ with varying degrees of force or vivacity, or Quinean
‘sensory impingements’ or other varieties of “brute impacts at the exterior” are hopeless
as candidate warrants for judgement. I agree with them.

McDowell concludes that the content of experience is conceptual content. But
that raises a problem for him. Part of what motivates the premise in the argument above
—that anything which is experience must be the kind of thing which can warrant
judgement—is the idea that empirical knowledge of the world must be constrained by the
world through our experience of it. McDowell is, rightly, not satisfied with a
Davidsonian coherentist picture in which our beliefs are warranted only by other beliefs;
23McDowell: “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. The
attempt to exptend the scope of justificatory relations outside the conceptual sphere
cannot do what it is supposed to do” (1994, p. 7).
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that would be merely internal justification without “external friction” (p.11), “a
frictionless spinning in the void”(p.11, p. 50 et al), or a “play of empty forms”(p.6)24.
But if our experience carries the very same kind of content as the content of our
judgement—if the kind of mode of presentation of the world is the same in experience as
it is in judgement—then how is McDowell’s account any better than Davidson’s? If loss
of contact with the world is entailed by a circle of beliefs then isn’t it also entailed by a
circle of conceptual contents?

Not, McDowell claims, if some of those conceptual contents are made available
within sensibility (for example, in perceptual experience). And, again, he is right about
this. If we take ourselves to be already entitled to appeal to the conceptual availability of

the world in experience, then we are home free when it comes to avoiding the threat
invoked by coherentism. What makes it the case that we are not locked into a circle of
belief? Well, some of our beliefs are conceptually grounded in perceptual experience of
the world. And — we are happy to assert — perception and other forms of sensibility
just are those faculties that, under normal conditions, put rational creatures in conceptual
touch with the world. Easy25.
24 McDowell: “if spontaneity is not subject to rational constraint from outside, as Davidson’s coherentist
position insists that it is not, then we cannot make it intelligible to ourselves how exercises of spontaneity
can represent the world at all. Thoughts without intuitions are empty …”, (1994, p. 17); “If we focus on the
freedom implied by the notion of spontaneity, what was meant to be a picture of thinking with empirical
content threatens to degenerate into a picture of a frictionless spinning in a void. To overcome that, we
need to acknowledge an external constraint on the exercise of spontaneity in empircal thinking”, (1994, pp.
50-51).
25It’s not this easy for McDowell for two reasons: first, because he defends the idea of conceptual contact
with the world from a charge that that would be idealism (lecture II, ‘The Unboundedness of the
Conceptual’). And secondly, because he provides a diagnosis of why there is felt to be a philosophical
problem in the idea of experience as conceptual access to the world. This has to do with conceiving of
experience as an interface between nature and reason. So for McDowell the philosophical work comes in
reconceiving these relations in terms of the idea of ‘second nature’. McDowell’s diagnosis is criticized by
Friedman (1996).
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If we can just help ourselves to the job descriptions of the seventeenth and
eighteenth century faculties of the mind, then the philosophical task in giving an account
of experience-based knowledge of the empirical world is just the traditional task of
epistemology. But—and McDowell is clear about this—there is a more profound and

more difficult philosophical task in giving such an account. One way to express the
problem is this: how could it make sense to suppose that within our mental life there are
states or occurrences that put us in a position to make genuine commitments about the
world through simultaneously being a mode of access to the mind-independent world and
yet also being taken up within our capacity for reflective, critical assessments of what to
think about the world? The idea of epistemic commitment seems to require both freedom
and constraint: freedom because making an epistemic commitment entails taking

epistemic responsibility, and taking epistemic responsibility requires that subjects be free
—that subjects are not compelled—in how they determine their judgements. And the
idea of epistemic commitment requires constraint because it requires that one could be
wrong, have made a mistake, and so be compelled to withdraw the commitment. In
making a commitment there is something to which one is answerable, and that to which
one is answerable entails constraint because it may require that the commitment be held
or withdrawn.
Consider contrasting cases, for example of experience which is not part of

sensibility: in imagination subjects are free to imagine as they will. But because subjects
are free in this way the idea of making commitments within imagination makes no sense
(one can imagine making a commitment but that is not to make a commitment). In
imagination there is no presumption that one is in touch with the world because how the
world is around us does not determine what we imagine. Experiential freedom threatens
loss of contact with the world. And so is an inappropriate basis for taking on epistemic
commitments. Or, from the other side, consider sensory irritations: experiential states
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that might lead one to scratch one’s skin, or withdraw one’s hand. In these cases its being
the experience that it is—a sensory irritation at one’s right arm—has to do with its
compelling a certain sort of response—a scratching—; although, of course, the
experience may be overridden by other parts of one’s mental life. It is because the
response is compelled that it makes no sense to say that in scratching one’s skin in
response to experience one is expressing a commitment grounded in sensory experience.
The difficulty in this case is not like the difficulty for imaginative experience, because the
experience of sensory irritation is certainly a form of contact with how the world is
around one. It nevertheless is not an appropriate basis for taking on epistemic
commitments about the world because the response it provides for (scratching,
withdrawal) is not something for which, in ordinary cases, the subject is responsible. The
idea of withdrawing the scratching makes no sense, so the idea of taking on a
commitment by scratching in response to sensory irritation makes no sense.
The freedom of imaginative experience entails that imaginative experience cannot
be a basis for epistemic commitment. And the constraint of experiential sensory
irritations entails that sensory irriations cannot be a basis for epistemic commitment. We
could, perhaps, consider hybrids of these two types of mental life which would involve
both experiential freedom and experiential constraint: mental occurrences that combined
elements of imagination and elements of sensory irritation. It should be obvious that the
hybrids are no better placed with respect to taking on epistemic commitments. Perceptual
experience is experience which is appropriate for grounding the commitments taken on in
judgement, and so requires both constraint (receptivity) and freedom (spontaneity), but it
seems that if we bring together elements of receptivity with elements of spontaneity we
get hybrid experiences that are also unsuited for epistemic commitment. Thinking along
these lines may lead us to wonder about the very possibility of perceptual experience. To
be told that there is in the mind a faculty of sensibility whose job it is to provide
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experiences of the right sort to warrant epistemic commitments seems, in this context,
like a poor joke.
Our question transforms the traditional ‘how do we know that our mental life is
not a dream?’ into the more basic ‘what would make it the case that our mental life is not
a dream?’ Or, what grip do we have on the very distinction between a mental life which
is a dream life and a mental life which is real? (What makes contemporary movies like
The Truman Show, eXistenz, The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix so anxiety-provoking
is not that they lead us to worry about whether what we took to be good reasons for our
beliefs about reality are really good reasons, but rather that they lead us to worry about
our grip on the very idea of reality. Not ‘how do I know that my life is real and not an
illusion?’, but rather, ‘what would it be for my life to be real?’. It’s not that we have got a
firm grip on the distinction between appearance and reality but are unsure of where that
distinction draws its line within our life. Worse: much of our contemporary philosophical
task has to do with the anxiety that we no longer understand the distinction between
appearance and reality.)
A consideration of the status of illusory sensory experiences, both with respect to
the traditional epistemological question and with respect to the question about the very
possibility of experiential content, may help us to understand the difference between
these two types of question. For the traditional epistemologist, the existence of illusions
poses a threat: how can we distinguish between illusory and veridical experience?; or,
might it not be that all of our sensory experience is illusory? Descartes’s concern is with
deception, and, for the cartesian, illusion is a kind of deception. So, the traditional
problem posed by dreams is an instance of the same kind of problem as that posed by
perceptual illusions. Contrast what we might call the problem of epistemic commitment:
how can there be, within our mental life, experiences—unlike dreams, and unlike
experiential hybrids of free-association and sensory irritation—that put us in a position to
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make epistemic commitments? (The anxiety that I claimed was reflected in parts of
contemporary popular culture is that our lives might be, or might become, lives in which
the possibility of commitment lapses). In this context illusions are not a source of
anxiety, except, perhaps, the kind of anxiety that might be felt for an endangered species:
perceptual illusions are instances of the kind of experience which places subjects in the
space of commitments. Perceptual illusions are already given as prima facie, defeasible,
commitments. So if there is a problem about undersanding how there could be such a
thing as veridical perceptual experience which provides warrants, then there is also the
same problem with respect to perceptual illusions. This problem does not arise for dream
experiences. Descartes’s anxiety is that there might be too much of the kind of thing that
illusion is (that everything might be deceptive); whereas anxiety about the possibility of
epistemic commitment is that there might be too little of the kind of thing that illusion is
(that nothing might provide for commitment).
McDowell offers what appears, initially, to be an ingenious solution to this
problem. Epistemic commitment does, he agrees, require both freedom and constraint,
and that is possible because perceptual experience involves the passive exercise of
conceptual capacities. That it is conceptual capacities that are exercised entails the
required connection to spontaneity, and that they are drawn on passively entails
receptivity. An assessment of this should consider both halves of McDowell’s

suggestion; here I will consider only the latter part, that an adequate role for receptivity—
that in perceptual experience we are in epistemic contact with the independent world—is
provided for by the passivity of experience:
I have stressed that experience is passive (Lecture I, §5). In that respect the
position I have been recommending coincides with the Myth of the Given. The
passivity of experience allows us to acknowledge an external control over our
empirical thinking... (lecture V, p.89).
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But when these [conceptual] capacities come into play in experience, the
experiencing subject is passive, acted on by independent reality [pp. 66-67]
… when we enjoy experience conceptual capacities are drawn on in receptivity, not

exercised on some supposedly prior deliverances of receptivity. And it is not that I
want to say they are exercised on something else. It sounds off key in this
connection to speak of exercising conceptual capacities at all. That would suit an
activity, whereas experience is passive. In experience one finds oneself saddled
with content. One’s conceptual capacities have already been brought into play, in
the content’s being available to one, before one has any choice in the matter .. it is
precisely because experience is passive, a case of receptivity in operation, that the
conception of experience I am recommending can satisfy the craving for a limit to
freedom that underlies the Myth of the Given. (p. 10)
I confess, after consideration, to being perplexed by this suggestion. Were it not for the
fact that McDowell’s remarks on the passivity of experience are introduced at exactly the
point where we are shown how to “dismount from the seesaw” (p.9) of the book’s central
problematic—a threatened oscillation between the myth of the given and coherentism—I
would interpret the claim that “in experience we find ourselves saddled with content” as
autobiography. But it is autobiography that is being asked to do a lot of philosophical
work.

One problem is that it is usually false that subjects are passive in experiencing the
world. Typical acts of perception are parts of subjects’ active explorations of the world.
In a footnote in Lecture I, McDowell allows that “experiencing the world involves
activity”, but adds that “one’s control over what happens in experience has limits: one
can decide where to place oneself, at what pitch to tune one’s attention, and so forth, but
it is not up to one what, having done all that, one will experience. This minimal point is
all I am insisting on” (p.10). Does this help? What’s at stake here is avoiding falling back
into the “craving for a limit to freedom that underlies the myth of the given”. How could
the ‘minimal point’ do that? It would have to mark off epistemic experience from belief
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in order to protect McDowell’s position from the threat of Davidson’s coherentism, but
it’s equally true of belief that “one’s control over what happens has limits”. I cannot just
bring myself to believe what I like. Nor have I exercised any control over many of the
beliefs that I do hold; having assimilated many of my beliefs in childhood or by a process

of social osmosis. Most of us have failed to do what Descartes recommended in his first
Meditation, and so, perhaps, we have been passive in the acceptance of most of our
beliefs. For any particular belief, we could always make it be “up to us”, but that is also
true of any particular experience; it is in the same sense up to us whether or not to
continue any particular experience, or to change the experience by changing the world or
our position in it. If the active involvement of the subject in belief is only a potential
then McDowell’s ‘minimal point’ fails to provide for a contrast between experience and
belief.

The difficulty is worse, because if perceptual experience, like much of belief, is
passive then non-epistemic experience is also passive in at least something like the same
minimal sense. Are we then to say that our passivity in dreaming suits our dreams for
epistemic contact with the world? Or that the “craving for a limit to freedom that
underlies the myth of the given” is satisfied because of our passivity in free-associating?
Or when an emotion washes over us, running its course quite independently of any
decision of ours, is that the kind of “external friction” required to make sense of
epistemic commitment? These parts of our mental lives are usually concept-involving,
too. Not only does passivity fail to mark a distinction between experience and belief, it
also fails to mark a distinction between mental episodes that are appropriate for epistemic
commitment and mental episodes that are inappropriate for epistemic commitment.

Now one might say that what is distinctive of sensory experience, and that suits it
to be a source of epistemic commitment is not its (claimed) passivity, but rather that the
conceptual capacities are taken up in receptivity. Yes, of course. But what does this word
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“receptivity” do for us? How does knowing that it is in receptivity that our conceptual
capacities are exploited resolve the paradox of freedom and constraint rehearsed earlier?
How did this word do that for us? Well, its not the word of course, but rather what we
understand by it. But what do we understand by it? And isn’t coming up with a coherent
understanding of receptivity a good part of our difficulty in giving an account of how
experience can ground epistemic commitment? That’s why McDowell emphasised
receptivity’s passivity, because in doing so he was telling us something about receptivity
that might suit it for the role it is supposed to play in the dialectic of Mind and World. If
appeal to the faculty of receptivity were itself sufficient explanation for what it is for
experience to put us in epistemic contact with the world then why bother with talk of
passivity? Passivity functions in Mind and World as the mark of the world’s impressing
itself on us: look again at the quotations from lecture I and lecture V. It is unfortunate that
passivity cannot do that work.26
How could McDowell go so badly wrong here? Once he has made the pivotal
move of supposing that the contents of experience are exclusively conceptual, other
moves are necessitated in order to distinguish his position from Davidson’s circle of
beliefs. McDowell feels compelled to mark the difference between how conceptual
contents are taken up in receptivity and how they are taken up in spontaneity, lest we lose
the crucial distinction between experience and belief. And in the grip of this
philosophical requirement, the idea that concepts are taken up actively in spontaneity and
passively in receptivity doesn’t seem such a bad one. As we will see, once we recognize
the distinction between the characteristic content of experience and the characteristic
content of thought the need for any property such as passivity simply evaporates.
26
It’s curious how programmatically similar is McDowell’s suggestion to that of the empiricists: that what
marks off perceptual experience from ideas is its vivacity
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There is another kind of difficulty in interpreting McDowell’s notion of
receptivity. Sensory experience had better not be a source of presentiments; a welling-up
within one of yens to take the world to be one way or another. (No-one has criticised the
presentiment model of experiential content better than McDowell himself. See his
(1998)). Yet isn’t that remark about his mental life—in experience one finds oneself
saddled with content—of a piece with the idea of experience as presentiments with which
one finds oneself? Suppose it were true that in sensory experience subjects just find
themselves with conceptual contents of various sorts (plus dispositions to express them
with assent). Would such subjects be well placed to sustain epistemic commitment about
the empirical world? Presentiment, or finding oneself with a yen to say such and such
about the world around one, is no source for taking on responsible, epistemic
commitments about the world around one. So if perception is to provide warrants for
judgement then perception must make its contents available to subjects as prima facie,
defeasible, commitments. One might wonder whether subjects who are passive as their
conceptual capacities are exploited in sensory experience are well-placed to take
responsibility for the implications in judgement of their sensory contents. Let’s suppose
that McDowell’s minimal passivity is no barrier here, but then we still need some account
of the kind of commitment characteristically suggested by sensory experience.
Traditionally an account of epistemic states requires an account of both the

content of the states and also the attitude towards the states’ contents. McDowell has
argued that the content of perceptual experience is conceptual, but what is the attitude
towards these conceptual contents? It cannot be that there is no attitude in sensory
experience because if that were so then having sensory experience would consist in just
finding oneself with contents of various kinds, and that can be no basis for taking
responsibility for those contents. Why trust contents that just pop up? (Contents ‘pop
up’ in dreams and whilst ‘spacing out’. They might be pleasurable or irritating, but pop-
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up contents cannot provide for a responsible epistemic life). The appropriateness of
epistemic commitment rests as much on the attitude as on the content. We have seen, for
example, that the attitude of imagination towards conceptual contents does not equip a
subject with prima facie epistemic commitment. Suppose McDowell were to say that the
attitude in perception is the same as, or similar to, the attitude adopted in judgement or
belief. Contents that are given to one in an attitude of judgement or of belief are certainly
given as prima facie, defeasible, commitments. So they are the right sorts of things to
provide warrants or justifications. But the author of Mind and World should not say such
a thing! He must mark off his position from that of Davidson, but if both the content and
the attitude in perceptual experience is the same as, or similar to, the content and the
attitude in belief, then perceptual experience would (as Armstrong thought) just be a kind
of belief. It would, at best, be perplexing how appeal to experience, so conceived, could
provide the “external constraint” that McDowell takes to be lacking in Davidson’s
account.

Well, couldn’t one say that the relevant attitude, which provides for epistemic
commitment, is the attitude of perception (perceiving that), or the attitude of receptivity?
Again, of course. But there would be an asymmetry between saying that the relevant
attitude in judgement is judging that (or in belief is believing that) and saying that the
relevant attitude in perception is perceiving that. To say that judging is the attitude of
judgement is not empty because we have a good understanding of how judgings should
relate to each other in the space of commitments. 27 It is because we have a relatively
good understanding of inference in theoretical and practical reasoning that talk of the
attitude of judging as a form of commitment is not empty talk. Forming a judgement has
27“The space of reasons” can sound hyper-intellectualist. And it would be a shame for a phrase to close
down our creativity in exploring how experience can lie within our spontaneity. We should adopt a broader
understanding of ‘reason’ than that provided by the intellectualist reading; it helps with this to consider to
what the notion of reason is answerable. Commitment is that to which our notion of reason is ultimately
answerable.
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structured consequences in the space of commitments, and we have explanations of what
we are doing in figuring out the epistemic consequences of any particular judgement. But
this is what we lack in the case of experience. What’s been troubling us in developing a
story about knowledge of the empirical world has been that we do not have a good
understanding of how sensory experience places us in the space of commitments; we do
not have a good understanding of the relations of warrant that may hold amongst
experiential states, or between experiential states and other kinds of content-involving
state. (That’s what lead Davidson to his bizarre view that experience stands only in
causal, not rational, relations to belief. So a response to Davidson, at least one that
doesn’t push us back into the myth of the given, had better provide what was lacking.)
It’s this asymmetry between judgement and experience that makes it not empty to say that
judging is the attitude of judgement, whereas it is empty to say that perceiving is the
attitude of perception. Or at least it is empty short of a logic of seeming (it seems that
things are so …) that accounts for the difference between conceptual beliefs and
conceptual seemings, while also explaining how seemings are prima facie placements
within the space of commitments. (So the argument of the last three paragraphs, like
McDowell’s argument against the nonconceptualist, has the form of a challenge).
If the content of perceptual experience is conceptual content, then what could the
attitude in perceptual experience be? Either it is an attitude that entails prima facie
epistemic commitment, or it is not. If it is, then the challenge becomes: how could an
attitude be an attitude towards a conceptual content and also an attitude which entails
prima facie epistemic commitment, and yet not be identical to, or very similar to, the
attitude in belief or judgement? If we call the attitude in sensory experience, that is an
attitude towards conceptual contents, “seeming” (‘it seems that …’), then how is it that
seeming is not just a less committed, or only conditionally committed, or defeasibly
committed, or doubtfully committed, form of belief? (For if it were one of these things,
Adrian Cussins

then once we have seen that passivity is no salvation, McDowell would fall foul to the
same objection as the coherentist). Or, on the other hand, the attitude in perceptual
experience is not an attitude that entails prima facie epistemic commitment. In which
case the contents of perceptions are given as presentiments—we find ourselves struck or
saddled with a conceptual content—but we have no reason to be committed to our
presentiments and so they cannot serve as warranting grounds for judgement. Either way
McDowell will have failed to distinguish his position from a position, like Davidson’s or
like the empiricist’s, that invites anxiety about having lost responsible contact with an
independent world.
Contrast the kind of account that has been unfolding in the earlier sections of this
paper. In that account we recognise two distinct kinds of content, because a theory of
content should ground its analyses in more than one kind of normativity: norms of
judgement, but also norms of activity. We should notice straightaway that corresponding
to these two kinds of normativity are two kinds of commitment: the kind of commitment
that is characteristic of judgement and the kind of commitment which is characteristic of
activity. In both cases one is committed: this is how the world is!, as one judges or as one
acts. In both cases the subject takes a stand with respect to how the world is, and in each
case the withdrawal conditions for the stand are fixed by the norms appropriate to that
kind of commitment. And subjects take on commitment with respect to themselves as

judging or acting subjects: both judgement and action are presentations of self, as well as
of the world.28 Both judgement and action manifest the epistemic credentials of a person.
(Consider the examples discussed in §4). But if this account is right then the content of
28Talk of commitment in activity, as a reflection both of how the world presents itself in experience, and of
how the self is presented, is familiar and non-technical in descriptions of activity. Here is one example
from Iris Young (1990): “Many times I have slowed a hiking party in which the men bounded across a
harmless stream while I stood on the other side warily testing my footing on various stones, holding on to
overhanging branches. Though the others crossed with ease, I do not believe it is easy for me, even though
once I take a committed step I am across in a flash.”
Adrian Cussins

experience is associated with one type of commitment and the content of thought is
associated with another type of commitment. Conceptual content and nonconceptual
content are taken up in distinctive forms of commitment which differ as the norms of
judgement differ from the norms of activity.
In effect my suggestion is this: activity stands to experience as judgement stands
to thought. Judgement (or belief) is the characteristic form of commitment for thoughts:
if I am committed with respect to a thought then I judge that it is true (I believe it).
Activity is the characteristic form of commitment for experiences: if I am committed with
respect to an experience then I act on it or through it. Kinds of content and kinds of
commitment are explanatorily inseparable from each other. When we think of thoughts
as reasons we think of thoughts as situated within a space of commitments which is
characteristic of thought-contents; a space which is structured by inferential connections
between judgements. So when we think of experiences as reasons we, likewise, should
think of the experiences as situated within a space of commitments which is characteristic
of experiential content; that is, within an activity-space. This is the key to understanding
how the characteristic content of experience can place subjects within ‘the space of
reasons’.
Adrian Cussins

CONCEPTUAL NONCONCEPTUAL
CONTENT CONTENT
EXPERIENCE
Cognitive Modality THOUGHT
BELIEF OR JUDGEMENT ACTIVITY

Kind of Commitment
REALM OF REFERENCE REALM OF MEDIATION

World-as
Figure 2: Two Kinds of Content, Two Kinds of Commitment
Given this account, we are in a position to understand how both experience and
belief involve prima facie, defeasible commitments, without being in any danger of
reducing the epistemic commitment involved in experience to the epistemic commitment
involved in belief. Sensory experience can provide warrant for belief that cannot be
provided by other beliefs because the epistemic commitment characteristically involved

in sensory experience is very different from the epistemic commitment characteristically
involved in belief: neither entails the other, and they are governed by different kinds of
withdrawal condition. So one kind of commitment is being grounded in another kind of
commitment. Friction results from contact between these two kinds of commitment:
failures of belief are not restricted to failures of coherence because a coherent system of
beliefs can fail with respect to the norms of activity. Because of the relations between
thought and experience, judgement can be assessed not only by the internal norms of
judgement, but also with respect to the norms of activity. Two kinds of commitment, two
Adrian Cussins

kinds of normativity, three kinds of failure. Belief, like the Los Angeles police
department, may assess itself by its own internal standards. Likewise experience. But
the friction that results from holding belief to the norms of activity, or holding experience
to the norms of belief provides for more trustworthy assessment.
I would like to end with an example suggested by my colleague, Gary Ebbs. Gary
is an outstanding pianist, with a Russian maestro as his teacher. On returning from a
Schubert concert, the Russian master says to Gary, “That wasn’t Schubert”. She wasn’t
denying that the score the musicians played from was written by Schubert, or that the
musicians were following the written notes. (She wasn’t denying the kinds of things that
a causal theorist of Schubert music would appeal to). She wasn’t asking for, or
questioning, evidence. What, then, was she saying? Should we understand this as a
denunciation of imperialist musicians by an eccentric, displaced Russian? No; she was
intensely and passionately ‘articulate’ about what she had in mind: sitting down at her
piano and playing as she pronounces, “Now, zis is Schubert!”
When she played at the piano the maestro provided Gary with a reason for her
judgement. A reason that—for one with sufficient skill to appreciate it—was persuasive,
was based on much knowledge, was subject to critical assessment and revision, and was
part of an ongoing discussion about music. Her playing opens the content music by
Schubert to reflective exploration. She shows by her skilled manifestation of music by

Schubert her reason for pronouncing at the concert “that wasn’t Schubert”. What was the
content of this reason? If we were to express it in words then we should talk about a
distinctive way, exhibited by the pianist, in which the activity of piano playing might be
structured. It’s easier to show what this way is than to state it in words, but it’s not
ineffable: after years of talking about music together we have our ways of describing the
different styles and authorities with which hands fly across keyboards. The reason was
available to Gary, as he listened and watched, as the content of his auditory and visual
Adrian Cussins

experience. This experiential content might be specified as a structuring in the activity
space of playing piano; a nonconceptual presentation of the world as mediated by
Schubert.
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Experience, Thought and Activity:: Their Content, Their Normativity and Their Characteristic Kinds of Commitment

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Experience, Thought and Activity 1

Experience, Thought and Activity:

Essays on Nonconceptual Content, MIT Press, 2002

Copyright Adrian Cussins

negatively in relation to conceptual content. Most discussions have followed this

suggestion. In this paper I give a symmetric discussion of the characteristic content of

generic type of mode of presentation which is distinctive of the nonconceptual content of

is distinctive of the conceptual content of thought. I describe the normative conditions

with the normative conditions that govern thought contents.

“judgement problem for nonconceptual content”. A theory of thought is as it is because it

independent world available to subjects of thought and experience.

§1 A (Too) Quick Argument for Nonconceptual Content

§2 Two Ways of Knowing about Speed

§3 Thoughts Present the World as Truth-Maker. And their conceptual constituents

§4 Experiences Present the World as Mediator. And their nonconceptual constituents

§5 Experiential Warrant and the Space of Commitments

§1 A (too) quick argument for nonconceptual content

if Φ is what is fully expressed by a definite description—the left-handed person with

by a singular term —Hermione Granger—. Here Φ is a descriptive content and Ψ is a

of experience (“nonconceptual content”), and a kind of content which is sometimes held

to be characteristic of thought (“conceptual content”). A subject’s cognitive relation to

content through an exploration of different kinds of experience-based knowledge about

generic distinction between kinds of content.2 So let us attempt a more general

conditions) are the normative conditions of thoughts. A defender of nonconceptual

presentations of the world.

(1) Closure under recombination of contents:

Thoughts are such that:

understands both Fa and Gb then T also understands the thoughts Fb and

complex thought and Gb then T also understands the thoughts in which Fb

or Ga or Gb are substituted for Fa in the complex thought.

least for Chomskyan reasons (transposed from language to thought): thought is

essentially productive. We are in a position to understand an infinite number of thoughts

that we have never entertained before.

suppose that thought content is essentially governed by the generality constraint.

6 T is able to understand both Fb and Ga because T’s understanding of Fa and Gb is conceptually

cat is capable of cognizing could stand.

presentation of the world and is governed by normative conditions (correctness

of argument is too vulnerable to a philosopher who characterizes, in part, their interest in

misconception about nonconceptual content: that nonconceptual content must be a

in some versions—that nonconceptual content is sub-personal7. The explanatory

demands of development—both ontogenetic and phylogenetic—may provide a

cognitive ladder to be kicked away once climbed.

recombination to be a motivated, proper constraint on conceptual content, the argument

range of examples of this sort. Or consider the sorts of Wittgensteinian examples of

kinds of recombination of contents which preserve understanding must be possible but it

argument treats as nonconceptual. Nonconceptual content would be distinctive only in

that it failed to be conceptual content: nonconceptual content would be defective

conceptual content. There would only be a single theory of content — a theory of

conceptual content — governed by a constraint like generality or closure, which applies

understood as constraints on content, and not as constraints on just conceptual content).

A robust defence of nonconceptual content requires motivating distinct explanatory

theories: one theory whose paradigmatic examples are examples of thought-based

cognition, and a distinct theory whose paradigmatic examples are examples of

experiential cognition; virtues which are not characteristic of thought-based cognition. I

has its own positive functionality.

conceptual content and for nonconceptual content.

§2 Two Ways of Knowing about Speed

lost for a moment somewhere inside my full-face motorcycle helmet, it dawned on me

travelling. I was knowingly making micro-adjustments of my speed all the time in

response to changing road conditions. These micro-adjustments weren't simply

given to me not as a truth-maker -- for example, a truth-maker of the proposition that I

moment-by-moment practical manifestation of my competence as a motorcyclist, and in

me as an object: as the truth-maker, 50 mph, or as what would be presented on the