I tried to write a post on the distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive and got completely tangled up.  So, instead, I am taking a step backward and addressing the relation between percept and concept, where I feel on surer ground.  I will follow up this post with another on fact/value.  And then, with those two pairings sorted out, I may be able to say something coherent about the cognitive/non-cognitive pairing.

So here goes.  A percept is what is offered to thought by one of the five senses.  I see or smell something.  The stimulus for the percept is, in most but not all cases, something external to myself. Let’s stick to perception of external things for the moment.  I see a tree, or smell a rose, or hear the wind whistling through the trees.  I have what Hume calls “an impression.”

I have always wanted to follow the lead of J. L. Austin in his Sense and Sensibilia.  In that little book, Austin takes on the empiricist tradition that has insisted, since Locke, that one forms a “representation” or an “idea” (that is the term Locke uses) of the perceived thing. (In the philosophical tradition, this gets called “the way of ideas.”) In other words, there is an intermediary step.  One perceives something, then forms an “idea” of it, and then is able to name, think about, or otherwise manipulate that idea.  The powers of thought and reflection depend upon this translation of the impression, of the percept, into an idea (some sort of mental entity.)  Austin, to my mind, does a good job of destroying that empiricist account, opting instead for direct perception, dispensing with the intermediary step of forming an idea–and thus appealing to some kind of “mental state” to understand perception. 

But Kevin Mitchell in Free Agents (Princeton UP, 2023) makes a fairly compelling case for raw percepts being transformed into “representations.”  First, there are the differences in perceptual capabilities from one species to another, not to mention differences among members of the same species.  If I am more far-sighted than you, I will see something different from you.  True, that doesn’t necessarily entail indirection as contrasted to direct perception.  But it does mean that the “thing itself” (the external stimuli) does not present itself in exactly the same guise to every perceiving being.  What is perceived is a co-production, created out of the interaction between perceiver and perceived.  There is no “pure” perception.  Perception is always an act that is influenced by the sensory equipment possessed by the perceiver along with the qualities of the thing being perceived. Descriptions of how human sight works makes it clear how much “work” is done upon the raw materials of perception before the “thing” is actually seen. And, of course, we know that there are colors that the color-blind cannot perceive and noises that are in most cases beyond human perceptual notice.

Second, the experiences of both memory and language speak to the existence of “representations.”  We are able to think about a perceived thing even in its absence.  To say the word “elephant” is to bring an elephant into the room even when that elephant is not physically present.  Similarly, memory represents to us things that are absent.  Thus, even if we deny that the perception of present things has an intermediary step of transforming the percept into a “representation,” it seems indubitable that we then “store” the immediate impressions in the form of representations that can be called to mind after the moment of direct impression. 

Finally, the existence of representations, of mental analogues to what has been experienced in perception, opens the door for imagination and reflection.  I can play around with what perception has offered once I have a mental representation of it.  I can, in short, think about it.  The sheer weight of facticity is sidestepped once I am inside my head instead of in direct contact with the world.  A space, a distance, is opened up between perceiver and perceived that offers the opportunity to explore options, to consider possible actions upon, manipulations of, what the world offers.  Representation provides an ability to step back from the sensory manifold and take stock.

So it would seem that Austin’s appealing attempt to dispense with the elaborate machinery of empiricist psychology won’t fly.  As accounts of how human vision works show, too much is going on to make a “direct” account of perception true to how perception actually works. Stimuli sensed by the senses are “processed” before being registered, not directly apprehended.

So the next issue is what “registering” or “apprehending” consist of.  But first a short digression.  We typically think of perception as the encounter with external things through one of the five senses.  But we can also perceive internal states, like a headache or sore muscle.  In those cases, however, perception does not seem to be tied to one of the five senses, but to some sort of ability to monitor one’s internal states.  Pain and pleasure are the crudest terms for the signals that trigger an awareness of internal states.  More broadly, I think it fair to say that the emotions in their full complex panoply are the markers of internal well-being (or its opposite or the many way stations between absolute euphoria and abject despair).  Emotions are both produced by the body (sometimes in relation to external stimuli, sometimes in relation to internal stimuli) and serve as the signal for self-conscious registering of one’s current states.  It’s as if a tree was not just a tree, but also a signal of “tree-ness.”  Anger is both the fact of anger and a signal to the self of its state of mind in response to some stimuli.  Certain things in the world or some internal state triggers an emotion—and then the emotion offers a path to self-awareness.  So there appears to be an “internal sense capacity,” ways of monitoring internal states and “apprehending” them that is parallel to the ways the five traditional senses provide for apprehending the external world. 

What, then, does it mean to “apprehend” something once the senses have provided the raw materials of an encounter with that thing?  Following Kant, apprehension requires a “determinate judgment.”  The percept is registered by the self when the percept is conceptualized.  Percept must become concept in order to be fully received.  To be concrete: I see the various visual stimuli that the tree offers, but I don’t apprehend the tree until I subsume this particular instance of a tree into the general category/concept “tree.”  I “recognize” the tree as a tree when I declare “that’s a tree.”  The tree in itself, standing there in the forest, does not know itself as a tree.  The concept “tree” is an artifact of human language and human culture.  Percepts only become occasions for knowledge when they are married to concepts.  Pure, non-conceptualized, percepts are just raw material—and cannot be used by human thought.  In other words, back to the representation notion.  Until what perception offers is transformed into a representation, it is unavailable for human apprehension, for being taken up by the human subject as part of its knowledge of the world. (Of course, famously in Kant, this yields the distinction between our representations and the “thing in itself.” The cost of “the way of ideas”–the cost that Austin was trying to overcome–is this gap in our knowledge of the world, our inability to see things independently of the limitations of human perceptual and conceptual equipment. Science attempts to overcome these limitations by using non-human instruments of perception (all those machines in our hospitals), but even science must acknowledge that what a machine registers, just like what a human registers, is a representation that is shaped by the nature of the representing apparatus.)

Determinate judgment appears to be instantaneous.  At least in the case of the encounter with most external things.  I see a tree and, without any discernible time lapse, identify it as a tree.  I have no awareness of processing the sensory signals and then coming to a judgment about what category the seen thing belongs to.  Percept and concept are cemented together.  Of course, there are some cases where I can’t at first make out what it is before me.  The lighting is bad, so I see a shape, but not enough more to determine what the thing is.  Such cases do indicate there is a distinction between percept and concept.  But in the vast majority of cases it is just about impossible to pry them apart.

For many artists from Blake on, the effort to pry the two apart is a central ambition.  The basic idea is that we see the world through our conceptual lenses—and thus fail to apprehend it in its full richness, its full sensual plenitude.  We filter out the particulars of this tree as we rush to assimilate the singular instance to the general category.  Thus painters strive to make us see things anew (cubism) or to offer ambiguous items that can’t be immediately or readily identified (surrealism).  They try to drive a wedge between percept and concept. “No ideas but in things,” proclaims William Carlos Williams—and this hostility to ideas, to their preeminence over things (over percepts), is shared by many modern artists.

One of the mysteries of the percept/concept pairing is the relative poverty of our linguistic terms to describe percepts.  We can in most cases quickly identify the tree as a tree, and we can certainly say that the tree’s leaves are green in the spring and rust-colored in the fall.  But more precise linguistic identification of colors eludes us.  We can perceive far more variations in colors than we can describe.  Hence the color chips at any hardware store, which offer 45 variants of the color we crudely call “blue” and invent fanciful names to distinguish each different shade from the rest.  The same, of course, holds for smells and for emotions.  We have a few, very crude terms for smell (pungent, sharp) but mostly can only identify smells in terms of the objects that produce such smells.  It smells flowery, or like hard boiled egg.  The same with taste.  Aside from sweet, sour, sharp, we enter the world of simile, so that descriptions of wine notoriously refer to things that are not wine. Notes of black currant, leather, and tobacco.  And when it comes to emotions we are entirely at sea—well aware that our crude generalized terms (love, anger, jealousy) get nowhere near to describing the complexities of what one feels.  Thus some artists (Updike comes to mind) specialize in elaborating on our descriptive vocabularies for physical and emotional percepts.  Thus a whole novel might be devoted to tracing the complexities of being jealous, to strive to get into words the full experience of that emotional state.

In any case, the paucity of our linguistic resources for describing various percepts, even in cases where the distinction between the percepts is obvious to us (as in the case of gradients of color), shows (I  believe) that there are ordinary cases where percept and concept are distinct.  We don’t immediately leap to judgment in every case.  Now, it is true that I conceptualize the various shades of blue as “color” and even as “blue.”  But I do not thereby deny that the various shades on the color chip are also different, even though I have no general category to which I can assign those different shades. 

Two more puzzles here.  The first is Wittgensteinian.  I had forgotten, until going through this recently with my granddaughter, how early children master color.  By 18 months, she could identify the basic colors of things.  Multiple astounding things here.  How did she know we were referring to color and not to the thing itself when we call a blue ball “blue”?  What were we pointing out to her: the color or the thing?  Yet she appeared to have no trouble with that possible confusion.  Except.  For a while she called the fruit “orange” “apples.”  It would seem that she could not wrap her head around the fact that the same word could name both a color and a thing.  She knew “orange” as a color, so would not use that word to name a thing.  Even more amazing than sorting colors from things, was her accuracy in identifying a thing’s color.  Given sky blue and navy blue, she would call both “blue.”  A little bit later on (two or three months) she learned to call one “light blue” and the other “dark blue.”  But prior to that distinction, she showed no inclination to think the two were two different colors.  And she didn’t confuse them with purple or any other adjacent color.  So how is it that quite different percepts get tossed into the same category with just about no confusion (in relation to common usage) at all? It would seem more obvious to identify sky blue and dark blue as two different colors.

The second puzzle might be called the ”good enough” conundrum.  I walk in the forest and see “trees.”  The forester sees a number of specific species—and very likely also singles out specific trees as “sick” or of a certain age.  His judgments are very, very different from mine—and do not suffer from the paucity of my categorical terms.  Similarly, the vintner may rely on an almost comical similes to describe the taste of the wine, but I do not doubt that his perceptions are more intense and more nuanced than mine.  A chicken/egg question here about whether having the concepts then sharpens the percepts—or if sharper percepts then generate a richer vocabulary to describe them.  Or the prior question: do we only perceive with the acuity required by our purposes?  My walk in the woods is pleasant enough for me without my knowing which specific types of trees and ferns I am seeing.  What we “filter out,” in other words, is not just a function of the limitations of our perceptual equipment, or the paucity of our concepts/vocabulary, but also influenced by our purposes.  We attend to what we need to notice to achieve something. 

Push this last idea just a bit and we get “pragmatism” and its revision of the empiricist account of perception and the “way of ideas.”  The pragmatist maxim says that our “conception” of a thing is our understanding of its consequences.  That is, we perceive things in relation to the futures that thing makes possible.  Concepts are always dynamic, not static.  They categorize what perception offers in terms of how one wants to position oneself in the world.  Percept/concept is relational—and at issue is the relations I wish to establish (or maintain) between myself and what is “out there” (which includes other people.) 

Back to the artists.  The repugnance many artists (as well as other people) feel toward pragmatism stems from this narrowing down of attention, of what might be perceived.  Focused (in very Darwinian fashion) upon what avails toward the organism’s well-being, the pragmatist self only perceives, only attends to, that which it can turn to account.  It thereby misses much of what is in the world out there.  The artists want to fling open the “doors of perception” (to quote Blake)—and see pragmatism as a species of utilitarianism, a philosophy that notoriously reduces the range of what “matters” to humans as well as reducing the motives for action to a simple calculus of avoiding pain and maximizing pleasure.  To categorize percepts immediately into two bins–these things might benefit me, these things are potentially harmful—is to choose to live in a diminished, perversely impoverished world.

Of course, Dewey especially among the “classic” pragmatists worked hard to resist the identification of pragmatism to a joyless and bare-bones utilitarianism.  The key to this attempt is “qualia”—a term that is also central in the current philosophical debates about consciousness.  “Qualia” might be defined as the “feel of things.”  I don’t just see trees as I walk in the woods.  I also experience a particular type of pleasure—one that mixes peacefulness, the stimulus/joy of physical exertion, an apprehension of beauty, a diffuse sense of well-being etc.  “Consciousness” (as understood in everyday parlance) registers that pleasure. Consciousness entails that I not only feel the pleasure but can also say to myself that I am feeling this pleasure.  Percepts, in other words, are accompanied by specific feelings that are those percept’s “qualia.” And through consciousness we can register the fact of experiencing those feelings.

The relation of concepts to “qualia” is, I think, more complex—and leads directly to the next post on the fact/value dyad.  A concept like “fraud” does seem to me to have its own qualia.  Moral indignation is a feeling—and one very likely to be triggered by the thought of fraud.  Perhaps (I don’t know about this) only a specific instance of fraud, not just the general concept of it, is required to trigger moral indignation.  But I don’t think so.  The general idea that American financiers often deploy fraudulent practices seems to me enough to make me feel indignant.

On the other hand, the general concept of “tree” does not seem to me to generate any very specific qualia.  Perhaps a faint sense of approval.  Who doesn’t like trees?  But pretty close to neutral.  The issues, in short, are whether “neutral” percepts  or concepts are possible.  Or do all percepts and concepts generate some qualia, some feelings that can be specified?  And, secondly, are all qualia related to judgments of value?  If we mostly and instantaneously make a judgment about what category a percept belongs to (what concept covers this instance), do we also in most cases and instantaneously judge the “value” of any percept?  That’s what my next post on fact/value will try to consider.