Conceptual knowledge as emergence
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Zoltán Vecsey
Abstract
This paper aims to briefly survey the epistemological debate about the connection between perception and cognition. Contemporary representationalists agree that both perception and cognition can represent how things are in our environment. They customarily separate two types of content. In the standard version, the content of paradigmatic perceptual processes is held to be nonconceptual. On the other hand, our typical conscious processes, such as thinking or remembering, operate with a representational content that might be called conceptual content. According to Peacocke this disctinction may be used to explain how we can gain a priori knowledge about the world. I argue in the final section that this claim poses a considerable problem, because the notion of the a priori seems to be incompatible with the representationalist's overall position. For this reason I present a new — emergentist — version of Peacocke's thesis.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Articles in the same Issue
- Foreword
- Introduction: The concept of emergence in philosophical and semiotic context
- Conceptual knowledge as emergence
- Representation as emergence: Evoking and encoding past and history
- Emergence and reference in Whitehead's Process and Reality
- ‘The emergence of an organic form out of a fluid medium’: The dynamic concept of work of art in German Romanticism
- On a special case of meaning-emergence in the literary text: The function of semantic formations with ‘contradictory’ sense-orientation in the process of poetic meaning-evolution
- Did the gods go crazy? Emergence and symbols (a few laws in the symbolism of objects)
- Emergence as a phenomenon of cultural history and language
- Introduction: From linguistic semiotics to cultural semiotics: Semiotic and narrative studies in China
- Anxieties of modernity: A semiotic analysis of globalization images in China
- I Ching and the origin of the Chinese semiotic tradition
- Fictional narrative as history: Reflection and deflection
- The voice of ten years of history: A narrative-semiotic approach to the Eight Revolutionary Model Plays
- The narrative strategy of Chinese avant-garde novels: The case of Mo Yan
- Présentation
- Semiotic research in Morocco: An inventory
- Barthes ou Eco
- Semiotique de la reception et approche semantique du texte litteraire
- La dimension interprétante de l'expérience onirique dans la tradition onirocritique musulmane
- Social context, language, and semiosis in Wole Soyinka
- Le corps comme non-signe dans la tradition arabo-musulmane
Articles in the same Issue
- Foreword
- Introduction: The concept of emergence in philosophical and semiotic context
- Conceptual knowledge as emergence
- Representation as emergence: Evoking and encoding past and history
- Emergence and reference in Whitehead's Process and Reality
- ‘The emergence of an organic form out of a fluid medium’: The dynamic concept of work of art in German Romanticism
- On a special case of meaning-emergence in the literary text: The function of semantic formations with ‘contradictory’ sense-orientation in the process of poetic meaning-evolution
- Did the gods go crazy? Emergence and symbols (a few laws in the symbolism of objects)
- Emergence as a phenomenon of cultural history and language
- Introduction: From linguistic semiotics to cultural semiotics: Semiotic and narrative studies in China
- Anxieties of modernity: A semiotic analysis of globalization images in China
- I Ching and the origin of the Chinese semiotic tradition
- Fictional narrative as history: Reflection and deflection
- The voice of ten years of history: A narrative-semiotic approach to the Eight Revolutionary Model Plays
- The narrative strategy of Chinese avant-garde novels: The case of Mo Yan
- Présentation
- Semiotic research in Morocco: An inventory
- Barthes ou Eco
- Semiotique de la reception et approche semantique du texte litteraire
- La dimension interprétante de l'expérience onirique dans la tradition onirocritique musulmane
- Social context, language, and semiosis in Wole Soyinka
- Le corps comme non-signe dans la tradition arabo-musulmane
