Primitive Perceptual Concepts

The All Reflective Concepts Assumption is, on my view, the assumption that all concepts are inextricably tied to capacities for thought, language, and experience. In this thesis, I track the All Reflective Concepts Assumption through Kant, John McDowell (1994 and 2009), Tyler Burge (2010 and 2022), and Jake Quilty-Dunn (2020); I show how it causes these philosophers to run afoul of a number of intractable problems (which I call our ‘panoply of problems’), and I argue that a good solution is to reject the All Reflective Concepts Assumption and to embrace primitive perceptual concepts: non-reflective concepts, which are not inextricably tied to thought, language, and experience, and belong to perception alone. On my account – which is a distinctively evolutionary account – to perceive is to understand something about the world, with the aid of primitive perceptual concepts and without the aid of any higher reflective, or cognitive, capacities, such as thought, language, experience, or reflective concepts.