Published in Y. Gunther (ed)

Essays on Nonconceptual Content, MIT Press, 2002

Copyright Adrian Cussins

Experience, Thought and Activity

Adrian Cussins

Adrian@haecceia.com

§1 A Preface to C3[1]

The “Connectionist Construction of Concepts” (‘C3’) was published twelve years ago when the phrase “nonconceptual content” was used only by a small group of mostly Oxonian philosophers. It has become quite popular recently, and on both sides of the Atlantic, although it is still the case that the proper demeanor to be worn by the analytic philosopher on confronting the phrase is an air of perplexity; a concession has been made in agreeing to talk about such a thing. A greater sense of perplexity would be a good thing: too much of the literature around nonconceptual content has been conducted as if we already understand the basic notions used to introduce the idea of nonconceptual content: content, mode of presentation, a way in which something may be given, …. We could divide the literature into two camps: those who assume that notions introduced for the theory of thought are well understood and, with appropriate modification, these notions can be adapted to characterise nonconceptual content. And a camp which holds that confrontation with the phenomena of nonconceptual content shows that our understanding of these notions is deficient and that we have a whole lot of basic work to do in reconfiguring the theory of content. Do we have a grip on the very idea of content that doesn’t already presuppose that all content is built out of concepts? If we try to work with such a general notion of content, what then are conceptual contents? Are we entitled to assume that resources introduced in a Fregean and neo-Fregean context (the intuitive criterion of difference, reference, correctness conditions…. ) are robust enough to figure unproblematically in a project that many neo-Fregeans (for example, Dummett) think is fundamentally misconceived?

I’d recommend the second camp. It’s difficult, but philosophically it is more exciting. It also helps open up a space for conversation between different philosophical traditions. The formal tradition in analytic philosophy has truth as its central concept, whereas concepts of practice and activity are central in the phenomenological tradition. Coming to see how truth and activity can figure as concepts with the same importance in a theory of meaning can only enhance such a conversation.

Don’t be put off by funny terms like ‘s-domain’ (or, what it has now become, “realm of mediation”) – they’re just devices to help throw open the notion of content; to free it from the presupposition that we begin our investigation of nonconceptual content already understanding the very idea of content. Don’t get hung up on the definitions of conceptual and nonconceptual properties; they’re only a place to start, and they’re only definitions. What matters is what happens to concepts like reference, or object, or world, when we accept that our responsibility is towards a theory of content in which experience, thought and activity figure equally. Once you come to see that there are very different generic kinds of content nothing in philosophy ever remains the same.

Another prefatory remark: the phrase ‘the theory of content’ is loaded with all sorts of more-or-less backgrounded exclusions and inclusions. That’s too heavy to address here, except this: the ‘content’ of an experience or thought is sometimes distinguished from the ‘object’ of the experience or thought. It is noticed that the same object can be ‘given’ in different ways, or ‘presented’ under different ‘manners’ or ‘modes’. It is then supposed that a specification of the experience or thought should specify two things: which objects (and properties, etc.) it concerns and in what manner those objects are presented. The theory of content properly concerns only the latter; something like a theory of reference is needed for the former. This is a mistake. A theorist of information may be entitled to such a separation of tasks; a theorist of information may be entitled to speak of which objects and properties are in question without having to address questions about cognitive access (and an information-processing psychologist may address questions of cognitive access but not objectivity) . But a theory of content is a theory of cognition: the concepts of content and of knowledge are tied together: distinctions in kinds of content are, essentially, distinctions amongst kinds of knowledge. A theorist of content must not speak of objects of content except through speaking of forms of epistemic access. This is the flip-side of an old but crucial insight of neo-Fregeans: if the reference of an expression is specified carefully it is not a separate task to specify the sense of the expression (the sense will have been shown in the statement of the reference). The right specification of what the referent is will also reveal how the reference is made; and it is crucial to understanding semantics to see that this is so. Likewise: if you get right the specification of the mode of presentation (the content) then something would have gone wrong if, having done that, the theorist had to go on to specify the reference. A specification of content is a specification of cognitive availability. If the reference was not captured in the correct specification of cognitive access (the epistemic presentation) then the reference is not cognitively accessible, so is not part of the content, and so should not be specified as part of the content specification. If, on the other hand, the reference is captured in the specification of cognitive access, then it would be redundant (and misleading) to specify it all over again. Either way, ordered pairs whose first member refers to the ‘object’ of experience or thought, and whose second member refers to a mode or manner of presentation have no place in a theory of content. The right specification of how is also a specification of what is available in a cognition; and it is crucial to understanding the theory of content to see that this is so. (I exaggerate: this wouldn’t be so in an epistemically Cartesian or Lockean theory of content). It’s in this spirit that I float the following idea in this brief essay: that reference is not only a semantic notion but also a notion within the theory of content – that reference is a generic kind of content. (And once you see this you will see that it is not the only generic kind of content).

The point of a theory of content is to reveal cognitive accessibility to the world, and therefore should be given in terms of elements of subjects’ access to the world. For example, by means of concepts that the subjects possess. That’s how a theory of conceptual content specifies contents. But that a theory of nonconceptual content can make canonical use of concepts that are not possessed by the subjects of content does not mean that a theory of nonconceptual content is not in the exclusive business of specifying forms of cognitive access to the world. It does not therefore mean that a theory of nonconceptual content can liberate itself from content specifications in terms of the elements of subjects’ access to the world. What it does mean is that there are elements of subjects’ access to the world other than concepts. What are these elements? Well, that’s the right question to ask. It is, I think, kind of unfortunate that scenarios and protopropositions and Stalnakerian propositions and just about anything else you’ll find in the literature supposedly on nonconceptual content won’t help you with this question. So let’s go back to the beginning: what are the distinctive ways in which the world is made available when it is not made available conceptually?

§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 a policeman stopped me and asked, "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 inside my full-face motorcycle helmet, it dawned on me that this was in fact a difficult philosophical question. On the one hand, I did know, 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 me, and for which I was as epistemically responsible as I was for my judgements.

On the other hand, I did not know how fast I was travelling in the sense of the question intended by the policeman. I was unable to state my speed, in an epistemically responsible way, as some number of miles per hour. 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 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. 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. My knowledge of my speed wasn’t structured in that kind of way.

The right way to put this point is this: the speed of my motorcycle was not made available to me 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 and environmental 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 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. 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 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.

I have suggested that there is a double dissociation between two ways in which a subject may know about his or her speed. A subject (for example, myself as queried by the policeman) may possess experiential, activity-based knowledge of speed without objectual, propositional knowledge, even though both forms of knowledge are knowledge of the same speed. And a subject (for example, the incompetent motorcyclist who reads off the speed from the instrument dial) may possess propositional knowledge without experiential knowledge.

Not only does possession of one kind of knowledge not entail possession of the other, but there is even a tension between the two kinds of knowledge. They are taken up in very different, sometimes competing, cognitive orientations to the world. For example, a motorcyclist’s reliance on objectual knowledge (“50 mph”) of their speed would be 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.

In the case of a novice who has to infer the significance-for-motorcycling of their speedometer-given speed, the characteristic functionality of conceptual knowledge interferes with the characteristic functionality of experiential knowledge. 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[2]. That's its great cognitive virtue, but it also suffers from an equally great cognitive vice: it is situation-specific. 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 situation-specificity, 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 tension 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 (for example, senses) and between kinds of normative conditions (for example, truth and reference). Let’s think first about conceptual modes of presentation and conceptual normative conditions.

§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. There are two sides to the constitutive claim that truth is the governing norm for thought content. First, truth is the standard against which a thought is primarily assessed (its normative condition). But second, in judging or entertaining a thought a subject is conceiving of the world as that which would render the thought true. If truth is the governing norm of thoughts, then a subject who conceives the world through thinking a 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. 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).

So: 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, the world is given in thought as having conceptual structure.

What is it for the world to be given as having conceptual structure? Reference to an object is one type of conceptual relation because we are forced to appeal to objectual reference in order to capture the rational structure of truth, for example in capturing inferential relations amongst propositions. So, if the world is presented to one as that which would render true a thought, then the world may be given as containing a particular object. 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.

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, 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.

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. ... Reference to the realm of reference does double duty.

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. 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, and therefore as having referential structure. 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?

§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 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. 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![3]) 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, 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 neither 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.

“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 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 collisions, system crashes or breakdowns. These knowledge failures are disruptions in a competent flow of activity; disruptions which may, or may not, have much to do with false judgement.

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 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). Thus, contents that present the environment-for-greeting-the-visitor present a single part of the world as a realm of reference AND as a realm of mediation: two distinct ontological structures, and two distinct modes of access to the world.

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 than or less than the legal speed.[4] 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.

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 grip on the shape of the normativity comes only through our understanding of the trails of activity. 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. The forms of guidance in activity are explanatorily prior to the mundane norms of activity; this is what makes them mundane norms.

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.

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 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’. 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 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 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 these matters only as shapings of activity-trails.

Trails within the space of a scientific laboratory, for example, are structured by the social routines of maintaining the cleanliness of pipettes and beakers as much as by the physical space of the laboratory. And they are structured by the skilled routines involved in maintaining the ‘data-trails’ in which test-tube labels are marked, transferred to logs and computer, and transformed into graphs and statistics. 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 relations between these norm-governed contents. 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 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. (“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.

	Conceptual Content	Nonconceptual Content
Norms (Governing Normativity)	Truth (& other elite norms)	Activity Guidance (& Skill / mastery & other mundane norms)
World given as … (content specified by reference to …)	Realm of Reference	Realm of Mediation
Modes of Presentation (Constituent Structure)	Referents: particular objects, properties, etc.	Activity Trails

Figure 1: Distinguishing Two Kinds of Content

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[1] Only about one fifth of C3 is republished here. The material in this ‘preface’ is also truncated in order to help keep down the length of this collection on nonconceptual content.

[2] Irene Applebaum suggested the following kind of resistance: consider a golfer who is losing to their opponent who asks, “Do you inhale or exhale on your backswing?”

[3] 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 conceptual content of the demonstrative.

[4] The 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!