1 Conceptual Capacities in Perception

1. Our perceptually based beliefs are intelligible as manifestations of rationality. We can make sense of them by putting them in an explanatory nexus with perceptual experience. If someone has a perceptually based belief, she believes something because her experience reveals to her, or at least seems to reveal to her, that things are as she believes them to be. And that “because ” introduces an explanation that depends on the idea of rationality in operation. I think crediting our perceptual experience with this rational significance is a fundamental insight of empiricism. I have argued that in order to accommodate it, we need to conceive our perceptual experience as an actualization, in sensory consciousness, of conceptual capacities.1 This conception of our perceptual experience bears a resemblance to Kant’s conception of empirical intuitions. In the first Critique2 (especially clearly in the Transcendental Deduction), Kant conceives empirical intuitions as configurations in sensory receptivity that are categorially structured. For Kant, intuitions belong together with judgments in this respect: what makes their objective purport possible is that they have categorial unity. To put a Kantian thought in a contemporary idiom, the content of intuitions is of the same general kind as the content of judgments. And of course the content of judgments is conceptual. This echo of Kant brings out a connection with the theme of creativity. Kant introduces the understanding, the seat of conceptual capacities, by contrasting it with the receptivity of sensibility. He describes the understanding as “the mind’s power of producing representations from itself, the spontaneity of knowledge ” (A51/B75). Even more directly, he says that concepts are “based on the spontaneity of thought ” (A68/B93)