ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits Digṅāga’s ephocal appeal to non-conceptual content as a criterion for what is perceptually evident and provides a new interpretation of Digṅāga’s infamous distinction between the non-conceptual contents of perception and the conceptual contents of thought. I will here present reasons to eschew the admittedly tempting line of interpretation on which Digṅāga was motivated to make the distinction based on the same sorts of considerations which led epistemologists in our own time to speak, whether in praise or blame, of something “given.” Once we resist the temptation to rely on empiricist intuitions in our reconstructions, keeping in mind Digṅāga’s novel characterization of what conceptuality involves, we might allow ourselves a fresh reconstruction of the motivations underlying Digṅāga’s contrast between conceptual and non-conceptual content. Along the way to such a reconstruction, this chapter provides (a) an inferentialist re-description of Digṅāga’s historically novel account of what is involved in our possession and use of concepts and (b) a characterization of Digṅāga’s non-conceptual contents as a criterion of phenomenal presence. So equipped, this chapter concludes with a frankly speculative reconstruction of Digṅāga’s non-empiricist motivations for insisting on a distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual content, one which I shall characterize as a variety of therapeutic skepticism: a variety of skepticism that is not so much directed at our beliefs as it targets our vocabulary for describing experience in epistemic terms.
