ABSTRACT
The starting point of the dispute between conceptualists and non-conceptualists resides in a number of related platitudes—largely shared on both sides—about how concepts are connected with thoughts and beliefs. For conceptualists, the functions concepts play in one's psychology aren't limited to thoughts and beliefs: the realm of the conceptual extends to perception and sensory awareness too. Many arguments take as their explicit target the view that perceptual experiences have a conceptual content (content conceptualism), but end up, if successful at all, discarding at most the view that such experiences are conceptual states (state conceptualism): there is, that is, a recurrent but illegitimate shift between content conceptualism and state conceptualism, the worry goes. Demonstrative concepts have proven a useful tool for conceptualists: one which helps escape a host of related objections about fine-grained experiences, and sheds some light on what concepts might be deployed in experience and how.
