Abstract
A strong claim, often found in the literature, is that it is impossible to categorize perceptual properties unless one possesses the related concepts. The evidence from visual perception reviewed in this paper however questions this claim: Concepts, at least canonically defined, are ill-suited to explain perceptual categorisation, which is a fast, and crucially a largely involuntary and unconscious process, which rests on quickly updated probabilistic calculations. I suggest here that perceptual categorisation rests on non-conceptual sorting principles. This changes the claim that categorisation cannot occur without concepts: It does not preclude that the concepts remain necessary for categorisation, but opens the possibility that they are not and that those sorting principles could be here sufficient.
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Notes
See Machery 2009 for discussion.
Thought is here considered mostly as rational thought or reasoning, but the use of concepts might also other kinds of thinking processes, like conscious mind wandering and associative thinking.
See Moors and De Houwer ( 2006 ) .
Separating perceptual from verbal categorisation is non-trivial. This is discussed below, but see Davidoff ( 2001 ) for a more comprehensive review.
See Davidoff ( 2001 ) for a much more detailed discussion.
The question of timing also bears on the interpretation of the effect as a top-down effect, but this matter is orthogonal to the present concern (see Firestone and Scholl 2015 for a review).
As pointed by a reviewer, one needs to underscore the difficulty to control for stimuli and be reminded that the effects are usually observed at the green-blue boundary but not with other color sets.
Durgin ( 2000 ) .
As pointed by a reviewer, the lack of control comes from perceivers being unable to refrain from using these principles, not from perceivers not being able to voluntarily apply them.
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Deroy, O. Categorising without Concepts. Rev.Phil.Psych. 10, 465–478 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-019-00431-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-019-00431-2