What's in a Concept? Conceptualizing the Nonconceptual in Buddhist Philosophy and Cognitive Science

Abstract

A recurrent problem in the philosophical debates over whether there is or can be nonconceptual experience or whether all experience is conceptually structured or mediated is the lack of a generally accepted account of what concepts are. Without a precise specification of what a concept is, the notion of nonconceptuality is equally ill defined. This problem cuts across contemporary philosophy and cognitive science as well as classical Indian philosophy, and it affects how we go about philosophically engaging Buddhism. Buddhist philosophers generally argue that our everyday experience of the world is conceptually constructed, whereas “nonconceptual cognition” (nirvikalpa jñāna) marks the limits of conceptuality. But what precisely do “conceptual” and “nonconceptual” mean? Consider that “concept” is routinely used to translate the Sanskrit term vikalpa; nirvikalpa is accordingly rendered as “nonconceptual.” But vikalpa has also been rendered as “imagination,” “discriminative construction,” “discursive thought,” and “discrimination.” Related terms, such as kalpanā (conceptualization/mental construction) and kalpanāpoḍha (devoid of conceptualization/mental construction), have also been rendered in various ways. Besides the question of how to translate these terms in any given Buddhist philosophical text, how should we relate them to current philosophical or cognitive scientific uses of the term “concept”? More generally, given that the relationship between the conceptual and the nonconceptual has been one of the central and recurring issues for the Buddhist philosophical tradition altogether, can Buddhist philosophy bring fresh insights to our contemporary debates about whether experience has nonconceptual content? And can contemporary philosophy and cognitive science help to illuminate or even resolve some older Buddhist philosophical controversies? A comprehensive treatment of these questions across the full range of Buddhist philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science would be impossible. I restrict my focus to certain core ideas from Abhidharma, Dharmakīrti’s apoha theory, and Yogācāra, as refracted through current philosophical and cognitive science views of concepts. I argue for the following five general theses. First, cognitive science can help us to clarify Abhidharma issues about the relation between nonconceptual sense perception and conceptual cognition. Second, we can resolve these Abhidharma issues using a model of concept formation based on reading Dharmakīrti through cognitive science glasses. Third, this model of concept formation offers a new perspective on the contemporary conceptualist versus nonconceptualist debate. Fourth, Yogācāra offers a conception of nonconceptual experience absent from this debate. In many Yogācāra texts, awareness that is said to be free from the duality of “grasper” (grāhaka) and “grasped” (grāhya) is nonconceptual. None of the contemporary philosophical arguments for nonconceptualism is adequate or suitable for explicating this unique kind of nonconceptuality. Thus, Yogācāra is relevant to what has been called the problem of the “scope of the conceptual,” that is, how the conceptual/nonconceptual distinction should be drawn. For this reason, among others, Yogācāra has something to offer philosophy of mind. Moreover, using cognitive science, we may be able to render some of the Yogācāra ideas in a new way, while in turn recasting ideas from cognitive science. Fifth, in pursuing these aims, I hope to show the value of thinking about the mind from a cross-cultural philosophical perspective. Sixth, from an enactive cognitive science perspective informed by Buddhist philosophy, a concept is not a mental entity by which an independent subject grasps or represents independent objects, but rather one aspect of a complex dynamic process in which the mind and the world are interdependent and co-emergent poles.

Compassion and skillful means: Cultural adaptation, psychological science, and creative responsiveness

“…As a practitioner familiarizes with non-dual levels of awareness, "subsequent awareness" is often described as experiencing things as like an illusion or a dream-things continue to appear in dualistic ways, but without grasping to them as such (Dunne, 2006;Makransky, 1997, pp. 97-100;Thompson, 2020). That is, the practitioner still experiences reliable appearances of the external world, which supports functional action.…”

Taking non‐conceptualism back to Dharmakīrti

“…conceptual content (cf. Coseru 2012;Spackman 2021;Thompson 2020). Here, we've only considered Dharmakīrti's account of non-conceptual perceptual content as developed under the presumption that the function of sense perception is to represent objects in the external world.…”

Implicit-explicit gradient of nondual awareness or consciousness as such

“…Among different ways of knowing and experiencing, the two are radically different: an indirect way, mediated by mental representations and processes that operate on them (Shea 2018), and a more direct way, without mediation by mental representations, via nondual awareness or consciousness as such (Dunne 2015;Thompson, 2021;Josipovic 2014;. In this sense, consciousness as such is a type of knowing, a basic non-conceptual, nonpropositional awareness, without reified dualistic structuring of knowing and experiencing into subject-object, self-other duality that characterizes the representational knowing.…”

“…This direct non-representational reflexivity is inherent in consciousness as such as its main property, and is non-transitive, without subject-knowingobject structure (Anspal 2005;Fasching 2020;Higins 2011;Laish 2015;MacKenzie 2015;Williams 2000). Thus, this is neither the reflective nor the pre-reflective consciousness as usually understood, as these are based on mental representations (but see Dreyfus in Thompson 2021 for an update on pre-reflective). The inherent reflexivity of nondual awareness, also termed as self-knowing or self-recognition (Williams 2000;Kshemaraja and Singh 1990) can become activated and awareness recognizes itself, either when isolated from other phenomenal content during a minimal phenomenal experience, or when present with full phenomenal content during ordinary waking state (Josipovic 2019;Josipovic and Miskovic, 2020;Metzinger, 2020;Dunne Thompson Schooler, 2018).…”

“…Nondual awareness has been compared to a mirror, while phenomena that appear to it have been compared to reflections in the mirror (Josipovic, 2016). Its manner of knowing phenomena can be described as mere reflecting or registering, without categorization or further conceptual elaboration, that is, without associating, evaluating, forming decisions, or taking itself as a reified subject that knows phenomena as reified objects (for a detailed discussion, and disambiguation from bare non-conceptuality, see Thompson 2021). Enaction, simulation and resonance, or a combination of these, have been proposed as mechanisms of the non-representational knowing, and may be mechanisms of nondual awareness as well.…”