Schulting, D. (ed.), Kantian Nonconceptualism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
In “Kantian Non-Conceptualism,” Robert Hanna advances a rigorous defense of non-conceptual mental content, contending not only for its existence but for its foundational role in cognition. Against the dominant “Conceptualist” thesis—which holds that all mental content is structured by and accessible only through conceptual capacities—Hanna articulates and defends a position he calls Absolutist Non-Conceptualism. More specifically, he develops a strong form of this view, according to which certain perceptual states are characterized by content whose semantic form and psychological function are irreducibly non-conceptual. Central to his argument is what Hanna terms “The Two Hands Argument,” which draws from Kant’s analysis of incongruent counterparts—notably the left and right hands—as perceptually distinguishable yet conceptually indiscernible. This phenomenon, Hanna argues, exemplifies a mode of cognition in which meaningful differences are grasped independently of conceptual mediation, thereby revealing the structural limits of linguistic or propositional articulation. By reconstructing this Kantian insight, Hanna proposes a theory of sensorimotor subjectivity in which essentially non-conceptual content undergirds and enables higher-order conceptual thought. This framework posits a bottom-up, perceptually grounded architecture of mind, thereby reorienting the traditional hierarchy between sensation and cognition and challenging prevailing models of mental representation.
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