"The Philosopher on the Merry-Go-Round"

Abstract:

Nonconceptualist philosophers argue that thanks to evolutionary continuities between animals and humans, the nonconceptual contents possessed (by definition) by nonhuman animals should have remained throughout the evolutionary development of our species as a basic trait of our minds too. My claim in this paper is that arguing that nonhuman animals have nonconceptual contents in order to defend the presence of these in humans as the nonconceptualist attempts, would still leave open the question of how these nonconceptual contents are used by linguistic creatures. But this would bring the nonconceptualist to the exact point where she started: trying to show that there are mental contents that can appear in beliefs and/or in reasoning processes that are not conceptual or linguistic.