John Campbell has recently suggested that experiential content occupies a privileged position in our conceptual repertoire by virtue of the explanatory role that experience plays in our grasp of concepts of a mind-independent world. This echoes Russell's Principle of Acquaintance: in the case of simple unanalysable referring terms, a pre-reflective acquaintance with objects explains our capacity to understand referring terms. Given the Wittgensteinian considerations about ostensive definition in the early passages of the Philosophical Investigations, the Russellian view of semantics appears naïve, if not altogether mistaken. So it is interesting that Campbell tries to revive the Russellian view of semantics in light of these Wittgensteinian and Kantian considerations.
Campbell thinks that he has the resources to meet the Wittgensteinian and Kantian objections to the Russellian view by appealing to the notion of conscious attention. Conscious attention to an object is the same relation as Russell's pre-reflective acquaintance with the object, but there is one important element added: conscious attention is not only linked upwards to conceptual capacities, but it is also linked downwards to underlying information-processing mechanisms. This downward link to information-processing mechanisms, Campbell thinks, is what overcomes the problems that Russell had in the wake of Wittgenstein's objections. For Campbell, conscious attention is not only linked upwards to conceptual capacities, but it is also linked downwards to underlying information-processing mechanisms. This downward link to information-processing mechanisms supposedly restores uncritical realism, i.e. the view that the nature of the object fixes the concepts we apply to it. But what is the nature of this downward 'link'? Campbell thinks it is both causal and justificatory.
I am particularly interested in the justificatory nature of this link. The question Campbell asks is what justifies our use of a demonstrative concept to refer to a particular object. The answer he gives is that we consciously attend to that object, and not some other object, to which the demonstrative concept refers. Conscious attention to an object triggers off certain neural firings in our brain, and these neurons are justified in firing off given the properties of that object (including its location). The standard view on which justification is not thought to essentially involve the subject's conscious engagement with the world is the reliabilist view, so I take it that the only sense in which we can make sense of 'the use of computational procedures' as being justified is to think of justification in reliabilist terms. However Campbell also wants conscious attention of objects to justify our use of demonstrative concepts. Here we certainly do not want to think of justification in reliabilist terms, primarily because we normally think of the use of concepts as a reflective capacity. A thermometer reliably registers temperature without employing the concept of temperature. Using a concept involves the exercise of recognitional capacities, at the very least. Recognition involves the objective matter of concepts being available to the subject in conscious awareness, so justification with respect to concept-use must be more than reliabilistic. If Campbell does not have a unified notion of justification, then it becomes very difficult to see how his appeal to the downward link (between conscious attention and information-processing mechanisms) can constitute (1) a satisfactory response to Wittgensteinian ostensive definition considerations, and thus (2) a successful defence of uncritical realism. Aren't we simply back to a new mutant strand of the Myth of the Given?
I argue that there is a dilemma here. Either Campbell has a unified notion of justification or he does not. On the one hand, if Campbell is using a unified notion of justification here, then he perhaps succeeds in responding to Wittgensteinian ostensive definition considerations, but only at the cost of adopting a reliabilist notion of justification on which we end up with a thermometer view of concept-use. On the other hand, if it turns out that Campbell is indeed running together two very different (perhaps incompatible) notions of justification to explain how the nature of the object can fix the use of concepts we apply to the object, then it is difficult to see how the nature of the object does 'fix' -via our conscious attention to the object (which is supposed to be pre-reflective)- the concepts we apply to it. So he hasn't given a response to Wittgenstein's objection to the Russellian view of demonstrative meaning.