Concept Pluralism, Direct Perception, and the Fragility of Presence

This paper has three main aims. First, I criticize intellectualism in the philosophy of mind and I outline an alternative to intellectualism that I call Concept Pluralism. Second, I seek to unify the sensorimotor or enactive approach to perception and perceptual consciousness developed in O’Regan & Noë (2001) and Noë (2004, 2012), with an account of understanding concepts. The proposal here—that concepts and sensorimotor skills are species of a common genus, that they are kinds of skills of access—is meant to offer an extension of the earlier account of perception. Finally, I describe a phenomenon—fragility—that has been poorly understood, but whose correct analysis is critical for progress in the theory of mind (both perception and cognition).