Kant (1791) said that concepts are predicates of possible judgement. That’s what concepts are. They are creatures of judgement. He also believed that concepts play a basic role in cognition. They organize the data of sense. Without concepts, sensory experience would be empty sensation; without sensory influx, there’d be nothing for concepts to organize. For Kant, judgement gives the basic form of experience (Erfahrung).

Frege (1891) said that concepts are functions from objects to truth-values. In this he appeared to break with Kant. Concepts have nothing to do with judgement or with our cognitive organization. They are before all that. This is in tune with Frege’s well-known anti-psychologism, according to which grasping, understanding, judging, and communicating are of no relevance to logic or ontology.[1] But Frege doesn’t actually sever the link between concepts and judgement; he only frames it differently. Concepts figure in what is judged; they belong to judgeable content. So Frege preserves Kant’s link to judgement, but in a de-psychologized version.[2]

Frege’s anti-psychologism gets him into trouble.[3] The fact that concepts are not themselves psychological, in the sense of being ideas or associations or feelings, doesn’t mean that they are not tied to understanding or judgement, for nothing forces us to think of understanding and judgement as psychological in that sense. At the same time, the claim that concepts are “third-realm” entities gives little substance to the idea that they are, in the relevant sense, objective. Finally, if concepts are some sort of occult abstracta, then it isn’t at all clear how we can grasp them. And surely, whatever concepts are, it is the case that we can grasp them.

I’ll return to this set of issues later. But for now let us agree that for both Kant and Frege, concepts are tied to judgement, where this means something like: they are tied to categorizing, to explicit reasoning, to subsuming objects under concepts. Each of these thinkers offers an account of concepts, or of the understanding of concepts, in what I’ll call the mode of judgement. According to Kant and Frege, grasp or understanding of concepts finds its natural, true expression in judgement.

This paper takes its start from the observation that there would appear to be other modes of conceptual activity, other ways for understanding (for concepts) to find expression in our lives. At least on the face it, judgement would not seem to be the only mode of conceptual understanding.

Take, for example, perceptual understanding, or what we might call understanding concepts in the perceptual mode. Consider reading. It is difficult to tell, looking at the entrance to the Taj Mahal, which bits of squiggle are mere ornament, and which are writing in Classical Arabic. You can have this experience, it is available to you, only if you are not fluent in Classical Arabic, or in this style of Arabic script. This marks the spot of the basic phenomenon: there would seem to be a mode of understanding that is perceptual in nature. It is impossible, as a psychological matter, to see meaningful text as a mere squiggle. For the one who knows, for the one who can, meaningful words just show up.

Compare this with the case of a scholar studying Renaissance paintings in which writing is shown embroidered into the robes of magi and other fabulous figures. Are these scripts in a familiar language, or could they be marks from a forgotten one? Or are they pseudo-scripts? How do you decide? A keen problem and one that affords opportunity, for it demands reasoning, explicit categorization, and judgement.[4]

But nothing like that seems to be going on when you are reading. And the point is general: it operates at the level of our everyday seeing. It is difficult, maybe even impossible—psychologically speaking—to see familiar kinds of things around us as mere things. We always see them as this or that.

I don’t mean that when we see, we represent the things we really see around us as this or that, by bringing them under the relevant concepts, by categorizing them, as it were, in judgement. The point rather is that the things we see, the things around us, are familiar, known, comprehended, understood, and recognized, from the very outset. Concepts are geared in before we are even in a position to ask what something is or to make a judgement about it.[5]

So we have here a distinct way in which concepts, or the understanding, can be put to use outside the setting of judgement. Specifically, as I’ve said, this is an example of the deployment of concepts in the perceptual mode or, more simply, perceptual understanding.

Note, in saying perception is a non-judgemental mode of understanding, I don’t mean to deny that there might be an interdependence between the judgemental and the perceptual modes. Maybe only one who can judge can perceive and precisely because perception enables judgement. And maybe it is only of one who can have perceptual experience that we could ever say that he or she is in a position to judge about anything.[6] My point is that, on the face of it, judging is one thing, and perceiving another, and yet they are both ways of exercising the understanding.

There are other modes, as well.

Concepts also get deployed in what I call the active mode; understanding, that is, can find expression, immediately, in what we do. There is such a thing as practical understanding. And what makes the relevant understanding practical is not that it is an exercise in judgement on, as it happens, practical matters. What makes it practical, in my view, is that it is the gearing in or putting to work of one’s understanding in the absence of any call for, or even space for, reflection or judgement.

The dog walker’s knowledge of dogs, for example, is put to work in the way he or she adopts a gait that suits the dog and encourages or permits it to accomplish its sniffy, doggy business; and so also in the way the owner spontaneously shortens the leash as another dog approaches; it is exhibited, even, we might say, in the cool she keeps when the two dogs begin barking and straining at their leashes. Without a word, in the absence of deliberation, or explicit thought, the owner knowingly engages the nature of dogs.[7]

And there may be still other kinds of understanding, other styles of conceptuality. For example, there is also perhaps what we could call the emotional mode, or maybe it would be better to say the personal, or even interpersonal mode. Tears, feeling, injury, but also posture, standing distance to others, navigating in a social environment, can all show a highly refined attunement to situation, relationship, status, goals, tasks, and so on. It takes understanding to do all this, even though we rarely try to make this understanding explicit and even though, very probably, we cannot do this, even in ideal circumstances. Let us say that in this kind of responsive engagement with our social worlds we display understanding.[8]

To summarize: there is a case to be made for the existence of at least three, maybe four, distinct modes of understanding. There is the judgemental mode, the perceptual mode, and the active mode, and perhaps also the personal mode.