Let us come back to the more particular line of investigation that has been our concern.
The intellectualist is quite right that in so far as seeing is expressive of understanding, this is because we bring concepts to bear in our seeing. But the intellectualist is mistaken in holding that this is because we categorize what we see, in the mode of judgement, by applying concepts. It is rather that we see with concepts. Concepts are techniques by which we take hold and secure access. Their job is not to represent what is there; their job is to enable what is there to be present to us. You can’t see the laser-projector if you don’t know what a laser-projector is. Your possession of the concept is a condition on the laser-projector’s showing up for you. It is the ability that lets you encounter what is in fact there.
Back to the example of text: your grasp of the relevant concepts enables you to read (to see what is there). Not because it gives you the resources to interpret or decode (although it does give you that). But because knowledge lets what might otherwise be unseen come into view. Knowledge can also, correspondingly, disable us. Your reading knowledge, for example, can make it difficult or even impossible to see the squiggles, the “mere marks”, which are also always there whenever you read.
And so across the board: we don’t apply concepts in judgement to what we see in order to represent things; our possession of the concepts is what enables us to make contact with them themselves. We see with our concepts. They are themselves techniques or means for handling what there is. Think of the concept in perception not as a category, or a representation, but a way of directly picking up what is there (to re-use and rehabilitate Gibson’s 1986 idea).
And so also for the active modality. My understanding gets expressed in what I do and it gets expressed directly—for example, I exercise my knowledge of teacups in the way I handle this cup; I grasp the cup with my hands, and also with my understanding. My understanding gets put to work in the fact that I am able to do this, in the fact that I know how to do it.
Understanding, I would urge, is put to work, in these doings, directly. We don’t need to suppose an action is skilful or knowledgeable or expressive of understanding only when it is guided, as it were from without, by propositional knowledge—as if the understanding couldn’t inform our practical knowledge and our action directly.
And we are now finally in a position to understand why this is the case: for then we would be owed an account of how understanding is put to work in judgement. And here, we are just thrown back on what we can do to bring what is there for us into focus, to achieve its presence.