What's in a Concept? Conceptualizing the Nonconceptual in Buddhist Philosophy and Cognitive Science
Authors: Thompson Evan 
Published: August 2020

A recurrent problem in the philosophical debates over whether there is or can be nonconceptual experience or whether all experience is conceptually structured or mediated is the lack of a generally accepted account of what concepts are. Without a precise specification of what a concept is, the notion of nonconceptuality is equally ill defined. This problem cuts across contemporary philosophy and cognitive science as well as classical Indian philosophy, and it affects how we go about philosophically engaging Buddhism. Buddhist philosophers generally argue that our everyday experience of the world is conceptually constructed, whereas “nonconceptual cognition” (nirvikalpa jñāna) marks the limits of conceptuality. But what precisely do “conceptual” and “nonconceptual” mean? Consider that “concept” is routinely used to translate the Sanskrit term vikalpa; nirvikalpa is accordingly rendered as “nonconceptual.” But vikalpa has also been rendered as “imagination,” “discriminative construction,” “discursive thought,” and “discrimination.” Related terms, such as kalpanā (conceptualization/mental construction) and kalpanāpoḍha (devoid of conceptualization/mental construction), have also been rendered in various ways. Besides the question of how to translate these terms in any given Buddhist philosophical text, how should we relate them to current philosophical or cognitive scientific uses of the term “concept”? More generally, given that the relationship between the conceptual and the nonconceptual has been one of the central and recurring issues for the Buddhist philosophical tradition altogether, can Buddhist philosophy bring fresh insights to our contemporary debates about whether experience has nonconceptual content? And can contemporary philosophy and cognitive science help to illuminate or even resolve some older Buddhist philosophical controversies? A comprehensive treatment of these questions across the full range of Buddhist philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science would be impossible. I restrict my focus to certain core ideas from Abhidharma, Dharmakīrti’s apoha theory, and Yogācāra, as refracted through current philosophical and cognitive science views of concepts. I argue for the following five general theses. First, cognitive science can help us to clarify Abhidharma issues about the relation between nonconceptual sense perception and conceptual cognition. Second, we can resolve these Abhidharma issues using a model of concept formation based on reading Dharmakīrti through cognitive science glasses. Third, this model of concept formation offers a new perspective on the contemporary conceptualist versus nonconceptualist debate. Fourth, Yogācāra offers a conception of nonconceptual experience absent from this debate. In many Yogācāra texts, awareness that is said to be free from the duality of “grasper” (grāhaka) and “grasped” (grāhya) is nonconceptual. None of the contemporary philosophical arguments for nonconceptualism is adequate or suitable for explicating this unique kind of nonconceptuality. Thus, Yogācāra is relevant to what has been called the problem of the “scope of the conceptual,” that is, how the conceptual/nonconceptual distinction should be drawn. For this reason, among others, Yogācāra has something to offer philosophy of mind. Moreover, using cognitive science, we may be able to render some of the Yogācāra ideas in a new way, while in turn recasting ideas from cognitive science. Fifth, in pursuing these aims, I hope to show the value of thinking about the mind from a cross-cultural philosophical perspective. Sixth, from an enactive cognitive science perspective informed by Buddhist philosophy, a concept is not a mental entity by which an independent subject grasps or represents independent objects, but rather one aspect of a complex dynamic process in which the mind and the world are interdependent and co-emergent poles.