by Siegel in the SEP:
"Another point of debate raised by McDowell's concerns whether it is possible to form demonstrative concepts of the shade represented in experience in cases of illusion, when the shade represented in experience differs from the shade of the thing seen. If demonstrative concepts of color shades can pick out only shades actually had by the thing demonstrated (as Heck 2000 contends), then again McDowell's argument fails. However, it is again a matter of controversy whether demonstrative concepts are limited in this way. Yet another point of debate in this area is whether experience itself would be needed to anchor demonstrative concepts in the first place — in which case, it is said, they could not already be constituted by them (Heck defends this view)."
...and by Tye in his (2005):
"The conceptualist might respond that, whatever may be the case for the demonstrative expression`that shade', the demonstrative concept exercised in the experience is a concept of the shade the given surface appears to have. But, now, in the case of misperception, there is no sample of the color in the world. So, how is the referent of the concept fixed? The obvious reply is that it is fixed by the content of the subject's experience: the concept refers to the shade the given experience represents the surface as having. However, this reply is not available to the conceptualist about the content of visual experience; for the content of the demonstrative concept is supposed to be part of the content of the experience and so the concept cannot have its referent fixed by that content (Heck 2000, 496)."
The putative tension here is between "anchoring" and "constituting" ["being part of"]. I will take "anchoring" to mean "serving as the referent of" [as opposed to, say, having some epistemological meaning a la "serving as grounds for"].
The nonconceptualist claims that the fineness of grain of experience shows that there are nonconceptual contents, viz. contents of our experience which are not denizens of our volutary, thinking-and-imagining conceptual repertoire. The conceptualist reply is that we do have a concept for each shade Red(n), where n ranges across the many many (infinite?) values corresponding to lines on the spectrum. We don't have, say,individual proper names for them all, but instead, we can represent each Red(n) as ''that shade (of red)", where "that" is a demonstrative. Hence our concepts of the different Red(n)'s are demonstrative concepts.
Now consider the case of an illusion of Red(29). The content of the hallucinatory experience is obviously "o is Red(29)." Do we have a concept of Red(29)? We should ask: what does the "that" in "that shade"---which must be the concept we are deploying if we are deploying one at all---refer to? It cannot refer to anything in the real world, since by hypothesis there is nothing in the real world that we are seeing. Hence it must be (some constituent of) the experience itself which serves as the referent of "that". But then we do need the experience to supply the referent of the demonstrative---we do not already have a concept for each color we experience.
Clearly, something would be missing if the content of experience were something like
"object o has this color"
...if there is, ahem, no accompanying demonstrandum. Yet the sentence above is precisely what the accompanying conceptual counterpart of the experience is taken to be, containing only 'deployed concepts' of the agent's conceptual repertoire. Upshot: if we take the relevant conceptual state (probably belief) to rely on experience to supply referents for its demonstratives, then it cannot be the that very concept [the demonstrative one] which is part of the content of the experience. This would make experience self-referential; moreover, there just wouldn't be anything (else) for the demonstrative to refer to.
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