Representationalism about Consciousness

Abstract

<p>According to representationalists, sensory consciousness is a matter of representing the world to be a certain way. Some (Armstrong, Tye, Dretske) have suggested that representationalism fits well with the idea that consciousness can be reduced to something physical. Others think that representationalism makes the mind–body problem harder because our usual models for reducing representation do not apply in the special case of conscious representation. This chapter formulates representationalism, discusses an argument for it, and considers standard objections. The chapter concludes by looking at <italic>reductive</italic> and <italic>nonreductive</italic> representationalism.</p>

Autonoesis and episodicity: Perspectives from philosophy of memory

“…One thing that is worth noting about content-based accounts is that they seem to align well with existing representationalist or intentionalist accounts of consciousness, according to which the phenomenology of mental states is explained by what those states represent (see Lycan, 2019, Pautz, 2020. This point is made explicitly by Fern andez (2019), who takes this to be an important motivation for his approach.…”

Whither naïve realism? – I

“…1313Some think that perception obeys constraints that belief does not. For example, while a confused person might believe that a surface has two incompatible colors, allegedly no one can perceptually experience a surface as being this way (Pautz 2020). Perhaps this could be leveraged into an argument for naïve realism, but we will not investigate it here.…”

Harmony in a panpsychist world

“… 14 For descriptions of scenarios in which experience-involving correlations are not harmonious, see Pautz ( 2015 ). …”

“… 26 Functionalist, teleological, and design explanations of harmonious correlations are also considered by Goff ( 2018 ). Pautz ( 2015 ) considers a design explanation and suggests a functionalist explanation on behalf of physicalists. …”

“…For simplicity, I will just discuss the design hypothesis in the main text. For other concerns about using an axiarchic view to handle harmonious correlations, see Pautz ( 2015 ). For further discussion of the axiarchic view, see Parfit ( 1998 ) and Rescher ( 2010 ).…”