concept

representationalism

Also known as: Representationalism

Facts (13)

Sources

Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Fall 2025 ... plato.stanford.edu Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Jun 18, 2004 12 facts

claimRepresentationalists often define conditions for conscious experience by combining a content condition with additional causal role or format requirements, as argued by Tye (1995), Dretske (1995), and Carruthers (2000).

referenceS. Shoemaker published 'Two cheers for representationalism' in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 1998.

perspectiveThe Multiple Drafts Model (MDM) is representationalist because it analyzes consciousness in terms of content relations, and it rejects the existence of qualia as a means to distinguish conscious from nonconscious states.

perspectiveProponents of representationalism, including Dennett (1990), Lycan (1996), and Carruthers (2000), are motivated by the goal of accommodating facts about consciousness within a physicalist framework without requiring the existence of qualia or non-representational mental properties.

claimArguments regarding representationalism involve perceptions in different sense modalities, such as seeing and feeling the same cube, which may involve mental differences distinct from how states represent the world (Peacocke 1983, Tye 2003).

claimRepresentationalism remains controversial, with Block (1996) noting that intuitions clash regarding key cases and thought experiments, particularly the possibility of inverted qualia.

perspectiveRepresentationalists, such as Dretske (1995) and Tye (2000), respond to the inverted qualia argument by denying either the possibility of such inversion or its significance.

referenceMichael Tye published 'Blurry images, double vision and other oddities: new troubles for representationalism?' in the 2003 book 'Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives', edited by A. Jokic and Q. Smith and published by Oxford University Press.

claimDaniel Dennett advanced the Multiple Drafts Model (MDM) of consciousness in 1991, which combines elements of representationalism and higher-order theory to provide an interpretational, less strongly realist view of consciousness.

claimRepresentationalism functions as a qualified form of eliminativism because it denies the existence of mental properties that are not representational, such as qualia understood as intrinsic monadic properties of conscious states.

claimSome representationalists, such as Dretske (1995) and Lycan (1996), treat qualia as objective properties that external objects are represented as having, rather than as properties of mental states or representations.

claimRepresentationalist theory posits that if two conscious or experiential states share all their representational properties, they will not differ in any mental respect.

Hard problem of consciousness - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org Wikipedia 1 fact

claimProposals made in the 2020s suggest that a cognitively inspired form of representationalism can reconcile neuroscience and the philosophy of mind by bridging gaps regarding concepts such as intentionality, emergence, consciousness, and qualia.