Reading Notes: April 21st, 2022

“Internalist representationalism says that the phenomenal qualities are representational properties of brain states. Representational properties are properties that represent some representational content. For example, a newspaper has a certain representational content and it represents this content in virtue of the representational properties of the letters written on it.” (Östman, It’s All in the Brain, 42) 

“Representationalism is currently the most popular theory of perception. A core idea among representationalists is that perception is a form of representation. There are many different versions of representationalism, or intentionalism as it is sometimes called. Let us use the following taxonomy to distinguish them. Weak representationalism is the claim that every perception necessarily has representational content; representational content is a condition of satisfaction on experiences that for each experience is either fulfilled or not fulfilled. Thus, just as beliefs or sentences can be true or false, experiences can be either correct or incorrect. For example, an experience as of a red square might have the representational content that there is a red square at a certain location in front of the perceiver. The content is satisfied and the experience correct if there is such a red square in front of the perceiver. Weak representationalism is a sort of minimal representationalist claim and so is included in all forms of representationalism. The position is false if experiences lack such a condition of correctness, for example if they only present perceptual items without representing anything. Strong representationalism states that in addition to the former claim, there is a change in phenomenal character of experiences only if there is a corresponding change in the contents of the experiences. This means that which phenomenal qualities we experience in an experience cannot vary independently of the experience’s representational content. Thus the phenomenal qualities we experience in an experience depend on the representational content of that experience in the sense that the former does not change if the latter do not change. Some versions of representationalism claim that the ground of this dependence-relation is that the representational content of experience explains its phenomenal character. A particular sort of strong representationalism is reductive externalist representationalism, or as I will call it, externalist representationalism. It is reductive in the sense that it identifies the qualia in an experience with properties included in the content of that experience. It is externalist in the sense that it claims that the properties included in the content of experiences generally are properties of external objects….For example, say we have an experience of a red square. According to externalist representationalism, the experienced phenomenal redness and phenomenal squareness in this experience are properties of external objects which are represented by the experience; in this case perhaps a surface reflectance property and a geometrical property.” (Östman, It’s All in the Brain, 53-54)