Reading Notes: August 1st, 2024

“Representationalism is the view that phenomenal characters somehow reduce to representational properties….A state has a representational property when, to put it intuitively, it has a meaning or somehow stands in some process for something else, such as an object, or a ‘proposition’—a putative fact. Standard philosophical theories consequently take representational states to involve a relation between a subject and a ‘content’—what is meant—via an attitude or the relation borne to that meaning….A representational property of a representational state may thus be characterized as a pair composed of an attitude and a content. Representational states have correctness, or satisfaction conditions, partly determined by the correctness conditions for their contents.” (Hellie, Consciousness and Representationalism, 1-2)

“Externalist accounts of representation offer another type of sufficient condition for having representational content. Although these accounts differ significantly from one another, each holds that a mental item has representational content in virtue of its bearing an interesting, robust relation to the environment. Dretske, for example, holds that a mental item (such as a perceptual experience) represents such-and-such if that item functions primarily to indicate the presence in the environment of such-and-such.” (Biggs, The Scrambler: An Argument Against Representationalism, 229)

“If neutral water is coloured, for example, and so simply possesses this quality, is simply in this condition, it would be sentient if it were not only for us or as a matter of possibility that it differed from the condition, but it were at the same time to distinguish itself from itself as being so determined. Differently expressed: the genus color only exists as blue, or as a certain specific color; in that it is blue, it remains the genus color.; But if the color as color, i.e., not as blue but at the same time as color, persisted in opposition to itself as blue color—if the difference between its universality and its particularity were not simply for us bit existed within itself, it would be sensation of blue.” (Hegel, Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, Vol. I, 123)

“The non-sentient subject is exhausted in its properties, Hegel seems to be claiming; it makes no distinction between itself and its properties, although we do. The sentient being, however, retains for itself an identity over against its particular properties, it makes a distinction between itself and its properties.” (DeVries, Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity, 58)