Colour Constancy and Russellian Representationalism

Representationalism, the view that phenomenal character supervenes on intentional content, has attracted a wide following in recent years. Representationalism can take various forms. Most representationalists have offered a form of reductive representationalism, according to which phenomenal character is itself intentional content of a certain sort.1 Such views promise to reduce the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness—that of explaining how conscious experience could arise in a physical world—to the seemingly easier problem of naturalizing intentionality. But representationalism can also take non-reductive form, or can even advocate a reduction in the other direction, of intentionality to phenomenal character.2 Representationalisms can also vary according to what kind of content phenomenal content is taken to be. The vast majority of representationalists have adopted the view that phenomenal content is a kind of Russellian content.3 It is this form of representationalism that I will be arguing against in the present paper.