The primary goal of this paper is to provide substantial motivation for exploring an Acquaintance account phenomenal consciousness, on which what fundamentally explains consciousness the relation acquaintance. Its secondary take a few steps towards such account. Roughly, my argument proceeds as follows. Motivated by prioritizing naturalization, debate about nature has been almost monopolized re...

Radical enactive and embodied approaches to cognitive science oppose the received view in the sciences of the mind in denying that cognition fundamentally involves contentful mental representation. This paper argues that the fate of representationalism in cognitive science matters significantly to how best to understand the extent of cognition. It seeks to establish that any move away from repr...

Representationalist theories of phenomenal consciousness have problems in accounting for pain, for at least two reasons. First of all, the negative a ective phenomenology of pain (its painfulness) does not seem to be representational at all. Secondly, pain experiences are not transparent to introspection in the way perceptions are. This is re ected, e. g., in the fact that we do not acknowledge...

Representationalism, the original driving theory behind artificial intelligence and cognitive science, has fallen upon hard times. Representationalism identifies cognitive processes with the manipulation of explicit symbolic structures according to well-defined rules. Rocha and Hordijk put forward three requirements for something to qualify as a representation: dynamically incoherent memory, co...

Macpherson (Nous 40(1):82–117, 2006) argues that the square/regular diamond figure threatens representationalism, construed as the theory which holds that the phenomenal character is explained by the nonconceptual content of experience. Her argument is the claim that representationalism is committed to the thesis that differences in the experience of ambiguous figures, the gestalt switch, shoul...

Contemporary pragmatists, especially those who follow Richard Rorty’s lead, have contested the philosophical paradigm they have referred to as ‘representationalism’: the idea that our claims or beliefs describe or are ‘about’ the world. These ‘new pragmatists’ have often been seen to be in an antagonistic relationship with their antecedents, the pragmatists of the turn of the 20th century: thes...

The most promising representionalist account of sensations and occurrent emotions is the ‘impure’ version of representationalism, which analyses the structure of an intentional state as consisting of an intentional content and a psychological mode. However, a critique of representationalism could question the analogy between propositional attitudes and sensory modes. Propositional attitudes can...

Ambiguous figures pose a problem for representationalists, particularly for representationalists who believe that the content of perceptual experience is nonconceptual (MacPherson in Nous 40(1):82–117, 2006). This is because, in viewing ambiguous figures, subjects have perceptual experiences that differ in phenomenal properties without differing in non-conceptual content. In this paper, I argue...