Abstract
Representationalism is a promising route to an intelligible and thoroughly naturalistconception of phenomenal experience. Unfortunately, the most thoroughly worked out
reductive representationalist accounts are externalist about phenomenal experience. There
are several criticisms of phenomenal externalism which rest upon the internalist intuition.
Here we develop this line of criticism and articulate a different problem with phenomenal
externalism: the unintelligibility of external determination. This new problem is harder for
the reductively minded representationalist to swallow, and places new constraints on the
kind of internalist account that would be satisfactory.
After establishing the need for a reductive and internalist representationalism we
turn to our positive project; providing an account of what it is to be a representation and an
account of content determination in a reductive manner, whilst maintaining internalism.
This account is a Russellian, projectivist representationalism, where representation is a
matter of being used as a representation and representational content is determined by the
properties of internal representational structures. One consequence of this position is
sensory property structuralism: the properties that we are aware of in sensory experience
are essentially structural and their nature exhausted by their relations to one another. Our
account is defended and compared with existing accounts that seek to achieve similar goals.
Finally we turn to something more speculative. We argue that the account proposed
here can be naturally extended to include mental content in general, providing a solution to
the content causation problem.
Date of Award | 18 Jun 2024 |
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Original language | English |
Awarding Institution |
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Supervisor | Tuomas Tahko (Supervisor) & Jason P Konek (Supervisor) |
Keywords
- representationalism
- similarity based representation
- Philosophy of mind
- metaphysics of mind