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The Scrambler: An Argument Against Representationalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Stephen Biggs
Stephen Biggs*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Toronto, ONM5R 2M8, Canada
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Extract

Brentano (1874) famously claimed that two features demarcate the mental: consciousness and intentionality. Although he claimed that these features are intimately related, subsequent generations of philosophers rarely treated them together. Recently, however, the tide has turned. Many philosophers now accept that consciousness is intentional, where to be intentional is to have representational content, is to represent ‘things as being thus and so — where, for all that, things need not be that way’ (Travis, 2004, 58). In fact, weak representationalism, which holds that perceptual experiences have representational content, is ‘now fairly uncontroversial’ (Lycan, 2004).

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , June 2009 , pp. 215 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2009

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