Questions: Representationalism: Consciousness as Representation

Question 1

A neuroscientist argues: 'The phenomenal redness of a visual experience is an intrinsic inner quality that exists inside the mind, entirely separate from what the experience is about.' Which view does this most directly contradict?

• A. Functionalism about consciousness
• B. Representationalism about consciousness
• C. Physicalism about consciousness
• D. Eliminativism about consciousness

Answer: (B)

Representationalism holds that phenomenal character just IS representational content — there is nothing more to the 'redness' of an experience than that it represents redness in the world. The neuroscientist is positing a separate, non-representational inner quality (a 'quale'), which is exactly what representationalism denies. Functionalism, physicalism, and eliminativism each have different commitments and are not directly targeted by this specific claim.

Question 2

Alex and Beth have functionally identical visual systems but systematically inverted color qualia — what looks red to Alex looks green to Beth. If representational content is entirely determined by functional role, what problem does this pose for representationalism?

• A. It cannot explain why color experiences feel different from sound experiences
• B. It predicts Alex and Beth share the same phenomenal experience, contradicting the intuition that their qualia differ
• C. It implies both Alex and Beth lack genuine phenomenal consciousness
• D. It cannot explain how color representations are physically realized in neural tissue

Answer: (B)

If functional role fixes representational content, and Alex and Beth have identical functional organization, representationalism predicts their experiences have the same content — and thus the same phenomenal character. But the inverted qualia scenario stipulates they feel different. This creates a gap: phenomenal character and representational content (so defined) come apart. Representationalists must either deny inverted qualia are coherent or appeal to external tracking relations to individuate content independently of functional role.

Question 3

According to representationalism, explaining what makes an experience feel a particular way reduces to explaining how that experience represents its objects as having certain properties — no additional non-representational phenomenal properties are needed.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

This is the central claim of representationalism: phenomenal character is exhausted by representational content. The philosophical payoff is that the 'hard problem' transforms into the (relatively more tractable) question of how brain states acquire representational content, rather than how they produce a mysterious inner glow over and above their functional and representational properties.

Question 4

Higher-order representationalism holds that the phenomenal character of an experience is fully constituted by its first-order representational content, with no requirement that the experience itself be represented by any higher-order mental state.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

That description applies to first-order representationalism (Dretske, Tye). Higher-order representationalism specifically adds the requirement that a mental state is conscious only when it is represented by a higher-order state — a thought or perception about the first-order state. The distinction matters because first-order views locate phenomenal character in the world-directed content itself, while higher-order views locate it in the meta-representational structure.

Question 5

Why does representationalism offer a potential solution to the 'hard problem' of consciousness, and what is the key theoretical move it makes?

Model answer: Representationalism dissolves the hard problem by identifying phenomenal character with representational content. Instead of asking how physical processes produce mysterious inner qualia over and above their functional properties, we only need to explain how brain states carry intentional content — a question naturalistic theories of mental content (causal covariance, teleosemantics, etc.) are already equipped to address. The key move is collapsing the apparent gap between what an experience is 'about' (intentionality) and what it 'feels like' (phenomenal character): on the representationalist view, these are not two separate things but one.

The hard problem is hard because phenomenal consciousness seems to resist functional/physical explanation — you can specify all the functional and physical facts and still seem to leave out the 'what-it's-like.' Representationalism reframes this: the 'what-it's-like' just IS the representational content, so any complete theory of intentional representation is ipso facto a theory of phenomenal consciousness.