There are two types of representationalism, strong and weak. Strong representationalism attempts to reduce phenomenal character to intentional content. On the other hand, weak representationalism claims only that phenomenal character supervenes on intentional content. Strong representationalism aims to provide a theory about the nature of phenomenal character, and offers a solution to the hard problem of consciousness.
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Rockmore is a strong critic of representationalism in epistemology.Rockmore, Tom. On Constructivist Epistemology. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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In contrast to this, weak representationalism does not aim to provide a theory of consciousness, nor does it offer a solution to the hard problem of consciousness. Strong representationalism can be further broken down into restricted and unrestricted versions. The restricted version deals only with certain kinds of phenomenal states e.g. visual perception.
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Oxford: Oxford Forum.Online PDF He argues that they provide empirical support for the theory of representationalism rather than direct realism.
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Lehar, Steve. Representationalism that our conscious experience is not of the real world but of an internal representation of the world.
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In his coloured chalk drawings and oil paintings Bredow explores abstracting representationalism, which is reminiscent of Werner Gilles' geometrical use of forms and Ernst Wilhelm Nay's abstract expressionism.
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The representational realist would deny that "first-hand knowledge" is a coherent concept, since knowledge is always via some means. Our ideas of the world are interpretations of sensory input derived from an external world that is real (unlike the standpoint of idealism, which holds that only ideas are real, but mind- independent things are not). The main alternative to representationalism is anti-representationalism, the view according to which perception is not a process of constructing internal representations.
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After encountering the constructivist concepts of Humberto Maturana, Werner moved away from representationalism as a way to explain the nature of how brain and mind enable knowledge of reality. Like Walter Freeman and the late Francisco Varela, Werner espoused dynamical systems theory in place of representationalism. Vision neuroscientist J. Anthony Movshon of New York University credited Werner and Vernon Mountcastle with introducing Alan Turing's statistical approach to making decisions into neuroscience in the 1960s. Dr. Werner was an adjunct professor with the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Most representationalists endorse an unrestricted version of representationalism. According to the unrestricted version, for any state with phenomenal character that state's phenomenal character reduces to its intentional content. Only this unrestricted version of representationalism is able to provide a general theory about the nature of phenomenal character, as well as offer a potential solution to the hard problem of consciousness. The successful reduction of the phenomenal character of a state to its intentional content would provide a solution to the hard problem of consciousness once a physicalist account of intentionality is worked out.
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Mental contents are those items that are thought of as being "in" the mind, and capable of being formed and manipulated by mental processes and faculties. Examples include thoughts, concepts, memories, emotions, percepts and intentions. Philosophical theories of mental content include internalism, externalism, representationalism and intentionality.
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It's a contemporary term for a philosophy which reintroduces many concepts from pragmatism. While traditional pragmatism focuses on experience, Rorty centers on language. The self is regarded as a "centerless web of beliefs and desires". It repudiates the notions of universal truth, epistemological foundationalism, representationalism, and epistemic objectivity.
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The "argument from hallucination" has traditionally been one of those used by proponents of the philosophical theory of representationalism against direct realism. Representationalism holds that when perceiving the world we are not in direct contact with it, as common sense suggests, but only in direct contact with a representation of the world in consciousness. That representation may be a more or less accurate one depending on our circumstances, the state of our health, and so on. Direct realism, on the other hand, holds that the common sense or unthinking view of perception is correct, and that when perceiving the world we should be regarded as in direct contact with it, unmediated by any representation in consciousness.
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Richard Rorty argues in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that contemporary analytic philosophy mistakenly imitates scientific methods. In addition, he denounces the traditional epistemological perspectives of representationalism and correspondence theory that rely upon the independence of knowers and observers from phenomena and the passivity of natural phenomena in relation to consciousness.
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Hearing (or audition) is the ability to perceive (create ideas of)sound by detecting vibrations. The sound waves of language cannot perceive directly. They are only heard, interpreted and understood because the physical waves were transformed into ideas (Mental representation of sound wages) by our brains. Representationalism is one of the key assumptions of cognitivism in psychology.
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"The compositions are simple and refined, with flattened shapes, minus the frills and minute details of representationalism," according to Kathaleen Roberts of the Albuquerque Journal. The watercolors, made on 11 7/8 x 9 inch (30.2 x 22.9 cm) paper, were held by O'Keeffe until her death and are now in the collection of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.
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When arguing against the unrestricted version of representationalism people will often bring up phenomenal mental states that appear to lack intentional content. The unrestricted version seeks to account for all phenomenal states. Thus, for it to be true, all states with phenomenal character must have intentional content to which that character is reduced. Phenomenal states without intentional content therefore serve as a counterexample to the unrestricted version.
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It favours compositional tension and instability rather than the balance and clarity of earlier Renaissance painting. In contrast, Baroque art took the representationalism of the Renaissance to new heights, emphasizing detail, movement, lighting, and drama. Perhaps the best known Baroque painters are Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, and Diego Velázquez. Baroque art is often seen as part of the Counter-Reformation— the revival of spiritual life in the Roman Catholic Church.
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According to Locke—following a tradition which can be traced back to the ancient (Democritus) and modern (Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton) atomism—some sense-data, namely the sense-data of secondary qualities (i.e. colours, tastes, smells, sounds), do not represent anything in the external world, even if they are caused by external qualities (primary qualities). By its talk of sense-data and representation, this theory depends on or presupposes the truth of representationalism.
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" Her work is "characterized by an elegant balance between mythical and realistic imagery. The tightly woven, reflective waters of her canvases are overlaid with figurative narratives and the result is a body of work that is both beautiful and, at times, haunting."Yee, Jeen(2012)Gallery Curator. Water Born Her style has also been described as a, "combination of representationalism, realism; naturalism, and takes the form of illustrational depictions of happiness using stylized, personal exaggerations and distortions.
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Price is known for his work in philosophy of physics and for his brand of "neo-pragmatism" and "anti-representationalism," according to which "all utterances must be looked at through the lens of their function in our interactions, not the metaphysics of their semantic relations." This view has acknowledged affinities with the work of Robert Brandom and, earlier, Wilfrid Sellars. He was elected a Fellow of Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1994, and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2012.
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Apparitional experiences appear prima facie more compatible with the philosophical theory of representationalism. According to this theory, the immediate objects of experience when we are perceiving the world normally are representations of the world, rather than the world itself. These representations have been variously called sense-data or images. In the case of an apparitional experience one might say that the subject is aware of sense-data or images which happen not to correspond to, or represent, the external world in the normal way.
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Moreover, any Form is not unitary but is composed of infinite parts, none of which is the proper Form. The young Socrates (some may say the young Plato) did not give up the Theory of Forms over the Third Man but took another tack, that the particulars do not exist as such. Whatever they are, they "mime" the Forms, appearing to be particulars. This is a clear dip into representationalism, that we cannot observe the objects as they are in themselves but only their representations.
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The personal style he developed during this time, using simplified forms, became increasingly more abstract. Many of the figures he depicted are based on the locomotives, stark landscapes, and large mechanical shapes of his native, coal-mining community in Pennsylvania. This is sometimes only apparent to viewers because the pieces are named after those places and objects, not because they actually look like the subject. With the influence of the contemporary New York art scene, Kline worked further into abstraction and eventually abandoned representationalism.
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Descartes held that there is a "homunculus" in the form of the soul, belonging to a form of natural substance known as res cogitans that obeyed different laws from those obeyed by solid matter (res extensa). Although Descartes' duality of natural substances may have echoes in modern physics (Bose and Fermi statistics) no agreed account of 'interpretation' has been formulated. Thus representationalism remains an incomplete description of perception. Aristotle realized this and simply proposed that ideas themselves (representations) must be aware—in other words that there is no further transfer of sense impressions beyond ideas.
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The new realists did not want to acknowledge representationalism at all but later embraced something akin to Aristotle's form of realism: blackness is a general quality that many objects have in common, and the nervous system selects not just the object but the commonality as a fact. But Arthur Lovejoy showed in his book The Revolt Against Dualism that the perception of black varies so much, depending on context in the visual field, the perceiver's personal history and cultural usage, that it cannot be reduced to commonalities within objects. Better, Lovejoy thought, to bring representational ideas back into the account after all.
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Ryle's notion of thick description has been an important influence on cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz. The Concept of Mind was recognised on its appearance as an important contribution to philosophical psychology, and an important work in the ordinary language philosophy movement. But in the 1960s and '70s, the rising influence of the cognitivist theories of Noam Chomsky, Herbert A. Simon, Jerry Fodor, and others in the neo-Cartesian school became predominant. The two major postwar schools in the philosophy of mind, Fodor's representationalism and Wilfrid Sellars's functionalism, posited precisely the 'internal' cognitive states that Ryle had argued against.
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A problem with representationalism is that if simple data flow and information processing is assumed then something in the brain must be interpreting incoming data. This something is often described as a homunculus, although the term homunculus is also used to imply an entity that creates a continual regress, and this need not be implied. This suggests that some phenomenon other than simple data flow and information processing is involved in perception. This is more of an issue now than it was for rationalist philosophers prior to Newton, such as Descartes, for whom physical processes were poorly defined.
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The representational realist would answer to this that "true likeness" is an intuitive concept that falls in the face of logic, since a likeness must always depend on the way in which something is considered. A semantic difficulty may arise when considering reference in representationalism. If a person says "I see the Eiffel Tower" at a time when they are indeed looking at the Eiffel Tower, to what does the term "Eiffel Tower" refer? The direct realist might say that in the representational account people do not really see the tower but rather 'see' the representation.
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Representationalism (also known as indirect realism) is the view that representations are the main way we access external reality. The representational theory of mind attempts to explain the nature of ideas, concepts and other mental content in contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science and experimental psychology. In contrast to theories of naive or direct realism, the representational theory of mind postulates the actual existence of mental representations which act as intermediaries between the observing subject and the objects, processes or other entities observed in the external world. These intermediaries stand for or represent to the mind the objects of that world.
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In this tradition, it was thought that truth was obtained when linguistic terms stood in a proper correspondence relation to non- linguistic objects (this can be called "representationalism"). The thought was that in order for a statement or proposition to be true it must give facts which correspond to what is actually present in reality. This is called the correspondence theory of truth and is to be distinguished from a neo-pragmatic conception of truth. There were many philosophical inquiries during the mid- twentieth century which began to undermine the legitimacy of the methodology of the early Anglo-analytic philosophers of language.
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While a certain trueness to color is important to him at first, he gradually abandons it, separates himself from the colors and inserts vertical and horizontal lines into the picture, so that the depicted object can almost be seen as a pure geometric form. Evard reduces the representationalism through spatial and surface tensions - but achieves emotional values such as warm and cold, light and dark, playful and harsh through the choice of color. André Evard's work is difficult to classify in the categories of art history. He was not committed to any particular style, but rather reverted to the past, mixed styles and invented something new.
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Even the notion of consciousness as drafts is not unique to Dennett. According to Hankins, Dieter Teichert suggests that Paul Ricoeur's theories agree with Dennett's on the notion that "the self is basically a narrative entity, and that any attempt to give it a free-floating independent status is misguided." [Hankins] Others see Derrida's (1982) representationalism as consistent with the notion of a mind that has perceptually changing content without a definitive present instant. To those who believe that consciousness entails something more than behaving in all ways conscious, Dennett's view is seen as eliminativist, since it denies the existence of qualia and the possibility of philosophical zombies.
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He finds laudable exceptions in the work of David Nicholls and, especially, Amy Beal , and concludes from their work that "The fundamental ontological shift that marks experimentalism as an achievement is that from representationalism to performativity", so that "an explanation of experimentalism that already assumes the category it purports to explain is an exercise in metaphysics, not ontology" . Leonard B. Meyer, on the other hand, includes under "experimental music" composers rejected by Nyman, such as Berio, Boulez and Stockhausen, as well as the techniques of "total serialism" , holding that "there is no single, or even pre-eminent, experimental music, but rather a plethora of different methods and kinds" .
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Baroque art took the representationalism of the Renaissance to new heights, emphasizing detail, movement, lighting, and drama in their search for beauty. Perhaps the best known Baroque painters are Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, and Diego Velázquez. A rather different art developed out of northern realist traditions in 17th-century Dutch Golden Age painting, which had very little religious art, and little history painting, instead playing a crucial part in developing secular genres such as still life, genre paintings of everyday scenes, and landscape painting. While the Baroque nature of Rembrandt's art is clear, the label is less use for Vermeer and many other Dutch artists.
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In Meditation II: Concerning the Nature of the Human Mind: That the mind is more known than the body, Descartes lays out a pattern of thought, sometimes called representationalism, in response to the doubts forwarded in Meditation I. He identifies five steps in this theory: # We have access to only the world of our ideas; things in the world are accessed only indirectly. # These ideas are understood to include all of the contents of the mind, including perceptions, images, memories, concepts, beliefs, intentions, decisions, etc. # Ideas and the things they represent are separate from each other. # These represented things are many times "external" to the mind.
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Some schools such as the Sarvastivadins explained perception as a type of phenomenalist realism while others such as the Sautrantikas preferred representationalism and held that we only perceive objects indirectly.Ronkin, Noa, "Abhidharma", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = The major argument used for this view by the Sautrāntikas was the "time lag argument." According to Mark Siderits: "The basic idea behind the argument is that since there is always a tiny gap between when the sense comes in contact with the external object and when there is sensory awareness, what we are aware of can't be the external object that the senses were in contact with, since it no longer exists."Siderits, Mark; Buddhism as philosophy, 132 This is related to the theory of extreme momentariness.
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The question, however, can arise how these critical philosophers, using the same armchair technique that they are criticizing, refute the robust argumentation of the Inverted spectrum experiment? C. L. Hardin criticizes the idea that an inverted spectrum would be undetectable on scientific grounds:Inverted Qualia, Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyHardin, C. L., 1987, "Qualia and Materialism: Closing the Explanatory Gap", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 48: 281-98. Paul Churchland using the Hurvich–Jameson (H–J) opponent process criticizes the inverted spectrum on scientific grounds: Inverted spectrum arguments have applications to behavioralism, physicalism, representationalism, functionalism, skepticism and the hard problem of consciousness. In his book I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter argues that the inverted spectrum argument entails a form of solipsism in which people can have no idea about what goes on in the minds of others—contrary to the central theme of his work.
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This project is developed at length in his influential 1994 book Making It Explicit, and more briefly in Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (2000); a chapter of that latter work, "Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism", outlines the main themes of representationalism (the tradition of basing semantics on the concept of representation) vs. inferentialism (the conviction for an expression to be meaningful is to be governed by a certain kind of inferential rules) and inferentialism's relationship to logical expressivism (the conviction that "logic is expressive in the sense that it makes explicit or codifies certain aspects of the inferential structure of our discursive practice").James Lindsey David Brown, "Propositions and Nondescriptivism in Metaethics", MPhil thesis, University College London, 2016, p. 51. Brandom has also published a collection of essays on the history of philosophy, Tales of the Mighty Dead (2002), a critical and historical sketch of what he calls the "philosophy of intentionality".
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In this book, Kordela goes beyond both representationalism (or correlationism) and the attempts to challenge it—such as Heidegger’s “disclosure of being,” Alain Badiou’s return to Platonism, Deleuze’s “expressionism,” speculative materialism (e.g., Quentin Meillassoux), various kinds of object-orientated ontology, etc.—by grounding a parallelism or homology between words and things (indexed by the term epistemontology) on Spinozan monism and its subsequent formulation in Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism (in this context the book engages closely also with Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s work). This book argues further that secular thought tends towards formalism and structuralism—accurately defined by Deleuze as a mode of thought in which “the sites prevail over whatever occupies them” (2004, 174)Deleuze, G. (2004) “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?,” in Melissa McMahon and Charles J. Stivale (trans.), David Lapoujade (ed.) Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e)—and shows the development of this tendency not only in ontology and epistemology but also in aesthetic theory and in the development of psychoanalytic thought.
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