The Representational View of Experience

In chapter 3, the author presents two arguments for the view that visual experience is representational. The first shows that phenomenal ‘look’ and ‘seem’ reflect phenomenal, representational properties of visual perception. It follows that experience is representational. This conclusion is consistent with some versions of naive realism, but considerably stronger than the minimal content view that takes content to be a description of what it is like for the subject to have the experience. The second argument establishes that the perceptual relation that obtains between experience and its object in core cases cannot fully explain the phenomenology of experience. In order to explain its phenomenology, we will need to appeal to the experience’s representational nature. The second argument thus shows that visual experience is fundamentally representational and not fundamentally relational, which is the central claim of the representational view.