Representationalism, Naturalism, and the Problem of Content

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problems of representational theories of percep­tion, which were identified by C. Travis in a 2004 work entitled “The Silence of the Senses”. Representationalism plays an important role in contemporary dis­cussions around the problem of a naturalistic explanation of conscious mental states. Travis attempted to demonstrate the inconsistency of the basic assumptions underlying representationalism. If his argumentation does undermine the founda­tions of representationalism, then the naturalization project loses the possibility of representationalist theories. The author analyzes in detail one of Travis’s main arguments – “the argument from looks”. It is shown that the main responses to this argument miss the mark, as they either misinterpret Travis's idea itself or lead to a distorted version of representationalism that loses its advantage in the context of explaining conscious experience. The author comes to the conclusion that Travis' critique of representationalism should be considered not just as a refuta­tion of some of the theses of the representationalists, but as a metaphilosophical signal indicating the need to clarify (a) what the methodology of the modern philosopher of perception should be and (b) what theoretical obligations imposes on him the dominant naturalistic paradigm of our time.