Fregean presentationalism
pp. 241-261
in: Annalisa Coliva, Paolo Leonardi, Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds), Eva Picardi on language, analysis and history, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstract
The paper focuses on two claims widely held in the philosophy of mind, namely, content externalism (the claim that the representational properties of mental states constitutively dependent, at least in part, on worldly, environmental facts) and phenomenological internalism (the claim that the phenomenal properties of conscious occurrent mental states constitutively depend only on the intrinsic, non-relational features of a subject). The question it addresses is which picture, if any, of the relationship between representational and phenomenal properties makes the conjunction between the two claims tenable. The main thesis of the paper is that the conjunction is tenable only within an account which treats the two kinds of properties as distinct, irreducible and yet related to each other. The relationship between them is then articulated within a Frege-inspired framework that treats phenomenal properties as manners of presentation of representational properties.
