The paper challenges strong, reductive representationalism, which tries to explain the felt quality of conscious experience solely in terms of what experiences represent, without appealing to intrinsic experiential properties. While this approach is attractive for avoiding irreducible mental qualities, the authors argue it risks failing: it may either misdescribe the phenomenology (what an experience feels like) or mischaracterize the representational content itself. The critique suggests that representationalism cannot fully capture both aspects simultaneously.
Disjunctivism, the view that no single feature is common to all mental phenomena, has become more appealing as other proposals for a mark of the mental face difficulties. A revised form of disjunctivism is developed that avoids traditional problems. On this account, all mental states exemplify either intentional presentationality or phenomenal presentationality (or both). These two features are irreducible to each other but are species of the common genus of presentationality: presenting something to the subject. This presentationality uniformly marks the mental domain. The account is labeled 'sui generis disjunctivism' because it is in the spirit but not the letter of disjunctivism.