Is pain representational?
Belgrade Philosophical Annual July 12, 2024 Aydede Murat
Strong representationalism, a dominant view in philosophy of perception, comes in reductive and non-reductive forms, typically paired with realist and irrealist commitments respectively. This paper develops a simple, largely empirical argument against the realist reductive version and then extends that argument to cover irrealist representationalism. The argument targets the core claims of these positions without relying on specialized proprietary concepts, instead drawing on empirical considerations to challenge their adequacy.