Double Vision, Phosphenes and Afterimages: Non-Endorsed Representations rather than Non-Representational Qualia

• Main Author: Işık Sarıhan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Rijeka. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences 2020-05-01
• Series: European Journal of Analytic Philosophy
• Subjects: perception; representationalism; qualia; non-conceptual content; afterimages; double vision
• Online Access: https://hrcak.srce.hr/238179

Pure representationalism or intentionalism for phenomenal experience is the theory that all introspectible qualitative aspects of a conscious experience can be analyzed as qualities that the experience non-conceptually represents the world to have. Some philosophers have argued that experiences such as afterimages, phosphenes and double vision are counterexamples to the representationalist theory, claiming that they are non- representational states or have non-representational aspects, and they are better explained in a qualia-theoretical framework. I argue that these states are fully representational states of a certain kind, which I call “automatically non-endorsed representations”, experiential states the veridicality of which we are almost never committed to, and which do not trigger explicit belief or disbelief in the mind of the subject. By investigating descriptive accounts of afterimages by two qualia theorists, I speculate that the mistaken claims of some anti-representationalists might be rooted in confusing two senses of the term “seeming”.