Open AccessDouble Vision, Phosphenes and Afterimages
Author(s) -
Işık Sarıhan
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
european journal of analytic philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1849-0514
pISSN - 1845-8475
DOI - 10.31820/ejap.16.1.1
Subject(s) - qualia , afterimage , physicalism , epistemology , experiential learning , phosphene , psychology , perception , functionalism (philosophy of mind) , cognitive science , consciousness , direct and indirect realism , cognitive psychology , disengagement theory , philosophy , metaphysics , computer science , artificial intelligence , neuroscience , mathematics education , transcranial magnetic stimulation , stimulation , image (mathematics) , gerontology , medicine
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”.