Subjectivity and Cognitive Science: A Defense of the Representational Theory of Consciousness

This dissertation provides a defense of reductive representationalism about consciousness. After an introductory chapter, chapter 2 provides a representationalist account of olfaction. In the literature, Burge’s (2010) account of representation is widely endorsed. According to his account, perceptual representation represents “objectually”, that is, it represents features of the world, as objective. This depends on perceptual constancies. Many authors attempt to defend representationalism about olfaction by showing that there are olfactory constancies. I argue that there are none. Instead, I show that representationalism regarding olfaction is correct by showing that olfaction represents minimally. I then argue that representations in Burge’s sense are constructed when minimal olfactory content is embedded in object-files that contain other non- olfactory properties that meet Burge’s criteria for representation. In chapter 3, I defend a particular reductive representationalist account of consciousness—the global workspacetheory—against an alternative which suggests that consciousness is richer than the global workspace theory claims. I argue that experience is richer than is standardly suggested by proponents of the global workspace theory, but less rich than the alternative theory suggests. I argue that there are additional resources available to defenders of the global workspace theory in accommodating intuitions of richness that have yet to be fully appreciated by participants in the debate. In chapter 4, I defend reductive representationalism against a new objection presented by Adam Pautz (20172020). He recently suggested that there are several constraints on experience, known as “The Laws of Appearance,” that put pressure on the representationalist thesis about conscious experience because they suggest that experience is constrained in ways that representations are not. Since the representationalist claims that experience just is a matter of representing the world to be a certain way, the representationalist owes us an explanation, or else representationalism is false. I argue that the laws are not genuine laws, but that we have the intuition that they are because of the limits of imagination. As a consequence, I show that representationalism is not threatened.