Representational Theories of Consciousness - William Lycan  ## Metadata - Author: **William Lycan** - Full Title: Representational Theories of Consciousness - Category: #articles - URL: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-representational/#ArgHal ## Highlights - Pautz (2007, 2010) appeals to hallucinatory experience. Suppose you hallucinate (simultaneously) a red ellipse, an orange circle, and a green square, without ever previously having encountered any of those colors or shapes. That experience directly gives you the capacity to form beliefs about the external world, e.g., that there is a red ellipse, that red is more like orange than like green, and that ellipses are more like circles than like squares. This “grounding property” of the experience motivates a “relational” view of it, according to which having the experience puts the subject in a relation to “items involving properties which, if they are properties of anything at all, are properties of extended objects” (2007, p. 524). Pautz offers two further arguments for relationality, based respectively on the “matching property” and the “characterization property.” Given relationality, representationalism still has three rivals: sense-data, Peacocke’s (2008) “sensationalist” theory, and Alston’s (1999) “theory of appearing.” But each of the rivals succumbs to objections; so representationalism is true of hallucinatory experience. Now, why not extend representationalism to experience across the board? At this point there is just one still unrefuted opponent: the “positive” disjunctivist who maintains that veridical experience differs radically in kind from hallucination. Pautz argues that that view is not worth the complications it enforces