ABSTRACT

The doctrine that our knowledge of the external world exists in the form of picture or analogue ‘representations’ of that world. The topic primarily arises in relation to visual perception, where it is held that we cannot see the world ‘directly’ but experience only its representations. The ‘direct versus indirect’ perception debate goes back as far as the 1700s at least and persists down to the present. It is, however, a conceptually confused distinction in the present author’s view, since it is impossible for either camp to specify what kind of empirical evidence would settle the matter and rather revolves around what one means by ‘direct’ in this context (and also to some extent ‘representation’). Visual illusions are often considered to demonstrate that what we see is not what is actually there, but this conflates the notion of ‘directness’ with ‘accuracy’ (and often with ‘completeness’). The doctrine is, however, a general one applying to language and cognitive processes as well as sensory ones. One deep problem is that representationalism appears to lead to an infinite regress – ‘seeing’ the representation implying surely that we must then have a ‘representation of the representation’. It was thus traditionally castigated as an example of a ‘homunculus theory’, that is to say, it simply proposes that there is a ‘little man’ in our heads who deals with our representations in the same way we do with the outside world – which clearly solves nothing. Modern versions of the doctrine are not as naïve as this, and our perceptions, ideas, thoughts, etc. must exist in some form or other. One suspects the idea of representationalism is not so much wrong as obsolete and that what is required is an approach which can integrate the merits of both camps and be consistent with psycho-neurological knowledge. This seems to be the direction current debates are actually taking, although the term ‘representationalism’ is being retained, its meaning is clearly undergoing considerable mutation (see ‘The Representationalism Website’). The issue is intimately bound up with debates about the nature of consciousness, AI, and the mind-body problem. Smythies (1994) has some original thoughts on this, but the on-line Stanford Encyclopedia entry ‘Epistemological problems of perception’ is probably the easiest starting point and has an excellent bibliography.