Fregean Presentationalism

My starting point in this paper is a couple of theses that have informed the debate in the philosophy of mind in the last decades, namely: content externalism (CE) and phenomenological internalism (PI). These theses concern the individuation conditions of two kinds of properties of mental states: representational properties (the properties in virtue of which a state is about something and that account for its content) and phenomenal properties (the properties in virtue of which a state has a phenomenal character and that account for what-it-is-like for the subject of the state to be in it). CE claims that representational properties are to be individuated relationally in terms of worldly environmental features, whereas PI claims that phenomenal properties are to be individuated only by reference to the subject’s intrinsic, non-relational features. In this chapter I shall not argue either for (CE) or for (PI). What I shall do instead is to consider which way, if any, of conceiving the relationship between representational and phenomenal properties makes the conjunction between (CE) and (PI) tenable. My main claim as regards this issue is that the conjunction is tenable only within an account which treats the two kinds of properties as distinct and irreducible to each other