"Particolarità, contenuto e fenomenologia: il dilemma del rappresentazionalismo"

The aim of this paper is to present a criticism to a very influential position on the nature of the phenomenological dimension of experiential states to the effect that it does not satisfy some minimal requirements of explanatory adequacy and should therefore be rejected. The paper’s main target is “representationalism” which can preliminarily be characterized as that position which aims at explaining the phenomenological dimension of experiential states in terms of the notions of mental representation and representational content. What we claim is that even though this position looks very appealing in so far as it does not postulate intrinsic and irreducible experiential properties, the attempt it pursues of accounting for the phenomenology of experience in terms of representational content runs the risk of providing either an inadequate phenomenological account or an inadequate account of the content of the experience. This constitutes in our view the dilemma of representationalism