Husserl: Critique of Representationalism

A fruitful way to approach The Idea of Phenomenology is through Husserl’s claim that consciousness is not a bag, box, or any other kind of container. The bag conception, which dominated much of modern philosophy, is rooted in the idea that philosophy is restricted to investigating only what is really immanent to consciousness, such as acts and sensory contents. On this view, what Husserl called the riddle of transcendence can never be solved. The phenomenological reduction, as Husserl develops it in (...) The Idea of Phenomenology, opened up a new and broader sense of immanence that embraces the transcendent, making it possible both to solve the riddle and to escape the bag conception once and for all. The essay will discuss ways in which this new conception of immanence is tied to the key Husserlian themes of appearance, phenomenon, essence, seeing or intuiting, and constitution. (shrink)

Richard Rorty in his recent book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1 offers a wide ranging critique of that version of modern philosophy which understands itself fundamentally as a theory of knowledge. He attacks analytic philosophy as well as phenomenology for falling into a sort of trap laid for us in the period of classical modern philosophy by most everyone from Descartes and Locke to Kant. I want to focus on just one element in Rorty's critique - namely, that (...) there persists on virtually all philosophic fronts an unacceptable view of knowledge as mirror-like representation of the physical world. In particular, I want to argue that Edmund Husserl's phenomenology - one of Rorty's many targets - does not rely on such a representational theory of knowledge (specifically, of perception) and consequently does not fall to Rorty's criticism. Indeed, I want to suggest that Husserl's view (with certain suitable modifications) offers one of the few plausible approaches available to us in dealing with questions of human knowledge. (shrink)

This paper begins by tracing the Hobbesian roots of `representationalism:' the thesis that reality is accessible to mind only through representations, images, signs or appearances that indicate a reality lying `behind' them (e.g. as unperceived causes of perceptions). This is linked to two kinds of absolute realism: the `naive' scientific realism of British empiricism, which provoked Berkeley's idealist reaction, and the noumenal realism of Kant. I argue that Husserl defined his position against both Berkeleyian idealism and these forms of absolute (...) realism by way of two arguments: a pragmatic argument against skepticism about the external world (as described by Karl Ameriks) and a distinctively phenomenological argument against the representationalism implied by absolute realism. (shrink)

: This paper advances an account of Twardowski as a representationalist. In particular, Twardowskian representationalism is a blend of what I call resemblance representationalism and mediator-content representationalism. It was not, I argue here, proxy-percept representationalism. Twardowski treated mental contents as "signs" or "quasi-pictures." Husserl was a well-known critic of this view. I additionally argue that Husserl's criticism is grounded in the claim that Twardowski conflated representational content with sensations. The distinction on which this Husserlian criticism rests is between the psychological (...) and ideal contents of consciousness, the cornerstone of the early Husserlian phenomenology. (shrink)

It is often said that by rejecting the representationalist model of mind, phenomenology makes a decisive advance over empiricism. Yet despite such pronouncements, the arguments Husserl uses to refute representationalism have received scant critical attention, and upon examination many turn out to be obscure. I argue here that some of Husserl's best known anti-representationalist arguments fail. I end the paper, however, by suggesting that if these unsuccessful arguments are paired with certain methodological considerations taken from Husserl's mature philosophy, they may (...) provide adequate grounds for a rejection of representationalism after all. (shrink)

According to contemporary representationalism, phenomenal qualia—of specifically sensory experiences—supervene on representational content. Most arguments for representationalism share a common, phenomenological premise: the so-called “transparency thesis.” According to the transparency thesis, it is difficult—if not impossible—to distinguish the quality or character of experiencing an object from the perceived properties of that object. In this paper, I show that Husserl would react negatively to the transparency thesis; and, consequently, that Husserl would be opposed to at least two versions of contemporary representationalism. First, (...) I show that Husserl would be opposed to strong representationalism, since he believes the cognitive content of a perceptual episode can vary despite constancy of sensory qualia. Second, I then show that Husserl would be opposed to weak representationalism, since he believes that sensory qualia—specifically, the sort that he calls “kinesthetic sensations”—can vary despite constancy in representational content. (shrink)