Representationalism, Inversion and Color Constancy

Abstract

Sydney Shoemaker has gone to great lengths to defend a repre-sentationalist view of phenomenal character, and yet he describes this view as breaking with standard representationalism in two ways. First, he thinks his representationalist position is consis- tent with the possibility of spectrum inversion, and second, he thinks there are qualia. Thus, we can think of his position in the qualia debate as moderate representationalism (or, equally, moderate qualia realism) by taking up some middle ground be- tween these two major camps. This \moderate" view faces several problems. Here I will very briey explain Shoemaker's represen- tationalist account of spectrum inversion in which he appeals to the existence of a certain sort of subjective property of objects, namely, what he calls appearance properties (formerly he called these phenomenal properties). I will argue that an alternative ver- sion of representationalism provides a more plausible explanation of both inversion-type scenarios and Shoemaker's color constancy case, which he uses to motivate the existence of these subjective properties, without positing appearance properties at all.