Thread by @Meaningness

Three obstacles to explaining why representationalism is wrong:

1️⃣ It’s the culmination of the whole 2600+ year rationalist tradition on which our culture mainly rests. Everything points toward it. It’s inexorably deducible from a millennia-enduring zeitgeist. It can’t be considered because it’s implied by too much.

2️⃣ It’s the final reductio ad absurdum of rationalism. Representations inescapably must be physical things that interact with non-physical things. That cannot be accommodated in rationalist metaphysics. Representationalism can’t be doubted because everything else might fall apart

3️⃣ There are better alternatives, but they aren’t well worked out, and nobody has bothered to explain them straightforwardly.

Representationalism is also not well worked out, and not explained clearly anywhere either. To their credit, as objections were raised in the 1980s, serious representationalists tried to work out the details and explain them clearly.

And realized they couldn’t…

And in the early 1990s the honest ones admitted defeat and found other things to do. Unfortunately, only a few bit the bullet and began revising their prior metaphysical assumptions, and those who did (Clark & Chalmers eg) did not work back far enough…

A turning point was realizing that no specific definition of “representation” can do the work that, intuitively, it seemed the prior vague idea ought to be able to do.