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ABSTRACT Representationism is the view that the phenomenal character of an experience supervenes on its representational content. Synaesthesia is a condition in which the phenomenal character of the experience produced in a subject by stimulation of one sensory modality contains elements characteristic of a second, unstimulated sensory modality. After reviewing some of the recent psychological literature on synaesthesia and one of the leading versions of representationism, I argue that cases of synaesthesia, as instances of what I call the extra qualia problem, are counterexamples to externalist versions of representationism.
Representationism is the view that the phenomenal character of an experience (the way the experience seems to its subject) is either supervenient on or identical to its representational content (the way the experience represents the world as being). On the strong version of the claim, for one's experience to seem the way blue experiences do just is for the experience to purport to represent that something is blue. This radical view about qualia is often explained by means of contrast between mental and non-mental representations. With many non-mental representations (e.g. paintings) we are aware of properties of the representation that are distinct from those the object is represented as having. We have no trouble distinguishing, for instance, that it is the paint and not the bowl of fruit that has brush strokes characteristic of a certain style, is only a few millimeters thick, and is beginning to fade in one corner. According to representationism, however, the representations involved in experience are very different. Representationists argue that the medium of experience is entirely transparent-it has no properties to which we can attend besides those the object is represented as having. There is no mental paint.
The representationist thesis itself is logically independent of any particular theory of intentional content, and has been advanced in combination with several different views. Among others, Fred Dretske (1995) and William Lycan (1996) have proposed teleological versions of the theory and Michael Tye (1996, 1998) has proposed a mixed (though mostly causal covariational) version. Representationism has already faced an initial wave of objections. Typical objections to representationism take the form of examples in which two subjects intuitively have different phenomenal states but count as being in the same state relative...