Daniel Weger

Representationalism is the view that perceptual experience essentially involves being in a representational state and that the phenomenal character of perceptual experience is exhausted in its representational content. In this paper, I argue that the representationalist’s Simple Answer to Molyneux’s question does not work because it has phenomenologically implausible consequences. Since intramodal representationalism has serious shortcomings, I suggest that the representationalist should opt for an intermodal approach. Moreover, I argue that intermodal representationalism is best supported by quality space theory so as to make sense of the claim that visual and tactile experiences of an object of a given shape differ in their representational content. On this view, the representationalist’s response to Molyneux’s question ultimately depends on whether the cross-modal calibration of quality spaces is innate or learned.

Recently, there has been growing interest in the metaphysics of musical groups. However, the concern of philosophical theorising has mainly been on rock and pop music and the transtemporal identity of bands in particular. In this contribution, I will take a look at rap music and hip-hop culture and the related phenomenon of collaborations between solo artists. More specifically, I will examine whether collaborations, as found in the rap genre, meet the constraints imposed by Petersen’s hylomorphistic account of musical groups. I will show that what I call full-blown collaborations satisfy all of the requirements that are thought to exhaustively characterise musical groups, except for having a name and a mental file associated with them. To maintain the distinction between musical groups and collaborations, and to provide an explanation for why only the former have names and mental files, I suggest invoking a further essential feature of the form of BEING A MUSICAL GROUP: the group-related attitudes and behaviours of the collection of people supposedly forming the musical group.

The circularity problem states that the representationalist about phenomenal consciousness gives a circular explanation if she adopts the classic view about secondary qualities, such as colours, that characterises them as dispositions to produce experiences with a specific phenomenal character. Since colour primitivism faces severe difficulties, it seems that colour physicalism is the only viable option for the representationalist. I will argue that the representationalist is not committed to colour physicalism because she can adopt an anti-realist theory of colour. My diagnosis is that the alleged commitment to colour physicalism rests upon the acceptance of colour realism which is due to the approval of externalist versions of representationalism, such as tracking representationalism. I will argue that the representationalist can deal with the circularity problem by adopting figurative projectivism, which holds that colours are contingently non-instantiated properties that only figure in the representational contents of colour experiences.