Does synesthesia undermine representationalism?1
Torin Alter talter@ua.edu
[Draft: please treat as such. For Pysche symposium on Gregg Rosenberg’s A Place for
Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World (OUP, 2004)]
Does synesthesia undermine representationalism? Gregg Rosenberg (2004) argues that it
does. On his view, synesthesia illustrates how phenomenal properties can vary
independently of representational properties. So, for example, he argues that sound/color
synesthetic experiences show that visual experiences do not always represent spatial
properties. I will argue that the representationalist can plausibly answer Rosenberg’s
objections. On reflection, synesthesia poses no serious threat to representationalism.
Rosenberg’s argument from synesthesia resembles anti-representationalist arguments
advanced by Ned Block (1995, 1996), Christopher Peacocke (1983) and others (e.g.,
Boghossian and Velleman 1989). Like Rosenberg, these philosophers......
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