Sydney Shoemaker has given a sophisticated theory of phenomenal content, motivated by the transparency of experience and by the possibility of spectrum inversion without illusion (
: Representationalism is sometimes advertised as providing a novel response to the argument from hallucination, one that accepts the presence of a ‘common factor’ between veridical and hallucinatory experience without positing sensory intermediaries between the mind and the world. I argue that much of the attractiveness of representationalism stems from a failure in the literature to distinguish between two distinct possible versions of representationalism, what I call ‘content‐based representationalism’ and ‘vehicle‐based representationalism’. Generically, representationalism appears to have a response to the argument from hallucination that avoids a commitment to qualia or sense‐data. But once the distinction between content‐based representationalism and vehicle‐based representationalism is recognized, this response to the argument from hallucination fails.
It is part of our notion of moral properties (certain forms of relativism to the contrary) that they are in some sense independent of our moral beliefs. A murderer cannot make his action moral simply by believing that it is so. Slavery was immoral even if a large number of people once believed that it was permissible, and it would remain so in the future even if every person came to believe that it was morally acceptable. But views that take moral properties to be objective and thoroughly mind-independent constituents of reality face familiar metaphysical and epistemological obstacles.
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