Abstract

This chapter and the next form of unit. In this one, I present and explore two further representationalist versus anti-representationalist debates that are prevalent in contemporary philosophical discussion: one concerning the nature of perceptual experience (indeed, experience more generally), the other how we should think of a scientific psychology or cognitive science. I lay out the interconnections between the different views in these debates and how they impact on and relate to different understandings of ARTL (here consider I amongst other things Rorty’s and John McDowell’s views on perception). The main argumentative aim of the chapter is to develop an alternative and in my view superior framework for a subject naturalistic substantiation of ARTL to that Price has offered through GE. I do this by advocating two other kinds of anti-representationalist position. The first of these I call phenomenological externalism (PE), a view that can be motivated by an assessment of the debate about perceptual experience, and involves the idea that, while experience is not a matter of representation, what we perceive in experience is something like a world for us, not the world in itself as described by physics. The other, which I see as providing a deeper, naturalistic undergirding of PE insofar as it is a position within cognitive science, is enactivism, under a certain understanding of what this position involves.