Abstract

This book contains a defense of representationalism—the thesis that all mental facts are representational facts. Some mental facts—such as facts about what a person believes—seem obviously to be representational facts—that is, facts about how things are represented to be. Other mental facts—such as certain facts about the character of sense experience, for example the painfulness of pain, or the fact that one’s knowledge of it is immediate and authoritative— seem less obviously to be facts about how things are represented to be. In this book, Dretske takes on the task of explaining in representational terms such features as the qualitative nature of sense experience and the source of the special authority we have about our own minds.