Are Cartesian Sensations Representational?

Abstract

Are Cartesian sensations representational? To contemporary philosophers of mind, this question might seem more than a little strange. Sensations, the thought goes, are non-representational by definition; they comprise whatever is left over after sense perceptual experience has been exhausted of its representational content. Sensations characterize what it is like to be a human perceiver or how things appear to human perceivers, without so much as purporting to present anything actually existing in extramental reality. What is debated today is whether any such perceptual leftovers exist.' This whole discussion is typically taken to be the legacy of Descartes, who is supposed to have introduced sensations to us in the first place. Having excised colors, sounds, flavors, odors and tactile qualities from the corporeal world, the story goes, he relocated them in the mind in the form of sensations that do little more than give an ornamental (and epistemically misleading) flair to our sense perceptual experience. So how does the question even arise? The question arises not because Descartes is especially unclear about what sensations are, but because he is unclear about what exactly sensory representation might be. Sensations include all those obscure and confused modes of mind that arise from the union and intermingling of mind and body: conscious experiences of pain, tickling, hunger, thirst, light, colors, sounds, flavors, heat, etc.2 There is little doubt that Cartesian sensations constitute the qualitative character, or what-it-is-like-ness, of human experience. But it is an open question in the context of Descartes' work whether that is all they do. It remains a question whether they also represent the corporeal world in some way, and, if so, how. Descartes is pulled in at least three different directions on this matter. After briefly considering these three lines of thought, I turn my attention to the third, according to which sensations do indeed represent the corporeal world in some way. The question to be asked is, how? What account of mental representation