Abstract
The sense datum theory is an act-object account of sensory experience, an account that captures the nature of experience through the properties of the objects of awareness. On the act-object view, the difference between an itch and a pain lies in the difference between what one is aware of, and not in the mode of awareness as in adverbial theories. If one uses “content” as a term of art for how things are being represented to be, then representationalism about experience is the view that an experience's content settles its experiential nature. Content in this sense is automatically truth-conditional—it is true just if things are as they are being represented to be. Causation is a part of the content, because it is intuitively plausible that perception represents the world as interacting. Representationalists should think of the distinction between what it takes to have a contentful belief and what it takes to have a contentful perceptual experience. The idea is that experience represents in a way that is independent of subjects' mastery of concepts, whereas belief does not.
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