On a Defense of the Hegemony of Representation

Abstract

On the general ideological issue, I am on Bill Lycan's side: I would like to believe in the hegemony of representation. But I don't find it quite so easy to believe this (or even to understand it fully) as he apparently does. When it comes to the details of his defense of the general thesis against some specific objections and counterexamples, I am not very clear about how the argument is supposed to go. I have worries both about the response to Ned Block's inverted earth argument for a distinction between qualitative and intentional content of experience, and about the response to Christopher Peacocke's proposed counterexamples to his version of the hegemony of representation. First on Block's inverted earth: I will review Block's argument, as I understand it, and then consider Lycan's response. Block told his story in two versions. In both of them, inverted earth is a place much like earth, except that the actual physical colors of things are inverted -switched with the complementary colors. Further, the language spoken by inverted earthians is an inverted version of English: they use blue to refer to the color yellow, which is the color of the sky. In the intersubjective version of the story, our subject