Rainbow's end: The structure, character, and content of conscious experience

Abstract

Separatism, representationalism, and phenomenal intentionalism are the primary views on the relationship between the phenomenality and intentionality of experience. I defend a novel position that is incompatible with separatism, can enrich representationalism and phenomenal intentionalism, but can also be accepted independently of those views. I call it phenomenal schematics: The phenomenal characters of our experiences have structures that place a priori, formal, and sometimes semantic constraints on our experience's possible intentional contents. Phenomenal structures are like the grammar of a language (or the compositional rules governing maps, models, and diagrams). Unlike words, however, phenomenal characters possess their “grammatical properties” essentially.