Representation, Experience, and Metaphysics

Jonathan Knowles is professor of philosophy at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. He took his PhD at Birkbeck College, London (1995) with a thesis on the nature and philosophical significance of cognitive science, with special focus on the interrelationships between the views on language of Chomsky, Davidson and Dummett. On moving to Norway his interests turned to embrace philosophy of science and epistemology, yielding amongst other things the book Norms, Naturalism and Epistemology: The Case for Science without Norms (Palgrave 2004) in which it is argued that naturalist approaches to epistemology are incapable of providing normative guidance to science that is both necessary to achieve optimal belief-formation and correct. Since then his work has moved in a more explicitly metaphilosophical direction with papers on naturalism, representationalism, realism, and the possibility of metaphysics, work which he has also related to the question of how we should understand and explain mind and experience.

• 1. Introduction.- 2. Global Expressivism.- 3. Representationalism versus anti-representationalism about perceptual experience and in cognitive science.- 4. The world for us and the world in itself.- 5. Brains in vats.- 6. Anti-representationalism, realism, and anti-realism.- 7. Metaphysics for anti-representationalists?.- References.