Illusionism as a theory of mental content

Abstract

Analytic philosophers of mind seemingly take the hard problem of consciousness to be the only aspect of the mind-body problem that has not been in principle solved. But phenomenal consciousness is not the only puzzling and mysterious mental phenomena. The capacity of our minds to have contents — to “be about” or “of” objects, and to represent them — is also puzzling and mysterious. And whilst, from the ‘80s on, it was largely assumed that mental contents could have been easily naturalized, the repeated and systematic failures of naturalistic theories of content invite us to search for an alternative approach. This paper aims to introduce one such alternative approach, which I dub content illusionism. Content illusionism revolves around two main claims. One is an eliminative claim, according to which mental contents do not exist. The other is the illusion claim, according to which there is an illusion of mental content: contents appear to exist and be “carried around” by our mental states. The paper offers a general presentation of content illusionism, explaining its core claims, showing that it is a compelling philosophical view of content, and defending it from some intuitive objections.