Ned Block (2003), “Mental Paint”, in Martin Hahn and Bjørn Ramberg (eds.), Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (a Bradford Book), chapter 9, pp. 165–200. Read from the copy Block links from his publications page.
The brief’s citation (in Reflections and Replies, 2003) is correct.
Key takeaways
- Phenomenism (p. 165). Sensations “almost always” have representational content, and “it is often the phenomenal character itself that has the representational content”, but “phenomenal character outruns representational content”.
- Paint and oil (pp. 172–174). Three things: the intentional content of an experience; mental paint, mental properties of the experience that do the representing (phenomenal character, on Block’s view, is one); and mental oil, mental properties that represent nothing, which Block claims for orgasm, pain and other bodily sensations.
- Against internalist representationism (pp. 166–168). Its only resources are functional. Erisa, raised in a room where every surface changes colour every few minutes, with no colour words and no standing colour beliefs, has “vivid” colour differences and no abiding functional differences that could constitute them. Replies appeal to “unsupported empirical claims”.
- Against externalist representationism. If phenomenal character supervenes on the brain, a swampman has it with no content (pp. 170–171). Harman’s transparency is right about attention and “straightforwardly wrong” about awareness (the jackhammer, the refrigerator compressor); and phosphenes and Bach-y-Rita’s tactile vision show attention to experience is possible (pp. 171–179). On Inverted Earth, revised so the traveller knowingly adopts the new community, phenomenal character stays the same while colour content changes; for colour, unlike water, there is no shared “appearance property” for the representationist to appeal to, so “Mental paint is what stays the same” (pp. 183–186).
- Shifted spectra (pp. 188–194). Normal observers differ in peak cone sensitivity (standard deviation 1–2 nm), with a genetic split in long-wave cones differing by 5–7 nm, and in a classic study 50 normal subjects put unique green anywhere from 490 to 517 nm, “9 percent of the visible spectrum”. So a standard aquamarine chip, a minimal shade, probably looks different to different people, though all represent it as aquamarine. “If representationism is right, color experience probably cannot be veridical for both men and women, both blacks and whites, both young and old. Hence representationism is not right” (p. 191).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, as the record’s statement of the case against representationalism about phenomenal character. No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice.
Relation declared. extends: LIT-634. The chapter restates the
Inverted Earth argument against representationism instead of
functionalism, changes the case so the subject consciously adopts the new
language community (p. 185), adds the long-term-memory reply to Lycan’s
gradual-shift objection, and shows in n. 10 that both Inverted Earth and the
inverted spectrum yield counterexamples in both directions.
The record’s representationalist holdings.
- Metzinger (LIT-568, NOTE-460; LIT-450, NOTE-372) holds that phenomenal content is representational content with specific functional properties and locally supervenes on the brain. That is the internalist, functionalist representationism of this chapter’s first section, and Erisa is aimed at exactly it. Block names Tye, Rey and White as holders; the pairing with Metzinger is mine.
- Ivy & Mroczko-Wąsowicz (LIT-099, NOTE-150) are representationalist about perception’s content without a claim about phenomenal character, so the chapter does not bear on them.
- Chalmers’s meta-problem (LIT-425, NOTE-354) lists first-order representationalism among theories that can begin to explain problem reports. This chapter’s claim is that the representationist cannot say what stays the same on Inverted Earth, which is the kind of report such a theory would have to explain.
- Dennett. Block cites Consciousness Explained (1991; LIT-443, held unread) for the claim that innate reactions to colours (red makes us nervous, blue calm) differ functionally, and calls such claims “empirical speculations” that could not constitute phenomenal character (p. 167).
Physicalist phenomenism. Block calls himself “a reductionist, a physicalist phenomenist” (p. 182): phenomenal qualities are physical, possibly even psychofunctional, but not representational. So this is not an argument for dualism, and it is consistent with LIT-407’s bet on neurophysiology.