Representationalism is currently a highly favored version of materialism, and in this chapter we will consider its main attractions and its difficulties. A key part of the view can be expressed in the following summary account of how color comes into seeing.

1. (R1) Color comes into the story of a person's seeing the red apple in exactly two ways, (a) as a represented property, i.e., as a property that the person represents the apple as having (namely, red) and (b) as a property of the (surface of the) apple.

The meaning of this statement evidently depends on one's account of representation and on what one takes to be the relevant property of an apple. Representationalists have a variety of understandings on both points. I shall begin the discussion of representationalism with a generic account designed to bring out essential commitments that are common to those who claim the label. Differences among accounts will then emerge as they become relevant to assessing the merits of representationalism.

A presumed advantage of representationalism is its naturalism, that is, its commitment to recognizing no entities other than those recognized in the natural sciences. Because advances in science sometimes add new entities – e.g., electromagnetic force, black holes, or quarks – we cannot reduce naturalism to recognition of a list. Instead, we must take naturalism to accept only what is presently admitted in natural science plus whatever will come to be admitted by the methods of natural science.