representationalistadj.n.

1846 J. D. Morell Hist. & Crit. View Speculative Philos. I. ii. 232 The great aim of Reid's philosophy..was..to controvert the representationalist hypothesis.

1848 N. Brit. Rev. Nov. 163 On the doctrine of the representationalist philosophers to whom we have referred, the observing mind is in fact in closer connexion with its own observed qualities than with the observed qualities of matter.

1937 R. I. Aaron John Locke ii. iii. 121 Though nominally Locke remains representationalist in his explanation of the knowledge we have of our minds, actually he proceeds as if we know ourselves and our operations directly.

1960 Brit. Jrnl. Philos. Sci. 11 71 His own version of the sense-datum theory..is a representationalist theory roughly similar to Locke's.

2002 A. Feenberg Transforming Technol. (rev. ed.) iv. 103 Maturana's theory of the nervous system breaks with this representationalist paradigm of cognition.

1920 Philos. Rev. 29 31 The truth is that nothing can represent a thing, in the representationalist's sense, unless in so far it is like that thing,—unless, that is, it has characteristics which are identical.

1977 F. Jackson Perception vi. 149 The representationalist cannot establish observationally a correlation between sense-data of certain kinds and objects of certain kinds, because he cannot allow that objects may be observed independently of observing sense-data.

2003 B. Gertler Privileged Access Introd. p. xvii Representationalists claim that the content of beliefs, desires, sensations and other mental states is exhausted by the states' representational content.

1952 H. Mead Introd. to Aesthetics iii. xv. 276 Rhys Carpenter..has strenuously opposed the formalist theories of men like Fry and Bell, as well as the art of abstractionists and extreme expressionists... But Carpenter is no ordinary nineteenth-century representationalist.

1976 Jrnl. Royal Soc. Arts 124 567/1 The Brocks were among the last great representationalists, preservers of a world of recognizable human types in clearly defined historical settings.

1993 Jrnl. Aesthetic Educ. 27 121 The art world has for too long been dominated by those who would promote the more esoteric aspects of modernism while disparaging those artists, such as representationalists, of more traditional persuasion.