A theory of semantics, closely related to descriptivism: to be cognitively contentful is to be representing the world.
- E.g. Demonstratives, indexicals, Proper names, natural kind terms can be thought of as representing without being descriptions, e.g. in Naming and Necessity.
After representation was developed by Descartes and Kant as a successor notion to “resemblance” (as a theory of the relation between appearance and reality), representationalism came to dominate philosophy as a dogma of both rationalists and empiricists.
Moving beyond representationalism
Kant made an advance by introducing the categories: these were concepts whose role was not to describe but rather to make description possible.
Sellars observed that Wittgenstein in the [[Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus||Tractatus]] made an advance by showing, for logical vocabulary, that we could make sense of it as not representing / picturing but as a way of combining other pictures.
The Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations realized that lots of other vocabularies can also play roles that are not merely representational.