A theory of semantics, closely related to descriptivism: to be cognitively contentful is to be representing the world.

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.