Kant says Descartes was right to think in terms of representation but that he didn’t distinguish two different kinds: picture like images/sensations vs sentence-like thoughts.
He saw both as different ends of a spectrum, while empiricists tried to reduce thoughts to pictures and rationalists vice-versa.
Spinoza’s interpretation of Descartes gives another view: within a representational picture, empiricists are atomists whereas rationalists are holists
Brandom’s interpretation using orders of explanation: empiricists treat representation as a primitive and infer reason-relations in terms of it. Rationalists treat reason relations as primitive, explain representational content in terms of inferential relations.
Rationalist Leibniz would have us understand the content of the map as the inferences that someone who treats it as a map could make about terrain facts (e.g. a river) from map-facts (wavy-blue line).
Sellars identifies both camps as descriptivists (to be conceptually contentful is just to describe / represent how things are).
Empiricists start with narrow postulate about what representing is and exclude a lot of genuinely contentful thought due to not meeting this standard (e.g. ethics, modality)
Rationalists take all our cognitively contentful expressions as therefore being part of the actual world, resulting in ontological extravagance (postulating objective values/universals/propositions/laws)
Sellars saw the Tractatus as teaching us how to get beyond this ideology with the case of logical vocabulary
Representation is a wider concept than description - Brandom thinks that Sellars’ anti-descriptivism is a form of anti-representationalism.
E.g. proper names represent without being descriptions, in Naming and Necessity.