The Needlessness of Adverbialism, Attributeism and its Compatibilty with Cognitive Science

Although adverbialism is not given much attention in current discussions of phenomenal states, it remains of interest to philosophers who reject the representationalist view of such states, in suggesting an alternative to a problematic ‘act-property’ conception. We discuss adverbialism and the formalization Tye once offered for it, and criticize the semantics he proposed for this formalization. Our central claim is that Tye’s ontological purposes could have been met by a more minimal view, which we dub “attributeism”. We then show that there is no incompatibility between the ontology of attributeism and the postulation of pictorial representations in the brain.