Hill's Representationalism: Qualia’s Appearance and Reality

Philosopher Christopher S. Hill’s mature theory of phenomenal consciousness is a comprehensive representationalism according to which awareness is essentially representational: whenever a subject is aware of something, the subject is in a mental state that represents it. Phenomenal consciousness involves a rich, typically nonconceptual form of experiential representation that presents colors, sounds, bodily conditions, emotions, and other qualitative features without requiring corresponding concepts or judgments; consequently, phenomenal character can outrun language and conceptual discrimination (Hill, 2009, 2014). Most distinctively, Hill extends the appearance/reality distinction to qualia themselves, arguing that how qualitative properties are experientially represented need not reveal their intrinsic nature—a strategy designed to preserve the reality of phenomenal experience while undercutting arguments from introspection to property dualism.

In other words, Hill's later theory holds that all awareness is representational—including introspective awareness of qualitative states such as pain—and draws from this the consequence that the appearance/reality distinction applies to qualia themselves: there is the way qualia are represented as being, and the way they are in themselves—and the two are not the same (Hill, 2009). Because introspection therefore does not disclose the essential nature of phenomenal properties, the anti-physicalist arguments that depend on such disclosure lose their evidential base, and property dualism is undercut without any appeal to identity claims. Hill’s theory is embedded in his taxonomy distinguishing six forms of consciousness, and is applied in detail to visual awareness, pain, emotional qualia, and introspective judgment, with sustained use of results from vision science (Hill, 2009, 2022). It represents a considered reversal: Hill's earlier Sensations defended type materialism about qualitative states, a position he has since abandoned in favor of representationalism while continuing to write about it.

Six Forms of Consciousness

Hill begins by refusing to treat "consciousness" as one explanandum. He distinguishes agent consciousness; propositional consciousness, expressed by the conscious that construction; introspective consciousness, possessed by states that are objects of introspective awareness; relational consciousness, expressed by conscious of; phenomenal consciousness; and experiential consciousness, common to all states counting as experiences (Hill, 2009).

The taxonomy enables Hill’s distinctive contribution. Several classical arguments about phenomenal consciousness trade, on Hill's diagnosis, on equivocation between forms—most consequentially between phenomenal consciousness and introspective awareness of it. Separating them makes room for his central move.

Awareness as Representation

Hill's distinguishing contribution to phenomenal consciousness is his general representational principle: if an agent is aware of X, the agent is in a mental state that represents X (Hill, 2009). The proposal is broader than the familiar claim that perceptual states carry information. Representation is constitutive of awareness itself. Hill motivates this view partly by the central role representation plays in cognitive science and partly by arguing that representationalism offers a unified treatment of veridical perception, hallucination, pain, emotion, and introspection.

Unlike higher-order theories, Hill does not require a distinct meta-representation of a first-order mental state in order for phenomenality to occur. His central concern is experiential awareness of qualitative properties and objects themselves. For this reason, his mature position fits most naturally among first-order representational theories, although it is broader than paradigmatic externalist accounts such as Dretske’s because it attempts to characterize awareness across perceptual, bodily, emotional, and introspective domains.

Nonconceptual Experiential Awareness

A major departure from Hill’s earlier physicalism concerns the relation between phenomenal awareness and concepts. In Sensations (1991), Hill had defended a posteriori type physicalism and later sought to protect physicalism by emphasizing the conceptual difference between phenomenal and physical descriptions. He subsequently concluded that awareness of qualia cannot generally be conceptual because experience is much more fine-grained than the concepts available to the subject (Hill, 2009).

A visual field may contain shades for which one possesses no corresponding color concepts; a pain can have a highly determinate phenomenal character that exceeds one's conceptual vocabulary. Even demonstrative concepts such as “that shade” presuppose a more primitive experiential presentation of what is being demonstrated. Hill therefore posits subconceptual or nonconceptual experiential representations. This allows phenomenal consciousness to be representational without reducing it to judgment, belief, or linguistic cognition (Hill, 2009; Stoljar, 2010).

Qualia and the Appearance-Reality Distinction

The most distinctive feature of Hill’s mature theory is his rejection of the assumption that experiential awareness provides transparent access to the intrinsic nature of qualia. In ordinary thinking, phenomenal qualities seem epistemically privileged: if something feels painful, perhaps there can be no further distinction between its seeming painful and its actually being painful. Hill challenges this inference. Because awareness involves representation, and representations can misrepresent, a qualitative property can be represented in experience in a way that differs from what it is in itself (Hill, 2009).

Hill conceives of qualia as ways things look, feel, smell, or otherwise experientially appear rather than as intrinsic, introspectively disclosed properties of inner mental objects. Representational content supplies the qualitative character of an experience. The transparency or diaphanousness of experience therefore cannot establish that introspection reveals the metaphysical essence either of consciousness or of its objects; introspection may tell us how things appear without telling us what properties ultimately constitute those appearances (Hill, 2009).

This move is central to Hill’s materialist strategy. Arguments for property dualism often assume that phenomenal qualities are fully revealed in experience and therefore cannot turn out to be ordinary physical properties. Hill denies the epistemic premise. Phenomenal awareness can be immediate and vivid without being metaphysically transparent.

Awareness as Representation

The unifying thesis is that all awareness involves representations—uncontroversial for perceptual awareness of external objects, highly contested for awareness of one's own qualia, where the intuition of direct acquaintance is strongest. Hill extends the representational account to that case too, arguing that introspective awareness takes the form of belief rather than a distinctive nonconceptual acquaintance relation.

Pain is the stress test and receives the fullest treatment. Hill defends a perceptual account on which pain experience represents bodily disturbance, in the tradition running through Armstrong and Pitcher, so that awareness of pain is awareness of a represented condition of the body rather than direct apprehension of an intrinsic mental quality (Hill, 2009; Byrne, 2011). Visual qualia receive a parallel externalist treatment: Hill identifies them with visual appearances construed as relational properties of external objects. The resulting position locates qualia in the world rather than in the head—the question posed directly in his contribution to the type-identity volume he co-edited (Hill, 2012).

The Appearance/Reality Distinction Applied to Qualia

The payoff is a denial of what the literature calls revelation: the thesis that experience discloses the essential nature of phenomenal properties. If awareness of qualia is representational, then representation can misrepresent, and the way qualia appear in introspection need not be the way they are (Hill, 2009). This disjunction provides explanatory powers. The knowledge argument, the conceivability argument, and the modal argument all require that introspection deliver phenomenal properties as they are in themselves; otherwise the inference from what we can conceive or fail to know to what is metaphysically the case has no purchase. Hill's move is thus a rival to the phenomenal-concept strategy rather than a version of it: where type-B materialists explain the epistemic gap by the special character of phenomenal concepts while granting that introspection is accurate, Hill denies the accuracy assumption directly. He then uses the doctrine to undercut the case for property dualism.

From Type Materialism to Representationalism

Hill’s earlier Sensations argued for a radical physicalism about qualitative states—that qualitative states are type-identical with high-level brain states—and held that sensations are possessed only by human beings and members of related biological species, so that silicon-based androids cannot have them (Hill, 1991). The later Hill states that he no longer holds this version of physicalism, having converted to a form of representationalism, though he continues to write about type materialism and to seek improvements on the earlier exposition.

The two positions are not directly incompatible, and the point matters for placement. McLaughlin, who does hold type materialism, argues that a type materialist can accept Hill's representational account of experiential awareness of perceptual qualia (McLaughlin, 2016). What changed is the explanatory architecture, not the physicalist commitment: the earlier Hill defended physicalism by identifying qualia with brain states, the later Hill by denying that introspection reveals qualia well enough to ground any argument against physicalism. Perceptual Experience extends the program to perceptual representation, awareness of particulars, the mind-body problem, pain, and the epistemic role of perception (Hill, 2022).

Assessment

Hill’s importance lies precisely here. His mature theory neither eliminates qualia nor treats them as metaphysically self-interpreting. It separates the reality of phenomenal consciousness from the claim that consciousness reveals its own underlying ontology. That combination makes representationalism not merely a theory of perceptual content but an epistemological strategy for explaining why phenomenality can seem irreducibly nonphysical even if a physicalist ontology ultimately proves correct.

The theory's strengths are systematic reach and potential empirical engagement. It supplies interlocking accounts of six kinds of consciousness rather than one, applies a single mechanism across vision, pain, emotion, and introspection, and draws on vision science and neuroscience rather than on intuition alone. Its treatment of revelation is a sustained attempt in the representationalist literature to remove the evidential foundation of anti-physicalist arguments rather than to answer them.

Objections cluster on the externalist construal. Locating visual qualia in relational properties of external objects raises familiar difficulties for hallucination and illusion, where the relevant objects are absent (Bernier, 2013). Critics question whether the perceptual account of pain accommodates cases where pain experience seems to outrun any represented bodily disturbance (Byrne, 2011), and whether the claim that all awareness of qualia is representational entails the stronger and less plausible claim that it is exhaustively conceptual. Reviewers of Perceptual Experience note that the non-visual modalities are treated unisensorially, without engaging multisensory interaction. Finally, denying subjective veracity makes phenomenal character something introspection may systematically get wrong—a substantial deflation of the datum most theories of consciousness take themselves to be explaining.

References

Bernier, P. (2013). La théorie représentationnelle de la conscience phénoménale et le problème des apparences visuelles. Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, 52(2).

Byrne, A. (2011). Christopher Hill: Consciousness. Philosophical Studies, 156(3).

Hill, C. S. (1991). Sensations: A Defense of Type Materialism. Cambridge University Press.

Hill, C. S. (2002). Thought and World: An Austere Portrayal of Truth, Reference, and Semantic Correspondence. Cambridge University Press.

Hill, C. S. (2009). Consciousness. Cambridge University Press.

Hill, C. S. (2012). Locating qualia: Do they reside in the brain or in the body and the world? In S. Gozzano & C. S. Hill (Eds.), New Perspectives on Type Identity: The Mental and the Physical (pp. 127–149). Cambridge University Press.

Hill, C. S. (2014). Meaning, Mind, and Knowledge. Oxford University Press.

Hill, C. S. (2016). Insects: Still looking like zombies. Animal Sentience, 1.

Hill, C. S. (2018). Unity of consciousness. WIREs Cognitive Science, 9(5).

Hill, C. S. (2022). Perceptual Experience. Oxford University Press.

Hill, C. S., & Bennett, D. J. (Eds.). (2014). Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness. MIT Press.

McLaughlin, B. P. (2016). Hill on phenomenal consciousness. Philosophical Studies, 173(3), 851–860.

Stoljar, D. (2010). Review of Consciousness. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.