The reality of qualia

This paper argues for the reality of qualia as aspects of phenomenal experience. The argument focuses on color vision and develops a dispositionalist, subjectivist account of what it is for an object to be colored. I consider objections to dispositionalism on epistemological, metaphysical, and ‚ordinary’ grounds. I␣distinguish my representative realism from sense-data theories and from recent ‚representational’ or ‚intentional’ theories, and I argue that there is no good reason to adopt a physicalist stance that denies the reality of qualia as phenomenally available intentional contents in Brentano’s original sense of ‚intentionality’.