Representationalism

Okay kiddo, so imagine that you have a toy car, right? You know that the car is red and it has wheels, right? But what if someone else saw the same car and said it was blue? Or what if they said it had four wheels instead of two? This is kind of like what representationalism is about.

Representationalism is the idea that we don't actually experience the world directly, but instead we experience our own mental representations of the world. So just like how different people might see your toy car differently, different people might have different mental representations of the same thing in the world.

The things we experience in the world are called "stimuli", and our brains take in that information and create mental representations of it. So when you see your toy car, your eyes are taking in information about its color and shape and your brain is creating a mental representation of it. And when someone else sees the same car, their brain might create a slightly different mental representation.

Some people argue that representationalism means that we can never truly know the external world, because we only ever experience our own mental representations of it. But others say that we can still learn about the external world by studying how our mental representations work and how they relate to the stimuli in the world.

So remember kiddo, representationalism is just the idea that we experience the world through our own mental representations of it!