The doctrine of representationalism is rooted in the philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences, but it can also be traced in the philosophy of language. The purpose of this paper is to apply representationalist approaches in language and meaning to knowledge and information science research. Therefore, in the first part, the application and achievements of representationalism for information retrieval action are analyzed. Studies are categorized according to their level of concern to language and meaning in organization and information retrieval. Then, in the second part, the representational approaches to Language in Information Retrieval Action (LIRA) are analyzed and criticized in the related research. In this analysis, philosophical approaches have been considered because the roots of representationalism can be traced in semantics and semiotics in linguistic approach. Representationalism with emphasis on the linguistic dimension in the organization and information retrieval research is a theory that is advocated due to the constant relationship between words and the world they represent. In this study representationalism in semantic tools (such as thesauri, subject headings, and classifications) consists of all processes (from indexing to user information searching and retrieval) called Information Retrieval Action (IRA), and can be criticized in various ways. Some studies focus on the nature of knowledge representation and find it in the philosophy of language. Some theoretical studies criticize representationalism by addressing cognitive sciences and related areas in the information representation and retrieval or by focusing on fundamental issues in the philosophy of language and its relation to information retrieval. Others go beyond linguistic level and analyze IRA in terms of semiotics and in connection to meaning. Some studies account for the representation (in knowledge organization and especially in classifications) not as a linguistic but paradigmatic issue at the level of modernist domination in the modern era against which postmodernism stands. Finally, this inquiry illustrates that information retrieval has been rooted in the paradigm of empiricism and positivism in these areas. Representationalism places the mind at the center of cognition and ignores other aspects such as context, culture and use of them. The changes that have taken place over time to overcome the problems in the field of retrieval, such as those of headings and thesauruses and the achievement of ontologies and folksonomies, illustrate the shortcomings of these paradigms arising from representational approaches to language and needs to be changed in favor of a pragmatic view point.