A Dictionary of Philosophy, Third Edition
. Mental imagery fell into disrepute in the mid-twentieth century in both philosophy and psychology. Statements about one’s images were not publicly assessable, and so fell foul of Wittgenstein’s PRIVATE LANGUAGE argument, while psychology had no means of studying them or using them in scientific accounts of human beings. They also suffered from being apparently indeterminate in nature. Recently, however, scientists have found ways of studying them, and integrating their study with that of vision, and following this their study has become respectable again in philosophy too. (Cf. at least in part the similar revival of SENSE DATA.)
Interest has centred mainly on visual images, and two main theories are current about what these are, pictorialism and descriptionalism.
Pictorialists argue first that images do indeed exist and are used in solving various imaginative problems, and that they do so by representing the relevant material in a spatial manner. Pictorialists use experimental data, such as that when subjects are asked to say whether two diagrams are congruent, where this could be found by rotating one of them, the time needed to answer is proportional to the size of the angular rotation required; this, pictorialists claim, suggests that subjects do indeed mentally rotate one of them.
Descriptionalists emphasize such things as the indeterminacy of images, and claim that they represent things more as linguistic items do. A verbal description of a scene, for instance, will inevitably ignore many features of it altogether—which is different from representing them as blurred or hidden, as a picture might. An image of a red tomato represents something as a red tomato, but does not itself contain something red, as a picture normally would. Pylyshyn, a leading descriptionalist, insists that we must distinguish whether ‘image’ refers to ‘what I experience when I imagine a scene,…surely that exists in the same sense that any other sensation or conscious content does (e.g. pains, tickles, etc.)’ or to ‘a certain theoretical construct that is claimed to have certain properties (e.g. to be spatially extended) and to play a specified role in certain cognitive processes’. He gives a large role to ‘tacit knowledge’ (see TACIT AND IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE), and also insists that in ‘image of object X with property P’, P belongs to the object, not the image; ignoring this, he thinks, is ‘probably the most ubiquitous and damaging conceptual confusion in the whole imagery literature’.
However, pictorialists agree that there is no actual picture in the brain—it would involve an inner eye to see it, and how would that work? Imaging a red tomato does not involve a circular bit of the brain being red. Rather, as with the descriptionalists, we represent something as a red tomato, only the representing is spatial rather than linguistic. Also the indeterminacy objection does not hold, they claim: an ordinary stick-picture of a person may leave it indeterminate, and not merely blurred or hidden, whether it is male or female, clothed or unclothed, etc.
But now the issue itself is becoming blurred (see Block’s ‘Introduction’ to Imagery), and others, such as Tye, present an alternative or compromise view.
B.Beakley and P.Ludlow (eds), The Philosophy of Mind: Classical Problems/Contemporary Issues, MIT Press, 1992. (Part in has relevant items.)
N.Block (ed.), Imagery, MIT Press, 1981. (Includes important articles on both sides; see pp. 152, 153 for quotations from Pylyshyn. See also Block (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 2, Harvard UP and Methuen, 1981.)
S.Kosslyn, Image and Brain: the Resolution of the Imagery Debate, MIT Press, 1994. (Full discussion of images, defending their existence and importance with very extensive bibliography.)
W.G.Lycan (ed.), Mind and Cognition, Blackwell, 1990.
M.Tye, The Imagery Debate, MIT Press, 1991. (Discusses the two main views both philosophically and scientifically, offering his own alternative.)
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