Are There People Who Do Not Experience Imagery?
(And why does it matter?)
Nigel J. T. Thomas
Page 2
Source: http://www.imagery-imagination.com/non-im.htm
Of course, Watson's (later) views were very influential, or, at least, he was riding the crest of a wave of historical intellectual change. The abrupt change in Watson's claims about his subjectivity would soon be mirrored in the psychological profession as a whole, and subsequently in allied disciplines. It was also foreshadowed (and partly caused) by the "imageless thought controversy" which raged amongst the introspective psychologists during the first decade of the 20th century (Thomas, 2001). On one side (to simplify the story somewhat) were Oswald Külpe and his students in Würzburg, Germany, and on another we find Edward Titchener and his students at Cornell. Although the Würzburg introspectors did not deny that they experienced mental imagery, they insisted that they also experienced other types of conscious contents (designated by jargon terms such as bewusstseinslagen, but rather vaguely described as, for example "an impalpably given knowing"), the Cornell introspectors categorically denied that such "imageless" contents existed, and insisted that more careful introspection revealed fleeting (perhaps non-visual) imagery or subtle bodily sensations in their place. Needless to say, the results obtained in each laboratory fitted very nicely with the theoretical commitments of the respective presiding professors. This fact did not go unnoticed, and contributed significantly to the loss of confidence in introspective methods, the concomitant decline in scientific interest in imagery, and (in America) the rise of Behaviorism.
Between about 1920 (in the wake of the imageless thought controversy and Watson's polemics) and 1960 I think you would have been hard pressed to find an experimental psychologist in the U.S.A. who would admit to experiencing vivid and copious imagery, and probably a very high proportion would have denied experiencing any sort of imagery whatsoever (with the possible exception of "inner speech"). In the years since the 1970s, and a fortiori before about 1913, when a "non-imager" could scarcely have functioned as a psychologist, you would certainly find things quite otherwise (Holt, 1964; Kessel, 1972; Thomas, 1989, 2001, 2003).
There is evidence for a similar historical pattern, but displaced a few decades forward, amongst both 20th century philosophers and literary critics. Heil (1998 p. 213), notes that contemporary philosophers are very much "inclined to downplay the significance of imagery. . . . In discussions of mental imagery, it is common for discussants to claim that their imagery is dramatically attenuated, or even altogether absent. (In some quarters a professed lack of imagery is worn as a badge of honor.)" (This anecdotal evidence of Heil's certainly jibes with my own experience, and may be further supported by a much earlier anecdote from Price (1953 p. 234).) As Heil is well aware, contemporary philosophers, in this regard, are at odds not only with "the folk", but with nearly all philosophers of previous ages, who regarded imagery as a crucial aspect of cognition (Thomas, 1997, 1999b, 2001, 2003; see also Brann, 1991; Jay, 1993). In Heil's view, rather than reflecting a true difference in subjective experience between contemporary philosophers and earlier ones (and most of 'the folk'), these informal introspective reports are actually much more the result of "what psychologists call a criterion difference, a difference in what we take to constitute imagery". (For the literary critics, see Esrock (1994) and, as evidence of a nascent return swing of the pendulum, Scarry (1999).)
It is not, I think, plausible to believe that these historical changes (within particular intellectual milieux) in what is informally said about said about the mind's contents, reflect actual fundamental changes in everyone's cognitive mechanisms. Nor is it reasonable to think that people were being widely and systematically dishonest in describing their inner experience during one or other of these periods, hypocritically conforming to what they thought would be acceptable to their peers. It is much more plausible to believe that they reflect changes in how the people concerned were inclined to conceptualize their minds' workings, and, thus, to describe them verbally, to themselves as well as to others. I see no reason to think that lay-people cannot be similarly affected by theoretical ideas of a less formal sort (and acquired in less systematic ways).
Weight is added to these speculations by the work of Schwitzgebel (2002a), who has noted a rather similar phenomenon in reports of dreaming. In the 1950s it was widely reported by psychologists that a majority of people's dreams were largely or entirely without color: they were experienced in monochrome. More recent evidence, from the 1960s and later, indicates to the contrary that most people believe themselves to dream in color. It seems fairly clear that this change was not a result of changes in the way people's brains function, but rather to changing cultural influences affecting how they conceptualize and report their subjective experience (and perhaps in how psychologists question them and interpret their answers). The cultural change that Schwitzgebel points to is the prevalence of black and white television in the period when dreams seemed to be in black and white, and its later replacement by color television. I would suggest that other factors may have been at work as well, including the generalized iconophobia of the still deeply Behavioristic American psychology of the 1950s, which had probably seeped somewhat into the popular mind as well.
Schwitzgebel also argues explicitly (2002b) that we really do not know much about what our own mental imagery is like. I find the position as he states it rather extreme and paradoxical, but his arguments certainly lend weight to the view that I have been arguing that we are really not very good at accurately reporting what our private subjective experience is like. Just because it is private, it is hard to be sure that we are applying the words we use to describe it in the same way that the next person does. In attempting this difficult descriptive task we are inevitably affected by our formal or informal theoretical conceptions of how the mind works.
Indeed, if we did not have some such theoretical preconceptions it is questionable whether we would be able to describe the contents of our consciousness at all. The language in which we describe our subjective experience derives entirely, or almost so, from our theories; after all, one could hardly build up a vocabulary for discussing private experience via ostensive definition. Although I think it is mistaken (Thomas, 1999a), the traditional inner 'picture' theory of visual imagery that is entrenched in 'folk' psychological thinking has perhaps served a useful purpose over the centuries by giving people a certain confidence that they are talking sense when they talk about visual imagery experience. At the very least it has given them a vocabulary for talking about such experiences. It is no coincidence, I think, that the reluctance of so many mid-to-late 20th century philosophers to admit to experiencing imagery has gone along with a widespread rejection of picture theory (following the work of Ryle and Wittgenstein) coupled with the absence (at least before Pylyshyn came along) of any clear and convincing alternative explanation of quasi-perceptual experience. The absence of any traditional equivalent to picture theory for explaining quasi-perceptual experience in the other sense modes may go some way towards explaining why non-visual imagery is relatively rarely discussed.
I should probably add, at this point, that the fact that I believe that although I believe that people's attempts to describe idiosyncratic aspects of their imagery experience are thoroughly "theoretically infected", it does not follow that there is no real phenomenon behind them. The eliminativist line taken towards imagery by psychological and philosophical behaviorists has long since proved itself quite inadequate not only to accounting for people's actual subjectivity, but also to accounting for what is now a large and diverse arrary of experimental findings that demonstrate the cognitive effects of imagery: the powerful mnemonic effects of imagery (Paivio, 1971, 1991) probably remain the most important in this regard, but a wide range of other findings (see Finke, 1989; Richardson, 1999) also bear out the point. (Pylyshyn's well known arguments do not, and are not intended to, controvert this. Pylyshyn frequently makes it quite clear that he fully accepts that people have quasi-visual experiences of the sort colloquially called imagery, and he also holds that the representations that embody this imagery have an important functional role to play in cognition. What he is rejecting is merely the view that such representations are in any meaningful sense similar to pictures.)
John Preston:
(ii) whether any psychologists, save for the most radical behaviorists, deny either that people have mental images, or that mental images can serve to produce or guide behavior (as goals, for example)?
The only significant psychologist that I know of who explicitly took such a position was J.B. Watson (see above for references); and even he hedges in places. There probably were other Behaviorists who made similar remarks, but as Glen Sizemore quite rightly points out, even so radical a Behaviorist as B.F. Skinner acknowledged the reality of "private seeing", although, of course, he was unwilling to call it mental imagery, and I do not believe he accorded it anything like the same sort of functional importance that it had for most cognitive theorists (philosophers and psychologists, from Aristotle to Hume to Bergson, Wundt, and Titchener) before the Behaviorist revolution. The iconophobia of the Behaviorist era, which still lingers on in an attenuated form in philosophy and much of cognitive science, is not so much a matter of the explicit denial of the existence or even the importance of imagery; it is simply a matter of ignoring the phenomenon as far as is possible, and treating it as trivial when it cannot be ignored.
We Make it Easy to Succeed
Successwaves, Intl.
Brain Based Accelerated Success Audios
 |