Imagery and Imagination
Amy Kind
Page 3
Source: http://www.iep.utm.edu/imagery/
Finally, Dennett (1969) presents two examples that seem to cause trouble for pictorialism and provide support for descriptionalism. The first example involves a striped tiger. (See also Armstrong 1968 for a related example involving a speckled hen.) Form a mental image of a tiger and then try to answer the following question: How many stripes does that tiger have? Invariably, the question cannot be answered; the mental images that we form typically do not contain that information. However, just as all tigers have a definite number of stripes, so too do all pictures of tigers. Thus, if mental images were pictorial, a mental image of a tiger should reveal a definite number of stripes. More formally, the objection to pictorialism that the striped tiger example poses can be stated as follows:
- Mental images can be indeterminate with respect to visual properties (e.g., the number of stripes on a tiger).
- Pictorial representations cannot be indeterminate with respect to visual properties.
- So, mental images are not pictorial representations.
Dennett’s second example attempts to show that mental images can be noncommittal in a way in which pictorial representations generally cannot. (See also Shorter 1952. In what follows, I slightly modify Dennett’s example. See Block 1981a for a discussion of why the example needs modification.) Form a mental image of a tall woman wearing a hat and then try to answer the following questions: What kind of hat was it? Was she sitting or standing? Was she indoors or outdoors? Was she wearing shoes? Was she wearing a watch? Though you can undoubtedly answer some of these questions—probably you can tell what kind of hat the woman was wearing in your image, be it a beret or a cowboy hat or a baseball cap—you were probably unable to answer some of the others. When asked whether she was indoors or outdoors, or whether she was wearing a watch, you probably did not have enough information to answer the question. And this need not be because you imagined her only from the neck up. Even if you imagined her full-figure before you, your image likely did not go into sufficient detail to enable you to answer whether she was wearing a watch.
Consider next a picture of a tall woman wearing a hat. Dennett argues that in a pictorial representation of the woman, assuming that her wrists are in view, she must either be depicted wearing a watch or not wearing a watch. The only way for the picture to avoid addressing the issue would be to have something obscuring the woman’s wrists. This seems to differentiate the representational nature of a mental image from the representational nature of a picture. Your image can be inexplicitly noncommittal about whether she is wearing a watch, but a picture can only be explicitly noncommittal about it. (This terminology derives from Block 1981a.)
Finally, consider a written description of the woman. Clearly a description can be inexplicitly noncommittal. Your description might be very short, for example, which would make it impossible to tell whether the woman was wearing a watch or not. Dennett thus concludes that mental imagery has to be descriptional, and not pictorial, in nature.
In response to this example, Block (1981a), Fodor (1975), and Tye (1991) have each argued that Dennett is operating with too narrow a conception of pictorial representation, accusing him of committing thephotographic fallacy. If we consider photographs, which are one kind of pictorial representation, then it might seem that Dennett is right: photographs are incapable of being inexplicitly noncommittal about visual features. But consideration of photographs does not show that pictorial representation in generallacks this option. In particular, consider children’s drawings or stick figures. In drawing a stick figure of a woman, you might simply fail to go into the matter of the woman’s wristwear. There are lots of different kinds of pictorial representation, and although both stick figure drawings and photographs represent pictorially, they do so in very different ways. The pictorialists’ claim that mental images represent pictorially should not force one to the position that mental images are like mental snapshots; they might be more like mental stick-figure drawings.
Interestingly, these points about the photographic fallacy do not protect the pictorialist from the striped tiger example. Since there is a difference between being inexplicitly noncommittal and beingindeterminate, the fact that some pictorial representations, like stick figures, are able to be inexplicitly noncommittal about certain visual features does not show that they can be indeterminate about these visual features. The descriptionalist might argue that just as a photograph has to depict a determinate number of stripes on the tiger, so too does a stick-figure drawing.
Fodor (1975) suggests a way to deny the first premise of the above argument. It might be that there is some definite answer to the question, “how many stripes does my image-tiger have?” but that I cannot answer the question because images are labile (changing constantly, plastic); the problem is that we cannot hold onto our images long enough to count the stripes. Ultimately, however, Fodor rejects the second premise of the above argument, suggesting that on blurry or out-of-focus pictures there may not be a determinate answer to the question, “How many stripes are there on the photograph?” (See Hannay 1971 for a similar treatment of the problem.)
Alternatively, the pictorialist might reject the move that Dennett seems to make from the claim:
(a) I cannot count the stripes on the tiger in my mental image
to the claim:
(b)The mental image is indeterminate with respect to the number of stripes.
Your mental image might well be determinate without your being able to count the stripes. For example, if you only get a fleeting glance at an actual tiger, you are not going to be able to count his stripes. (See Lyons 1984 for a suggestion of this sort.) But that does not entail that the tiger has an indeterminate number of stripes.
d. A Remaining Question About Pictorial vs. Descriptional Representation
Above, in explaining the descriptionalist view, I noted that descriptional representations need not be literally descriptive. Descriptional representations are characterized primarily negatively, i.e., for the purposes of understanding the imagery debate, a representation will count as descriptional as long as it is not pictorial. This assumes, however, that we have a clear understanding of what makes a representation pictorial. Unfortunately, spelling out exactly what makes a representation a pictorial one—or, to put it another way, spelling out the nature of depiction—turns out to be rather difficult.
It is standardly noted that a pictorial representation must have at least one feature in common with what it is representing. Not just any feature will do, so we will have to limit ourselves to visual features. Suppose that we could specify, without begging any questions, what a visual feature is. In any case, we can surely identify some uncontroversial examples of visual features, such as color and shape, even if we cannot give a precise specification of what makes something a visual feature. Nonetheless, it soon becomes apparent that merely sharing the visual feature of color with the thing represented seems insufficient to make a representation pictorial. To take an obvious example, writing the noun “apple” in red ink does not make it a pictorial representation of an apple. (See Rey 1981 and Hopkins 1995 for further discussion of the nature of depiction.)
In the absence of a clear characterization of pictorial representation, some recent accounts of mental images may seem difficult to classify as either pictorialist or descriptionalist. For example, Tye (1991) claims that his own view of mental imagery—which treats images as interpreted, symbol-filled arrays—is a “hybrid” one. Since these arrays are in some respects like pictures but in other respects like linguistic representations, Tye claims that his view cannot be easily classified as either pictorialist or descriptionalist.
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