Imagery and Imagination
Amy Kind
Page 4
Source: http://www.iep.utm.edu/imagery/
2. Accounts of Imagination
Mental imagery clearly plays a role in many mental activities. For example, memory often proceeds by way of imagery. But no mental activity is more prominently linked with mental imagery than that of imagining. In this section, I will discuss different accounts of the imagination, paying particular attention to the connections between imagery and imagination.
a. Image-Based Theories
René Descartes’ treatment of the imagination (1642/1984) is representative of a long philosophical tradition that analyzes imagination in terms of mental imagery. As he says in his Meditations on First Philosophy:
[I]f I want to think of a chiliagon, although I understand that it is a figure consisting of a thousand sides just as well as I understand the triangle to be a three-sided figure, I do not in the same way imagine the thousand sides or see them as if they were present before me. … But suppose I am dealing with a pentagon: I can of course understand the figure of a pentagon, just as I can the figure of a chiliagon, without the help of the imagination; but I can also imagine a pentagon, by applying the mind’s eye to its five sides and the area contained within them. And in doing this I notice quite clearly that imagination requires a peculiar effort of mind which is not required for understanding.
Presumably, what he means by this “peculiar effort of mind” is the effort to produce an image. In this way, Descartes sharply distinguishes the act of imagining from the related intellectual act of conceiving (or, in his terms, the act of understanding).
On this understanding of the imagination, imagining is thought of as importantly analogous to perception. This fits well with various experimental data (notably, Perky 1910) and corresponds to a long philosophical tradition of treating imagining as an inferior kind of perceiving. For example, Thomas Hobbes (1651/1968) refers to imagining as “decaying sense” and George Berkeley (1734/1965) claims that sense perceptions are “more strong, lively, and distinct” than our imaginings.
This analogy between imagining and perceiving makes it natural to consider imagination as a kind of perception with the “mind’s eye.” Again, Descartes’ discussion of the imagination in the Sixth Meditationprovides a representative example of this:
When I imagine a triangle, for example, I do not merely understand that it is a figure bounded by three lines, but at the same time I also see the three lines with my mind’s eye as if they were present before me; and this is what I call imagining. (1642/1984)
Of course, there are clear instances of imagining in which the mind’s “eye” is not doing any work at all, i.e., in which visual images are not involved. Vendler (1984) gives examples such as imagining the roar of the lion, imagining the smell of onions frying on a grill, imagining the heat of the sun, imagining the pain in one’s molar. The image-based account thus must extend the notion of image to encompass imagistic representations from other sensory modalities. Presumably, there are counterparts to visual images for each of the other senses—auditory images, olfactory images, and so on. The case of imagining the pain in one’s molar can be dealt with in a parallel way. Although pain is not perceived by one of the five traditional senses, there is an analogue to sensory images that comes into play in this case: what is often called anaffective image.
Even with this broad understanding of the notion of image, however, there are instances of uses of the word “imagine” in everyday language that do not seem to involve mental imagery. Consider cases where “imagine” is used to signal supposition (or, even more commonly, false supposition), as when a parent who says, “I imagined that my daughter was in her room last night, when in fact I now learn that she snuck out her bedroom window.” Consider also cases where “imagine” is used as part of various idiomatic expressions, as when someone says, “Imagine that!” in response to some surprising news.
Fortunately for the proponent of an image-based account, such cases can be easily dismissed. Surely it is unreasonable to expect that we should have to accommodate every ordinary language use of “imagine” or its cognates when giving an account of the imagination. (But see White 1990 for a contrary view.) Rather, what we should focus on are the cases where the imagination is actually being exercised and attempt to explain the nature of such imaginative exercises. This is what the proponent of the image-based account attempts to do.
So let us focus on actual exercises of the imagination. Are there any such exercises in which there is no mental imagery? Ryle (1949) answers in the affirmative. Though he grants that acts commonly described as “having a mental picture” of something are instances of imagining, he argues that concentrating on these sorts of examples to the exclusion of others gives us a misleading picture of what the imagination is. Consider:
- a witness who lies when she takes the stand
- an inventor who contemplates the machine she is working on
- a novelist working out the plot of her next book
- a group of children who are pretending that they are bears.
In these cases, Ryle claims that the witness, the inventor, the novelist, and the children may be exercising their imaginations without accompanying imagery. (In fact, the exercises of the imagination that occur when the judge listens to the lying witness’ story, the inventor’s colleague comments on the new machine, someone reads the novel, and the mother ignores the growls emanating from the “bears,” also might well proceed without imagery.) Think about what is going on when a group of children “play bears.” They get down on their hands and knees, growl at each other, probably rearrange the sofa cushions to make dens for themselves, and so on—but while engaging in this activity, they need not produce mental imagery of, say, furry paws and the snowbound den.
In response to Ryle’s discussion, the proponent of an image-based conception of the imagination might argue that these cases conflate being imaginative with exercising the imagination. But even if this suggestion covers the above cases, there are additional examples for which the suggestion lacks plausibility. White (1990) suggests that “we can imagine, or be unable to imagine, what the neighbours will think or why someone should try to kill us, just as we can imagine that the neighbours envy us or that someone is trying to kill us. Yet none of these imagined situations is something picturable in visual, auditory or tangible terms and, therefore, none is something pertaining to imagery.” Likewise, although we can imagine George W. Bush playing the electric guitar, how (assuming that imagining requires imagery) can we imagine his having a secret desire to be a rock and roll musician? What image could we produce to imagine, as John Lennon exhorts us to do, that there’s no heaven?
In addition to dealing with counterexamples such as these, there are two questions that any proponent of an image-based account must answer:
(1)What role does the image play in imagining?
(2)What makes an imagining the imagining that it is?
Image-based theories have often been saddled with an unfortunate answer to the first of these questions. First, once someone invokes mental images in an account of imagination, she appears to commit herself to the claim that such images are the objects of our imaginings—a highly implausible claim. (For development of this argument, see Vendler 1984.) In brief, the problem with this view is that when I imagine something, say George W. Bush, my imagining is about George W. Bush, not about a mental image. The proponent of an image-based account thus must find some other way of answering question (1).
Interestingly, image-based theories have also often been saddled with an unfortunate answer to the second question, namely, that the image involved in an imagining serves to individuate the imagining from other imaginings. The problem, however, is that imagery seems neither necessary nor sufficient to make an imagining the imagining it is. The basic worry traces back to Wittgenstein (1953), who wrote, “What makes my image of him into an image of him? Not its looking like him.” (See also Tidman 1994.) Consider the following two examples from White (1990):
One is imagining exactly the same thing when one imagines that, for example, a sailor is scrambling ashore on a desert island, however varied one’s imagery may be.
The imagery of a sailor scrambling ashore could be exactly the same as that of his twin brother crawling backwards into the sea, yet to imagine one of these is quite different from imagining the other.
Although proponents of image-based theories have various options for answering both of these questions (see Kind 2001), the associated problems have often led to the abandonment of image-based accounts.
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