Imagery and Imagination
Amy Kind
Page 5
Source: http://www.iep.utm.edu/imagery/
b. Non-Image-Based Theories
In response to the apparent problems besetting image-based accounts (particularly the apparent counterexamples discussed above), many theorists deemphasize the role and importance of mental imagery in imagination. While accepting that some exercises of the imagination involve imagery, they deny that the imagery plays any sort of essential role in making a mental act an act of the imagination; moreover, they also claim that there are other instances of imagining that do not involve imagery. Scruton (1974) and Walton (1990) both offer theories of this sort. Scruton claims that “imagining may, and often does, involve imagery” but that “neither [imagination nor imagery] is a necessary feature of the other.” Walton accepts that some exercises of the imagination “consist partly in having mental images,” but claims also that “imagining can occur without imagery.” Hidé Ishiguru (1966) deemphasizes the image even further. On Ishiguru’s view, imagery never plays an essential role in imagining: “mental images are, at most, necessary tools for a limited number of people in certain kinds of exercise of the imagination and are, for many people, merely psychological accompaniments which occur when they are engaged in imaginative work and not the essence of it.” Finally, another non-image-based account is offered by White (1990), who claims that to imagine a state of affairs is to think of it as possibly being so.
Perhaps the most important variety of non-image-based account, however, is the experiential theory. Lyons (1986), Peacocke (1985), and Vendler (1984) each offer a version of this theory. While there are significant differences between these three philosophers’ versions of the experiential theory, there are nonetheless important similarities, and I will here concentrate on Vendler’s version as representative of the tradition that analyzes imagining in terms of experience.
Vendler explicitly treats imagination as a kind of vicarious experience, claiming that “the materia ex qua of all imagination is imagined experience.” To motivate this account, Vendler contrasts two different kinds of imaginative exercises. First, imagine swimming in cold water. Next, imagine yourself swimming in cold water. In the first case, what you do is to imagine the salty taste of the water, the feel of the waves as they lap against you, and so on. You put yourself in the water from the inside. Vendler calls this subjectiveimagining. In the second case, one thing you might do is to picture yourself in the water, so you see your head bobbing in the waves, and so on. Once again, you put yourself in the water, but in this case you do it from the outside. Vendler calls this objective imagining.
Notice that I can adopt the same objective perspective in imagining someone else. I can just as easily imagine my sister or my husband swimming in the ocean as I can imagine myself swimming in the ocean. But subjective imagining works differently. There, I conjure up the experiences that I would be having if I were in certain circumstances, and it seems that I can do this only about myself. In objective imagining, I imagine what someone, myself included, would look like in a certain situation; in subjective imagining, I imagine what the situation itself would feel like.
Clearly, subjective imagining involves evoking experiences. When I imagine swimming in the ocean, I evoke experiences like feeling cold, being pulled by the current, and seeing the shoreline. Interestingly, however, Vendler argues that objective imagining also requires us to evoke experiences. When I imagine myself swimming in the water, I am essentially imagining the experience of seeing (or hearing, etc.) myself swimming in the water. Thus, objective imagination ultimately reduces to a specialized kind of subjective imagination. According to Vendler, the materials of both subjective and objective imagination are basically the same, namely, experiences. Both kinds of imagination are constructions out of experiences, but the constructions proceed in slightly different ways: “In the subjective case the aim is to represent a consciousness, one’s own, or someone else’s, at a given point of life-history. In the objective case the purpose is to represent a thing as it appears in the field of experience” (Vendler 1984).
Adopting an experiential account has interesting consequences for answering the question: What can we imagine? The basic form of subjective imagining is “I imagine φ-ing,” suggesting that we can substitute any activity for φ. But Vendler does not believe that we can. Consider being dead, or being sound asleep, or snoring while sound asleep. These are activities, or states of being, that lack experiential content. According to an experiential account of imagining, it is a necessary condition on imagining performing a certain action φ (or imagining being in a certain condition C) that there be an experiential content to φ-ing (or to being C). Thus these are activities that Vendler does not think we can imagine.
An interesting corollary of this necessary condition comes out in Thomas Nagel’s seminal paper, “What is it like to be a bat?” (1974). Bats are mammals, and most of us would probably share the intuition that they have conscious experiences, but bats perceive the external world in a way that is radically different from the way we perceive the external world: they use sonar, or echolocation. They emit high-pitched, subtly modulated noises and then detect objects that are in range on the basis of the reflections they detect. This raises an interesting question: can we know what it is like to be a bat? In attempting to answer this question, Nagel implicitly endorses the claim of an experiential account that we can only imagine what we can experience; as he notes, “Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited.” Because Nagel thinks our imagination does not allow us to extrapolate to the experience of bats, he denies that we can imagine what it is like to be a bat. This shows that on an experiential account, not only must there be an experiential content to φ-ing (or to being C), but also it must be the case that the experiential content is in principle accessible to the imaginer.
Although the experiential account has some intuitive plausibility, the reduction of objective imagination to subjective imagination requires the proponent of the experiential analysis to do some fancy footwork in response to certain occurrences of the word “imagine” that come up in everyday speech. For example, it is quite common to say things like:
- “Imagine that there is life on Mars.”
- “I can pretty clearly imagine why she married him.”
- “Imagine what would happen if the NAFTA treaty had not been signed.”
In each case, it seems as if we change the meaning of each of these mental exercises if we insert the word “seeing.” Imagining that there is life on Mars might not entail putting myself into the situation as observer, that is, it seems that it need not involve imagining seeing that there is life on Mars. Similar points can be made about the other two cases.
To deal with this problem, Vendler argues that the word “imagine” functions differently in these cases from the way it functions in the cases of objective and subjective imagination that we’ve been talking about. In essence, Vendler denies that these claims describe genuine exercises of the imagination. Just as one might say “I can pretty well see why she married him” without implying that one was doing something with one’s eyes, one can say “I can pretty well imagine why she married him” without implying that one is doing something with one’s imagination. In this case, it seems plausible to suppose that what is going on is an exercise of reasoning rather than a perceptual or imaginative exercise. (This recalls the strategy used by the image-based theorists to dismiss cases in which the word “imagining” seems to mean only supposition.)
There are, however, other cases that Vendler may not be able to dismiss as easily. Some of these are the sorts of cases that threaten image-based accounts—both image-based theories and experiential theories have trouble accounting for apparently non-perceptual imagining, as when someone imagines a solution to a problem. White (1990) suggests other examples as well; for example, one can imagine “sacrificing everything for one’s principles or selling one’s birthright for a mess of pottage, without giving oneself a representation of any experiences.” Or, to use another of White’s examples, suppose someone imagines giving up all she has for love. It is hard for the experiential theorist to dismiss this as an exercise of mere reasoning, but likewise, it is not plausible to suggest that in such an imagining what one is doing is imagining seeing oneself giving up all one has for love.
Interestingly, the fact that examples of the sort that threatened image-based accounts reappear in the context of experiential accounts suggests an important connection between these two types of accounts. Though image-based accounts and experiential accounts initially appear clearly different, in that they draw attention to different features that make an act an act of the imagination, it can be argued that the experiential analysis entails that acts of the imagination will involve mental imagery. If such an argument were to succeed, then the experiential account would ultimately collapse into an image-based account. Recall that Vendler claims that the material of the imagination is imagined experience. The image-based theorist might try to argue that these experiences can only be understood in terms of imagery. Similar points might be made about other experiential theories. For example, Lyons (1986) offers an experiential analysis according to which imagination is the “replay” of perception. For Lyons, when someone imagines something, she does not form a mental image but rather rehearses, reactivates, or replays the act of seeing that thing. But since, as we saw above, empirical evidence strongly suggests that the mechanisms underlying imagery and underlying perception are the same, the replay of perception will likely involve imagery as well.
As the foregoing suggests, even if experiential theories do not analyze imagination in terms of imagery, such theories may be thought at least implicitly to rely on imagery. Thus, insofar as mental imagery is ontologically problematic, such problems will likely confront experiential theories as well as image-based theories. Ontological worries about imagery began with the rise of behaviorism in the early twentieth century. As the mind-brain identity theory gained currency in the 1950s, worries about imagery grew, since the very existence of mental images has been thought to raise an ontological problem for such theories. To put the problem crudely, images are not the right sort of “stuff” for use in a scientific explanation of the mind. This problem has engendered a strong antipathy for mental images in the second half of the twentieth century. Correspondingly, many of the mid- to late-twentieth century theories of imagination, such as those offered by Ryle (1949), Shorter (1952), Armstrong (1968), and Dennett (1969), are imageless theories.
.
We Make it Easy to Succeed
Successwaves, Intl.
Brain Based Accelerated Success Audios
 |