Imagery and the Coherence of Imagination: A Critique of White
Nigel J.T. Thomas
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Source: http://www.imagery-imagination.com/white.htm
However, the orthodoxy has recently been challenged, from within the 'linguistic philosophy' camp itself, by the late Alan R. White, in his book The Language of Imagination (1990). I must say, I share his reservations. To treat phonologically and orthographically identical forms as if they are quite different words (each easily paraphrased by something more precise: 'imagine' here really means 'suppose', there it really means 'visualize', and so on) should surely be an option of last resort. My own diagnosis of what has gone wrong is that legitimate but unresolved worries about the adequacy of traditional accounts of the nature of mental imagery have led to less well founded doubts about the coherence of our notion of imagination, the imagery producing faculty, itself. But this is not White's view. Although for him, 'there is only one sense of "imagine"' (p. 137), not only does 'imagine' never mean 'suppose', and never mean 'pretend' or 'believe', it also never means 'visualize' (White, 1989; 1990).
What 'to imagine something' does mean, according to White, is 'to think of [something] as possibly being so' (p. 184, original emphasis). On this basis, all the ordinary implications of the term are to be accounted for. Although it is hardly the sense which springs most readily to the average person's mind (Sutherland 1971), the view that imagination just is the ability to think of possibilities seems to have a certain currency amongst contemporary philosophers (e.g. Rorty, 1988; Nozick, 1993; Johnson, 1993). However, to the best of my knowledge, White is the only person to have actually tried to argue for the view.
But as White himself remarks, 'From the earliest to the latest times philosophers, psychologists and ordinary folk have linked imagination to imagery and images' (p. 86), and, indeed, the first part of his book documents that claim, with most impressive scholarship, as it applies to philosophers from Aristotle to Sartre and Ryle. However, White is no more intimidated by this massive and venerable consensus than he is by recent fashion. He argues that there is no conceptual link between imagination and imagery. Although some things we call exercises of imagination may contingently involve the production of imagery, many, he claims, need not or even could not. Of course, it is the acceptance of this latter claim that has led so many to the view that imagining only sometimes means having imagery; White holds on to the univocality of 'imagination' by insisting that it never does. Furthermore, he not only wants to argue that 'imagination does not imply imagery' (pp. 88, 91) but also the converse: 'the presence of imagery does not imply imagination'. The link is to be well and truly broken, it seems, whether the cost be conformity or nonconformity to current orthodoxies.
I think White raises some very telling objections to the now almost standard polysemy theory, and I will expand on them. However, his strictures on the traditional linkage between imagery and imagination probably form the best marshalled articulation of the very worries which have promoted this theory. I want to defend the traditional view, the imagery centered view of imagination, by rebutting these arguments, and thereby sketch an alternative to White's account of the coherence of the concept. There is, of course, an ulterior motive in all this. I would like to have a scientific account of imagination, something which would enable us to take it seriously whilst dispelling the clouds of mystification which the term is so often used to raise. Of course, the polysemy view does not preclude the possibility of giving disparate scientific accounts of each of the various referents which are ascribed to the term, but this would amount to an explaining away of imagination, an elimination rather than an explanation of it. Genuine explanation requires a coherent explanandum. However, the sort of coherence that White finds in the notion of imagination hardly presents us with a likely explanandum for science. Our ability to think of possibilities surely does not look like a very plausible candidate for a psychological natural kind. Mental imagery, however, may well be such a kind, and the scientific investigation of imagery is already well in hand. I want to keep alive the promise of a wider relevance for this research.
2. Terminological preliminaries.
I shall use 'imagery' to mean experiences which seem significantly like perceptual experiences, but which occur in the absence of the things which seem to be perceived. However, I do not intend 'perceptual' here necessarily to imply a limitation to perceptions of the external world. It may also cover our means of knowing about such 'psychosomatic' states as our own pains or emotions. Newton (1982) has argued persuasively that we can have imagery of such states. Some such form of vicarious emotional experience (that we somehow 'have' but do not take as real), whether we call it imaginative or not, must surely be postulated to explain such things as, for example, the sort of sadness that can be induced in us by music or tragic drama, but which actually gives us pleasure. It should also be noted that there seems to be a definite phenomenological difference as well as the similarity between imagery and veridical perceptual experience. In waking life imagery is seldom (Sartre (1936) thinks never) confused with 'real' experience. However, this issue will not affect our argument.
In ordinary English usage, of course, 'to imagine' can mean to have or form imagery of something or other; at least, the O.E.D. gives this as the first, and oldest, sense of 'imagine'. If I tell you, when you ask why I was staring vacantly into space, simply 'I was imagining my boyhood home,' I do not see what this could mean except that I was indulging in a reverie of imagery of that place. But since this usage begs the very question with which we, and White, are concerned, it will be best provisionally to employ the jargon term (c.f. p. 90) 'imaging' in this connection. When, as so often, such imaging is considered only in its visual aspect, it may, a little more colloquially, be called 'visualizing' or 'picturing'. People often also simply call this '"seeing"' (philosophers are wise to insist on the scare quotes, even if folk don't always bother), a convention which is useful in that it can be used for other modes, giving '"hearing"', '"feeling"' etc.; otherwise I think there is no ordinary language term for non-visual imaging except 'imagining'. All this terminology seems consistent with White's own practice (see e.g. pp. 110, 121, 123).
I do not intend any of these terms to imply the actual existence, material, ætherial or even 'functional' of mental images construed as inner pictures. I agree with White that to talk thus of imagery, or even of mental images or pictures, does not necessarily commit us to including such things in our ontology. The situation may be analogous to our talk of 'itches' (p. 123), which we are not much inclined to think of as things that cause itching. But of course, it has been very widely held that the imagery experience does depend on inner picture-like entities, (with imagery in other modes, when considered at all, being similarly thought of as constituted from 'mental copies' (Matthews, 1969) of former sense impressions). This view was almost universal before the twentieth century, and is still has important advocates, such as Alastair Hannay (1971, 1973) and Stephen Kosslyn (1980, 1983, 1994). However, this is no longer the only type of explanation of the mechanisms of imagery which receives support. These days there are at least two other types of theory extant amongst psychologists, and 'pictorial' theories have been much criticized on both conceptual and empirical grounds.
White, like myself, seems disinclined to accept a 'pictorial' theory of imagery (pp. 93-100, 123), but he has little to add to the standard arguments against it, and no alternative to propose. Perhaps he sees this as a psychological issue, irrelevant to his purely philosophical concerns, but if so I think he makes a mistake. Many of his counter-examples to the linkage between imagery and imagination, it seems to me, can only derive from a deeply ingrained, implicit pictorial theory of imagery which, perhaps, he has not taken sufficient pains to root out of his thinking. Precisely because it is implicit and disavowed, this version of 'pictorialism' remains unexamined and crude. I fear that this fault is endemic in philosophical work on the subject; introspective determination of even the most basic facts about imagery, even its very occurrence, is known to be peculiarly vulnerable to such theoretical conditioning (Thomas, 1989). If White presents a particularly suitable target for criticism, that is largely because of the exceptional care and consistency with which he works out the consequences of this hidden assumption.
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