Imagery and the Coherence of Imagination: A Critique of White
Nigel J.T. Thomas
Page 3
Source: http://www.imagery-imagination.com/white.htm
3. Imagery as a product of imagination.
White's implicit pictorialism is particularly apparent in his argument that 'imagery does not imply imagination'. Consider: Merely to ask someone to have or produce imagery of a sailor scrambling ashore is no more to ask him to imagine anything than if one were to ask him to draw a picture of such a scene. . . . 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. (p. 92). Two dubious pictorialist assumptions seem to be confounded in this example. The first is that mental imagery consists of static pictures, like snapshots, paintings or, the granddaddy of them all, wax impressions (introduced by Plato in Theatatus 191 c-d). Clearly a movie or a video of sailor Jim scrambling out of the sea would be quite different from one of him crawling backwards into it, and I can see no reason, apart from the spell of analogies drawn from archaic technologies, why our mental imagery should not be thus inherently dynamic. Given the dynamic nature of the perceptual world it reflects, surely we should expect imagery to be dynamic, and there is now a good deal of available evidence that indeed it is (e.g. Freyd, 1987; Cooper, 1976).
In fact White himself seems to allow only a couple of lines later that imagery may be like a film, even a sound film, and surely he is right to do so. It is not only the preconception that imagery is static which owes most of its plausibility to the pictorial analogy (or its close relatives, the ideas that mental imagery consists in 'decaying sense', as Hobbes (1651) had it, or reproductions, 'mental copies' (Matthews, 1969), of former sensations). The same can be said of the assumption that there is some special difficulty involved in having multi-modal imagery like that of a sound (or even 'sensurround' and 'smellavision') film. It is hardly a directly given truth that imagery comes to us one sense mode at a time, so that such 'talkie' imagery would involve having to somehow synchronize a visual and an auditory image. The assumption would seem to arise from reading back our knowledge about our separate, specialized types of sensory organ into our conceptualization of our experience. But experience, whether perceptual or imaginal, does not come to us in the first place broken down by mode. As given it is multi-modal, even though it may readily be analyzed by mode, and even though one particular modal aspect may often monopolize our attention.
But moving, even talking, pictures remain pictures, and there is a more subtle pictorialist assumption embedded in White's argument, and, I fear, in much of our thinking about imagination and imagery. in order to deal with it satisfactorily, we must digress somewhat, to consider historical aspects of the concept of imagination and contemporary scientific theories of imagery, before returning to White's 'sailor on the shore' example.
Even having allowed for 'cinematic' imagery, White goes on to claim that there is no difference between imagery of a man saying something and his 'criticizing, explaining, commending, repeating or replying to something' (p. 92) in the same words. Since he also claims that imagining each of these different speech acts would be quite different in each case, it follows that imagining and imaging cannot be the same thing.
The second premise of this argument seems reasonable enough, but why should we accept the first? Surely there is no special difficulty, when watching more than a momentary clip from a movie, in telling whether a certain utterance amounts to criticizing or commending or explaining or whatever. We tell from the context, just as we do in real life. I take it that White would not want to deny that we can hear someone criticizing or commending when they are standing in front of us. Why should things be any different with inner cinematic imagery, and why, therefore, should having such imagery not amount to imagining the specific speech act rather than just the mere empty sounds and mouth movements?
White might reply that having such 'cinematic' imagery, like watching an actual movie, does not amount to imagining someone criticizing, explaining, or whatever, but, at most, merely induces us to imagine it (albeit fairly compellingly). The point seems reasonable enough, but it raises important implications. If it applies to mental imagery, and to the movies, surely something similar must be said about how we understand what is happening when a speaker is really in front of us. The implication is that imagination is involved in ordinary intensional perception. It is seen as the interpretative aspect of perception, as what makes mere mechanical sensation into perception of something meaningful.
White himself notes that Aristotle's discussion of phantasia, which is very arguably the original source for the very concept of imagination (Schofield, 1978; Rees, 1971), does indeed treat it as responsible for the particular way in which things appear to us in normal perception, for what we see them as (c.f. Nussbaum, 1978). White also notes (but dismisses) the key role that Kant attributes to imagination in synthesizing the sensory manifold, thus making meaningful perceptual experience possible (p. 44). It is probably true that the explicit use of 'imagination' in this sort of sense rarely occurs in ordinary conversation and writing, but the Romantic writers, who were largely responsible for endowing the term with the considerable evaluative and ideological charge that it carries today, were certainly very much under the influence of this understanding of it. Shelley (1821) characterized imagination as the 'principle of synthesis', and Coleridge (1817) defined it (in its 'primary' sense) as 'the living power and prime agent of all human perception'.
In my view, this notion of imagination as operative in normal perception (although it has perhaps never had much currency amongst 'ordinary folk') is the ancestral idea which ties together all the various usages of the term. No doubt the descendant senses are many and various, and 'family resemblances' amongst them may not always be obvious when they are examined from a purely synchronic perspective, but, just as our understanding of currently existing living organisms is greatly enhanced by viewing them in an evolutionary context, our understanding of the plethora of seemingly diverse current usages of a rich term like 'imagination' may be enhanced by an appreciation of their origins. If I am right in thinking that they have a common conceptual ancestry in the long lived view of imagination as the interpretative aspect of perception, then (as an alternative to the eliminativism discussed in section 1 above) it may well be worthwhile to try to regain our grasp of this root concept.
However, even accepting this sort of account of imagination, White's arguments against there being any connection between imagination and imagery would still make sense in the context of a pictorial theory of imagery. Pictorial theory relies on an implicit view of perception as a two stage process. In the first stage, a picture, a visual sense impression, (or a sense impression of some other mode) is got into the mind through the sense organs, using some more or less mechanical, physiological process. In the second stage, this picture is interpreted or understood, made meaningful, through processes which are, in effect, mental (in modern versions, computational). In this light imaging can be understood as an alternative way of getting pictures (or other pseudo sense impressions) into the mind, and can reasonably be distinguished from the interpretative processes which, as has just been suggested, have traditionally been identified with imagination. Although this view of perception has serious problems, it remains highly influential (Ben-Zeev, 1984), and in particular it remains operative even in modern, scientific versions of the picture theory of imagery. A distinction between the processes of ('quasi-pictorial') image formation, and those of the 'mind's eye interpretative function' (Kosslyn, 1980 p. 6) is crucial to their theoretical identity.
But, as we have already noted, there are other views of imagery to be found in the contemporary psychological literature, and these do not support such a distinction. Contemporary cognitive approaches to perception have been decisively affected by computer vision research, and the long standing textbook view in this field is that vision consists in the construction of explicit, meaningful descriptions of physical objects from images. . . Descriptions are a prerequisite for recognizing, manipulating and thinking about objects. (Ballard and Brown, 1982). The 'images' referred to here are physical images, formed inside the TV cameras that computer vision systems use as sensors. The human equivalent would be the retinal image in the eye. No-one thinks there is anything mental about such images. But if (like most cognitive theorists) we take at face value the claim that the 'descriptions' that the computer vision system generates are 'meaningful', then these descriptions may indeed seem like a suitable model for visual mental contents. Taking such a view seriously has led several theorists, notably Simon (1972), Hinton (1978), and Pylyshyn (1973; 1978; 1981), to the view that mental imagery should be understood as consisting of such descriptions (expressed, as it were, in Fodor's (1975) 'mentalese'), differing from the descriptions that are supposed to be produced in actual vision only in their proximal source (and perhaps their wealth of detail). (A useful summary and critique of this position is given by Tye (1991 ch. 4).)
Another view (which I happen to favor) is that perception should be regarded as a matter of active interaction between the perceiver and its environment, as an integral part of behavior rather than a preliminary to it (Gibson, 1966; 1979; Neisser, 1976; Young, 1978; Bickhard and Richie, 1983). Recently this outlook has found favor amongst certain robot vision researchers, who have become disillusioned by the failure of 'traditional' computer vision work to deliver practical, working systems (Ballard, 1991; Blake and Yuille, 1992; Swain and Stricker, 1993; Aloimonos, 1993). Our sense organs are not regarded as passive recipients of stimulation, whose outputs are in need of further internal processing, but rather as instruments that we actively deploy in order to explore, interrogate and interpret our environment, seeking out specific answers to specific task- relevant questions (Thomas, forthcoming). The interaction between an organism and its environment is constituted by 'a rapid sequence of microperceptions and microreactions, almost simultaneous as far as consciousness is concerned' (Damasio and Damasio 1992), and it is the ongoing course of this interaction - rather than some 'end product' of it - which gives rise to perceptual experience. From this perspective, imagery may be regarded as a matter of the (partial and covert) enactment of the specific perceptual (i.e. information seeking) behaviors that would be appropriate to the identification of the imaged objects or scenes if they were actually present (Neisser, 1976; 1978; Sarbin and Juhasz, 1970; Sarbin, 1972; Hochberg, 1968; Ellis, 1995; Thomas, forthcoming).
Both of these non-pictorial accounts of imagery assimilate the processes of imagery formation to the processes of perceptual interpretation which, I have argued, have been traditionally assigned to the faculty of imagination. Thus, unlike picture theory, these views fail to support a distinction between imagery and imagination in this sense. The relevant 'imaginative' processes, whether they are thought of as internal computational processing of passively received information, or as active, purposeful extraction of information from the environment, are conceived of as responsible for 'categorical perception', they are what enable us to perceive the things in the world aswhatever sorts of things they may be. Thus we may say that, on these views, imaging is understood as a particular sort of exercise of the capacity for 'seeing-as' (or, more generally, 'perceiving-as') rather than as the formation of internal pictures or sensation copies.
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