Imagery and the Coherence of Imagination: A Critique of White
Nigel J.T. Thomas
Page 7
Source: http://www.imagery-imagination.com/white.htm
§7. The prototype of imagination.
By this point we should be able to see why the fragmentation of the concept of imagination has seemed so compelling to so many recent philosophers. They may find the idea that creativity depends on the imagination in the sense of the capacity for seeing-as plausible enough. Certainly it is quite widespread, and is much more plausible than any suggestion that creativity might depend on having particularly vivid or copious imagery. However, the picture theory of imagery, as we saw in §3, pushes us towards drawing a sharp distinction between imagination in the sense of the imagery producing faculty and imagination in the sense of the capacity for seeing-as. Thus, when, as is almost always the case, thinking about imagery is colored by the perspective of pictorialism, a scrupulous thinker will be likely to conclude that there is no deep connection between these two usages. Our consideration of White's thought has shown us that, in the absence of a developed alternative, even overt rejection of picture theory does not guarantee immunity from its pervasive influence. Imagination in its most significant, value laden sense is thus broken off from imagination in the prototypical sense that gives it its name, and the cracks begin to spread. Possibility will not stop the rot; but a good non-pictorialist imagery theory just might.
I have rejected White's contention that 'imagery does not imply imagination' (p. 91), and also his attempt to characterize imagination as just the capacity to think of possibilities. I have also tried to suggest that imaging, or something very like it, is much more often and more intimately bound up with imagining than White would allow. I think he has failed to break the link. However, I have accepted that we sometimes speak of imagining that something is the case when no imagery (at least, no imagery of that circumstance) is involved. We cannot, then, say that imagining just is imaging. The usual response has been to suggest that one, important, meaning of 'to imagine' is 'to image', but that it can also sometimes mean 'to suppose', 'to believe', 'to pretend', 'to be inventive', or a number of other things (to which list 'to think of as possibly being so' might very well be added). However, I share White's dissatisfaction with this approach, which amounts to the unparsimonious view that we do not have a single word 'imagine' at all, but a collection of homonyms. Although such a scenario cannot be ruled out a priori - homonyms do exist - I think White destroys most of its appeal by his critique of the more popular suggestions as to what 'imagine' might sometimes mean. Although he fails to eliminate 'visualize', I have argued that he succeeds in showing that 'imagine' and 'suppose' are never simply synonyms. He also has a creditable go at other candidate synonyms, such as 'pretend' (ch. 17) and 'believe' (pp. 147-8). ('Think falsely' is dealt with more summarily (p. 142).)
None of this proves that 'imagine' is univocal, but I do want to claim that, between White's arguments and mine, the motivation for thinking otherwise has been undermined. In the absence of good reasons to the contrary, it is sensible to affirm the traditional view of a word's meaning, which is usually compatible with what can be 'read off' the phonological structure of the language. In this light, 'imagination' and its cognates are clearly revealed as univocal terms whose basic meaning is closely bound up with the subjective phenomenon of mental imagery. Of course, traditional 'folk wisdom' is by no means always right, but all our philosophizing must start from there, drawing out and adjudicating the contradictions implicit within it. The fundamental claim in this article is that philosophical concerns about the meaning of 'imagination' arise, ultimately, not from inherent contradictions in the way the word is used, but from an incompatibility between its traditional sense and the, equally traditional, pictorial theory of imagery; and that it is by no means clear that it is the former that should give way.
However, there can be no denial that in particular contexts 'suppose', or one of the other alternatives, can often be substituted for 'imagine' with no, or infinitesimal, alteration in sense, and that we sometimes speak of 'imagining' when no directly relevant imagery is involved. How can this be explained? Let us hypothesize that 'imagination' or its conceptual ancestor originally meant the capacity for perceiving-as. This, indeed, is how Nussbaum (1978) understands the Aristotelian phantasma. We have already noted that Aristotle defined this as 'the process by which we say that an image [phantasma] is presented to us' (De Anima 428a - Hett, 1936), but the word 'phantasma' can also often plausibly be translated as 'appearance' or 'perceptual presentation' (Lycos, 1964; Nussbaum, 1978; K. White, 1985), being applied, as White (p. 8) notes, just as much to what things look like during ordinary perception as to 'pure' imagery. Indeed, Beare (1906 p. 290ff) seems to regard this as the primary meaning, and often preferred to translate 'phantasia' as 'faculty of presentation'. If, as White claims (p. 13), Aristotle extended his usage of 'phantasia' beyond the realm of merely sensory, let alone visual, appearances, then so much the better. On this view the production of mental imagery might not be the most fundamental function of imagination, but it would be its purest exercise - seeing-as uncontaminated by actual seeing, as it were. Furthermore, in ordinary conversation, it is only in cases where there is no X to see as a Y, only during relatively pure cases of imaging, that any expression beyond 'see as' seems called for. Imagery production might thereby come to seem the representative function of the imagination, the plainest mark of its operation. This is especially so since the terminology of imagination has now (sometime post-Kant) largely dropped out of our theorizing about perception.
But another person's imagery cannot be directly observed and there are doubtless cases where one person's thought about a particular subject is rich with imagery, heavily embroidered, where another's is not. Also, what we say about the content of our thought processes is often neither very detailed nor very clear. There is thus much scope for misunderstanding and consequent 'broadening' of mentalistic terms like 'imagine'. I hear you say you are imagining where I would not have any, or any very elaborate, imagery (although you, actually, do) and so I come to learn to use 'imagine' not only when I do have such imagery, but also when I merely suppose, or otherwise think of, something. Others can now learn this usage from me, but it is not so much a new discrete meaning as an extension of meaning (c.f. Wittgenstein, 1958 §67), a broadening or stretching of the sense.
Perhaps, then, words like 'imagine', 'suppose' or 'believe' do not have one or a few sharply defined meanings, but rather a range of meaning, an 'area' with 'blurred edges', as Wittgenstein (1958 §71) has it. Parts of the range of 'imagine' may overlap with those of 'suppose', 'pretend', 'think of as possible' etc., and sometimes the context will constrain the interpretation of a particular instance of usage to such a part of the range. Then we have an appearance of synonymy. Sometimes the context will push the interpretation way out on the blurred edge of the range, and we may wonder if the word is being used quite correctly. Does it not sound at least a little stilted to say 'I am inclined to imagine [rather than 'believe'] that Fermat's last theorem is true'? But even an area with a blurred edge must have a center, or at least a central region. Indeed, without a true edge it is this center, the word's prototypical sense, that must define it. (Some maintain that this is the standard way in which concepts are structured (Smith and Medin, 1981).) I have argued that most claims or calls to imagine that something is the case can and ought to be construed as claims or calls to produce 'embroidering' imagery relevant to that situation, and that seeing something as some sort of thing involves essentially the same cognitive processes as imaging (or, as we might now allow ourselves to say, imagining) a thing of that sort. I suggest that what holds together all usages of 'imagine' and its cognates, what constitutes imagination as a concept, is the greater or lesser (perhaps indirect) resemblance or relation of all the acts in question to the prototypical cases where mental imagery, or the more basic process of perceiving-as, really is involved; or, perhaps it would be better to say, to cases which fall under the ancestral Aristotelian notion of phantasia.
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