Images and Thinking
(Critique of arguments against images as a medium of thought)
David Cole
Page 4
Supposing that mental representations have a causal or indicator semantics is compatible with supposing that the representations are images. Thus imagistic models of mental representation are not saddled with an untenable resemblance semantics. (There are of course many other objections to resemblance as an account of representaion - resemblance is symmetric, representation not. Resemblance is vague, representation is not.)
Recognizing an indicator semantics for images creates pregnant possibilities: images can then represent states of affairs, including abstract, non visual, states of affairs - and not just objects. And then images with such a semantics could be true or false. Next argument!
6. Thoughts must be capable of being true or false. This is probably the most important consideration for driving a wedge between pictorial and propositional representations. The latter are semantically evaluable. The former, being neither true nor false, are hopeless for anything but a peripheral role in thought, for they are incapable of partaking in all the good things: truth-functional connectives, modality, tense.
Reply: The presupposition appears to be that images must represent by resemblance. Images can represent states of affairs - without resembling them. Consider icons. Often an illuminated oil-can icon on an automobile instrument cluster represents that the oil pressure is below safe operating limits. It does not represent an oil-can. The icon does the work of a warning in natural language. It's shape is mnemonic - an aid to recognition, not a determinant of semantics. It's semantics is paradigmatic of indicator semantics. As an artifact, it has a purpose and can misrepresent - if the oil pressure light goes on when oil pressure is normal, it gives a false indication.
While icons may represent states of affairs, but they do not, or do not easily, admit of compositionality and systematicity. Fortunately, there are alternative ways in which images may be true or false.
The important additional way in which images can be true or false is by being sentential. E.g. you as reader are having a visual image right now B of this sentence B and quite possibly an accompanying auditory or proprioceptive image of this sentence, an image of how it would sound spoken. It is a false dichotomy to suppose that representations must be sentences or (exclusive) images. For images can be of cars, or dogs, cabbages or kings -- or of sentences in natural languages. Visual images can be of printed sentences. Auditory images can be of spoken language. (And proprioceptive imagery might be of speech -- or of writing, signing, or tapping out Morse code.)
This changes everything. In place of a false dichotomy of image (almost always visual, in the literature) opposed to mentalese sentence, with all the virtues necessary for thought going to the sentential, we can consider the possibility that imagistic representations can have all the requisites for thought: systematicity, truth values, and causal potential mirroring implicature.
Mental sentences can take the form of acoustic, visual, or proprioceptive images. A mental image of a sentence is a tokening of that sentence, just as is an inscription or an utterance. A tokening of an auditory image of a sentence, unlike a tokening of a mentalese sentence, will represent acoustic and phonological features of an utterance of the sentence, including all or some of pitch, rhyme, duration and phrasing. An auditory image will be of an image of a sentence in a particular natural language. It will be a token of a natural language sentence inside the head. As such, imaging of sentences in natural language inherits important features of natural language: systematicity and truth values. And unlike sentences outside the head, imaged sentences, as states of a complex causal system, can have inference roles.
In light of this possibility of sentential images as a medium of thought, let us turn to Steven Pinker's arguments against supposing images are important for thinking. Pinker's interests are broad, his knowledge encyclopedic, and he attempts to develop at general account of cognition. Pinker's views are especially interesting because he has done empirical work on imaging, and recognizes that some thought is imagistic. However he argues, both in The Language Instinct and in How the Mind Works, that the primary medium of thought must be a non-imagistic representation system, mentalese.
Pinker's arguments are, broadly speaking, semantic. They concern the adequacy of images as content bearers. Pinker argues that images are too impoverished semantically to be a medium of thought. Generally, Pinker discusses visual images, and almost always images of non-linguistic objects...
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