Images and Thinking
(Critique of arguments against images as a medium of thought)
David Cole
Page 5
In one of the few places where he mentions phonological images, Pinker (How the Mind Works p.89) says that phonological images are "a stretch of syllables that we play in our minds like a tape loop, planning out the mouth movements and imagining what the syllables sound like. This string-like representation is an important component of our short-term memory…."
Pinker notes that these representations last only 1-5 seconds, with a capacity limit of 4-7 "chunks". This form of representation is contrasted with grammatical representations, and, most importantly, with mentalese - "the language of thought in which our conceptual knowledge is couched….Mentalese is the medium in which content or gist is captured." Mentalese is the mind's lingua franca - it carries information between modules, and, presumably, is suitable for representation in long term memory (since phonological memory is so short).
It seems clear how Pinker understands the general deficiencies of images: visual images, with their concrete objects, are not suitable for abstract thought. Phonological images are not of much interest -- they are too fleeting. (And they are too connected with speech, and so not relevant to thought in animals and prelinguistic children - not suitable as a general medium of thought). Phonological images have no semantic role to play, they are only used for imagining sound. So we are left with a non-imagistic medium, mentalese, for the real work of thought.
But note the pregnant role allowed acoustic images: phonological images are for "planning out our mouth movements" -- that is, speech. Inflate this role a bit and you have phonological images as an ingredient in planning what to say, not just how to say it. And this accords with the introspective evidence that we think, at least some of the time, in phonological (or proprioceptive) representations of natural language (for more on this, see Carruthers 1996 and Cole 1997, and for more of empirical evidence see e.g. Smith, Wilson and Reisberg 1995).
Later (pp.294-298), Pinker marshals four or so arguments specifically against images as a medium of thought. He begins with the remark, "Imagery is a wonderful faculty, but we must not get carried away with the idea of pictures in the head." (294)
First argument: "Images are fragmentary." One can't image a whole visual scene, just glimpses of parts. And images are always from one vantage point, "distorted by perspective".
Some visual images are perspectival. But two-dimensional icons -- including the letters on this page -- are not. And even when visual images are perspectival, there often are privileged perspectives that show things the way they are, as it were. For some objects of thought, the privileged perspectives are from overhead, God's Eye views (shared with cartographers), and, for other objects, face on. Many artifacts -- televisions, automotive dashboards, building facades, hairstyles -- have privileged perspectives. These perspectives are the most appropriate for viewing the objects - and often, for general thinking purposes, for imagining them as well. If I want to tell you whether frogs have tails, or Clinton has a moustache, or how many windows are on the front of my house, perspectival images are likely the best way to do this. They are a substitute for looking at the rear end of a frog, Clinton's face, the front of my house - and all these lookings would be perspectival.
Pinker goes on to suggest that there is a way that we can image a whole object after all - "To remember an object, we turn it over or walk around it, and that means our memory for it is an album of separate views. An image of the whole object is a slide show or pastiche."(294) But if that solves the limit of the perspective inherent in imagery, why is there any residual problem with visual images as vehicles of thought? In particular, what is wrong with pastiches and slide shows?
More seriously, this objection to images betrays a basic limiting presupposition that permeates discussions of images in thought -- namely that the representational properties of images are limited to those appropriate to pictorial likeness. But this is just to presuppose that the only possible semantics for images would be resemblance. By now it should be clear that this is too provincial in imagining the semantic possibilities. (See the discussion above of the argument based on resemblance semantics).
Second argument: "A second limitation is that images are slaves to the organization of memory. Our knowledge of the world could not possibly fit into one big picture or map. There are too many scales, from mountains to fleas, to fit into one medium with a fixed grain size."(294)
If this is distinct from the limits of images listed heretofore, it appears to be weak. First, again the focus is entirely on visual images. If our knowledge of the world can be stored in mentalese sentences, why can't it be stored in images of natural language sentences? Second, one needn't suppose that thinking in images requires that one have just one big image as ones life-thought. Images might be linked to one another, as they are in a hypertext image map. I may image my Buick parked on the driveway. The Buick part of the image may be causally linked to images of transmissions (exploded diagrams), images of gas stations, petroleum fields, a "How Things Work" cutaway image of an oil well descending to the oil far below, linked to images of dinosaurs and other sources of oil, etc. And the driveway part may be linked to maps of my neighborhood, the city, the world. No single image captures my thought, but images are linked to others images to form an interlaced web of images.
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