Images and Thinking
(Critique of arguments against images as a medium of thought)
David Cole
Page 6
Against this possibility, Pinker continues: "And our visual memory could not very well be a shoebox stuffed with photographs, either. There would be no way to find the one you need without examining each one to recognize what's in it. (Photo and video archives face a similar problem.) Memory images must be labeled and organized within a propositional superstructure, perhaps a bit like hypermedia, where graphics files are linked to attachment points within a large text or database." (294-5)
This argument (and the next) are probably of central importance; they motivate the requirement of propositional representations distinct from images. But the point is misleading. Hyperlinks are causal links, not a "propositional superstructure". The claim that images must be organized is not equivalent to the claim that they "must be labeled and organized with a propositional superstructure". Photo albums organize, not with a propositional superstructure, but proximity. Museums label, but they also arrange exhibits in physical space, sometimes with a constrained path so that patrons will encounter exhibits in a predetermined order.
The demand for explicit propositional labeling runs counter to a deeper point Pinker raises earlier - a point going back at least to Lewis Carroll. Carroll's "What Achilles said to the Tortoise" has a moral, which Pinker draws in the course of his discussion (98-99). The moral is that inference connections can't all be by explicit representations of inference rules. We don't need a propositional representation of modus ponens, even though modus ponens is a very important, indeed essential, component of the inference. Yet we manage to infer. So why would we need propositional representations of what to do with images? We just, as Pinker says echoing Nike, p. 99, do it!"
Similarly with images. It is entirely possible that images be causally connected with one another, as associationist psychologists supposed. No propositional superstructure is needed for an image of a lion to cause proprioceptive images of running away. But while this may address this specific objection, it leaves the problem that ordinary visual images are incapable of representing abstractions.
Suppose now that the image is itself a tokening of a sentence - an image of a sentence, for example, a phonological image of "All cows decry carnivores". Must we suppose that this image requires an additional label in order to have the content "All cows decry carnivores"? Not for the reasons adduced against, say, a visual image of cows drawing back from a wolf. The question is merely whether a phonological image of "all cows decry carnivores" can serve as a vehicle of thought - can it, e.g., enter into inferences by causing new tokenings of sentences. And in order to do this, do we need an explicit propositional representation, say of "all strings beginning with "all" are suitable for Barbara inferences". Achilles all over again. We don't need labels on these strings because they bear their inference potential on their sleeves. (More on this in Cole 1997 - "I don't think so")
Third argument,
"Finally, images cannot serve as our concepts, nor can they serve as meanings for words in the mental dictionary."( 296) The moral derives from British empiricism - as Berkeley noted in his critique of Locke's doctrine of abstract ideas, the imagistic approach to understanding thought could not account for abstract ideas. Pinker says that Berkeley's solution, denial of abstract ideas, is desperate and implausible (and one might remark, somewhat self-defeating for a philosopher).
But Berkeley did not deny that we have abstract thought. He only denied that we have abstract ideas (images). He and Hume had the solution to the problem endemic to previous imagistic approaches, but did not fully appreciate the scope of that solution. The solution is not to suppose that the pictorial content of an imagistic representation determines its inference role. Berkeley says that in thinking about triangles, we cannot form an image of some triangle which is neither equilateral, isosceles nor scalene - or all three at once. But we can use an arbitrary triangle and ignore its particular shape. That is the functional role of the mental triangle image does not depend upon its pictorial properties.
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