The Multidimensional Spectrum of Imagination
Nigel J.T. Thomas
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Page 8
Source : http://www.imagery-imagination.com/spectrum.htm
Although he knows it is real and important, McGinn can't quite understand imaginative perception. Because he thinks that percepts and images are radically disparate things, he is forced to say that, in imaginative perception, a percept and a distinct mental image somehow become blended together, or overlain on one another. He recognizes that this is unsatisfactory, but tries to brazen it out:
This joining of imagistic and perceptual space is particularly perplexing . . . . The intentional object of the image fuses with the object located by the percept, as if the objects of imagination have come down to earth temporarily – jumped spaces, as it were. (I know this is very obscure, but someone has to say it.) (p. 172 n.7)
Someone does not have to say it! The various types and examples of imaginative perception clearly differ in the degree to which the intentional content of the experience is constrained by what is present to the senses (I do not say this is the only dimension along which they differ). That being so, normal, veridical perception, and imagery, readily find their respective places at the opposite ends of this continuum of constraint, as limit cases of imaginative perception. At one end, reliable perception (seeing things as just what they are) occurs when good seeing conditions and an intent not to be deceived converge to ensure that our experience is maximally constrained by what is present (although, even here, philosophers as diverse as Aristotle, Hume, and Kant have held that imagination still plays a vital role, interpretatively transforming raw sensory stimulation into meaningful perceptual experience (Strawson, 1970; Thomas, 1997, 1999b, 2006)). At the other end of the spectrum, when we choose to set aside the constraints of the current deliverances of our senses almost entirely, our imagination is free to construct what imagery it will. Imagery is still a form of seeing as, but it is unconstrained seeing as: it is seeing nothing (which, being nothing, imposes no constraints) as whatever we want it to appear to be (Thomas, 1999a).
Dreams and the Spectrum of Imagination
Having now gone through McGinn's entire list of differences between imagery and perception, I believe I have shown that his nine items can actually be reduced to just two or three. The differences with respect to saturation, occlusion, thought, and observation are all consequences of the absence of the imagined object (together with some facts about the role of attention in perception and imagery). The differences with respect to recognition and visual field, inasmuch as they are real, are consequences of the difference with respect to will (again, when taken together with some of the facts about attention). But the genuine differences that McGinn labels asabsence and will, I have argued, are both best understood as differences of degree rather than of kind. The way that attention interacts with the voluntary control (will) dimension, and especially with the absence-presence dimension, to give rise to the other effects, may be what gives the impression that perception and imagery differ in their degree of dependence on attention. In fact, however, there is no real difference in this regard. Despite what the Cartesian, passive theory of perception might seem to imply, perceptual experience depends upon active attention quite as much as imaginal experience does.
Not only does McGinn fail to make his case for a distinction in kind between imagination and perception, but his insistence on it leads him into many needless difficulties (quite besides those he has with imaginative perception). For example, he devotes over twenty closely argued pages to the defense of the thoroughly unsurprising claim that dreams are products of the imagination. Ichikawa (2009) spills yet more ink in this direction. Why do they feel the need to tilt so hard at this windmill? Because (lucid dreams aside) we seem to have very little voluntary control over our dreams, and, for them both, voluntary controllability (will) is an essential characteristic of imagery, demarcating it from perception. Dreams thus look like a significant counterexample to the dichotomy that has been set up between imagery and perception, and McGinn must work hard to persuade us that, all appearances to the contrary, they really are under the control of the will.
He is also much concerned to reject the quite plausible notion that dream experiences are akin to that other form of quasi-perceptual experience that escapes voluntary control, hallucination. This is because he has committed himself to the view that hallucinations are a type of percept, and thus, by his lights, not imaginative products at all. In order to keep dreams within the fold of imagination he must go to elaborate lengths to distinguish them from hallucinations, and to explain why we can't usually control them even though he thinks that they consist of inherently voluntaristic imagery.
From the continuum perspective the problem situation looks very different (and, dare I say, more interesting): percepts, dreams, hallucinations, and waking mental images, as well as all the various types of imaginative perception, are all products of the imagination, and our task is not to sort them all into two Procrustean boxes, nor to assimilate any one to any other, or banish any from the fold, but rather to map the space of imagination and the various dimensions along which imaginative experiences may differ from one another. Our analysis of McGinn's ideas has, I think, left us with three such dimensions: absence-presence (which might more perspicuously be called stimulus constrainedness), will (or amenability to voluntary control), and the old Humean dimension of "vivacity" or vividness. (There may also, perhaps, be others that neither Hume, McGinn, nor I have thought of.) Non-lucid dreams, presumably, score low, far from imagery and close to percepts, on the amenability to voluntary control scale, and also very low on the dimension of stimulus constrainedness, in this case being far from percepts but close to waking imagery. (Vividness, inasmuch as something so subjective can be quantified in a meaningful way (Thomas, 2009a), may well vary markedly from dream to dream and from person to person, as seems to be the case with waking imagery (Marks, 1999).)
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