ABSTRACT
Our imaginative activities often exploit our ability to produce sensory mental images. Indeed, putative links between mental imagery and the imagination are enshrined within the definitions issued by respected lexicographers: the OED states that, on one usage, ‘imagination’ is “the faculty or action of forming ideas or mental images.” Philosophical attempts to identify the imagination’s nature have also often traded upon its supposed links to mental imagery, as we will see below. Very many of us would respond to, say, the instruction to “imagine an explosion” by
entertaining visual and auditory mental imagery that presents the sights and sounds created by something exploding. Similarly, the imaginings in which many of us engage while reading fiction revolve around mental images that illustrate the scenes being described. One important way in which mental imagery and the imagination seem to be connected is thus as follows: what we imagine – the “content” of our imaginings – is often significantly shaped by what is shown in mental images. Suppose that an imaginative episode features some mental imagery that plays a part in
determining what is being imagined. Then the imagining is imagistic. So, suppose that I imagine a wooden table by visualizing a wooden table. My imagining of a wooden table is imagistic, as the imagining’s content derives partly from the details of the visual image that I produced. As we will see in the next section, though, what is shown by the mental images featuring in imagistic imaginings can relate more or less straightforwardly to the contents of those imaginings. This fact raises interesting questions about the precise nature of the ways in which the mental images that occur within imagistic imaginings may affect the contents of the latter. Another fundamental question about the relationship between the imagination and mental
imagery is whether there can be nonimagistic imaginings. Are there imaginings, that is, whose contents do not derive in any way from the contents of mental images? Indeed, can there be imaginings that do not feature mental images at all? Here is the plan for what follows. The next section sets things up for later parts of the
chapter by distinguishing some of the different ways in which mental images may contribute to the contents of imaginative episodes. Sections 3-5 consider some interesting philosophical
questions concerning imagistic imaginings, questions that are raised by the especially sensory nature of mental images. Sections 6-8 then broaden the discussion, by examining whether mental images are essential to our imaginative abilities. Before proceeding, a caveat. The following sections often focus upon questions about the
nature of the relationships obtaining between the contents of mental images and the contents of imaginings. A fuller survey of the imaginative consequences of the contents of mental images would need to reckon, though, with the additional question of just what sorts of contents mental images may possess. Can our visual images literally show cats as such, for instance – that is, as falling under the
concept cat – or are they rather limited to portraying “colour, light and shade, shape, size, motion, and spatial relations”?1 Can they display Bertrand Russell as such, say, rather than merely showing someone who is visually indiscernible from Russell himself? Can we conjure auditory images of “Three Blind Mice” as played on a trombone, rather than merely a series of imaged sounds that share certain audible properties with a trombone’s rendition of “Three Blind Mice”? Those questions about the potential contents of mental images parallel related questions
about the potential contents of sensory experiences themselves: do we literally seem to see cats as such, for instance?2 And one might suspect that the previous correspondence is no accident, for the potential contents of mental images seem to be closely related to the potential contents of suitable experiences.3 The previous questions thus lead rather inevitably to tricky questions in the philosophy of perception. Thankfully, however, the following pages will be able to avoid becoming embroiled in the latter debates. So, produce a visual mental image “of a cat.” It is a good question whether the visual
mental image that you have just produced really displays a cat or rather just displays some item that looks the way that a cat might look. But it is, for communicative purposes, helpful to waive that question and simply to indulge one’s inclination to speak of the image’s being “of a cat”; the resulting description is, after all, acceptable enough by ordinary standards. By contrast, there probably isn’t any similar license for the claim that your image characterizes the cat that it displays as once owned by Bertrand Russell. For the purposes of what follows, then, I will talk of mental images that display things like
cats and people, without meaning to incur a commitment to the view that mental images are genuinely capable of explicitly presenting such items as such; instead, I will just be exploiting some handy ways of talking. I will also rely upon some hopefully appealing claims about what particular mental images do not display; but if the reader is not convinced by the claims thereby made about the examples being discussed, he or she should feel free to substitute more convincing ones of his or her own devising.
