What do pictures and mental images have in common? The contemporary tendency to reject mental picture theories of imagery suggests that the answer is: not much. We show that pictures and visual imagery have something important in common. They both contribute to mental simulations: pictures as inputs and mental images as outputs. But we reject the idea that mental images involve mental pictures, and we use simulation theory to strengthen the anti-pictorialist's case. Along the way we try to account for (...) caricature and for some basic features of pictorial representations. (shrink)

But say you,surely there is nothing easier than to imagine trees,for instance,in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no dif?culty in it:but what is all this,I beseech you,more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of anyone that may perceive them? But do you not yourself perceive or think of (...) them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind;but it doth not shew that you can conceive it possible, the objects of your thought may exist without the mind: to make out this, it is necessary that you conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy. (shrink)

The Way of Ideas died an ignoble death, committed to the flames by behaviorist empiricists. Ideas, pictures in the head, perished with the Way. By the time those empiricists were supplanted at the helm by functionalists and causal theorists, a revolution had taken place in linguistics and the last thing anyone wanted to do was revive images as the medium of thought. Currently, some but not all cognitive scientists think that there probably are mental images - experiments in cognitive psychology (...) (e.g. Shepard and Metzler 1971) have shown it to be plausible to posit mental images. Even so, the phenomenon of mental imagery has been largely regarded as peripheral in cognition, perhaps even epiphenomenal. Images cannot fix the content of thought (intentions, rules), the Wittgenstein story went. The central processes of thought, so the post-Wittgenstein story goes, require a propositional representation system, a language of thought, universal and modeled on the machine languages of computers. The language of thought is compositional, productive, and, leading advocates argue, has a causal semantics. Images lack all of these essential qualities and so are hopeless as key players in thinking. (shrink)

The presence of spatial patterns of activity in the brain is suggestive of image-exploiting processes in vision and mental imagery, but not conclusive. Only behavioral evidence can confirm or disconfirm hypotheses about whether, and how, the brain uses images in its information-processing, and the arguments based on such evidence are still inconclusive.

Visualizings, the simplest imaginings which employ visual imagery, have certain characteristic features; they are perspectival, for instance. Also, it seems that some but not all of our visualizings are imaginings of seeings. But it has been forcefully argued, for example by M.G.F. Martin and Christopher Peacocke, that all visualizings are imaginings of visual sensations. I block these arguments by providing an account of visualizings which allows for their perspectival nature and other features they typically have, but which also explains how (...) we can visualize things without thereby imagining visual sensations. (shrink)

The problem seems apparent even in Glasgow's term ``depict'', which is used by way of contrast with ``describe''. Now ``describe'' refers relatively unproblematically to strings of symbols, such as those in this written sentence, that are systematically interpretable as propositions describing objects, events, or states of affairs. But what does ``depict'' mean? In the case of a picture -- whether a photo or a diagram -- it is clear what depict means. A picture is an object (I will argue below (...) that it is an analog object, relative to what it is a picture of) and it DEPICTS yet another object: the object it is a picture OF. But in the case of an array, whether described formally, with numerical coordinates, or stored in a machine, or ``depicted'' diagrammatically by way of a secondary illustration, it is not at all clear whether the entity in question is indeed a picture, or merely yet another set of symbols that is INTERPRETABLE as referring to a picture, which picture in turn depicts an object! It is clear that we are dealing with many layers of interpretation here already, and so far we are still talking only about external objects (such as pictures, symbols and objects simpliciter). We still have not gotten to MENTAL objects, such as mental ``images''. (shrink)

Both imagery and imagination play an important part in our mental lives. This article, which has three main sections, discusses both of these phenomena, and the connection between them. The first part discusses mental images and, in particular, the dispute about their representational nature that has become known as the _imagery debate_ . The second part turns to the faculty of the imagination, discussing the long philosophical tradition linking mental imagery and the imagination—a tradition that came under attack in the (...) early part of the twentieth century with the rise of behaviorism. Finally, the third part of this article examines modal epistemology, where the imagination has been thought to serve an important philosophical function, namely, as a guide to possibility. (shrink)

People have always wondered how thinking takes place and what thoughts are constructed from. We typically experience our thoughts as involving pictorial (or sensory) contents or as being in words. Although this idea has been enshrined in psychology as the “dual code” theory of reasoning and memory, serious questions have been raised concerning this view. It appears that whatever the form of our thoughts it is unlikely that it is anything like our experience of them. But if thought is not (...) in pictures or words, what form does it take? If we do not sometimes think in words, then what actually goes on when we think by engaging in an “inner dialogue”? And if we do not sometimes think in pictures, what goes on when we reason by creating and examining “mental images”? (shrink)

In Gregory, Richard. Oxford Companion to the Mind (Second Edition, 2006) Oxford University Press.

Jacques Mehler was notoriously charitable in embracing a diversity of approaches to science and to the use of many different methodologies. One place where his ecumenism brought the two of us into disagreement is when the evidence of brain imaging was cited in support of different psychological doctrines, such as the picture-theory of mental imagery. Jacques remained steadfast in his faith in the ability of neuroscience data (where the main source of evidence has been from clinical neurology and neuro-imaging) to (...) choose among different psychological positions. I personally have seen little reason for this optimism so Jacques and I frequently found ourselves disagreeing on this issue, though I should add that we rarely disagreed on substantive issues on which we both had views. This particular bone of contention, however, kept us busy at parties and during the many commutes between New York and New Jersey, where Jacques was a frequent visitor at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. Now that I am in a position where he is a captive audience it seems an opportune time to raise the question again. (shrink)