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On the Relation Between Visualized Space and Perceived Space

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Abstract

In this paper, I will examine the question of the space of visual imagery. I will ask whether in visually imagining an object or a scene, we also thereby imagine that object or scene as being in a space unrelated to the space we’re simultaneously perceiving or whether it is the case that the space of visual imagination is experienced as connected to the space of perceptual experience. I will argue that the there is no distinction between the spatial content of visualization and the spatial content of visual perception. I will base my conclusion on two uncontroversial, empirically confirmed aspects of imagery: (a) the perspectival character of imagery, and (b) the possibility of superimposing an imagined object upon the perceived scene.

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Notes

  1. This question, about the unity among all your simultaneous conscious states is distinct from the question of diachronic unity of consciousness. I focus on the former here.

  2. Hopkins’s notion of a “frame of reference” is very much reminiscent of the notion of perspective I adopted from Gregory above. Hopkins thinks that the frame of reference consists of a single point from which things are represented, and the “lines of sight” that define directions and other spatial notions such as nearer and farther.

  3. In the kinds of cases that I have in mind, the subject is aware that the visualized objects are not in fact in the subject’s environment; in contrast to a hallucination in which the subject takes the hallucinated object to be in fact in her environment.

  4. More precisely, I allow the content of my perceptual experience to impose constraints on the content of my visualization experience.

  5. I am not aware of any empirical work that investigates the distinction between the two kinds of visualization, and one can see how hard it would be to ensure the subjects do not automatically insert the visualized images into the perceived scenes with any degree of rigor.

  6. I’m grateful to a reviewer for this journal for alerting me to this possibility.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Andrew Bollhagen, Adam Hauptfeld, Eli Chudnoff, two anonymous referees for this journal, and the audience members at the Annual Conference of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology for their generous and helpful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy and Religion, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Bartek Chomanski

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Chomanski, B. On the Relation Between Visualized Space and Perceived Space. Rev.Phil.Psych. 9, 567–583 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0380-1

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