Abstract
Visual imagination (or visualization) is peculiar in being both free, in that what we imagine is up to us, and useful to a wide variety of practical reasoning tasks. How can we rely upon our visualizations in practical reasoning if what we imagine is subject to our whims? The key to answering this puzzle, I argue, is to provide an account of what constrains the sequence in which the representations featured in visualization unfold—an account that is consistent with its freedom. Three different proposals are outlined, building on theories that link visualization to sensorimotor predictive mechanisms (e.g., “efference copies,” “forward models”). Each sees visualization as a kind of reasoning, where its freedom consists in our ability to choose the topic of the reasoning. Of the three options, I argue that the approach many will find most attractive—that visualization is a kind of “off-line” perception, and is therefore in some sense misrepresentational—should be rejected. The two remaining proposals both conceive of visualization as a form of sensorimotor reasoning that is constitutive of one’s commitments concerning the way certain kinds of visuomotor scenarios unfold. According to the first, these commitments impinge on one’s web of belief from without, in the manner of normal perceptual experience; according to the second, these commitments just are one’s (occurrent) beliefs about such generalizations. I conclude that, despite being initially counterintuitive, the view of visualization as a kind of occurrent belief is the most promising.
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Notes
Notably, the overlap in neural mechanisms is only partial. On the one hand, disruption of activity in visual area V5 impedes performance on imagery-related tasks (Kosslyn, et al. 1999). And neuroimaging results show activation in common areas during visual and visual imagery tasks (Ganis et al. 2004; Mechelli et al. 2004)—yet, these same studies also indicate that the overlap is not complete. Moreover, there are double-dissociations reported between visual perception and visual imagery abilities in neurological subjects (Bartolomeo et al. 1998; Bartolomeo, Bachoud-Levi, & Denes, 1997; Behrmann, Moscovitch, & Winocur 1994; Chatterjee & Southwood 1995).
Performance on visual imagery tasks degrades when subjects are given a concurrent visual perception task (Brooks 1967; Catherine Craver-Lemley and Reeves 1992). The performance time required for visual perception tasks is mirrored by the time required for corresponding visual imagery tasks (Borst and Kosslyn 2008)—see Kosslyn (1994, p. 4-10) for a summary. Visual perceptual deficits are often mirrored in one’s capacity to use visual imagery(Bisiach et al. 1979; Levine et al. 1985).
For much of the 1970s and 1980s, the central issue surrounding sensory imagination was the representational format of mental imagery—this was known as the “imagery debate” (Block 1981). Pictorialists argued (and continue to argue) that mental imagery occurs in an iconic or pictorial representation of some kind (Kosslyn 1994; Kosslyn and Thompson 2003). Descriptivists countered that experimental data adduced by pictorialists is compatible with mental imagery occurring in a Fodorian language of thought (Pylyshyn 2002). Others have developed intermediate options (Cornoldi, Logie, Brandimonte, Kaufman, & Reisberg 1996; De Vega et al. 1996; Tye 1991).
This is not to say that I endorse their view. In other work (Langland-Hassan 2011) I argue that propositional imagining involves only ordinary belief and desire.
Currie and Ravenscroft (2002) develop an entirely different account of sensory imagination, one which sees perception as its “counterpart”. Nichols and Stich (2000, 2003) are silent on the role of visual imagery in their account, and have been criticized for offering no account of the role of mental imagery in imagination (Goldman 2006).
In another work (Langland-Hassan 2008), I question Grush’s claim that visual images themselves are properly conceived of as the relevant “predictions” of incoming perceptual information, proposing that simpler “filtering” mechanisms could accomplish the same task. If that account is right, then the predictions constitutive of visualization are not the same as those discussed in work on “forward models” and “corollary discharge.” Rather, they constitute a separate, personal-level phenomenon—though perhaps one that draws on some of the same mechanisms and abilities as the signal-attenuating “predictions” made during ordinary perception. Here, I stick to Grush’s account, as it is comparably well known, and the aspects of it to which I object can ultimately be dispensed with for present purposes.
If “simulating” perception just amounts to using perceptual centers of the brain in reasoning that is not driven by an external stimulus, then all three views are consistent with the claim that visualizing is simulating visual perception. What I am trying to make clear is that there are important questions about the representational and functional properties of visualization that remain open even once we have accepted a very broad simulation view. Those more exacting in their use of the term ‘simulation’ (Currie and Ravenscroft 2002, Ch. 5) may justly question whether visualization is properly thought of as a simulation of perception.
We can assume that the role of a visual imagining here is not to represent a situation as it would really look if it occurred (i.e., in all of its detail), but rather to get certain coarse-grained features right. That is, an imagining can be veridical to the extent that it does not “say” things that are false, even if it is representationally silent about many matters that a corresponding visual perception would not be.
This means we can accept the point that a single “static” image or “cognitive map” cannot by itself represent a conditional (Bermudez 2009, p. 162), while insisting that diachronic sequences of images whose unfolding is governed by probabilistic predictive algorithms can plausibly constitute such representations. That said, there is space for what we might call “single” or “static” image imaginings to have truth values according to BV as well. This might occur when a certain visual image forms a proper part of a larger content, such as: my childhood home looked like: H (where H is the contribution of a single visual image). Or, looking to the future: when John opens his present, his expression will be: J. Centered as it is around answering (1), this paper focuses on the truth conditions arising out of diachronic sequences of visualization.
One might argue that even if such misrepresentational states were not “cut off” from action-guiding systems, they would not give rise to hallucinatory behavior because they are easily distinguished from perceptual experiences by their impoverished representational contents (that is, they are phenomenologically “dim”). But, this then begs the question of whether they are properly characterized as representing their objects as present in the first place, since even when not isolated from action-guiding systems they have no tendency to cause behavior appropriate to the presence of the objects represented.
Harris (2001) explicitly voices the common assumption that such representations are misrepresentations, when he notes that the counterfactual reasoning guiding pretense depends “on the ability to temporarily entertain a representation that is non-veridical, and known to be so” (p. 252).
What about dreams? Don’t dreams involve visualization? And isn’t it far-fetched to suppose that we are involved in reasoning processes during dreams? Here I would insist that the will-driven process of visualization is not the same mental phenomenon as dreaming, even if (as with visual perception) many of the same cortical areas are active during dreaming as during visualization. While both dreams and visualizations feature mental imagery and are endogenously caused, their specific causes are likely quite different, as are obviously their effects. For one thing, subjects engaged in visualization (even in its “daydreaming” instances) have a clear sense of the difference between what they are current perceiving and what they are visualizing—a necessary condition for the visualization to play its typical causal role. This difference between visualizing and dreaming demands any functionalist account of mind to treat them as different kinds of processes. Nevertheless, I grant that the “desires to explore” responsible for some visualizations may play a causal role in the development of some dreams. Unfortunately, I lack the space here for a properly detailed account of the difference between visualization and dreaming.
Roughly speaking, the generality constraint on concept possession requires that anyone who can conceptually think that a is F and that b is G can also conceptually think that a is G and that b is F (in short, one’s mental states constitute concepts only if they are systematic).
Carruthers (2006) understands encapsulation similarly: “To say that a processing system is encapsulated is to say that its internal operations can’t draw on any information held outside of that system in addition to its input” (p. 5).
This may be only a norm regarding belief—one that is violated often enough by normal reasoners. See Bortolotti (2009) for useful discussion.
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Special thanks go to Carl Craver, Frederick Eberhardt, and Jacob Beck for helpful discussion on a variety of topics treated in this paper.
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Langland-Hassan, P. A puzzle about visualization. Phenom Cogn Sci 10, 145–173 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9197-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9197-z