Putting the Image Back in Imagination

Abstract

Despite their intuitive appeal and a long philosophical history, imagery-based accounts of the imagination have fallen into disfavor in contemporary discussions. The philosophical pressure to reject such accounts seems to derive from two distinct sources. First, the fact that mental images have proved difficult to accommodate within a scientific conception of mind has led to numerous attempts to explain away their existence, and this in turn has led to attempts to explain the phenomenon of imagining without reference to such ontologically dubious entities as mental images. Second, even those philosophers who accept mental images in their ontology have worried about what seem to be fairly obvious examples of imaginings that occur without imagery. In this paper, I aim to relieve both these points of philosophical pressure and, in the process, develop a new imagery-based account of the imagination: the imagery model. Strangely, the image seems to have disappeared from recent philosophical discussions of the imagination. Departing from a tradition that dates back at least to Aristotle, many philosophers in the second half of this century have minimized the importance of the image-or left it out entirely-in their accounts of the imagination. My goal in what follows is to put the image back in imagination.develop-what I call the imagery model-is relieved of the problems that have led philosophers away from the image. Framing the InvestigationAs we begin our investigation of the imagination, it is important that we are clear on what is to be investigated. In particular, I want to point out that while there are lots of ordinary language uses of the word "imagine" and its cognates, not all of these correspond to the phenomenon in which we are interested. Many of these, I expect, are rather easy to spot. To give a trivial example, someone might respond "Imagine that!" to some surprising piece of news, and yet we would by no means understand this to imply an exercise of the speaker's imagination, nor would it be properly understood as a command for the listener to do so. In this instance, the word "imagine" functions simply as part of an idiomatic exclamation.Another common use of the word is to signal supposition or, perhaps more commonly, mistaken supposition. We might say of a high school teacher, "The teacher imagined that her students had done their homework," and mean simply that she made an incorrect assumption? Of course, this same statement in a different context might be used to refer to a teacher who attempted to escape the reality of her students' indolence by exercising her imagination. Context, then, helps to make clear whether the word "imagine" refers to an actual exercise of the imagination, and it should not present much trouble to separate out those which refer merely to an exercise of supposit i~n .~ Consider also the following passage from Gilbert Ryle:There are hosts of widely divergent sorts of behaviour in the conduct of which we should ordinarily and correctly be described as imaginative. The mendac...

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