Experience and Theory as Determinants of Attitudes toward Mental Representation: The Case of Knight Dunlap and the Vanishing Images of J.B. Watson.
Nigel J.T. Thomas
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Source: http://cogprints.org/3750/1/dun-wat-cp.htm
The frustrating stalemate of the "analog-propositional" debate, however, threatens to remove imagery from the agenda once again. Even if imagery is real, one suspects that it would be a relief for many psychologists if they could regard it as unimportant, and there is a readily available rationale for such a position. When Galton issued his pioneering questionnaire on the vividness of mental imagery (Galton, 1880; 1883, pp. 83-144), he was "amazed" to find that although most people reported experiencing images of greater or lesser vividness, a few, concentrated among scientists and other intellectuals, denied experiencing any imagery at all.3 Such non-, or at least very poor,4 imagers seem nowadays to form about 10% to 12% of the population (Abelson, 1979), and it seems natural and plausible to conclude that the argument between iconophobes and iconophiles may rest simply on a personal, idiosyncratic difference in visualizing power (e.g., Abelson, 1979; Marks, 1981). Accepting this explanation of the theoretical differences leads to a sort of compromise view: Mental images must exist (because the iconophiles, we admit, have them), but because many iconophobes manage very well without them, images cannot have any significant cognitive function. At best, imagery must be some sort of mental luxury or cognitive crutch; at worst, it is a distraction from the serious business of proper "scientific" thinking.
Tempting as this conclusion is as a way out of a seemingly irreconcilable dispute, I think we can and must resist it. The real stumbling block to resolution lies not in the personal characteristics of the disputants, but in their conceptual confusions. After all, if people's theoretical attitudes toward imagery are determined by idiosyncratic personal differences, then how does one account for the historical record? Was the American psychological community from sometime before 1920 entirely recruited from the 10% to 12% of nonimagers? If so, why did the vetting procedure break down sometime before 1960? Surely we are rather looking at a process of persuasion and change of theoretical view. Differences in subjective experience may account for some of the passion of the debate, but not, I think, for the substantive disagreement - and even the passion may arise more from an apprehension of the far-reaching implications of the issues involved. I would like to suggest that the reported vividness and quantity of people's imagery may be at least as much determined by the theoretical views they (and their peers) hold on the topic as vice versa. There is, in fact, some empirical warrant for thinking that such self-ratings of imagery are very susceptible to social pressures, to the desire to please whoever is asking (DiVesta, Ingersoll, & Sunshine, 1971). The familiar problems of experimental demand characteristics (Orne, 1962) are thus especially acute here, and imagery research in general does seem to be particularly susceptible to experimenter effects (Intons-Peterson, 1983; Neisser, 1970, 1972; but see Marks, 1983a; J.T.E. Richardson, 1980, p. 12 1). Without direct access to other minds, it is hard to know how to properly conceptualize our subjective experience and against what standards to judge it. Unless one is strongly committed to some theory about mental contents, it is not unreasonable to take some implicit guidance from questioners who seem to know better and care more. "Folk psychology," the beliefs of the general public about the workings of the mind, seems to be iconophilic, on the whole (Denis & Carfantan, 1985; cf. Price, 1953, chap. 8), so most ordinary people normally think they experience plenty of imagery, or perhaps we should say that they are inclined to notice the relevant experiences and to conceptualizethem in imagery terms. When iconophobic theories are in the air, however, those who are likely to hear about them and are inclined to be impressed by theoretical argument (i.e., scientists and other intellectuals) may tend to conceptualize any such experiences differently, and perhaps generally to downplay them.5 It may even be that they are simply reluctant to call the relevant experiences "imagery." This sort of interpretation of iconophobia seems to me to be supported by the comments made by one of the "nonimaging" scientists replying to Galton's inquiries:
These questions presuppose assent to some sort of a proposition regarding the "mind's eye", and the "images" which it sees . . . . This points to some initial fallacy . . . . It is only by a figure of speech that I can describe my recollection of a scene as a "mental image" which I can "see" with my "mind's eye." . . . I do not see it . . . any more than a man sees the thousand lines of Sophocles which under due pressure he is ready to repeat. The memory possesses it, and the mind can at will roam over the whole, or study minutely any part. (Quoted by Galton, 1883, pp. 85, 91; Galton's ellipses).
The varieties of iconophobia
I believe it will help if we distinguish certain issues over which people can be iconophobic or iconophilic. We can hope that this may prove a first step toward resolving their antagonisms. The first possible disagreement occurs over whether people ever really do have the experiences which are commonly designated as "having/seeing a mental image," "visualizing," "picturing," "seeing in the mind's eye," etc.: that is, experiences that resemble (faint) perceptual experiences, but that occur in the absence of the things that seem to be "perceived." Let us call these two possible positions "experiential iconophobia" and "experiential iconophilia." In fact, out-and-out experiential iconophobes seem to be very rare; it takes some gall to deny other people's experiences - even so strict a behaviorist as B.F. Skinner acknowledges "seeing in the absence of the thing seen" (Skinner, 1953, pp. 266, 271; 1976, pp. 91ff.). A more common position is that although imagery experiences may sometimes occur, they have no real cognitive function, they may even hinder clear thinking, or positively deceive us - at the extreme, imagery may be entirely assimilated to hallucination (see Holt, 1964, on this tendency in an iconophobic psychological culture; Sarbin & Juhasz, 1967, set it in a much longer historical context). We may call this "functional iconophobia," and its counterpart - the view that imagery plays an important, regular, perhaps vital role in cognition - will be "functional iconophilia." Two important functional iconophobes of the past were Plato (Republic, 598b; Sophist, 236b-c in Hamilton & Cairns, 1961) and Pascal (Pensées, sec. 81 in Lafuma & Barnwell, 1973). Functional iconophilia begins with Aristotle (De Anima, 427b, 431a; De Memoria et Remeniscentia, 449b in Ross, 1931) and forms the mainstream of the Western tradition (McMahon, 1973; Thomas, 1987).
A quite distinct point of difference arises not over the existence or functional importance of mental imagery but over its underlying mechanism. The problem is that the everyday terminology of "images," "the mind's eye," and "picturing" strongly suggests a particular sort of explanation of the phenomenon; they suggest that something significantly like an ordinary material picture, yet somehow mental, is centrally involved. This is probably the form generally taken by "folk" explanations of imagery, and sometimes by scientific and philosophical accounts too (see Thomas, 1987, chaps. II.A, II.B). Let us call the people who accept this sort of commonsense "pictorial" view "pictorial iconophiles." Those who reject it, who regard the everyday terminology of "images" as implying a radically false theory and who thus deny that there are "real" mental pictures, will be "pictorial iconophobes."
Now it should be apparent that functional and pictorial iconophobia/philia are logically independent of one another. You can quite well regard mental images as being picture-like yet unimportant or bad (this seems to have been Plato's position), or as not involving anything pictorial yet very important - a view which I myself share with several contemporary psychologists (e.g., Neisser, 1976; Paivio, 1977, see secs. 3, 3.2). Nevertheless, there has been a strong tendency to associate the various forms of iconophilia and iconophobia, and this, I think, has caused confusion not only in people's understanding of their opponents' views but sometimes in their self-understanding as well. Galton's correspondent quoted above looks to me very much like someone who has allowed his quite reasonable pictorial iconophobia to push him all the way to an entirely unwarranted experiential iconophobia. This, I think, is one way at least in which theoretical belief can affect introspective reports, and perhaps has affected them in our contemporaries. Pictorial iconophiles, such as Kosslyn (see, e.g., Kosslyn, 1980, 1983; Kosslyn & Shwartz, 1977), are likely to readily recognize their images as such, but Hebb, who seems to be in principle a functional iconophile, has found that his pictorial iconophobia has severely impaired his ability to introspect his own imagery. Hebb gives an amusing account of how he largely lost conscious access to his image life through imagining his own "mind's eye" and recognizing the absurdity of it (Hebb, 1968, p. 476; 1969, p. 57).
Pictorial iconophobes, it must be admitted, face a particular problem. If like Ryle (1949, chap. 8), they reject the everyday "image" terminology as "misleading" and try to avoid it, they run a grave risk of being mistaken for out-and-out experiential iconophobes - nonimagers misled by simple ignorance of other people's interior life. Ryle has certainly suffered this fate (see, e.g., Danto, 1958; Lawrie, 1970), and it has sometimes led, I think, to some of his arguments not being given the weight they deserve. In fact, Ryle seems to have been a moderate functional iconophile (Ryle, 1979, chap. 3). Paivio, by contrast, retains the "image" terminology in expounding his own strong functional iconophilia (e.g., Paivio, 1971, 1975, 1977, 1983, 1986), and gets taken, even by his departmental colleague Pylyshyn (1973), to be a pictorial iconophile also - which he seems not to be (Paivio, 1975, p. 277; 1977, secs. 3, 3.2). By the same token, careful reading shows that it would be a mistake to regard Pylyshyn (1973) as an experiential iconophobe, although he is clearly an iconophobe in our other two senses. Such misunderstandings bedevil the imagery literature.
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