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
Page 4
Source: http://cogprints.org/3750/1/dun-wat-cp.htm
I had already discarded the old doctrine of "images." Watson, however, still accepted it. He, he said, used visual imagery very effectually in designing his apparatus. Watson had not at that time developed his behaviorism and his thinking was, to a large extent, along conventional lines. He was violently interested in animal behavior, and was looking for some simplifications of attitude which would align that work with human psychology. Hence, he was interested in the iconoclastic activity I was developing, and was influenced by my views, but carried them out to extremes. I rejected images as psychic objects, and denounced introspection as held by the orthodox psychologists. Watson carried this further, to the excluding from his psychology of everything to which the word "introspection" could be applied, and excluded imagination along with images. (Dunlap, 1932, p. 45)
What does Dunlap mean here by implying that he would not have had Watson drop "imagination" but only "images"? I believe that this indicates that Dunlap's "iconoclasm" amounted only to what we have called pictorial iconophobia, whereas Watson, failing to make the distinction, carried this right through into functional, and even experiential, iconophobia. Dunlap certainly stoutly denied the existence of mental images in the sense of mental pictures, faint reinstatements of former visual impressions (or, indeed, impressions of other sense modes): "I contend that the image, as a copy or reproduction of sensation of variable mode does not exist" (Dunlap, 1914, p. 28). He offered both theoretical argument and introspective evidence in support of this (Dunlap, 1912b, pp. 156-160; 1914, pp. 38-39). However, he still held that something, something mental, was needed to fill the functional role that images played in the conventional psychology of thinking - something to form the "carriages" in the "train of association" - and he provided not only an account of what these mental contents were, but also of why people so widely took them to be reproductions of former sensation, images in the "pictorial" sense. He suggested:
There is indeed a present content essentially connected with imagination or thought; but this present content is in each case a muscle sensation, or a complex of muscle sensations. We are therefore, in investigating images, dealing not with copies, or pale ghosts, of former sensations but with actual present sensations. (Dunlap, 1914, p. 28)
These muscle sensations were not at all to be confused with the impalpable "imageless thoughts" of Würzburg (Dunlap, 1914, p. 37); rather: "This sensation is the true image" (Dunlap, 1914, p. 34, emphasis in original). The muscle sensations were supposed to be caused by small, outwardly imperceptible, muscular reflex responses to particular stimuli, and Dunlap provides an account of how regular successions of stimuli can cause the relevant muscular responses to become entrained so that perception of one stimulus can make us "imagine," by producing the relevant muscular responses, those which go with it: "In concrete illustrative terms: the visual presentation of an apple no longer arouses visual perception merely, but arouses also the perception of the gustatory, olfactory, tactual, and possibly thermal qualities of the apple" (Dunlap, 1914, p. 33). Dunlap claims that his own introspections reveal only muscle sensations in such cases, and not the "absent" perceptual qualities (1914, pp. 35, 38). However, these muscular response pattern "images" serve us as "ideas," as representations of the stimulus objects which in the first place produce them (just as pictorial images do in more traditional forms of associationism). In the thinking process, they can therefore represent some absent object of thought. Dunlap is thus able to explain away the fact that most people believe that they experience "mental images" as reinstatements of former perceptions (rather than of former responses):
[T]his form of present content (muscular activity) is that which is actually observed by those who report "mental images". These observers correctly notice that there is a present content in addition to the "absent" or ultimate object of thought, but they mistakenly confuse the quality of the ultimate object with the quality of the present content. (Dunlap, 1914, p. 39)
Furthermore:
The muscles of the organs of the special senses are in many cases concerned in "imagery", and there is a strong tendency in these cases to refer the image to the mode of the special sense concerned. If the muscles of the eye are involved in the production of an image, there is a tendency to classify the "image" as visual, and so on. (Dunlap, 1914, p.36)
The real trouble, however, is that other introspectors hold the wrong theory!
It is of course extremely difficult to separate completely in introspection the direct content from the idea. The difficulty is especially great if we do not understand what the direct content really is. Hence we need not be puzzled by the fact that the direct content has been described in conventional psychology as possessing the modality, and possibly other characteristics, of the idea. (Dunlap, 1914, p. 36).
It seems that our introspections can only be relied upon to reveal to us the true nature of the image, or other thought content, if we already have a "correct" understanding of this. Here, as in the "imageless thought" debate, we see again that futility of introspectionist argument which led Watson to rail so successfully against the whole approach.
But, although he lays much less stress on laryngeal, language responses, Dunlap's theory of "image" association bears a considerable resemblance to Watson's theory of thought (Watson, 1919, chap. IX; 1930, chaps. X-XI). Under both theories, thinking could be described as a matter of a succession of implicit muscular responses serially conditioned to one another. However, Watson's behaviorism disavowed all interest in conscious contents, utterly rejected introspection, and seemingly denied the existence of imagery altogether. Dunlap, it seems to me, was rather trying to explain these things in a new (if perhaps ultimately unconvincing) way. However, lacking a firm grasp of the distinctions between the various forms of iconophobia, Dunlap occasionally talks as if he is denying the reality of imagery altogether. Watson, it seems to me, probably took him to be doing just that.
We may perhaps take Watson as not only the leader but also the exemplar of the switch to behaviorism in American psychology. "Iconoclastic" objections, such as Dunlap's, to "pictorial" accounts of imagery (and to other notions from the "retinue" of "consciousness") were, I suspect, widely seen to be essentially cogent. However, the available alternative accounts of these phenomena, even if clearly distinguished from outright rejections of them, probably seemed far less persuasive. After all, like all theories, they would inevitably have their defects and limitations. It should be no surprise that the hope of cutting through these difficulties once and for all, by entirely excluding the "inner" from psychology, came to hold great attractions. In the case of imagery, the difficulties would have been compounded (as they are today) by the general failure to recognize the distinction between the various forms of iconophobia. Arguments against "pictorial" mechanisms could easily be misunderstood as powerful, if somewhat elusive, arguments against the reality of the experience itself. Anyway, the received wisdom among psychologists became that "mental imagery," especially, was a bad concept and best avoided.
However, denial of the experiential reality of imagery has always looked implausible, whatever the pressure of theory, and in recent times its functional significance has been demonstrated in numerous ways (see, e.g., Kosslyn, 1980, 1983; Paivio, 1971, 1983, 1986; Shepard, 1978a, 1978b; Shepard & Cooper, 1982; for critical appraisal of this and other related work see Thomas, 1987, chap. I.C). None of this, however, demands that imagery should be regarded as pictorial (Thomas, 1987, pt. II), a view which is, indeed, probably untenable, despite the efforts of Kosslyn (e.g., 1980, 1981, 1983; Kosslyn et al., 1979; Kosslyn & Shwartz, 1977) to promote it. But perhaps Kosslyn would never have embarked on his pictorialist project if he had realized that functional iconophilia does not entail pictorial iconophilia. It may even be inconsistent with it. Realizing this, we may hope that psychology will not recapitulate the confusions of its past.
.
We Make it Easy to Succeed
Successwaves, Intl.
Brain Based Accelerated Success Audios
 |