The False Dichotomy of Imagery
Nigel J.T. Thomas
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Picture theorists should not cheer, however. The only plausible account of the intentionality of mental pictures or quasi-pictures is that it derives from the intentionality of mentalese (Fodor, 1975; Tye, 1991; Thomas, in press §3.2). Without mentalese (or, worse, a homuncular mind's-eye) inner pictures will be neither intentional nor consciously experienced.
But the assumption that pictorialism and descriptionism exhaust our options for explaining imagery arises from mere historical accident. In the 1970s computational cognitive science was a new, exciting paradigm, but imagery, prima facie a thoroughly un-computational phenomenon, conscious and informal, was also a newly fashionable topic in psychology, with experimental evidence emerging demonstrating its objective reality and functional significance (Kessel, 1972; Thomas, in press §2.1). The notorious "imagery debate" of that era was really about how and whether the evidence on imagery could be reconciled with symbolic computationalism, and Kosslyn's quasi-pictorialism (1980) soon emerged to rival Pylyshyn's descriptionist answer. Around the same time, several psychologists, (sensitive, like Pylyshyn, to the defects of pictorialism) suggested alternative, non-computational mechanisms for imagery, versions of what I call perceptual activity theory4, but their voices were drowned by the clamor of the computationalists' urgent debate.
Circumstances today are very different. Symbolic computationalism has lost much of its luster, and is certainly is no longer "the only game in town". With the emergence of embodied and situated approaches to cognition (not to mention connectionism and dynamical systems theory) we need no longer remain locked into a dichotomous choice of theories developed to appease symbolic computationalists. Perceptual activity theory coheres well with these newer approaches to cognition and has distinct conceptual and empirical advantages over both quasi-pictorialism and descriptionism (Thomas, 1999). It also suggests a promising approach to naturalizing intentionality and consciousness (Thomas, 1999, 2001).
Pylyshyn's critique appeals to O'Regan's work, but O'Regan's conclusions (1992; O'Regan & Noë, 2001) are incompatible with pictorialism and descriptionism alike. Visual experience, he holds, arises not from the presence of representations in the brain but from the active exercise of our "mastery of the relevant sensorimotor contingencies" (O'Regan & Noë, 2001) as we explore our visual surroundings. Perceptual activity theory holds that imagery arises from vicarious exercise of such mastery: a sort of play-acting of perceptual exploration (Thomas, 1999). Although the evidence does not support pictorialism we should not thereby conclude that Pylyshyn's "null hypothesis" is true, or even null.
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