Nigel Thomas

Traditionally ‘imagination’ primarily denotes the faculty of mental imagery, other usages being derivative. However, contemporary philosophers commonly hold it to be a polysemous term, with several unrelated senses. This effectively eliminates this culturally important concept as an appropriate explanandum for science, and paves the way for a thoroughgoing eliminative materialism. White challenges both these views of imagination, arguing that ‘imagine’ never means ‘suppose,’ ‘believe,’ ‘pretend’ or ‘visualize,’ that imagery may occur without imagination, and that the true sense of ‘imagine’ is (roughly) ‘think of as possibly being so.’ I defend a version of the traditional view. The disseverance of imagination from imagery is motivated by an implicit version of the theory of mental images as pictures. Other contemporary scientific theories of imagery do not entail it. I defend a view of imagery as arising from the interpretative aspect of perception (‘seeing-as’) and connect this, and our contemporary concept of imagination, to the root Aristotelian concept of φαντασία.This captures the association between imagination and creativity, and reveals the coherence of the concept, more plausibly than White’s theory.

This book is a philosopher's examination of the dispute, which raged amongst cognitive psychologists in the 1970s, and has continued to sputter on since, about the nature of mental imagery. As Tye sees things (and, indeed, as the textbooks generally have it) on the one side of the issue we find Stephen Kosslyn and certain close associates, arguing that mental images are best understood on analogy with pictures; and on the other side we find Zenon Pylyshyn, ably seconded by Geoffrey Hinton, arguing that the pictorial analogy is thoroughly misleading, and should be replaced by an analogy to descriptions. Tye's consideration of this debate, attempting to clarify and arbitrate a tangled mess of argument and to explore the implications of what he takes to be the proper outcome, is generally excellent. If you want to understand the strengths of the arguments of Kosslyn, Pylyshyn, and their allies, then this book is to be recommended very warmly.