Christian O. Scholz

In his recent book Mental imagery: Philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, Nanay presents a far-reaching empirically grounded account of mental imagery. This commentary focuses on Nanay's proposal that individuals with aphantasia, a cognitive norm variant characterized by an absence of imagery experience, have unconscious mental imagery. Recent empirical findings on aphantasia are reviewed, and evidence both for and against voluntary and involuntary unconscious mental imagery in aphantasia is discussed in the context of Nanay's general account of mental imagery and its taxonomy. It is argued that people with aphantasia, contrary to Nanay's proposal, do not possess unconscious mental imagery.

Aphantasia, namely the inability to voluntarily form visual mental imagery, does not, counterintuitively, impair the affected from successfully performing mental imagery tasks. One way of explaining this finding is to posit that aphantasics, despite their claim to the contrary, can form visual imagery, a position here referred to as aphantasia skepticism. This article outlines and rejects two types of aphantasia skepticism and argues that the position results from what is coined the visualizer’s fallacy, namely the false belief that visual mental imagery is necessary to carry out mental imagery tasks. Furthermore, it is argued that the visualizer’s fallacy and the resulting aphantasia skepticism are not only potentially harmful to aphantasics but may also lead to an impoverished view of the dynamics of cognition in general.

Aphantasia, i.e., the inability to voluntarily form visual mental images, affects approximately 2 to 5 percent of the population and plays an important role in a more general debate revolving around the role of imagery for our cognition. This thesis investigates aphantasia by means of an interdisciplinary approach, combining insights from contemporary neuroscientific research with historical philosophical arguments, with a specific focus on the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. A new theoretical concept, meta-imagination, is developed and it is argued that the concept can explain why aphantasics perform successfully on a wide range of visual imagery tasks, thus providing important implications for the more general debate about the connection between imagery and cognition.