Sacha Behrend

La question du rapport entre la perception et l’imagerie mentale (appelée aussi imagination) a une longue histoire en philosophie. L’essor des sciences cognitives, depuis les années 1960, permet désormais d’axer nos réponses sur des données expérimentales solides. Cet article se propose ainsi de montrer en quoi les recherches récentes en psychologie cognitive et en neurosciences fondent le rapprochement de la perception et de l’imagerie mentale. Mais loin d’en rester à un simple constat de rapprochement, il questionne la nature de la proximité entre ces deux facultés, arrivant à la conclusion que l’imagerie mentale est une simulation de l’activité perceptive.

Speaking of mental imagery suggests a similarity between internal mental representations and external pictorial representations, such as drawings, paintings and photographs. This perceived similarity has led some philosophers and cognitive scientists to consider that both types of representations belong to a specific category known as depictive representations. Since the depictive role of external pictures has often been explained in terms of resemblance, the same principle has been applied to mental images. In this article, I start by reviewing some of these attempts. Then, I put forward objections against the core project behind these attempts, particularly emphasizing what I call the ‘homogeneity problem’. Finally, this article proposes an alternative approach to understanding mental imagery by drawing insights from the literature on pictorial representation in artifacts, namely from recognitional accounts of pictorial representation. I argue that one of the merits of this definition is that it does not fall prey to the homogeneity problem and the other objections described previously.

The history of science is often understood as a succession of theories. However, this conception of the history of science does not do justice to the complexity of the dynamics implemented in scientific development. To illustrate this, we focus on a type of phenomena that cannot be described as a simple linear succession : the desuetude of certain theories and particularly the temporary desuetude of the theory of neuroplasticity. We argue that studying this theory reveals some of the inadequacies of the linear conception of the history of science.