Image, Image-Making, and Imagination

Abstract

Despite the importance and ubiquity of visual imagery as a means of representation, philosophers have tended instead to concentrate upon language, because of its standing as the natural vehicle for voicing conceptual thoughts and discursive reasoning. The relative philosophical neglect of images has been coupled with a parallel neglect of those mental states to which visual images seem to be most closely linked. Recent philosophers, at least, have covered reams of paper with reflections about beliefs and other mental states whose instances typically revolve around linguistically articulable information, but they have spent far less time investigating the imagination, for instance, or dreams. One feature of visual imagery that acts as both an enticement to investigation, and as a potential obstacle to its progress, is its sheer diversity. Visual images may be realized using radically different media, for instance: thus mental visual imagery exploits neurological resources, while frescos employ pigments and plaster. And the range of styles that visual images manifest might make one wonder whether the category of “visual images” really possesses the unity that surely characterizes the phenomenon of human linguistic representation, and which makes it natural to see all human languages as different branches of a single tree. The pictures produced by small children in the West seem to be very different to those produced during Ancient Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, for instance, and those last are very different again to Hokusai’s drawings. The striking differences between different modes of image-making are also relevant here, as they can seem to put additional pressure on the idea that there is any interesting unity