The most obvious types of mental representation are our own conscious perceptual states: seeing an apple on the table or imagining a flock of sheep on a mountainside. Many philosophers have thought that we also have a more abstract kind of mental representation: concepts, which compose together to make up thoughts. It seems I can think the thought that there are 80 sheep in Birgit’s top field without having any particular image in mind. At least, that has been a leading philosophical view for many years.
In the first Mind Bites podcast, Professor Jesse Prinz counters that orthodoxy with a mixture of empirical data and philosophical arguments. His proposal is that all mental representation is in some sense imagistic. All our thinking takes place in pictures. And what about people who sincerely claim that they can solve problems without using any mental imagery? Prinz makes the provocative argument that those people are not consciously aware of the images that are being processed in their minds. Although counterintuitive, there is a surprising amount of evidence for Prinz’s view. Have a listen and see what you think – comments are open below.
Thank you to Jesse Printz for his interesting thoughts and good integration of current research into validating his theory, however,
When someone is having a visual hallucination, the image-thought is internal sometimes, a “top down” phenomenon gone wrong, and at times, the person is painfully aware of the subject being shrouded by a sense of irreality, a dream like characterization, commonly seen for example in Lewy Body Dementia and Parkinson´s disease. So some images are thoughts, but not all images are thoughts? Can some thoughts also be perceived as non real? In some cases the person herself can talk her or himself out of a hallucination, but that in itself it´s a thought process and, if we are to take Printz´s theory as real, an image process itself. If we think in images, would the visual pathways not become completely saturated? Would not thought processes be more impaired when it is so obvious that there are problems with the visual pathways? Yet it is relatively easy in early stages of Lewy Body Dementia and in Parkinson´s disease to “reason yourself out” of a hallucination.
Secondly, I would love to know Printz´s views on blindness, or thought in the congenitally blind. If anyone knows if he has addressed this matter in any of his books and could point me to it?
Thank you to Jesse Prinz for his thoughts on thinking with images,
Just a couple of things:
-Visual hallucinations are internal thoughts that are sometimes shrouded by an aura of irreality, being often described as having an oneiric quality to them (in Parkinson´s disease, in Lewy Body Dementia), yet in these neurodegenerative disorders, as long as they are not yet too advanced, it is sometimes possible to “reason yourself out” of the hallucination, a thought process that must somehow be separated from the obviously damaged visual cortex, if we always think in images.
– What would the thought be like in a congenitally blind person, according to that theory?
I am sure Prinz has already addressed these issues, if someone could point me to one of his books that would talk about this I´d be most grateful.
MCorretge
Thanks for your comment, Maria. ‘Images’ is being used broadly here to cover all kinds of sensory / perceptual imagery. So it would include auditory imagery and tactile imagery, for example, which I suspect would be more important for people who are congenitally blind.
Prinz writes a lot more about consciousness in his book *The Conscious Brain* (2012). His imagistic theory of conceptual thought was set out in detail some time ago in *Furnishing the Mind* (2002).
I think it would be correct to say ” during the act of thinking,the visual pathways are often activated” without jumping to the conclusion of we ” think in images”. If we are not conscious of either thinking in images or in words, aren’t we falling in the nemeric phallacy? We “just” think, and draw on visual and non visual pathways as we do… Thanks for pointing me to his other works, will add them to my list!
I don’t have the background to engage with this on a rigorous philosophical level – apologies. But I have a knee-jerk wariness of these kind of discussions – My sense is that when somebody tries to propose a universal theory of human cognition, in actuality the person tends to propose a theory of their own cognition. Prinze touches on this near the end of the podcast, when he says there is undoubtedly field bias in this area – there’s a bit of a philosophy echo-chamber of only the same type of minds considering the question. I think neurodiversity – the multiplicity of human cognitions – must be brought much more front-and-centre into consideration in these discussions. I am put in mind of a talk by Temple Grandin I once saw, where she contends that the way she thinks is more fundamentally imagistic than a neurotypical person. I’m not similar to her, except in that I also have the unfortunate blessing of being trapped in an atypical mind. (Language is very much anathema to me; life is an unending labour of extracting the human world from language in order to make it comprehensible to me, and trying to crowbar my own cognitive experience and intellect back into language in order to interact with the world at large.) If I took the musings of philosophers and the painfully slow science of neuropsychologists too seriously I’d negate my own existence. I’m a walking talking ontological problem! Anyway – I guess my point is that we need to gather a more diverse sample of minds and their mechanisms, before we start closing in on a definitive description of the nature of the human mind.