Joanna Ahlberg is a philosophy PhD student at the University of Hertfordshire interested in the role of the image in imaginative thoughts. She quit a sought-after job with a pension, benefits and career progression to do this 🤦♀️.
A post by Joanna Ahlberg.
In the past twenty years or so, we have seen an increasing interest in a type of image-free imagination commonly referred to as Propositional Imagination. When we propositionally imagine, we imagine that a state of affairs obtains such as “imagining-that velociraptors invade the university library.” In so doing, the content of our imagining, or the representation used in our imagining, is understood to be a proposition rather than an image. The proposition within our imaginative thought therefore “fixes” the content of what we are imagining. This is a proposition-first account of imagination.
It is often, but not always conceptually juxtaposed with Sensory or Objectual imagination (Kind, 2016; Debus, 2016; Wiltsher 2012; et al). Unlike propositional imagination, sensory imagination takes imagery as its content; images, not propositions represent what we are imagining, and therefore “fix” the content of our imaginative thought. Imagery in this sense could be any kind of phenomenology associated with our five senses. When we imagine a cat, for instance, the content of our imagining could be a visual mental image that we see with our “mind’s eye” which represents cat. We might hear her purr with our “inner ear” or feel the softness of her fur with our “inner touch”, and so on.
What I’m about to put pressure on is the idea that sensory imagination is non-propositional – or at least that mental images, specifically visual mental images, do not represent propositionally. I think that they do. In fact, I think that visual mental images are loaded with propositional content, and if the content of a sensorily imagined thought is a visual mental image, it follows naturally that sensory imagination is more propositionally contentful than initially thought – in some cases, even more so than so-called propositional imagination.
Your ontological commitments regarding propositions will most likely determine whether you are likely to be sympathetic to my thesis. A popular description of propositions is that they have a language-based structure, and that they are very often conceptually tied-up with the language-like representations through which they are expressed. Kathleen Stock, for instance, thinks of propositions as ‘the contents of declarative sentences’ (2017:21) which are the bearers of truth values. Elisabeth Camp takes a more stringent position. Not only are propositions abstract entities which are the bearers of truth values, but, in line with Russell and Frege, she thinks that they possess a structural aspect which is specifically predicative (2018: 25). And Alexandru Radulescu (2017:189) describes the standard view of propositions as being specifically ‘the (semantic) content of sentences.’
It is easy to assume that propositions take a language-like grammatical structure because they have become synonymous with the type of representation we most frequently use to express them: semantic representations. This can easily lead to an assumption that the representation, which is used to express the proposition is, at worst, the proposition itself or, at best, the only type of representation which propositions can use to express themselves.
Yet, as Alex Grzankowski points out in his prize-winning essay (forthcoming: 233-241), there is no reason to assume that the metaphysical requirements of what is represented should be determined by the structure of the (usually linguistic) representation which they express themselves through. He thereby does some work in disambiguating what is represented from the representation which expresses what is represented. According to Grzankowski (2012; 2015; 2016a; 2018) propositions are abstracta. It is their business to express states of affairs or that things are some way. Since propositions express things as being some way, two natural features of propositions arise: (i) each proposition expresses a logical arrangement of objects and properties in the world. They possess a certain orderliness or structure, and because they do, (ii) they are truth-evaluable. They are either true or false and they stand in logical relations with each other. It must be possible to join the representations which express them with some form of logical connectives (&, or, ->, etc.). A good way of testing for propositional content is by negation. If it cannot be negated, it’s not a proposition, and conversely, if it can, it is a proposition.
This way of conceiving of propositions releases them from a specifically grammatical structure. It instead invites us to a format of “orderliness” sufficient to accommodate the expression of a truth-evaluable state of affairs, but not one which is so strict that it limits propositions to semantic representations only. The versatile nature of the representations used by other abstracta, such as numbers and virtues, can provide us with a good indication of the scope and flexibility of the kind of representations which could be used to express propositions. The number three, for example, can be represented by a triangle, a digit, or even the word “three”.
Not everyone will be open to the idea that pictures, let alone visual mental images, possess the right structure for the expression of propositions. Tim Crane (2009) disagrees. His main reasons are twofold: (i) he thinks that pictures have accuracy conditions rather than truth conditions, and (ii) pictures are not open to negation in the say way language is. It’s easy for us to negate a sentence with another sentence but not a picture with another picture. Pictures do not stand in logical relations to one another (ibid: 458).
For Crane, in order for us to negate the content of a picture something must be said, through assertion, about the picture. The expression of propositions within the picture is reliant upon a speaker and the structure of linguistic assertion. A picture cannot assert or negate its content, but a speaker can assert and negate its content, and a speaker will do this through language-like structures. Thus, propositions must be linguistically structured and interpreted in order to be expressed.
Grzankowski challenges this and notes that Crane has, in his own words, admitted to the possibility of pictures being negated. The point is not how a picture is negated, but rather that it is negatable. There is no reason to assume that we must use the same representational form with which to negate the propositions expressed within a picture:
[I]f one can negate the content of a picture (with words, symbols, images, or whatever, ad hoc or otherwise), the content must be the sort of thing that can be negated i.e. a proposition. The anti-propositionalists’ own observations lead to an argument in favour of the view that the contents of pictures are propositional (2015:16).
His case is pressed by a scenario, where, if he were to hold up a picture of Napoleon’s Coronation and declare “this is not how it was”, there appears to be a lot of propositions which are available for negation. We should therefore ‘hold that the proposition the picture encodes is a very complex proposition, perhaps a long conjunction… the contents of pictures are typically rich with information’ (ibid).
If we accept Grzankowski’s argument, we’re in a position to determine whether mental imagery possesses the right structure for propositions to be expressed. How might we go about determining whether visual mental imagery expresses truth-evaluable states of affairs? I suggest that when we imagistically represent an object such as a sleeping cat, we tend to imagine the cat as being some way. We imagine-that the cat is ginger; that it’s curled up or sprawled out; that it is sitting on a couch or outside. There are a great many ways we can imagine our cat – and, when we do this imagistically, we are able to do this with a representation which can express a great deal of information about the way in which the cat is – and we do this at one and the same time. The interesting thing about mental pictures, as opposed to physical pictures, is that what they represent, what objects and states of affairs they depict, is up to the imaginer. We ascribe meaning to what is represented within the image, and we generally know what we are negating within our image as much as we know what our image expresses. When we affirm or negate what is the case within our imagining, we might do this by changing the circumstances surrounding our image or mentally manipulate our image so that the proposition expressed within it is otherwise, such as the cat is no longer happy, but feeling sad.
If mental pictures aren’t just propositionally expressive, but are in fact loaded with propositional content, the consequence of such a conclusion is a radical one given propositional / sensory imagination distinction. So-called sensory imagination, usually understood to be a type of non-propositional imagination, is potentially just as propositionally “contentful” as propositional imagination – and in some informationally rich cases even more so!
An outcome such as this makes one wonder about the potential of visual mental imagery. I am now starting to think about the special kind of representational structure a visual mental image has in order to have this level of informational and propositional expression, and what this might mean for imagination when its thought content is imagistic in kind.
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