Georgina Brighouse is a second-year PhD student at the University of Liverpool, working in philosophy of mind and collaborating with psychologists to take an empirically informed approach. Her interests focus on individual differences in imagery capacity, particularly aphantasia and its cognitive and societal implications.
A post by Georgina Brighouse
Can you imagine a bright red apple sitting on a table? Or a sunset over the ocean with orange and pink clouds?
These are examples of imagistic imagination. Visual mental imagery, in these examples, is essential to imagination.
A popular view of imagination is that mental imagery is a necessary requirement for all forms of imagination. Classical theories have often assumed that imagination depends crucially on imagery (e.g., Aristotle 1968, 428a1-2; Hume, 1739/2007), and contemporary philosophers have continued this line of thought.
Amy Kind defends an imagery-essentialist account of imagination. On her view, imagery serves as the ‘paint’ of the imagination (2001, p. 33). Just like paint captures the object of the painting, imagery captures the object of the imagining. Further, she argues that the experiential aspect of imagination – the ‘what-it’s-likeness’ – can only be explained by invoking mental imagery.
Bence Nanay also argues that, whilst imagination and imagery are distinct, the former necessarily depends on the latter (Nanay, 2023a, 2023b). Imagination is something we do, a (typically) voluntary action, whereas mental imagery can be involuntary, such as in flashbacks or earworms (Nanay, 2023a, p. 165). Nanay claims that imagery is necessarily triggered automatically during an imaginative episode.
Such accounts essentially claim that without imagery, one cannot have imagination. This view of imagination does have some intuitive appeal: many everyday cases of imagination do tend to feel similar to perceptual experiences. When one imagines a friend’s face or a scene from a novel, there seems to be something pictorial about the experience.
However, recent reports on aphantasia, a diminished or complete absence of capacity for imagery, presents a significant challenge to this view.
Aphantasia and the challenge to the imagery-essentialist view
Aphantasia is the diminished or complete absence of mental imagery. The term was coined by Zeman and colleagues (2015), although this cognitive divergence was initially recognised by Francis Galton (1880) and somewhat discussed in subsequent works (Faw, 1997; Marks, 1973, 1986).
If imagination is the same as or dependent on imagery, then aphantasics should lack imagination altogether, or at least have a very diminished ability to imagine. Yet it seems they do not. They entertain hypothetical scenarios, solve problems, and empathise intellectually – activities that one can attribute to imagination – even if they do not ‘see’ mental pictures (Zeman et al., 2015; Keogh & Pearson, 2021).
Many aphantasics also pursue careers typically associated with imagination. For instance, Oscar winning animator Glen Keane, the original designer of The Little Mermaid, reported an inability to picture things in his ‘mind’s eye’, but was still able to draw and design animations (MacKisack, 2021). There are a number of examples of aphantasics working in art and design despite an incapacity to visualise (Archer, 2023; Grinnell, 2020; HulloAlice, 2019). It seems intuitively inaccurate to suggest that such activities are not exercises of imagination.
Now, we have seen examples of people without mental imagery nonetheless engaging in activities we would be inclined to call instances of imagination, but there also seem to be instances of imagination which need not necessarily involve imagery, even if one has the capacity to visualise.
For instance, when David Chalmers asks us to imagine our zombie twin (1996), or Brie Gertler asks us to pinch ourselves and imagine the pain existing without a body (2007), it is not clear that any imagery would be essentially required. For some, it may occur automatically, but it does not seem to be a necessary component.
Similarly, in affective imagination – such as ‘imagining how she felt’ – imagery may be involved for some, but it is arguably not a necessary feature. One might imagine that one is in another person’s position, to empathise or solve an ethical dilemma, without invoking mental imagery.
This brings us to the puzzle of aphantasia and imagination: Should we say that aphantasics are able to engage in imaginative activities but without imagination, thereby suggesting we were wrong to assume such tasks require imagination? Or rather, should we argue that aphantasics do have imagination, thereby rejecting imagery-essentialist theories and suggesting we were wrong to assume imagination requires imagery?
The puzzle therefore raises a conceptual question regarding what counts as ‘imagination’.
Options for imagery-based accounts of imagination
It appears that proponents of the imagery account of imagination have two options. The first is to suggest that people with aphantasia do have mental imagery, but that it is unconscious (Nanay, 2021; 2023a; 2023b). On this view, aphantasics are able to imagine even though they cannot consciously access the accompanying imagery.
However, there is evidence which challenges this view, suggesting that aphantasics may actually lack imagery altogether, not just at a conscious level. For example, studies measuring skin conductance (a marker of physiological arousal) show that when reading frightening passages from stories, individuals with typical mental imagery show a clear bodily response, whereas people with aphantasia do not (Wicken et al., 2021).
Similarly, pupillometry studies measuring changes in pupil size demonstrate that while both groups respond normally to actual visual brightness, only those with imagery show corresponding changes when imagining bright or dark objects. Their pupils dilate more when imagining dark scenes than bright ones – an effect not observed in people with aphantasia (Kay et al., 2022).
If unconscious imagery were still present in aphantasia, it is unclear why it would fail to produce these automatic physiological responses. Explaining this would therefore be an important task for accounts that posit unconscious imagery.
A further difficulty with the idea of unconscious mental imagery is that many imagistic theories treat imagination as a conscious, voluntary activity (Kind, 2021). On these views, imagery serves to explain what imagining feels like – its phenomenology – even if it does not always fully determine content (Kind, 2001, p. 19). However, if the imagery involved is unconscious, it is hard to see how it could play this role. After all, something we are not aware of cannot really explain the felt experience of imagining.
A second option is to argue that imagery really is necessary for imagination. On this view, people with aphantasia would lack imagination in the full or strict sense, though they can still perform tasks that usually require imagination by other means. This suggests we may be mistaken in assuming that abilities like creativity or empathy necessarily depend on imagination.
Amy Kind proposes preserving an imagery-based account of imagination by reclassifying the abilities shown by aphantasics. Activities we usually group under imagination – such as animating a scene in a Pixar film, responding empathetically to a story, or coming up with new ideas – might instead be exercises of creativity. Likewise, considering hypothetical or counterfactual situations without imagery could be understood as supposition rather than imagination (Kind, 2001).
On this view, imagination essentially involves imagery, and apparent imagery-less imagining is a different mental capacity that we habitually – but mistakenly – label as imagination. Aphantasics are not lacking important cognitive or emotional capacities; rather, those capacities simply fall outside the strict philosophical category of imagination.
Whilst this option would allow the imagery-essentialist account of imagination to avoid the challenge posed by aphantasia, it is difficult to make sense of the notion of creativity without imagination. In ordinary usage, the term ‘imagination’ encompasses a wide range of phenomena that are not obviously tied to sensory imagery. It also feels somewhat counterintuitive to say that someone ‘has creativity, but not imagination’. Creativity seems to imply some sort of output - not necessarily a piece of art or literature, but it appears as though something comes out of creativity that needn’t with imagination.
Similarly, supposition doesn’t seem to really capture the character of philosophical thought experiments. These scenarios are often so unusual or elaborate that they seem to require something stronger than simply supposing that something is the case.
This option therefore risks narrowing the concept of imagination in a way that diverges from both everyday language and our ordinary understanding of imaginative activity.
A pluralistic account of imagination
Perhaps the most promising path is a pluralistic account of imagination (Salis & Frigg, 2020; Murphy, 2020): one that acknowledges the intuitive appeal of imagery-based theories yet accommodates the empirical and conceptual diversity of imagination revealed by aphantasia.
On this account, imagery is an important but not a necessary form of imagination. So, one could imagistically imagine an apple or a sunset, say, but one could also imagine that something is the case, engage in mathematical reasoning about higher-dimensional spaces, and construct complex counterfactual scenarios, without relying on imagery at all.
A pluralist account of imagination serves to modify rather than discard existing theories – imagistic imagination is a common form of imagining. What it denies is that imagery is a necessary feature of imagination, thus preserving the insights of the imagery-based accounts whilst overcoming their limitations.
On a pluralist view, imagery-based imagination is simply one expression of a broader faculty. Recognising this plurality not only accommodates cognitive diversity but also clarifies the conceptual landscape: what philosophers have long called ‘imagination’ is, and perhaps always has been, a family of related but distinct mental capacities.
References
Aristotle. (1968) De anima. Books II and III (with certain passages from Book I). Translated from the Greek by D. W. Hamlyn. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Chalmers, D. J. (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dorsch, F. (2016) ‘Hume’, in A. Kind (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination. Routledge, pp. 40-54.
Galton, F. (1880) ‘Statistics of Mental Imagery’, Mind, 5, pp. 301-318.
Gertler, B. (2007) ‘In Defense of Mind-Body Dualism’, Reason and Responsibility, 13th Ed. Oxford University Press, pp. 285-297.
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Zeman, A., Milton, F., Della Sala, S., Dewar, M., Frayling, T., Gaddum, J., Hattersley, A., Heuerman-Williamson, B., Jones, K., MacKisack, M., Winlove, C. (2020) ‘Phantasia – the psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes’, Cortex, 130, pp. 426-440.