A post by Michelle Liu

This blogpost, as its title suggests, is about the role of mental imagery in comprehending language. Here, mental imagery is understood as perceptual simulation or perceptual representation without direct external stimulus.

It is widely known that mental imagery plays a crucial role in understanding novel and poetic language. The comprehension of some metaphors, as philosopher Mitchell Green (2017) argues, requires the construction of conscious mental imagery. Green calls them ‘image-demanding metaphors’. As an example, he tells the story of Wittgenstein’s first meeting with Frege, about which Wittgenstein recalled that Frege had ‘wiped the floor with’ him. As someone who had never heard of this phrase, Green (2017: 34) notes that only after having formed a mental image of ‘one person using another to sweep or mop a floor’, had he understood Wittgenstein’s point that he was intellectually dominated by Frege.