Our pains can be more or less intense, our mental imagery can be more or less vivid, our perceptual experiences can be more or less striking. These degrees of intensity of conscious experiences are all manifestations of a phenomenal property I call mental strength. In this article, I argue that mental strength is a domain-general phenomenal magnitude; in other words, it is a phenomenal quantity shared by all conscious experiences that explains their degree of felt intensity. Mental strength has been (...) largely overlooked in favor of mental states’ type, representational contents, domain-specific phenomenology, or processes such as attention. Considering mental strength in our reflections about the mind illuminates debates about the relation of representational contents and phenomenal character, and it also helps address questions about the structure and functions of consciousness. Mental strength provides a unifying construct to model what is shared in the phenomenology of different types of conscious experiences. (shrink)

According to a common view, conscious thoughts necessarily involve quasi-perceptual experiences, or mental images. This is alleged to be the case not only when one entertains conscious thoughts about perceptible things, but also when one thinks about more abstract things. In the case of conscious abstract propositional thoughts, the idea is that they occur in inner speech, which is taken to involve imagery (typically auditory) of words in a natural language. I argue that unsymbolized thinking and total aphantasia cast doubt (...) on this common view. Unsymbolized thinking is the experience of thoughts that does not involve imagery. Total aphantasia is the inability to produce mental images of all sensory modalities. I consider and reject the objection that these individuals are mistaken either because their thoughts do involve images, or because those thoughts are not conscious. Thus, unsymbolized thinking and aphantasia provide evidence that conscious thoughts can occur without imagery. (shrink)

Aphantasia, i.e., the inability to voluntarily form visual mental images, affects approximately 2 to 5 percent of the population and plays an important role in a more general debate revolving around the role of imagery for our cognition. This thesis investigates aphantasia by means of an interdisciplinary approach, combining insights from contemporary neuroscientific research with historical philosophical arguments, with a specific focus on the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. A new theoretical concept, meta-imagination, is developed and it is argued that (...) the concept can explain why aphantasics perform successfully on a wide range of visual imagery tasks, thus providing important implications for the more general debate about the connection between imagery and cognition. (shrink)

While discussions of the imagination have been limited in philosophy of science, this is beginning to change. In recent years, a vast literature on imagination in science has emerged. This paper surveys the current field, including the changing attitudes towards the scientific imagination, the fiction view of models, how the imagination can lead to knowledge and understanding, and the value of different types of imagination. It ends with a discussion of the gaps in the current literature, indicating avenues for future (...) research. (shrink)

Recently, the term ‘aphantasia’ has become current in scientific and public discourse to denote the absence of mental imagery. However, new terms for aphantasia or its subgroups have recently been proposed, e.g. ‘dysikonesia’ or ‘anauralia’, which complicates the literature, research communication and understanding for the general public. Before further terms emerge, we advocate the consistent use of the term ‘aphantasia’ as it can be used flexibly and precisely, and is already widely known in the scientific community and among the general (...) public. (shrink)

Dialectica, Volume 73, Issue 4, Page 598-602, December 2019.

ABSTRACT Aphantasia is a spectrum disorder, affecting the ability of otherwise healthy individuals to form voluntary or conscious mental images, and in some cases also any form of sensory representation. Although only discovered in 2010, it is now estimated that 2–3% of the population may have aphantasia – otherwise termed, the absence of a ‘mind’s eye,’ that aspect of conscious experience which so many people take for granted as part of their general way of experiencing the world. Aphantasia, although it (...) does not imply the absence of all forms of imagination, such as perspective taking and narrative construction, is quite literally a disorder affecting the individual’s capacity to form and work with images, and thus the absence of a certain way in which consciousness engages with the image-object, distinct both from perception and thought. This paper examines how phenomenological accounts of imagination can help us to better understand aphantasia, and also the ways in which aphantasia calls into question some aspects of an existential account of self. (shrink)

Aphantasia is a recently discovered disorder characterised by the total incapacity to generate visual forms of mental imagery. This paper proposes that aphantasia raises important theoretical concerns for the ongoing debate in the philosophy and science of consciousness over the nature of dreams. Recent studies of aphantasia and its neurobehavioral correlates reveal that the majority of aphantasics, whilst unable to produce visual imagery while awake, nevertheless retain the capacity to experience rich visual dreams. This finding constitutes a novel explanandum for (...) theories of dreaming. Specifically, I argue that the recent dream reports of aphantasics constitute an empirical challenge to the emerging family of views which claim that dreams are essentially imaginative experiences, constitutively involving the kinds of mental imagery which aphantasics, ex-hypothesi, lack. After presenting this challenge in the context of Jonathan Ichikawa’s recent arguments for this view, I argue that this empirical challenge may be overcome if the imagination theorist abandons Ichikawa’s account of dreaming in favour of a modified version. This involves the claim that dreams are essentially inactive and constitutively involve non voluntary forms of imagination. I conclude with a suggestion for further research which can test the viability of this alternative hypothesis, and move the debate forward. (shrink)

Episodic memory (EM) involves re-experiencing past experiences by means of mental imagery. Aphantasics (who lack mental imagery) and people with severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM) lack the ability to re-experience, which would imply that they don't have EM. However, aphantasics and people with SDAM have personal and affective memories, which are other defining aspects of EM (in addition to re-experiencing). This suggests that these supposed aspects of EM really are independent faculties or modules of memory, and that EM is a (...) composite faculty rather than a natural kind. Apparent varieties of (normal and "defective") EM (as well as some closely related kinds of memory) are different combinations of these modules, and the EM construct itself adds little if any explanatory value to these modules. (shrink)

How are we to understand the phenomenology of imagining? Attempts to answer this question often invoke descriptors concerning the “vivacity” or “vividness” of our imaginative states. Not only are particular imaginings often phenomenologically compared and contrasted with other imaginings on grounds of how vivid they are, but such imaginings are also often compared and contrasted with perceptions and memories on similar grounds. Yet however natural it may be to use “vividness” and cognate terms in discussions of imagination, it does not (...) take much reflection to see that these terms are ill understood. In this paper, I review both some relevant empirical literature as well as the philosophical literature attempt to get a handle on what it could mean, in an imaginative context, to talk of vividness. As I suggest, this notion ultimately proves to be so problematic as to be philosophically untenable. (shrink)

This paper assesses five main empirical scientific arguments against the reliability of belief formation on the basis of introspecting phenomenal states. After defining ‘reliability’ and ‘introspection’, I discuss five arguments to the effect that phenomenal states are more elusive than we usually think: the argument on the basis of differences in introspective reports from differences in introspective measurements; the argument from differences in reports about whether or not dreams come in colours; the argument from the absence of a correlation between (...) visual imagery ability and the performance on certain cognitive tasks; the argument from our unawareness of our capacity of echolocation; the argument from inattentional blindness and change blindness. I argue that the experiments on which these arguments are based do not concern belief formation on the basis of introspection in the first place or fail to show that it is unreliable, even when limited to introspection of phenomenal states. (shrink)

Proponents of phenomenal intentionality share a commitment that, for at least some paradigmatically intentional states, phenomenal character constitutively determines narrow intentional content. If this is correct, then any two states with the same phenomenal character will have the same narrow intentional content. Using a twin-earth style case, I argue that two different people can be in intrinsically identical phenomenological states without sharing narrow intentional contents. After describing and defending the case, I conclude by considering a few objections that help to (...) further illustrate the problem. (shrink)

Francis Galton has long been recognized as a pioneer of experimental psychology. The work on which this reputation is based occupied him for several years – broadly, from 1877 to 1884 – at the peak of his scientific productivity. This period of Galton's career has, however, attracted relatively little attention from historians, and few have made full use of the materials available for its study.

A theory of the structure and cognitive function of the human imagination that attempts to do justice to traditional intuitions about its psychological centrality is developed, largely through a detailed critique of the theory propounded by Colin McGinn. Like McGinn, I eschew the highly deflationary views of imagination, common amongst analytical philosophers, that treat it either as a conceptually incoherent notion, or as psychologically trivial. However, McGinn fails to develop his alternative account satisfactorily because (following Reid, Wittgenstein and Sartre) he (...) draws an excessively sharp, qualitative distinction between imagination and perception, and because of his flawed, empirically ungrounded conception of hallucination. His arguments in defense of these views are rebutted in detail, and the traditional, passive, Cartesian view of visual perception, upon which several of them implicitly rely, is criticized in the light of findings from recent cognitive science and neuroscience. It is also argued that the apparent intuitiveness of the passive view of visual perception is a result of mere historical contingency. An understanding of perception (informed by modern visual science) as an inherently active process enables us to unify our accounts of perception, mental imagery, dreaming, hallucination, creativity, and other aspects of imagination within a single coherent theoretical framework. (shrink)

Philosophers tend to assume that we have excellent knowledge of our own current conscious experience or 'phenomenology'. I argue that our knowledge of one aspect of our experience, the experience of visual imagery, is actually rather poor. Precedent for this position is found among the introspective psychologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two main arguments are advanced toward the conclusion that our knowledge of our own imagery is poor. First, the reader is asked to form a visual (...) image, and it is expected that answering questions about certain basic features of that experience will be difficult. If so, it seems reasonable to suppose that people could be mistaken about those basic features of their own imagery. Second, it is observed that although people give widely variable reports about their own experiences of visual imagery, differences in report do not systematically correlate with differences on tests of skills that psychologists have often supposed to require visual imagery, such as mental rotation, visual creativity, and visual memory. (shrink)

Aphantasia is a heterogeneous neuropsychological syndrome consisting of the inability to create mental images. We argue that its progressive form may be a harbinger of dementia. Aphantasia may manifest as the inability to create any mental images or to create complex scenes, inability to spontaneously initiate generation of mental images, and/or inability to visualize a sequence of events.

The epistemological chasm between how we (implicitly and subjectively) perceive or imagine the actual world and how we (explicitly and “objectively”) think of its underlying entities has motivated perhaps the most disconcerting impasse in human thought: the explanatory gap between the phenomenal and physical properties of the world. Here, I advocate a combination of philosophical skepticism and simplicity as an informed approach to arbitrate among theories of consciousness. I argue that the explanatory gap is rightly a gap in our understanding, (...) but one that is not surprising; and we being observers biased by our first-person perspective and our existence may both hinder and (the realization we have them) assist our reasoning. Further, I unfold the concept of observer into two distinct notions based on its functional and phenomenal aspects, and exploit this device to elucidate the subject-observer relationship. Then, I proceed to analyze the philosophical zombie dilemma. Lastly, I contend that from a skeptical viewpoint, panpsychism (or neutral monism) is the most parsimonious doctrine accounting for the explanatory gap, and suggest that it would be possible to make headway in the hard problem of consciousness by uncovering non-trivial causal relationships between qualia states and functional states, if routine and controlled manipulation of neural circuits were easily available. (shrink)

This paper argues that we should distinguish two different kinds of imaginative vividness: vividness of mental images and vividness of imaginative experiences. Philosophy has focussed on mental images, but distinguishing more complex vivid imaginative experiences from vivid mental images can help us understand our intuitions concerning the notion as well as the explanatory power of vividness. In particular, it can help us understand the epistemic role imagination can play on the one hand and our emotional engagement with literary fiction on (...) the other hand. (shrink)

Various kinds of observations show that the ability of human beings to both consciously relive past events – episodic memory – and conceive future events, entails an active process of construction. This construction process also underpins many other important aspects of conscious human life, such as perceptions, language and conscious thinking. This article provides an explanation of what makes the constructive process possible and how it works. The process mainly relies on attentional activity, which has a discrete and periodic nature, (...) and working memory, which allows for the combination of discrete attentional operations. An explanation is also provided of how past and future events are constructed. (shrink)

Mental imagery (varieties of which are sometimes colloquially refered to as “visualizing,” “seeing in the mind's eye,” “hearing in the head,” “imagining the feel of,” etc.) is quasi-perceptual experience; it resembles perceptual experience, but occurs in the absence of the appropriate external stimuli. It is also generally understood to bear intentionality (i.e., mental images are always images of something or other), and thereby to function as a form of mental representation. Traditionally, visual mental imagery, the most discussed variety, was thought (...) to be caused by the presence of picturelike representations (mental images) in the mind, soul, or brain, but this is no longer universally accepted. (shrink)

The past 25 years have seen a rapid growth of knowledge about brain mechanisms involved in visual mental imagery. These advances have largely been made independently of the long history of philosophical – and even psychological – reckoning with imagery and its parent concept ‘imagination’. We suggest that the view from these empirical findings can be widened by an appreciation of imagination’s intellectual history, and we seek to show how that history both created the conditions for – and presents challenges (...) to – the scientific endeavor. We focus on the neuroscientific literature’s most commonly used task – imagining a concrete object – and, after sketching what is known of the neurobiological mechanisms involved, we examine the same basic act of imagining from the perspective of several key positions in the history of philosophy and psychology. We present positions that, firstly, contextualize and inform the neuroscientific account, and secondly, pose conceptual and methodological challenges to the scientific analysis of imagery. We conclude by reflecting on the intellectual history of visualization in the light of contemporary science, and the extent to which such science may resolve long-standing theoretical debates. (shrink)

I argue that scientism in general is best understood as the thesis that the boundaries of the natural sciences should be expanded in order to include academic disciplines or realms of life that are widely considered not to belong to the realm of science. However, every adherent and critic of scientism should make clear which of the many varieties of scientism she adheres to or criticizes. In doing so, she should specify whether she is talking about (a) academic or universal (...) scientism, (b) reductive, methodological, epistemological, ontological, moral, or existential, scientism, (c) full or partial scientism, (d) strong or weak scientism, and (e) in the case of moral and existential scientism: replacement or illusion scientism. The strongest version of scientism one could defend is a conjunction of the following theses: strong full epistemological scientism, strong full ontological scientism, strong full Illusion-moral scientism, strong Illusion-existential scientism, and strong full reductive scientism. After a detailed discussion of each of the main varieties of scientism and their interrelations, the paper provides a conceptual map, consisting of two figures, which displays the main varieties of scientism and the relations that obtain between them, primarily, those of implication and mutual exclusion. (shrink)

In the last six or seven years, aphantasia has received attention from media outlets, television shows, and social networks. This alleged condition, however, has hardly been discussed in the philosophy of mind. In this paper, I assess some of the research conducted in cognitive science and provide, for the first time in the literature, a comprehensive assessment of possible explanations for aphantasia. Specifically, the hypotheses I submit for consideration ascribe the reports of absence of visual imagery to (i) a discrepancy (...) at the level of concepts, (ii) a failure of attentional mechanisms that modulate introspection, (iii) a lack of personal-level access to sub-personal imagistic representations, and (iv) an absence of sub-personal imagistic representations. I conclude that hypotheses (i) and (ii) can be rejected while hypotheses (iii) and (iv) can be accepted as defensible candidates for explaining aphantasia, although the latter is better suited to account for the available evidence in both comparative and absolute terms. Finally, I present some educated guesses and empirical research that could shed further light on the study of this condition. (shrink)

The journal Mind is now a wholly philosophical journal. At the time of its founding, in 1876, however, its mission was rather different in character. Its aim was to discover whether scientific psychology was a truly viable enterprise and, if so, what its boundaries with philosophy, with other scientific disciplines, and with the earlier generation of discredited attempts at `scientific' studies of the mind (e.g. phrenology, mesmerism) might be. Although at first Mind published mostly philosophical pieces and literature reviews, by (...) the mid-1880s it was publishing primary experimental research, mostly by American psychologists who as yet had few outlets of their own. For a time it was the leading journal of experimental psychology in the English-speaking world. As the international competition among scientific and scholarly journals intensified in the 1890s, however, Mind started to lose its share of experimental contributions, and with the editorial takeover of the journal of George Stout in 1892, the journal soon became one dedicated purely to philosophy. (shrink)

In light of our knowledge about neurodiversity, I argue that the cognitive science framework Miščević uses in Thought Experiments must be broaden to create a pluralistic account of thought experimentation, one able to account for the many ways thought experiments are replicated using not only visual models, but also arguments, conceptual analyses, and images as some of the many instruments used in the laboratory of our mind.

Thought experiments (TEs) are important tools in science, used to both undermine and support theories, and communicate and explain complex phenomena. Their interest within philosophy of science has been dominated by a narrow question: How do TEs increase knowledge? My aim is to push beyond this to consider their broader value in scientific practice. I do this through an investigation into the scientific imagination. Part one explores questions regarding TEs as “experiments in the imagination” via a debate concerning the epistemic (...) status of computer simulations in science. I outline how, against Hacking, TEs also have “a life of their own” and I argue against accounts that privilege experiments over simulations (and by extension TEs) in light of their capacity to surprise in a productive way. Part two develops a pluralist account of the nature of the imagination in science. At its core, my view is that when we attend to a number of examples of TEs and consider the context in which they are used, we see that TEs engage a variety of our imaginative capacities. Existing monistic views fail to recognise the richness of the imagination and its potential in science. Part three looks to the “beauty” of TEs which is currently overlooked in the aesthetics of science literature. I put forward a new account that demonstrates the epistemic value of aesthetic features in science by showing how an appropriate fit between form and content enhances the usability of a TE, and its effectiveness as a prompt for our imagination. This also enables a more nuanced take on the proposed similarities between TEs and literary fictions. In the concluding chapter, I outline ways in which the core features of my account can be extended beyond TEs to illuminate the significance of the imagination and aesthetic values in other areas of science. (shrink)

This thesis investigates the relationship between eye movements, mental imagery and memory retrieval in four studies based on eye-tracking experiments. The first study is an investigation of eye movements during mental imagery elicited both visually and verbally. The use of complex stimuli and the development of a novel method where eye movements are recorded concurrently with verbal data enabled the above-mentioned relationship to be studied to an extent going beyond what previous research had been able to do. Eye movements were (...) found to closely reflect content and spatial layout while participants were listening to a spoken scene description, while they were describing the same scene from memory, and while they were describing a picture they had previously seen. This effect was equally strong during recall from memory irrespective of whether the scene visualised had originally been inspected visually by the participants or whether it was constructed whole-cloth from long-term memory. It was also found that eye movements "to nothing" appeared both when the participants were visualising scenes while looking at a blank screen and when they were doing so in complete darkness. The second study explored an effect frequently observed in the first study, involving a "scaling-down" during recall of participants' gaze patterns to an area smaller than that occupied by the stimulus encoded. It was found that this scaling effect correlated with spatial-imagery ability: the gaze patterns of participants with weaker spatial-imagery ability were closer in size to the encoded scene than the gaze patterns of those stronger in spatial-imagery ability. In the third study, the role of eye movements during mental imagery was investigated in four experiments where eye movements were prohibited during either the encoding phase or the recall phase. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that maintaining central fixation during visual or auditory encoding, respectively, had no effect on how eye movements were executed during recall. Thus, oculomotor events during recall are not reproductions of those produced during encoding. In Experiments 3 and 4, central fixation was instead maintained during recall. This turned out to alter and impair scene recollection, irrespective of the modality of encoding. Finally, in the fourth study, the functional role of eye movements in relation to memory retrieval was further investigated by means of direct eye-movement manipulation in the retrieval phase of an episodic-memory task. Four conditions were used: free viewing on a blank screen, maintaining central fixation, viewing within a square congruent with the location of the objects to be recalled, and viewing within a square incongruent with the location of the objects to be recalled. The results obtained show that gaze position plays an active and facilitatory role during memory retrieval. The findings from these studies are discussed in the light of current theories regarding eye movements during mental imagery and memory retrieval. (shrink)

Recent findings suggest that our capacity to imagine the future depends on our capacity to remember the past. However, the extent to which episodic memory is involved in our capacity to think about what could have happened in our past, yet did not occur , remains largely unexplored. The current experiments investigate the phenomenological characteristics and the influence of outcome valence on the experience of past, future and counterfactual thoughts. Participants were asked to mentally simulate past, future, and counterfactual events (...) with positive or negative outcomes. Features of their subjective experiences during each type of simulation were measured using questionnaires and autobiographical interviews. The results suggest that clarity and vividness were higher for past than future and counterfactual simulations. Additionally, emotional intensity was lower for counterfactual simulations than past and future simulations. Finally, outcome valence influenced participants’ judgment of probability for future and counterfactual simulations. (shrink)

One of the main fields of consciousness studies is the search for the function of consciousness. The article deals with the hypothesis of the function of imagination as an attribute of consciousness. In the regard of the issues of the attributes of consciousness, the author analyzes the phenomenon of aphantasia, that is, lack of imagination. Despite the lack of formalized ideas about the function of consciousness and despite the scientific trend of the narrowing research areas where subjective experience is necessary (...) for a normal behavior of brain, there is a tendency to expand the presence of consciousness in the world in the modern Western philosophy of consciousness. The result of this “emancipation of consciousness” is the idea of the theoretical essential closeness of a human being and other agents: animals, artificial intelligence, plants. A consequence of the “emancipation of consciousness” is the emergence of modern versions of panpsychism, which propose expanding the space of consciousness to the world as a whole. However, studies in the field of conscious cognitive processes show that the processes that need the participation of consciousness, according to the standard intuitions, in some cases successfully performed without it. For example, the phenomenon of aphantasia shows that the tasks of imagination are performed in the absence of the ability to imagine. Therefore, it is important to take also into account the theoretical possibility of the lack of the realization of the function of consciousness. This makes it possible to ask a question about the presence of consciousness in the space that is traditionally endowed with consciousness, according to the dominant views in philosophy. Therefore, by approaching the question of the attributes of consciousness, the author demonstrates the limitations of the program for the emancipation of consciousness and offers an alternative solution to the question of the scale of the presence of consciousness in the world. (shrink)