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The Imagery Debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Kim Sterelny
Kim Sterelny*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park
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Abstract

One central debate in cognitive science is over imagery. Do images constitute, or constitute evidence for, a distinctive, depictive form of mental representation? The most sophisticated advocacy of this view has been developed by Kosslyn and his coworkers. This paper focuses on his position and argues (i) that though Kosslyn has not developed a satisfactory account of depiction, there is nothing in principle unintelligible about the idea of depictive neural representation, but (ii) Kosslyn's model of imagery rescues the intelligibility of pictorialism at the cost of its explanatory power.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , December 1986 , pp. 560 - 583
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1986

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Footnotes

†

Thanks to David Armstrong, Ned Block, Michael Devitt, and Bill Lycan for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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