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The "Philosophical" Case Against Visual Images. A "Crucial" Experiment.

In their study of reasoning with diagrammatic and nondia~,rammatic representations, Larkin and Simon (1987) are concerned with external representations and explicitly avoid drawing inferences about the bearing of their work on the issue of internal, mental representations. Nonetheless, we may infer the bearing of their work on internal representations from the theories of Kosslyn, Finke and other ’pictorialists’ who take internal representations to be importantly like external ones regarding their ’privileged’ spatial properties of depicting and resembling their referents. Thus, Finke (1990) suggests that "perceptual interpretive processes are applied to mental images in much the same way that they are applied to actual physical objects. In this sense, imagined objects can be "interpreted" much like physical objects" (1990, p. 18). Elsewhere he suggests that "The image discoveries which then ’emerge’ resemble the way perceptual discoveries can follow the active exploration and manipulation of physical objects" (1990, p. 171). After twenty years of controversy, the ’imagery debate’ concerning the ’format’ of visual mental representations is widely regarded as having become stalled and the impasse has even led some (Anderson 1978) to conclude that the issue between pictorialism and the ’tacit knowledge’ alternative is undecidable in principle on the basis of behavioral evidence. At least part of the reason for the persistence of the imagery debate has been the fact that the dispute has centered upon alternative explanations of the same body of chronometric evidence. The debate has come to appear intractable because the two contending theories make identical predictions for chronometric evidence and, accordingly, adducing new evidence of timedependent measures, as has repeatedly been done, cannot strengthen the case for a pictorial, spatial medium against the rival tacit knowledge theory. Thus, experiments are needed on which the contending "crucial experiment", since a falsified prediction can always be blamed on one of the auxiliary hypotheses on which any theory depends. Nonetheless, the text-book example of a "crucial experiment" is the null result of the Michelson-Morley test of the speed of light, and I take the null results of our own investigations to show that, like the luminiferous ether, the pictorial medium does not exist. It is in this sense that the possibility of reinterpreting visual patterns in mental imagery has recently emerged as new focus for the long-standing controversy. The question of whether, and under what conditions, novel information may be discovered from images may shed new light on the debate, since it provides a new means for testing the properties of the conjectured pictorial medium.and the claimed parallel between imagery and perception.