Michael Tye

The Imagery Debate

Michael Tye untangles the complex web of empirical and conceptual issues of the newly revived imagery debate in psychology between those that liken mental images to pictures and those that liken them to linguistic descriptions. He also takes into account longstanding philosophical issues, to arrive at a comprehensive, up-to-date view and an original theory that provides answers to questions raised in both psychology and philosophy.Drawing on the insights of Stephen Kosslyn and the work on vision of David Mart, Tye develops a new theory of mental imagery that includes an account of imagistic representation and also tackles questions about the phenomenal qualities of mental images, image indeterminacy, the neurophysiolgical basis of imagery, and the causal relevance of image content to behavior.Tye introduces the history of philosophical views on the nature of mental imagery from Aristotle to Kant. He examines the reasons for the decline of picture theories of imagery and the use of alternative theories, the reemergence of the picture theory (with special reference to the work of Stephen Kosslyn), and the contrasting view that mental images are inner linguistic descriptions rather than pictorial representations. He then proposes his own theory of images interpreted as symbol-filled arrays in part like pictures and in part like linguistic descriptions, addresses the issue of vagueness in some features of mental images, and argues that images need not have qualia to account for their phenomenological character. Tye concludes by discussing the questions of how images are physically realized in the brain and how the contents of images can be causally related to behavior.Michael Tye holds appointments in Philosophy at both Temple University and Kings College, London.

A REPRESENTATIONAL THEORY OF PAINS AND THEIR PHENOMENAL CHARACTER

The fundamental assumption of cognitive psychology is that the cognitive mind is a representational system which mediates between sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. The primary task for the cognitive psychologist is one of explaining how the various cognitive capacities operate by reference to the structure of the salient parts of this representational system. The explanations offered are both functional and decompositional: they decompose the relevant capacities into their basic representational components and show how those components function together to produce the capacities. Theories are evaluated by how well they account for the behavior observed in psychological experiments and, at the lowest level, by how well they fit with knowledge gleaned from neurophysiology about the physical bases of the capacities. Philosophers have usually assumed that pain cannot lie within the domain of cognitive psychology. Pains, it has been supposed, are not like images or memories or visual percepts: they have no representational content. So, there can be no explanation of the desired sort. To understand the various facets of pain, we need to look elsewhere, perhaps to the realm of neurophysiology. Cognitive psychology cannot help us. This, I now believe, is, a mistake: pains do have representational content. So, the view that pain is not a proper object of study for cognitive psychology is not well founded. My discussion begins with an old objection to the token identity theory in connection with after-images, and a modem response to it which has become widely accepted. This response, I maintain, is unsatisfactory, as it stands. But, with one key revision, it is, I believe, defensible, and it has ramifications for our understanding of pain. In particular, it points to the conclusion that pains have representational content, as does at least one other facet of our everyday conception of pain. In the third section of the paper, I consider the question of what sorts of representations pains are most plausibly taken to be. Are they sentences in an inner language, like beliefs and desires, on the usual computational conception of the latter states? Or are they representations of a different sort? I suggest that a purely sentential approach is difficult to reconcile with some of the neuropsychological data on pain, and I make an alternative hybrid proposal. Pains, I propose, are representations of the same general sort as mental images:

Reflections on Dennett and Consciousness

There is much that is stimulating in Dennetts book for philosophers and non-philosophers alike. There is much too with which I find myself in agreement. I especially like Dennetts discussion of mental imagery, in which he shows himself now to be much closer to the quasi-pictorial array conception of images defended by Kosslyn and his followers than in his earlier work. I also think that Dennetts remarks on the representation of time in experience are extremely insightful. But there are parts of the book which seem to me misguided. In this note, I shall focus on two related strands of argument which are central to Dennetts overall position and which are, I believe, unsound.

A theory of phenomenal concepts

There is widespread agreement that consciousness must be a physical phenomenon, even if it is one that we do not yet understand and perhaps may never do so fully. There is also widespread agreement that the way to defend physicalism about consciousness against a variety of well known objections is by appeal to phenomenal concepts (Loar, 1990; Lycan, 1996; Papineau, 1993; Sturgeon, 1994; Tye, 1995, 2000; Perry, 2001). There is, alas, no agreement on the nature of phenomenal concepts.

The Function of Consciousness

To many philosophers, it is a remarkable fact there is any such thing as consciousness. Typically, this attitude stems from a sense of bewilderment as to how consciousness could be generated in the brain. But it is also hard to fathom why Mother Nature went to the trouble of installing consciousness in so many of her creatures. What was consciousness selected for? What biological purpose or function does it serve? Not everyone finds these questions puzzling. To some philosophers and psychologists, it is obvious in what the function of consciousness consists: there really is no room for serious disagreement.1 Arguments about the matter are just so much spilt ink. This unqualified assessment is jejune. It rests upon a failure to grasp fully what is at issue. Even so, in my view, answers are available for the above questions, and these answers are obvious, once a certain theoretical framework is adopted. The purpose of this paper is to clarify what seems to me the main focus of the present debate, and to explain in what I take the function, or at least a function, of consciousness to consist. Along the way, I shall comment upon, and criticize, some of the opposing positions.

I–Michael Tye

Externalism about thought contents has received enormous attention in the philosophical literature over the past fifteen years or so, and it is now the established view. There has been very little discussion, however, of whether memory contents are themselves susceptible to an externalist treatment. In this paper, I argue that anyone who is sympathetic to Twin Earth thought experiments for externalism with respect to certain thoughts should endorse externalism with respect to certain memories.

Is Consciousness Vague or Arbitrary

David Papineaus book on naturalism is clear, level-headed, and illuminating. It is also very broad in its sweep. Papineau considers a variety of different challenges to the naturalists position, and he tries to meet each of these challenges head-on. There is no waffling or obscurantism. My focus in this paper will be on some of the remarks Papineau makes with respect to consciousness. I am sympathetic to much of Papineaus discussion here, but space limitations necessitate that I limit my comments to two areas of disagreement.