Images as "Pictures"
In Wednesday's post, I wrote about the picture analogy for vision and the implicit (and possibly erroneous) assumptions about visual experience invites. Well, the picture analogy for visual imagery, visual imaginings, is even more pervasive. It almost doesn't feel like a metaphor to call an image a "picture" in the mind or to say "picture to yourself".
This struck me with particular force as I was reading through English translations of ancient Greek texts, looking for analogies between visual experience and paintings or pictures (I found exactly one in the whole corpus, though I can't pretend to have given it exhaustive coverage), pursuing thoughts relevant to the issues in Wednesday's post. I kept finding reference to "picturing" in the English translations, in discussions of imagery -- but, oddly, different translations would use that word in different places. Going back to the original Greek, it was evident in nearly every case I examined that it was the translator bringing in the metaphor (possibly not even aware of its metaphorical status or its potential interest in understanding the history of conceptions of imagery).
The analogy between images and pictures has worked its way so deeply into our thoughts about imagery that it's almost invisible as an analogy.
Now in some sense, surely, images are like pictures and the analogy between them is a good one. But let me suggest some ways in which images might not be like pictures (might not -- I don't think these issues have been adequately explored yet).
(1.) Images might be three-dimensional in some robust sense, while pictures are flat. Perhaps even (as some people have reported and as Borges describes in his story "The Zahir") images can be experienced simultaneously from multiple angles?
(2.) Images might be indeterminate in a way it's difficult for pictures to be. For example, it might be indeterminate whether the man you're imagining is wearing a hat, or what color his jacket is, or whether he has a beard.
(3.) Images might have their interpretations built into them in a way that pictures do not. For example, when we imagine an "ambiguous figure" like Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit or the Necker cube, the image might incorporate or involve one interpretation then another, while nothing in the "picture" before our mind changes. (This thought arose recently in conversation with Charles Siewert, as we were reading a paper by William Robinson that seemed to assume that there's nothing different in the visual imagery experience of a Necker cube interpreted one way and that same Necker cube interpreted another.)
As I mentioned in Wednesday's post, I'm inclined to think our metaphors for the mind often distort our understanding of it. So I wonder: Would people be more likely to accept features 1-3 as aspects of our imagery experience if the picture analogy weren't so deeply ingrained in our thinking?