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In memory of Fabian Dorsch (1974–2017)
An honest man here lies at rest, The friend of man, the friend of truth, The friend of age, and guide of youth: Few hearts like his, with virtue warm’d, Few heads with knowledge so inform’d; If there’s another world, he lives in bliss; If there is none, he made the best of this.
—Epitaph On A Friend
Robert Burns
Preface and Acknowledgements
The chapters forming this volume were first presented as talks at a conference on ‘Perceptual Imagery and Perceptual Memory’ held at the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience at the University of Glasgow. Further details of the Centre can be found at <www.gla.ac.uk/cspe>. Fabian Dorsch and I were very grateful to the Scots Philosophical Association, the Mind Association, the University of Fribourg, and the College of Arts at the University of Glasgow for providing the funding to run the conference.
I would like to thank enormously all of the contributors for their essays, and for their quite considerable patience while we produced this volume containing them. I would also like to thank Peter Langland-Hassan and an anonymous referee for their invaluable comments on the specific chapters, and the volume as a whole. Finally, I thank Peter Momtchiloff and his staff at Oxford University Press for their help and advice in preparing the volume.
The writing of this preface coincided with my receiving the shocking news of Fabian’s unexpected and untimely death at the age of 42. Fabian wrote much important work about perception, imagination, and aesthetics throughout his career. He graduated with a PhD from University College London in 2005, and thereafter spent time at several institutions around the world, including Berkeley, Paris, and Warwick. I met him at various conferences and remember great nights talking to him over many a beer—not only about philosophy but about all concerns in life. We became great friends.
Fabian took up a position in Fribourg, Switzerland, and not long after, we organized a conference there on ‘Phenomenal Presence’ in 2010. He spent the Spring semester of 2011 as a visiting faculty member at the University of Glasgow where he partook in all the various academic and social aspects of life at Glasgow with gusto. During that time, we organized and held the conference on perceptual imagination and perceptual memory on which this volume is based.
Fabian founded the European Society for Aesthetics in 2008. The organization has now named the newly launched European Society for Aesthetics Essay Prize after him. He served for over four years as an associate editor of the journal Dialectica and then became Editor-in-Chief of the journal Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics. In 2009 he became the Research Coordinator of the Fribourg-based research group Experience & Reason (EXRE). Among other things, he recently published a monograph The Unity of Imagining (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), and at the time of his death was preparing to publish a monograph on imagination with Routledge. In addition to this volume, we were also jointly editing a volume on Phenomenal Presence (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
x Preface and Acknowledgements
Fabian leaves behind a wife, Evgenia, and a young son Maxim. Fabian’s love for his son and the great pleasure that he took in watching him grow and develop was a joy to see.
Throughout his life, Fabian greatly promoted the study of perception, imagination, and memory not only by his numerous activities outlined above but also by his personal influence on people. So many philosophers report having wonderful conversations with Fabian and the influence that he had on their work. He will be remembered by his colleagues with great fondness, not least for his good company, sense of fun, and his enthusiasm for, and great contribution to, philosophy. He will be sorely missed.
FM
Glasgow, February 2017
Notes on Contributors
Robert Eamon Briscoe is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Ohio University and a contributing editor at Brains, a group blog on topics in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His research takes an empirically oriented, interdisciplinary approach toward a range of issues in the philosophy of cognitive science and neuroscience, philosophy of perception, and philosophy of mind.
Derek H. Brown is Associate Professor in Philosophy at Brandon University. He will take up a lectureship in Philosophy based in the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience at the University of Glasgow in April 2017. His primary research interests are in philosophy of perception, especially colour vision, theory of knowledge, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language.
Gregory Currie is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and the Executive Editor of the journal Mind & Language. He works mostly on the arts and cognition. Presently, he is thinking about literature and the mind, the way the mind is represented in literature, and how well or badly these representations comport with the picture given us by experimental psychology. He also writes about film, empathy and the emotions, irony, and about cognitive archaeology.
Dorothea Debus teaches Philosophy at the University of York. Her research interests lie in the philosophy of mind and psychology, and ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. At present, she is mainly thinking and writing about memory and the emotions, and exploring how subjects take an active part in their own mental lives.
Fabian Dorsch was Research Professor in Philosophy at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and the Director of the EXRE Centre of Research for Mind and Normativity where he ran two research projects: The Normative Mind and The Aesthetic Mind. The main foci of his research were interrelated issues in aesthetics, the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of normativity, notably meta-ethics. Among other things, he recently published a monograph on the various forms of imagining and their unity. Together with Fiona Macpherson he has edited another volume forthcoming shortly from Oxford University Press on Phenomenal Presence. In addition, he served for over four years as an associate editor of the journal Dialectica and was Editor-in-Chief of the journal Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics.
Dominic Gregory is a philosopher at the University of Sheffield. Some of his published research has concentrated on philosophical and logical issues concerning
necessity and possibility. More recently, however, he has worked on the philosophical problems that are raised by the contents of a wide range of distinctively sensory forms of representation, including pictures and sensory mental images. He is currently working both on that material and also on modal epistemology.
Robert Hopkins is Professor of Philosophy at New York University. His research is mostly in the philosophy of mind and aesthetics. He has worked on pictorial representation and picture perception, and on other topics central to the philosophy of the visual arts, including the aesthetics of sculpture, photography, painting, and film. He has also conducted research on other mental states that relate in interesting ways to our perception of pictures: perception itself, experiential imagining, and episodic memory. He has also written on the epistemology and metaphysical status of aesthetic and moral judgement.
Magdalena Balcerak Jackson is Assistant Professor at the Philosophy Department at the University of Miami. She works mainly in philosophy of mind and epistemology but is also interested in the philosophy of language, certain areas of philosophy of science, and phenomenology. Before coming to Miami, she was Co-Director of the Emmy Noether Research Group ‘Understanding and the A Priori’ at the University of Konstanz.
Amy Kind is Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. Her research interests lie broadly in the philosophy of mind, though most of her published work has concerned issues relating either to the imagination or to phenomenal consciousness. She has also written about the nature of persons and personal identity.
R. A. H. King is Professor ordinarius with focus on history of philosophy at the University of Bern. He has published works on Aristotle and life and death, and Aristotle and Plotinus on memory. He has carried out research comparing different conceptions of life in early China and in Græco-Roman Antiquity.
Fiona Macpherson is Professor and Head of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, where she is also director of the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She sits on the Arts and Humanities Research Council and is a trustee of the Kennedy Memorial Trust. Her work concerns the nature of consciousness, perception and perceptual experience, introspection, imagination, and the metaphysics of mind. She has written on the nature of the senses, on cognitive penetration, and on illusion and hallucination. She has published previous edited collections: Hallucination, MIT Press (with Dimitris Platchais), The Senses, OUP, The Admissible Contents of Experience (with Katherine Hawley), Wiley-Blackwell, and Disjunctivism (with Adrian Haddock), OUP. Together with Fabian Dorsch she has edited another volume forthcoming shortly from Oxford University Press on Phenomenal Presence.
Paul Noordhof is Anniversary Professor of Philosophy at the University of York. He has interests in various kinds of sensuous states—for example, perception, sensuous imagination and memory (sometimes known as experiential or episodic memory), and sensations such as pain. He is also conducting research on causation and related topics in mind and metaphysics, and belief, self-deception, and delusion.
1 Perceptual Imagination and Perceptual Memory
An Overview Fiona Macpherson
The essays in this volume explore the nature of perceptual imagination and perceptual memory. How do perceptual imagination and memory resemble and differ from each other and from other kinds of sensory experience? And what role does each play in perception and in the acquisition of knowledge? These are the two central questions that the essays in this volume seek to address.
One important fact about our mental lives is that sensory experience comes in (at least) three central variants: perception, imagination, and memory. For instance, we may not only see the visible appearance of a person or a building, but also recall or imagine it in a visual manner. The three types of experience share certain important features that are intimately linked to their common sensory character, many of which distinguish them from thought. Among these features are their apparent presentation of external objects or events (rather than propositions about them), their perspectival nature, that is that they present the world from a certain point of view, and their connection to one (or more) of the sense modalities, such as by having some modalityspecific content and phenomenal character.
But there are also important differences among the three types of sensory experiences. Most notably, there is usually taken to be a fundamental divide between perceptions, on the one hand, and recollections and imaginings, on the other. Perceptual experiences are typically taken to be distinct from imaginative and mnemonic ones in that they present objects with a certain sense of immediacy. When we see objects, they seem to be present directly before us in our environment; while the objects of our memory or imagination don’t seem to exist now in front of us they may be given to us as being located in the past or in some imagined world or in some location in this world other than our environment (although we may imagine that objects are now in front of us).
This difference in kind between perceptual experiences, on the one hand, and memories and imaginings, on the other, is often accompanied by certain differences
in degree. Thus sensory episodes of imagining or remembering are typically said to have less “force and vivacity”, to quote David Hume, than episodes of perceiving; while the latter often appear to be less open to the influence of voluntary mental activity than the former.1 Whether Hume’s description should be taken literally or metaphorically is a matter of debate.
In addition, all three types of sensory experience are typically taken to play different motivational and justificatory roles; and these rational differences are taken, by some at least, to be phenomenologically salient to a certain extent. We are inclined and entitled to different beliefs in response to perceptions, memories, and imaginings; and this is arguably reflected by differences in what it is subjectively like to undergo these sensory experiences.
The nature of perception has always been one of the major topics in the philosophy of mind, while the opposite has been true of perceptual imaginings and perceptual memories. In particular, not much attention is paid to the similarities and differences between memory and imagination in their sensory forms, as well as to the fact that both are, from a phenomenal point of view, much closer to each other than to perception.2 One central aim of the volume is, therefore, to remedy this situation and to get clearer about the nature of perceptual imaginings and perceptual memories by comparing them with each other and with perceptions.
One important issue in this domain is what makes it possible for imaginings and memories to possess the features distinctive of sensory experiences despite lacking perceptual immediacy. When we perceptually imagine an object does this consist in imagining having a perceptual experience of that object? And when we perceptually recall an object, do we perceptually remember a perceptual experience of such an object?
Another important issue is whether perceptual imaginings and perceptual memories differ intrinsically or extrinsically from each other. For instance, do the differences between them stem solely from how they originate in, and depend on, past perceptions, or solely in how they are related to the will and to mental agency?
Our sensory imagination is not completely unconstrained. What we can visualize, say, is restricted to the visible and, arguably, to what we have seen in the past or can extrapolate from our past perceptions (cf. Hume’s missing shade of blue). But the imagination is, nonetheless, that aspect of our mental lives concerning which we enjoy most freedom, at least compared to perception and memory. We typically enjoy voluntary control with respect to when and what we imagine. This has led some
1 David Hume, Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (London: A. Millar, 1777), Section 2, E2.1.
2 At least this was the case until very recently. One exception comes in the form of the newly published Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2016). Another is the work on aphantasia—the condition in which people lack the ability to form mental images. See Adam Zeman, Michaela Dewar, and Sergio Della Sala, ‘Lives without imagery: congenital aphantasia’, Cortex 73 (2015): 378–80 and Matthew MacKisack, Susan Aldworth, Fiona Macpherson, John Onians, Crawford Winlove, and Adam Zeman, ‘On picturing a candle: the prehistory of imagery science’, Frontiers in Psychology 7 (2016): 00515.
to argue that there is a certain kind of agency that is constitutive of imagining and differentiates it from both perceiving and remembering. But is this conception viable given that people report involuntary instances of imagining? And, in any case, isn’t some perceptual remembering voluntary?
Some people have thought that only our sensory recollections, but not our sensory imaginations, are inescapably particular in their presentation of objects. While we recall the appearances of specific objects which we perceived in the past by means of particular perceptions, imaginings—like depictions—allow for the presentation of generic objects and do not require any specific past acquaintance (although they do not exclude it). This raises the question of how, and in virtue of what, we can imagine particular objects rather than generic ones, or to what extent particular and generic imaginings involve some form of particular or generic sensory memory. It may be helpful in this context to compare the imagination with the phenomenon of depiction.
The first half of this volume opens with an illuminating essay by R. A. H. King investigating Aristotle’s conception of imagination and memory, and their relations to perception. Dominic Gregory then investigates different forms of perceptual memory, arguing that there are two kinds of perceptual memories—both memories of what things were subjectively like for one at a certain time, and memories simply of how things were at a certain time. Experiential or episodic memory is also the topic of Robert Hopkins’ essay. He argues that an important feature of this type of memory is that it involves imagining the past in a sensory way. Dorothea Debus considers how it is that we recognize perceptual memory as presenting the way the past was and we recognize that we should not take perceptual imagination to do so. The answer that she gives in her essay is that perceptual memories are related to a host of beliefs and experiences that allow a subject to tell a certain narrative about that perceptual memory, in a way that perceptual imaginings are not, and thereby provide the subject with a reason to take the perceptual memory to be a memory. Paul Noordhof turns his attention to the nature of perceptual imaginings and whether an account of their phenomenal character (that is, what it is like for the subject to have them) can provide reason to believe something about the metaphysical nature of the properties which determine that phenomenal character.
The second main aim of the volume is to specify and clarify the epistemic roles that the imagination and memory play in our mental lives.
One part of this discussion consists in the investigation of interactions between imagination and perception. Sometimes, we project mental imagery onto a perceived scene; and doing so may help us to acquire certain pieces of knowledge (e.g. whether a painting would look good on a particular wall), or to successfully perform a certain practical task (e.g. to pot a ball in billiards or snooker). Similarly, the sensory imagination has been said to be involved in the perception of hidden or occluded aspects of objects (e.g. when we see something as a voluminous building, rather than as a mere facade), or in the perception of ambiguous figures (e.g. seeing a wire cube in one of two possible
ways, rather than the other). This raises the question of what the relationship between perception and imagination is in these cases, and whether they involve experiences that are amalgams of perception and imagination, and whether this relationship may help to explain central features of experience.
Another important issue is whether sensory imaginings can provide us with evidence for belief, and ground knowledge, by themselves, that is, independently of perception. Standardly, discussions of this issue have been focused on our modal knowledge of the external world and the closely related knowledge of counterfactual conditionals. By contrast, this volume also addresses the questions of whether the sensory imagination can also give us access to non-modal knowledge, and whether it can play an evidential, rather than a merely enabling role, in the acquisition of modal and non-modal knowledge about experiences (i.e. about the mind itself). Thus the emphasis is not only on the kind of knowledge needed for certain fairly ordinary practical tasks, but also on knowledge about the essence of our own experiences. One key thought that needs to be spelled out is whether, and if so how, the imagination has to be constrained by our existing beliefs about relevant facts in order to be able to justify new beliefs.
Finally, it is interesting whether the insights gained into the perceptual and epistemic role of the sensory imagination can help to answer the question of the nature of sensory imagination and of its similarities and differences to other kinds of sensory experience. If perceptual imagination can enrich perception and ground knowledge then this would seem to indicate that it cannot be too far removed in its nature from perception and memory since, otherwise, it would be unable to play any comparable epistemic role.
The second half of this volume consists of five essays addressing these questions. Derek Brown defends the idea that all perceptual experiences receive some input from imagination, and spells out what kind of input. Robert Briscoe starts by assuming that perception and imagination interact and that we can superimpose mental imagery onto a perceived scene. He considers what knowledge and skills this ability bestows on us. He then goes on to consider how this phenomenon might explain the phenomenal character of occlusion. Gregory Currie addresses the question of what interaction there is between perception and imagination when watching films. He investigates the relationship between what he argues are distinct systems involving purely visual activity on the one hand, and the imagination on the other. Magdalena Balcerak Jackson argues that sensory imagination can provide us with knowledge of the nature and structure of our own experiences. She investigates this by examining the way in which sensory imagination is voluntary in a way that perception and memory are not. What we imagine seems up to us in a way that what we perceive and what we remember is not. Investigating exactly the way in which it is up to us leads her to draw interesting conclusions about the justificatory nature of imagination. Amy Kind’s essay deals with the issue of whether perceptual imagination can provide
non-modal knowledge. She argues that it can and gives a detailed account of the sort of imagination that can play this role.
Fabian and I believe that the essays in this volume substantially push forward the debates about the nature of perceptual imagination and perceptual memory, and hope that they will inspire a great deal more work on these interesting topics by philosophers in the future.
PART I
The Nature of Perceptual Imagination and Perceptual Memory
2 Aristotle on Distinguishing Phantasia and Memory
R. A. H. King
1. Accounting for Memory Using Imagination
Like many ancient philosophers Coriscus worked for a potentate: he left Athens where he had been a member of Plato’s Academy for Atarneus near his home city of Scepsis in Asia Minor, where Hermias held power. And Aristotle remembers Coriscus.1 What does he do, when he does this?
Aristotle is the first theorist to use ‘imagination’ or phantasia to account for memory. But just how phantasia forms part of the explanation of memory, and just how Aristotle distinguishes phantasia when not used in memory, from memory, is not easy to say. This is the first of two contrasts we shall be pursuing in Aristotle— phantasia in memory and phantasia apart from memory. Two fundamental strategies for making this contrast may be crudely distinguished—let us call their proponents ‘the Activist’ and ‘the Phenomenalist’. An Activist will say, or say that Aristotle will say: imagining is doing something different from remembering. A Phenomenalist will say that memories and imaginings appear different to their subject. The aim of this chapter is to show that neither Phenomenalist nor Activist can stand alone in an account of
My thanks to Fabian Dorsch and Fiona Macpherson for organizing a bracing conference, and to the participants for a spiky discussion. I dedicate this chapter to the memory of Fabian—he is sorely missed, very warmly remembered. For a (German) translation of and commentary on On Memory and Recollection, see King (2004); and for an account of the theory in English and a comparison with Plotinus’ work on memory, King (2009).
1 Coriscus plays the role of the example for an individual in a variety of Aristotle’s works: On the Generation of Animals 767b25, 768a1; Posterior Analytics 85a24; Soph. Ref. 22 178b39ff; Phys. 219b20; Eudemian Ethics 1240b45. His name has survived largely because of this use; and also because the sixth Platonic epistle is addressed to him, Hermias, and Erastos. The final reason he is known is that his son Neleus was left Theophrastus’ library which contained Aristotle’s works and library as well (Strabo 13.1.54). Aristotle may be remembering Coriscus in the latter’s absence either before Aristotle leaves Athens for Assos and Lesbos around the time of Plato’s death in 348 bc, or else when Aristotle has returned to Athens in 336, leaving Coriscus behind, as far as we know. It is not known what happened to Coriscus after the death of Hermias at the hands of the Persians in 341. See Lasserre (1987).
memory such as Aristotle’s. For, to put it in a slogan, remembering is an activity involving appearances.
So one contrast is that between imagining and remembering. Another contrast is that between remembering rightly and wrongly.2
To see how this may look, let us see how Aristotle approaches memory through what I call the Canonical Formula:
For always whenever someone is active with respect to remembering, then he says in this way in the soul that he heard this or perceived it or thought it before. (On memory 1 449b22–23)
Here we are given a canon or standard for deciding when memory is present, when someone is remembering. Actively remembering is saying something, and relates to a past perception or thought. Of course, the person remembering need say nothing out loud; it can be in the soul: Aristotle says to himself, I saw Coriscus. If an act of memory is saying something, one important implication is that it can be assessed as to truth and falsity. “I saw Coriscus”, said by particular person at a particular time, may be true or false. Depending on that, the memory claim of which it is the content is successful or not. One may be deceived or not, as to whether one is remembering or not, or remembering rightly or not. This is the second important contrast for a theory of memory.
Apparently, there is no ‘imagination’ here at all. We will see that phantasia is called in to explain memory; the occurrence of memory, as described here, requires no occurrent “image”. And it is good that we are neither asked to consider remembering an image, nor that all memory requires occurrent images. But while the “image” (phantasia or phantasma) is not the object of memory, it may form part of the explanation of memory. The theorist appeals to it in her theory. The theory is then that the fact that we are able to remember is based on the fact that we have phantasia. Phantasia forms part of the capacity to remember.
This approach to memory through the Canonical Formula is an application of an insight which relates generally to capacities: to understand a capacity, you need to look at the related activity, and to look at the activity you have to consider the object (De anima II 4 415a16–22). This points to the first step Aristotle takes in his account of memory, and which the Canonical Formula forms part of: to explain memory we need to understand what it is we remember. A crucial element in the answer to this question is the past (449b15), that is, I take it, past perceptions and so what we perceived in past perceptions. When someone is active with memory, the Canonical Formula says, we say I perceived this or that earlier. And this or that may be Coriscus, for example.
Aristotle is adamant that animals apart from humans possess the capacity to remember.3 The account in On Memory and Recollection applies to animals besides humans; as has often been pointed out, the Canonical Formula presents a problem here in that animals do not say anything. So, humans are the main witnesses, but
2 On these two contrasts, cf. Pears (1991), Ch. 3, ‘Memory’.
3 Cf. Historia Animalium I 1 488b24–25 with On memory 1 449b28–30, 2 453a7–9.
Aristotle remains committed to explaining living behaviour in general, and one determinant of his view of memory is the conviction that it is not an activity of reason, since then only humans would have it. The one cognitive faculty all animals possess is perception, and perception is, ultimately, responsible for imagination. This is an important result of the treatment of phantasia in De anima, which Aristotle refers expressly back to in the account of memory (1 449b30). The memory involved is perceptual in that it relies on an act of perception, and has as its object the object of that perception. Thus, in remembering, Aristotle says, I saw Coriscus. (For the purposes of this chapter, I ignore remembering relating to thought.)
He explains memory by relying on his account of the faculties of the soul given in De anima—above all, perception and phantasia. We will have to be selective in using this general theory of the soul here; but here are some theses, in descending order of generality which help support the theory of memory. Soul is, by definition, embodied: it is the primary activity of an organic body. Ends are involved in living behaviour. Perception gives rise to the ability to have and activate phantasia. In turn memory depends on phantasia. Thus memory is not a fundamental faculty of the soul. So we have in our case a capacity to remember, and its exercise, being active with memory.4 This is the patch where the Activist will pitch her camp.
We may distinguish two perspectives from which one should be able to distinguish between phantasia and memory. It is firstly something that you and I, Aristotle and Coriscus need to be able to do on a day-to-day basis. If we cannot distinguish between the two, we would be in trouble, practically, and, presumably, psychologically. But besides this everyday perspective, there is secondly the philosophical or theoretical question.5 Posing the puzzle of distinguishing between imagination and memory forces the question on us, at least for some ways of thinking, what each of them is. In everyday use, we do not have such an account. Nor, since we make this distinction as a matter of course, do we need to have such an account. You’re imagining things, you say. No, I remember it clearly, I reply, I heard her say that. Clearly, there are cases and cases to be distinguished in everyday talk here.
Aristotle is committed to a methodology which consists in making precise what is held to be the case, by the wise or the many, about the explanandum. In an important sense, his philosophy is a refinement of what we anyway know. He does not construct a conception of memory, and of imagination, to then rely exclusively on technical definitions to distinguish them. This would anyway be a problematic procedure in the case of memory and imagination. What right would we then have to say that what we have defined is memory? As we have seen, Aristotle in fact starts his investigation from
4 David Bloch (2007: 72) claims that for Aristotle memory is a passive state which is not discussed in terms of activity and capacity. As he sees, this would make Aristotle’s view of memory very different from ours. His argument is largely based on linguistic considerations; and he has considerable trouble in reinterpreting the phrase “being active with memory” in the Canonical Formula.
5 Sorabji (2004) rests content with the theoretical distinction between the two.
