8 Forms of representation
Over the last two chapters we have been considering the nature of psycho-
logical content. In the present chapter we take up the question of how such
content isrepresentedin the human brain, or of what itsvehiclesmight be.
Following a ground-clearing introduction, the chapter falls into two main
parts. In theWrst of these, the orthodox Mentalese story is contrasted with
its connectionist rival. Then in the second, we consider what place natural
language representations may play in human cognition. One recurring
question is what, if anything, folk psychology is committed to in respect of
content-representation.
1 Preliminaries: thinking in images
One traditional answer to the questions just raised, concerning the vehicles
of our thoughts, is that thinking consists entirely of mental (mostly visual)
imagesof the objects which our thoughts concern, and that thoughts
interact by means ofassociations(mostly learned) between those images.
So when I think of a dog, I do so by virtue of entertaining some sort of
mental image of a dog; and when I infer that dogs bark, I do so by virtue of
an association which has been created in me between the mental images of
dogand ofbarking. This view has been held very frequently throughout the
history of philosophy, at least until quite recently, particularly amongst
empiricists (Locke, 1690; Hume, 1739; Russell, 1921). Those who hold
such a view will then argue that thought is independent of language on the
grounds that possession and manipulation of mental images need not in
any way involve or presuppose natural language.
In fact the imagist account is that thinking consists in the manipulation
of mental images, and that thoughts inherit their semantic properties from
the representative powers of the images which constitute them. There may
be something importantly correct in theWrst part of this claim, as we will
argue in section 3 of this chapter. It may be that our conscious thinking
presupposes imagination, and that mental images (particularly images of
natural language sentences) are implicated in all of our conscious
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