Abstract
This study is about mental representation considered from the point of view of reflection upon consciousness. Methodologically speaking it is thus a phenomenological investigation in Husserl’s sense. In elaborating the text, however, I did not primarily intend to make a contribution to Husserl scholarship. Rather, as I wish to outline here, my hope is that the thoughts expressed in this study will be of interest to readers who are receptive to recent developments in cognitive science and in the philosophy of mind, which has seen a resurgence of activity in the wake of the “cognitive revolution” in scientific psychology.
He who swims against the stream reaches the source.
Old Chinese Saying
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Notes to Introduction
See Hua XVI (1973): “Die Bedingungen der ‘Möglichkeit der Erfahrung’ sind das erste. Bedingungen der Möglichkeit der Erfahrung…darf nichts anderes bedeuten als das alles, was immanent im Wesen der Erfahrung…liegt und somit unauthebbar zu ihr gehört. Die Essenz der Erfahrung, die die phänomenologische Erfahrungsanalyse erforscht, ist dasselbe wie die Möglichkeit der Erfahrung, und alles im Wesen, in der Möglichkeit der Erfahrung Festgestellte ist eo ipso Bedingung der Möglichkeit der Erfahrung” (p. 141f.). Since Husserl’s concept of ‘Erfahrung’ can be understood as the sum total of ‘Erlebnisse’ (experiences), it may be appropriate to write the term with an upper case ‘E’ as ‘Experience’ in order to distinguish it from the term for individual experiences (compare in the same context: “We do not ask how Experience is formed (namely as sum total of psychological experiences…), but what ‘lies’ in it”; in German: “Wir fragen nicht, wie Erfahrung entsteht (nämlich als Inbegriff psychologischer Erlebnisse…), sondern was in ihr liegt”‘ (p. 141).
Thanks to a grant from the Swiss National Foundation for Scientific Research, I am currently resuming work on this developmental study under the working title: “Mental Representations. A Phenomenological and Empirical Contribution to the Study of their Development”. Methodological considerations about empirical, i.e. applied, phenomenology are followed by a presentation of the exploratory study in which I used pictorial displays that have a picture within another picture. Drawing on the theoretical clarifications of the outline of a phenomenology of mental representation in the present study, some findings concerning children’s understanding of pictorially appearing “embedded worlds” and of the role of spatial-temporal individuation, or “infralogical relations” in Piaget’s (e.g., 1948, 1959) sense, are discussed. The pilot-study is based on protocols with 3- to 9-year-old children. — For a first glimpse of the empirical study, see Marbach (1983); and for some more theoretically relevant related considerations, see Marbach (1982), (1987), (1988) and (1992).
See, e.g., Z. W. Pylyshyn (1973); D. A. Norman (1976), chapter 8; A. Baddeley (1976), chapters 11ff.; P. H. Lindsay and D. A. Norman (1977), chapter 10; R. Lachman et al. (1979), chapter 9; J. R. Anderson (1980), part II; H. Aebli (1981), chapters 4ff.; R. C. Schank (1982).
See, e.g., Holt (1964), p. 260. — Compare in Gardner’s (1985) recent history of the cognitive revolution: “…there is the faith that central to any understanding of the human mind is the electronic computer. Not only are computers indispensable for carrying out studies of various sorts, but, more crucially, the computer also serves as the most viable model of how the human mind functions” (p. 6). Interestingly, in the very detailed subject index of Gardner’s history there is no entry “consciousness” to be found! See also note 5.
See J. Watson (1913), p. 176, quoted in Mandler and Kessen (1959), p. 33. — There is a growing number of clear signs, though, that “consciousness is making a comeback in psychology”, as D. C. Dennett (1982) put it at the outset of a paper whose topic he much extended in a new book, Consciousness Explained (1991). (I could no more study the book in time for the present text. But I plan to review Dennett’s book for the Journal Husserl-Studies,to be published in the second half of 1993.) For example, in 1980, G. A. Miller, in a comment on Z. W. Pylyshyn’s (1980) target article, “Computation and Cognition”, had made the following point: I believe that consciousness is the constitutive problem of psychology. That is to say, I am as dissatisfied with a psychology that ignores consciousness as I would be with a biology that ignored life or a physics that ignored matter and energy. Since I assume that psychology is a cognitive science, I assume that cognitive science inherits the problem of consciousness (p. 146; emphasis mine).
In his response to the commentaries, Pylyshyn said that Miller, among others, had suggested phenomena that may not be capturable within a computational cognitive theory. The case of consciousness is especially clear. In this case we not only lack an approach that seems equipped to clarify the mystery of conscious experience (certainly neither a functionalist approach like the computational one, nor a biological approach has even succeeded in formulating the problem coherently) — we don’t have the faintest idea of what it would be like to have such a theory…, so that we might (not) recognize an adequate theory if one were proposed (p. 166; emphasis partly mine).
In the excellent recent collection of papers, Consciousness in Contemporary Science,edited by A. J. Marcel and E. Bisiach (1988), A. J. Marcel, in his contribution “Phenomenal experience and functionalism”, forcefully argues “that reference to consciousness in psychological science is demanded, legitimate, and necessary” (p. 121), alluding thereby to G. A. Mandler’s (1975b) paper, “Consciousness: respectable, useful and probably necessary”, which had set an early signal for the turn of the tide regarding the topic of consciousness in scientific psychology. — At the time of revising the present manuscript for print, I also noticed with great interest that J. Searle (1990), in the “Abstract” of a target article, entitled “Consciousness, explanatory inversion, and cognitive science”, pointed out the following regarding the question of consciousness: The moral is that the big mistake in cognitive science is not the overestimation of the computer metaphor (though that is indeed a mistake), but the neglect of consciousness (p. 585; emphasis mine).
And in the Introduction of the target article itself, Searle writes: I now believe the underlying mistake is much deeper: We have neglected the centrality of consciousness to the study of the mind…. If you come to cognitive science, psychology, or the philosophy of mind with an innocent eye, the first thing that strikes you is how little serious attention is paid to consciousness. Few people in cognitive science think that the study of the mind is essentially or in large part a matter of studying conscious phenomena; consciousness is rather a “problem”, a difficulty that functionalist or computationalist theories must somehow deal with. Now, how did we get into this mess? How can we have neglected the most important feature of the mind in those disciplines that are officially dedicated to its study? There are complicated historical reasons for this, but the basic reason is that since Descartes, we have, for the most part, thought that consciousness was not an appropriate subject for a serious science or scientific philosophy of mind. As recently as a few years ago, if one raised the subject of consciousness in cognitive science discussions, it was generally regarded as a form of bad taste…” (p. 585; emphasis mine).
I have very often been perplexed, indeed, when checking “Author Indexes” in the literature, how unbelievably absent Husserl with his “science of consciousness” still is in the English writing world of cognitive science and philosophy of mind. To illustrate, in the collection of papers, Consciousness in Contemporary Science,mentioned above, for example, there is only one explicit reference to Husserl’s work, namely in R. Van Gulick’s (1988) contribution, entitled “Consciousness, intrinsic intentionality, and self-understanding machines”. In the context of discussing whether “there was a dimension along which intentional states involving conscious subjective experiences differ from those not involving such experiences”, Van Gulick introduces the notion of “semantic transparency”. Briefly explaining an example of “a conscious visual experience”, he says that such an experience “seems to involve my using or having present in my mind a complex representation…”, that “I also understand, on the whole, how that representation represents the world as being”, and that “such visual representations are so transparent in content that we normally ‘look right through’ them. Our experience is of the external world as represented” (pp. 95f.). Interestingly for my present purpose, Van Gulick then suggests the following: In looking for an explanation of this transparency associated with conscious experience, we should look primarily to the kinds of processing associated with conscious representations. For it is by better understanding the processes that allow us to move almost instantaneously from one representation to another semantically related one that we are likely to gain insight into how the representations or symbolic structures associated with conscious experience differ from other sorts of representations. If so, then most analytic philosophers who have concerned themselves with conscious experience in recent years have been wrong in focusing primarily on qualia and so-called “raw feels” such as the redness of phenomenal red or the subjective taste of a pineapple…They would do better to consider the dynamical aspects of experience and the processes that underlie them. In that respect there is much, I suspect, that might be learned from the phenomenological tradition (Husserl 1931) (p. 95; emphasis mine).
By the way, I tend to believe that the almost ubiquitous neglect of Husserl’s work in the contemporary sciences of the mind is, in part at least, linked to the widespread misunderstanding, or misrepresentation, of his method of reflective phenomenology of conscious awareness as being a study of conscious awareness through introspection. The failure of this latter enterprise of scientific psychology in the early years of the century may well have contributed to the circumstance that Husserlian phenomenology is still nowadays largely ignored in the quarters of cognitive science and philosophy of mind concerned with questions of consciousness. — Perhaps the new Journal, Consciousness and Cognition,number i of which has just been published at the time of finishing the revision of this text, will also help to bring about a change regarding the potential of Husserl’s work for the scientific study of the conscious aspects of the mind.
See, e.g., the “Open Peer Commentary” to Kosslyn, Pinker, Smith and Shwartz (1979), pp. 548–570; also K. J. Holyoak’s (1981) review of Kosslyn (1980). Holyoak puts Kosslyn’s work in perspective, emphasizing, in particular, the shift in the research domain from studies on “the mnemonic effectiveness of imagery” in long-term memory (foremost represented by investigations of A. Paivio) to “the generation and transformation of transient images in active memory” (p. 199). — At the last minute, so to speak, of revising this text, I discovered an excellent presentation and thoughtful critical philosophical discussion of “the imagery debate” between St. M. Kosslyn and Z. W. Pylyhyn, in particular, in a study by M. Tye (1991) (see also a brief reference to this work later in this Introduction, p. 7f.).
See, e.g., St. M. Kosslyn (1980), p. 21, and G. A. Miller (1962), p. 15. See also, for example, G. Mandler (1975a), p. 20f. — More recently, the philosopher C. McGinn (1991), speaking of “consciousness”, says that it “is not a diaphanous membrane; it is more like a pyramid only the tip of which is visible — a pyramid equipped with elaborate internal workings, scarcely imaginable from what is given” (p. 91); see also below, note 13.
See also, e.g., Pylyshyn (1981) in N. Block (Ed.), p. 152. — It is only fitting to recall here G. Rey’s (1981) remark concerning the vocabulary in discussions of mental imagery. Rey says: “Following the practice of many writers in this area, we ought to distinguish the activity of imaging, that is, deliberately forming an image, from imagining, which, in English, may often refer merely to conceiving, which may or may not involve imaging” (p. 126). As useful as this distinction is — reminiscent, by the way, of, e.g., Descartes’ use of “imaginatio” versus “pura intellectio” (see, e.g., the beginning of Meditatio VI, 1966, p. 70f.) — we will have reasons to distinguish carefully several ways of “forming an image” in “imagining something”, where the important point is not merely one of contrasting them with “conceiving” (see below, chapters 3 and 5). Kosslyn et al. seem to use the verb terms “image” and “imagine” interchangeably (e.g., (1978), p. 51; (1980), p. 43).
Let me reproduce a few excerpts taken randomly from texts about “mental imagery” in order to give a flavor of how language is used in scientific psychology. The unclear language of psychologists has in part motivated me to propose a phenomenological notation in this study (see chapter 1) in order to try to avoid comparable ambiguities in the language of phenomenology.
Here are first a few examples from Kosslyn, and Kosslyn et al. (see note 6 above, regarding the importance of Kosslyn et al. ‘s work). In the chapter about “Validating the Privileged Properties of Imagery” in Kosslyn (1980), on the one hand, we find this:
Are the spatial, picture-like images most people report experiencing a functional part of mental life? On one view, there are no special image representations that play a causal role in cognitive processing (p. 29, emphasis here and in the following samples mine).
On the other hand, Kosslyn explains: Alternatively, mental images could be distinct kinds of data-structures which can be used in the course of cognition. Further, the quasi-pictorial properties of images apparent to introspection may in fact reflect functional properties of the underlying representation, properties that affect how image representations may be processed.* It is important to realize that the issue here concerns the format of image representation (pp. 29f.).
With reference to the text marked by Kosslyn with the asterisk, he adds in a footnote: Note that the word “image” is here used to refer to a data-structure that happens to give rise to the experience of perceiving in the absence of appropriate sensory stimulation, and does not refer to the experience itself. As a working hypothesis I began with the notion that the characteristics of an image evident in the experience of imagery did in fact index characteristics of the underlying data-structure, but this need not be so (p. 30).
In a paper by Kosslyn and Pomerantz (1977) there are statements such as these: No researcher in the field would seriously argue that images are like pictures; pictures are concrete objects that exist in the world, while images are ethereal entities that occur in the mind. A more serious claim is that the experience of an image resembles the experience of seeing the referent of the image. Similar internal representations are posited to underlie all forms of visual experience (whether perceptual or imaginal), and these representations may be activated by information from the sensory periphery (when one is viewing a scene or picture), or by information from long-term memory (when one is imaging; cf. Hebb, 1968). The internal representations then may be processed in ways appropriate to the processing of sensory data regardless of whether they are sensory or imaginal in origin….. We can think of the mind’s eye as a processor that interprets perceptual representations (i.e. those underlying perceptual experience) in terms of “conceptual” categories…. When these interpretative processes are applied to remembered perceptual information instead of information that comes from the senses, an image rather than a percept will be experienced (p. 58f.).
In N. Block (Ed.), 1981, Kosslyn writes, when introducing his “theory of how information is represented in, and accessed from, visual mental images”: For example, when asked to count the number of windows in their living room, most people report mentally picturing the walls, scanning over them, and “looking” for windows. The present theory is intended to provide accounts of this “mental picturing” process, of “looking” at images, and of transforming images in various ways. In addition, the theory also specifies when images will be used spontaneously in the retrieval of information from memory (as in the foregoing example) (p. 208 ).
In reviewing the literature on imagery research, D. A. Norman (1976) observes: The fact that a person “perceives images” when recalling perceptual experiences from memory does not mean that information is stored within memory in that way. It only implies that they are processed as images…. The regenerated image could be a reasonably complete analogy to the original perception of the real world, with all the properties that people ascribe to their images. The regenerated image is likely to contain errors, of course, and the errors will be conceptual ones that reflect the underlying propositional base from which they were constructed” (p. 169f.).
By contrast, in Block (Ed.), 1981, Pylyshyn clearly points out once again the double usage of cognitive verbs (and related nouns etc.), when he states the following: One cannot say of something that it is or is not epiphenomenal until one has a clear statement of what that something is. For example, to the extent that image refers to what I experience when I imagine a scene, then surely that exists in the same sense that any other sensation or conscious content does (e.g.. pains, tickles, etc.). If, on the other hand, image refers to a certain theoretical construct that is claimed to have certain properties (e.g., to be spatially extended) and to play a specified role in certain cognitive processes, then the appropriate question to ask is not whether the construct is epiphenomenal but whether the theoretical claims are warranted, and indeed whether they are true (p. 152; emphasis partly mine).
See Pylyshyn (1978) in Block (Ed.), 1981, p. 184. See also, e.g., Kosslyn (1984), p. 97f. — For further related statements by Fodor, see, e.g., Fodor (1978, also in Block (Ed.), 1981): “If the representational theory of the mind is true, then we know what propositional attitudes are…, we must now face what has always been the problem for representational theories to solve: what relates internal representations to the world? What is it for a system of internal representations to be semantically interpreted? I take it that this problem is now the main content of the philosophy of mind” (p. 61 in Block). Or Fodor (1984): “Well, what would it be like to have a serious theory of representation?…The worry about representation is above all that the semantic (and/or the intentional) will prove permanently recalcitrant to integration in the natural order…” (p. 232). — For a recent critical discussion of representational theories of the mind, see, e.g., H. Wilder (1988).
For further discussion of Husserl’s criticism and his hope in future generations of scientific psychologists who would be willing to take advantage of phenomenological clarifications, see Marbach (1988).
See Hua V (1952), §9: “Wer phänomenologisch geübt ist, sieht ohne weiteres, dass all die wohigemeinten Deskriptionen der Psychologie kaum die Oberfläche streifen and selbst für die Oberfläche wesentlich verkehrte sind. Man braucht nur…hinzublicken auf die Unfähigkeit der gewöhnlichen Deskriptionen, so kardinale Unterschiede wie die zwischen Gegenwärtigung and den verschiedenen Modi der Vergegenwärtigung, z. B. zwischen materieller Wahrnehmung, entsprechender Phantasie, Erinnerung, Erwartung, Bildanschauung zu verstehen and in strengen Begriffen zu beschreiben, sowie dabei einzusehen, dass in jeder Vergegenwärtigung, in der schlichtesten Phantasie, schon eine höhere Stufe der Intentionalität and eine radikal neuartige vorliege” (p. 54f.).
This may be a good place to add a brief remark about the new book The Problem of Consciousness by C. McGinn (1991) that I greatly admire and whose main message concerning ‘the hidden structure of consciousness” I will still have to ponder over before really taking position. Presently, it may be helpful, however, at least to draw the reader’s attention to McGinn’s use of the phrases “surface of consciousness” and “deep, or hidden, structure of consciousness” in contrast to my own use of a similar vocabulary. To illustrate, McGinn writes, for example: The field of introspection is thus highly restricted with respect to the entire extent of consciousness. Introspection is confined to the surface of consciousness, as it were, but the secret of embodiment is not legible from the surface. One would have to decipher the deep structure of consciousness in order to understand how it can spring in all its vivid glory from the monochrome convolutions of the cerebral cortex (p. 63; emphasis mine).
As I see it, my way of talking of and trying to articulate “deep structures” or “hidden forms of consciousness” (see chapter 1) is still within the range of what is accessible to introspection, or better to reflection. As hidden forms of consciousness,they are not,in this sense, hidden from all possibilities of being captured. I suppose that McGinn, rightly in his perspective, would say that my attempt is one of merely articulating the surface of consciousness, instead of simply (pre-reflectively) experiencing consciousness in its surface way of functioning. The question, then, would be whether the not so trivial articulation of the hidden phenomenological forms (see chapter 1, section 1. 1 in particular) that I try to carry out in this study can advance the search for the hidden explanatory property which McGinn is looking for, whether it helps to decide where to look for the hidden structure, or whether, perhaps, it helps sharpening the sense that such search may forever be hopeless for us, because there is the clash between consciousness and the perceptible world…Another question that I also sense to be worthwhile pursuing is this: Is McGinn’s “hidden structure of consciousness” “merely” meant to be a structure of consciousness,or is it rather a structure of “consciousness-brain”, or “brain-consciousness”, that is, a structure of the link,and if so, is it, at the least, a structure of something that must simultaneously be accessible from an external and from an internal perspective? I can readily endorse McGinn’s view, when he says: We cannot understand how conscious states reach out to the world until we understand how they reach down to the brain (p. 57).
I can do so, if I take him to mean an understanding in a naturalistic, explanatory way. I would only add that such understanding must also do justice to the account of hidden phenomenological forms of consciousness that is based on reflective analysis of the type presented in this study — or else it must be shown that something in principle is wrong with the type of account here provided.
See, e.g., Ch. J. Maloney (1984): Representations represent. But representation presupposes reference. So, how do mental images refer? My visual or visual-like mental image of ferocious Leo supposedly represents that Leo is ferocious. Hence, it must refer to Leo. If my mental image deserves to be called an image, it must represent according to the manner of images generally…. As Goodman has shown, tokens of representational art, pictures, photographs and such, do indeed refer, but they cannot do so by way of resemblance. So, while mental images must refer in the manner of public images, mental images need not refer through resemblance. Not even public images refer that way. Importantly, this is consistent with maintaining that public images and, hence, mental images nevertheless refer. They simply do not so through resemblance. That, of course, calls for a general theory of imagistic reference, not repudiating the referential force of either public or mental images…. Postulating mental images does necessitate finally providing a theory of how such images secure reference. Yet it is crucial to appreciate that this problem, as genuine and pressing as it is, may find its solution in an adequate theory of pictorial reference. If so, it is no more a serious complaint against the possibility of mental images that we presently do not understand how they represent than it is against the reality of pictures or words that their manner of reference remains mysterious (pp. 238f.).
And on p. 243, Maloney continues: Nevertheless, it is a pressing issue as to what makes the picture and the mental image of Leo both images. And the answer to this is, in a sense, trivial and, in another sense, unknown. In the trivial sense the picture and the mental image are both images because they are included in a physical system of representation…By virtue of belonging to the representational system they do, each has semantic properties, including reference. What we want ultimately to know is what makes their respective systems representational, what is it about the systems that endows reference to some of their elements? This no one yet knows. But this is not a complaint against theories of mental images in particular but rather to theories of representation generally, including theories of not only the mental language but also all natural languages. As long as we have hope for an answer, at any level of representation, to semantic riddles, we may anticipate that the answer will generalize to all. And so hoping, we may retain the representational theory of the mind and, with it, mental images.
I have quoted from this text at length because it provides a clear discussion of some of the main views of representational theories of the mind which, if what will be developed in the present study is true, will have to be abandoned or substantially modified.
As H. Putnam (1981) puts it: What is important to realize is that what goes for physical pictures also goes for mental images, and for mental representations in general: mental representations no more have a necessary connection with what they represent than physical representations do. The contrary supposition is a survival of magical thinking (p. 3).
And later in the same text Putnam writes: What we have been doing is considering the preconditions for thinking about, representing, referring to, etc…. I mentioned earlier (namely, on p. 2) that some philosophers (most famously, Brentano) have ascribed to the mind a power, “intentionality”, which precisely enables it to refer. Evidently, I have rejected this as no solution. But what gives me this right? Have I, perhaps, been too hasty? (pp. 16f.).
Well, to the extent that Putnam seems to be prepared without ado to take “representation” in the sense of one or another “mental vehicle” in need of semantic interpretation, rather than in the sense of a mental activity qua consciousness of something, he may indeed too hastily miss the genuine sense of Brentano’s “intentionality” as a property of mental phenomena that Husserlian phenomenology of consciousness has taught us to articulate in precise detail.
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Marbach, E. (1993). Introduction. Mental Representation in Cognitive Science and the Point of View of the Phenomenology of Consciousness. In: Mental Representation and Consciousness. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2239-1_1
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