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The importance of the relation between imagination and perception
has recurred throughout western philosophy. It was the focus
of Aristotle's concept of phantasia; Kant famously remarked
that "Psychologists have hitherto failed to realise that
the imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself";
and Wittgenstein's discussion of aspect seeing and seeing-as,
in the final sections of the Philosophical Investigations,
draws attention to the contribution that the subject's mind
makes to perception.
My DPhil thesis is in this tradition, and attempts to develop
the concept of imagining correctly; for if the imagination
contributes to veridical perception, as these philosophers suggest,
then the contribution of the imagination must be to imagine
the object of perception correctly. (To misperceive a black
plastic bag, on a dark night, by seeing it as a cat, for example,
is to imagine the cat correctly and the bag incorrectly.)
The contribution of the mind to perception is familiar to mountain-goers
who frequently see faces in rock formations. One of the most
famous is the
Old Man of the Mountain
(now sadly collapsed) in the White Mountains,
New Hampshire, USA. Here are two external webpages with pictures
of rocks or mountains that may be seen as faces.
Ten Images
Various Images
(Beware, this page includes a dodgy-looking image
of a sleeping cat!)
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