Imagination as recognition: a recognitional approach to mental imagery

Speaking of mental imagery suggests a similarity between internal mental representations and external pictorial representations, such as drawings, paintings and photographs. This perceived similarity has led some philosophers and cognitive scientists to consider that both types of representations belong to a specific category known as depictive representations. Since the depictive role of external pictures has often been explained in terms of resemblance, the same principle has been applied to mental images. In this article, I start by reviewing some of these attempts. Then, I put forward objections against the core project behind these attempts, particularly emphasizing what I call the ‘homogeneity problem’. Finally, this article proposes an alternative approach to understanding mental imagery by drawing insights from the literature on pictorial representation in artifacts, namely from recognitional accounts of pictorial representation. I argue that one of the merits of this definition is that it does not fall prey to the homogeneity problem and the other objections described previously.