Philosophy of Mind Seminar (Friday - Week 6, TT26)

Abstract: An explosion of experimental work has done little to resolve the puzzle of aphantasia: how it is that individuals reporting no visual imagery perform more-or-less normally on tasks presumed to draw on it. One increasingly popular response to the puzzle is to hypothesize that phantasic and aphantasic individuals do not primarily differ in their visual imagery but only in whether that imagery is conscious (or: introspectable, retrievable, meta-accessible, etc.). I examine a series of recent, representative studies interpreted as supporting this view and show that they are quite consistent with the hypothesis that phantasic and aphantasic individuals differ profoundly in their visual imagery. Several general lessons are drawn, including (i) the difficulty of interpreting subjective reports both of imagery and strategy, (ii) the surprisingly wide range of effective strategies which can be used to tackle tasks presumed to depend on visual imagery, and (iii) how aphantasia research consequently faces a ‘criterion content’ problem familiar from consciousness science, namely that of aligning subjective measures and task-relevant representations.

Registration: If you do not hold a university card, please contact the seminar convenor or admin@philosophy.ox.ac.uk at least two working days before a seminar to register your attendance.