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When you imagine a red apple or visualize a scene, you have a visual experience without external stimulation. Mental imagery reveals the representational and phenomenal aspects of consciousness: it is genuinely representational (about objects) yet entirely subjective. Does imagery use the same representations as perception? What is its functional role?
Examine empirical work on mental rotation and imagery. Consider functional theories of representation.
Mental imagery is a natural laboratory for testing theories of consciousness and representation. You have already studied representationalism — the view that mental states have content by representing the world — and intentionality — the property of mental states being "about" things. Mental imagery displays both properties vividly: when you visualize a red apple, your image is *about* an apple and represents it as having certain properties (redness, roundness, the particular shape of a stem). Yet crucially, nothing in your external environment is causing these properties to appear in your visual field. The image is internally generated.
The classic debate in the study of mental imagery is between pictorialism (imagistic representations are picture-like, preserving spatial structure) and descriptionalism (imagery is composed of language-like, abstract representations). Roger Shepard's famous mental rotation experiments from the 1970s lent support to pictorialism: participants took longer to judge whether two shapes were the same as the angular difference between them increased — exactly as if they were mentally rotating a physical object. The rotation time was proportional to the angle, suggesting that mental imagery is spatially structured and has analog properties, not just discrete symbolic labels.
The phenomenal character of mental imagery — the "what it's like" aspect — creates a puzzle connecting to your study of phenomenal consciousness. When you imagine a red square, is there something it is *like* to have that image? If so, is that phenomenal character identical to the phenomenal character of actually seeing a red square? The common view is that they are similar but not identical: imagined red looks less vivid than perceived red. Yet both have genuine phenomenal character. This suggests that perception and imagination share a common representational format — a hypothesis supported by neuroimaging evidence showing overlapping activation in early visual cortex during imagery and perception.
The philosophical upshot connects representational content to phenomenal character. A core insight from this area is that representational content alone does not fully determine phenomenal experience. Two experiences can represent the same object yet differ phenomenally — the perceived apple versus the imagined apple. This motivates a distinction between what a mental state is *about* (intentional content) and what it *is like* (phenomenal character), and raises the question of whether theories of representation — including teleosemantics — can explain the phenomenal dimension of mental life, or whether that dimension always eludes purely functional or biological accounts.
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