A post by Stephen Müller

The realm of sensory imagination is a place where dragons soar and unicorns prance, highlighting a pivotal feature of mental imagery: it can represent things that do not exist. This fact is broadly recognized yet seldom examined in the face of the substantial challenges it presents to standard theories of representation, such as informational and teleosemantic frameworks. These frameworks hinge on the notion that a sequence of physical events—like light reflecting off an apple and being processed by our visual system—culminates in the mental representation of the apple (e.g., Pylyshyn, 2007; Recanati, 2012; Neander, 2017)[1]. Hence, these theories do not easily extend to the representation of non-existent entities, where no light from fictitious creatures reaches our eyes.

Adopting a positivist perspective, one might question what it even means for mental images to represent non-existent entities. It verges on the Meinongian to propose that "there are objects of mental imagery about which it is true that there are no such objects" (compare Meinong, 1904 / 1960). Thus, it falls upon philosophers to navigate these tricky waters carefully, ensuring that our explanations do not introduce bizarre ontologies or outright contradictions. This brings us to the core question I wish to delve into: What kinds of objects do our mental images represent, and by what process do they come to represent them?