Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics by Cova Florian; Réhault Sébastien;

Author:Cova, Florian; Réhault, Sébastien;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

Aphantasia and the Decay of Mental Images

Steve Humbert-Droz

1.Introduction

At the end of the nineteenth century, Francis Galton made an astonishing discovery: some people have no mental images. Galton also observed in discussions with “men of science” (1880: 302) that most of them considered “mental image” and “imagery” as ineffective metaphors: they seem to consider that there is no phenomenal experience behind expressions such as “I visualize an apple in my head.” Meanwhile, two French doctors reported the case of “Monsieur X,” a man who lost overnight the ability to invoke and experience mental images (Charcot and Bernard 1883). Recently, psychologists confronted with a similar case described this phenomenon as aphantasia (Zeman, Dewar, and Della Sala 2015).

Testimonies about aphantasia are still surprisingly rare, more than a century after Galton. It is therefore difficult to understand how a person devoid of (a kind of) imagination actually thinks. In order to outline “what it is like” to be aphantasic, I will start by compiling two qualitative interviews with aphantasics that I will then compare with other testimonies collected in literature and online. The fact that aphantasia is poorly documented may also explain why few philosophers (with the notable exception of Phillips 2014) seem to take this phenomenon seriously—contrary to other phenomena such as blindsight, for instance. To redress the balance, the second part of this paper will consider three debates to which aphantasia could contribute.

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