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Perception and imagination: amodal perception as mental imagery

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Abstract

When we see an object, we also represent those parts of it that are not visible. The question is how we represent them: this is the problem of amodal perception. I will consider three possible accounts: (a) we see them, (b) we have non-perceptual beliefs about them and (c) we have immediate perceptual access to them, and point out that all of these views face both empirical and conceptual objections. I suggest and defend a fourth account, according to which we represent the occluded parts of perceived objects by means of mental imagery. This conclusion could be thought of as a (weak) version of the Strawsonian dictum, according to which “imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself”.

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Notes

  1. This metaphor and the quote are originally from Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, A120, footnote a).

  2. Some may not accept the key assumption behind this question, namely, the assumption that we do represent the occluded parts of perceived objects. I address what I take to be the most plausible version of this worry in Sect. 5.

  3. See also Sorensen (forthcoming) on the auditory sense modality.

  4. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to these interesting examples of amodal perception that do not involve occlusion.

  5. There may also be a worry about occlusion in the case of back-lit objects, as Roy Sorensen argues that in these cases occlusion relations are reversed as the more distant object is the occluder (Sorensen 1999, and especially Sorensen 2007, pp. 52–54 on the concept of occlusion). The more general formulation of amodal perception above fits both reversed and ordinary cases of occlusion.

  6. There are some exceptions. Roy Sorensen, for example, would question this necessary condition (Sorensen 1999, 2007, forthcoming), but would accept something similar that suffices for our purposes. He writes: “To see an object, the object must be causally responsible for the visual information” (Sorensen 1999, p. 45). The cat’s occluded tail is not causally responsible for any visual information, thus, we cannot represent it perceptually.

  7. See Harman (1984) for a classical analysis of the topic of contradicting beliefs.

  8. See Singh (2004) for a good overview of the differences between modal and amodal completion.

  9. But see my reservations about this way of defining amodal perception in Sect. 2.

  10. See, for example, Tse (1999, pp. 37–38). The terms originally come from Michotte et al (1964).

  11. Further, if we have expectations about the cat’s tail behind the picket fence, this means that we need to represent it in some ways. But then our original question reoccurs again: how do these expectations represent the cat’s tail? In perception? With the help of beliefs? The problem of amodal perception remains unsolved.

  12. Berkeley could be interpreted as holding a version of this view. He writes: “the immediate perception of ideas by one sense suggests to the mind others, perhaps belonging to another sense, which are wont to be connected with them” (Berkeley 1713/1979, p. 39). The examples he gives for this ‘perception by suggestion’ are all examples where the two sense modalities are different, but his phrasing permits that they would be the same. And ‘perception by suggestion’ seems to represent its object by mental imagery: the represented objects “[…] are not the objects of sight, but suggested to the imagination by […] color and figure” (ibid., pp. 39–40).

  13. It is important to point out that this dependence of amodal perception on background knowledge will not itself settle the question about how we represent occluded parts of perceived objects. A number of our representational abilities (perception, belief, mental imagery) can depend on our background knowledge, after all.

  14. A related objection is the following. Perception is determinate: when we perceive a polygon, it has a definite number of sides, even if the viewer does not know the number. But mental imagery is indeterminate. So if imagery completes the polygon amodally, there will not be a definite number of sides it supplied. My response is that perception is not determinate. The object causing the perception is determinate: the perceived polygon has a definite number of sides. But the content of my perceptual experience may not be (and normally is not) determinate. Our peripheral vision, for example, is very indeterminate indeed. And the same is true of mental imagery. Amodal perception (conceived as mental imagery) does not bring in a greater degree of indeterminacy than extra-foveal perception. (I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising the question of determinacy about my account.)

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful for comments by Alva Noë, Emma Esmaili and Robert Van Gulick as well as the members of my PhD seminar on imagination at Syracuse University. I gave a version of this paper at Simon Fraser University in 2008 and I learned a lot from the discussion afterwards, especially with Kathleen Akins. Finally, I am grateful for the comments of an anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Studies.

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    Bence Nanay

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Nanay, B. Perception and imagination: amodal perception as mental imagery. Philos Stud 150, 239–254 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9407-5

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