Taine

Taine appears as a referenced thinker in a discussion of mental imagery, not as a participant in a narrated life or event. His significance lies in two theories attributed to him: an associative account of how words relate to images, and the theory of reducers as a consequence of treating an image as a perception produced by a cerebral centre. The discussion uses these positions to clarify why imagery cannot be reduced to either an externally assembled set of contents or a perception situated in space.

Words and Images

The argument rejects Taine’s treatment of words as independent psychic contents reattached to an image from outside by association. Words are not indispensable to every image, and they do not belong to consciousness in precisely the same way as the image’s intended object. Yet they can articulate knowledge that would otherwise remain relatively undifferentiated, enabling the Imaging consciousness to seek distinct qualities in its Analogon.

A word may retain its ordinary function as a sign, but it can also become integrated into the image’s representation. The example of the word “moon” shows how it may adhere to an imaged moon as a quality, rather than being added as an external accompaniment. In that case, the word can help provide the image with an externality otherwise associated with movements of the eye, head, or arm. This account therefore qualifies the relation between language and imagery rather than treating the word as merely an associative appendage.

The Image and Real Space

Taine is also invoked in considering what follows if an image is produced by a cerebral centre functioning as it does in perception. On that hypothesis, the image would have to be located among other perceptions. The theory of reducers is presented as the logical consequence of this assumption: it attempts to account for the image within a perceptual framework.

The account finds that consequence inconsistent with the reported character of mental images. People may say that they see a mental image, but they distinguish it from a hypnagogic image: it is not located in real space, among the chair, table, and other perceived surroundings. The image of a dog may be described through visual qualities such as coat colour or bodily shape, yet those qualities are not given through the eyes or placed in the external perceptual field. The theory of reducers thus serves as a test case for the difficulty of explaining mental imagery as perception occurring in the same spatial manner.

Role in the Argument

Taine’s two appearances expose a shared problem: an image cannot be adequately explained by importing the structure of another mental or perceptual process without accounting for what makes imagery distinctive. In the discussion of words, the image’s structure allows language to be integrated rather than merely attached from outside. In the discussion of location, the claim that an image is seen does not establish that it occupies real space. Together, these contrasts make Taine a point of departure for distinguishing image-consciousness from both associative assembly and ordinary perception.