A Stimulus to the Imagination:
A Review of Questioning Consciousness: The Interplay of Imagery, Cognition and Emotion in the Human Brain by Ralph D. Ellis
Nigel J.T. Thomas
California State University
Los Angeles, CA 90032
U.S.A.
nthomas@calstatela.edu
Copyright (c) Nigel J. T. Thomas 1997
PSYCHE, 3(4), October 1997
Previously held: http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v3/psyche-3-04-thomas.html
KEYWORDS: language, mind-body problem, mental imagery, mental representation, thinking.
REVIEW OF: Ralph D. Ellis (1995) Questioning Consciousness: The Interplay of Imagery, Cognition and Emotion in the Human Brain (Advances in Consciousness Research Series, Vol. 2). John Benjamins Publishing Company. $34.95 pbk., pp. vii + 260. ISBN 90 272 5122 3 (Eur.)/ 1-55619-182-0 (US).
Twentieth century philosophy and psychology have been peculiarly averse
to mental images. Throughout nearly two and a half millennia of
philosophical wrangling, from Aristotle to Hume to Bergson, images
(perceptual and quasi-perceptual experiences), sometimes under the alias
of "ideas", were almost universally considered to be both the prime
contents of consciousness, and the vehicles of cognition. The founding
fathers of experimental psychology saw no reason to dissent from this
view, it was commonsensical, and true to the lived experience of
conscious thinking. However, early in this century, just about when the
behaviorist revolution in psychology was loudly declaring the scientific
illegitimacy of any attempt to study consciousness, and the concomitant
non-existence of imagery (Watson, 1913; see Thomas, 1989), philosophy
was undergoing its "linguistic turn", a turn to seeing philosophy as
essentially about language rather than the world, even the 'inner'
world. For decades, the very concept of the mental image was suspect,
and it was certainly banished from playing any major role in theories of
mind and of thinking. Ralph Ellis' Questioning Consciousness, together
with the recent speculations of certain influential neuroscientists
(Edelman, 1992; Damasio, 1994), may be signaling the end this unusual
era.
Of course, as everybody knows, the world did change in the 1960s. It
wasn't just that everyone was taking hallucinogens; for a whole host of
very respectable practical and empirical reasons, psychologists found it
imperative to take imagery seriously again (Bugelski, 1984; Paivio,
1971/1979; Holt, 1964). The discoveries of the striking 'mental
rotation' (Shepard & Metzler, 1971; Shepard & Cooper, 1982) and 'mental
scanning' (Kosslyn, 1973, 1980) effects only reinforced a burgeoning
revival of imagery research that one of the leading pioneers of
cognitivism saw as portending "a paradigm shift in psychology" (Neisser,
1972). Before long, psychologists were ready directly to broach the
issue of consciousness in major journals once again (e.g., Natsoulas,
1974, 1978).
But it was not to be. The consciousness revolution fizzled out, and the
real paradigm shift in psychology during the 60s and 70s turned out not
to be about imagination, but computers. Both imagery and consciousness
research were overwhelmed by the rising tide of computational
cognitivism. Until very recently, consciousness has remained the concern
of just a handful of mavericks (lately it seems to have become the
concern of a whole lot of mavericks). Meanwhile, imagery researchers
became embroiled in an impassioned, high-profile, but ultimately sterile
dispute as to whether computational models could accommodate
fundamentally picture-like representations, or whether imagery
experiences (and the experimental evidence suggesting their functional
significance) could and should be explained entirely in terms of the
sorts of language-like encodings with which computer programmers were
more familiar (Pylyshyn, 1973; 1981; Kosslyn & Shwartz, 1977; Kosslyn,
Pinker, Smith, & Shwartz, 1979; Kosslyn, 1980; Anderson, 1978; Hinton,
1979; Block, 1981).
Whoever won this so called "analog/propositional" debate (for what it is
worth, it seems to have been the 'analog' or picture theorists (Tye,
1991; Kosslyn, 1994)) the upshot was to be the marginalization of
imagery within cognitive theory. The assumptions built into the question
being asked inevitably led to the view that most, if not all, of the
real work of cognition and mental representation goes on at a
non-conscious, computational level. The widespread move from 'symbolic'
to 'connectionist' computational theories only served, if anything, to
consolidate this trend: as computational psychology has become more
plausible as an account of brain mechanisms it has become all the less
plausible as a picture of the conscious mind, and it is no accident that
connectionist modelers and 'eliminativist' philosophers have been able
to make so much common cause (e.g., Churchland & Sejnowski, 1992;
Churchland, 1989). With only a handful of isolated exceptions,
connectionists have had nothing to say about imagery. Whereas in the
1970s imagery theory was widely regarded as fundamental to the theory of
cognition, now it gives the appearance of a specialized and quite
peripheral sub-field.
But these developments amount to the marginalization of conscious
processes in cognitive theory: after all, even conscious linguistic
thought, the silent monologue we 'hear' in the 'mind's ear', is a form
of imagery (Paivio, 1986; Reisberg, 1992). In such a situation,
consciousness can easily come to seem to be quite irrelevant,
inessential, to thought (Flanagan, 1992), and we soon find ourselves
committed to the possibility of conceptual monstrosities like zombies
(see Thomas, 1996), and running smack into problems so "hard" that the
only reasonable way to solve them (without backing-up and rethinking our
picture of cognition) seems to be the postulation of properties that are
forever beyond the reach of physical science, and the stipulation of
'natural' laws that are untestable in principle (Chalmers, 1996).
But the marginalization of imagery and (thereby) consciousness can by no
means be blamed entirely on psychologists, or even on computationalism.
For most contemporary analytic philosophers the idea that imagery has a
fundamental and necessary role to play in human thought is something not
to be countenanced. The founding fathers of the analytic movement
(especially Frege, Wittgenstein, and Schlick) were very conscious that
image-based conceptions of thought had led many of the most acute of
their 18th and 19th Century predecessors deeply into skepticism or
idealism, and they very much wanted to avoid going down those paths.
Thus they took linguistic representation to be fundamental instead and
argued vehemently against image-based theories of thought, and
particularly against the traditional view (often associated with Locke,
1700/1924) that language is somehow grounded in imagery -- that what
we say is largely an expression of what we (consciously, but
non-verbally) think. In this way, a fervent if rather unfocused
'iconophobia', a skepticism toward all explanatory invocations of
imagery, and sometimes even toward the very reality of the experience of
imagery (see Thomas, 1989), came to be built into the foundations of the
analytic movement that soon came (and continues) to dominate philosophy
in the English speaking world.
The actual arguments that were made against image-based theories of
thought boil down essentially to four. Now polished by the passage of
time, they are routinely trotted out against anyone naive or foolhardy
enough to question the iconophobic orthodoxy, but they are rarely
seriously challenged (apart from the book under review, Lowe (1996,
ch.6) provides a recent and very worthy exception). Still more rarely
are any such challenges given their due consideration.
The first of these arguments, which actually goes back to Berkeley
(1734/1975), is that images, conceived of as being like inner pictures,
cannot possibly embody general ideas -- dogs in general, triangles in
general, etc. -- but, at best, ideas of the particular individual
objects that they do or might derive from. Thus, if images were the
fundamental medium of thought we could never think of such generalities,
which we clearly can do.
The related second argument is also ultimately rooted in Berkeley,
although he himself pressed the basic insight to idealistic rather than
iconophobic conclusions: although we normally assume that ordinary
pictures represent their subject through resembling it, such resemblance
relations are not sufficiently objective to ground our basic capacity
for mental representation. Resemblances need to be recognized, and
being able to recognize something seems to entail having certain mental
abilities (including representational abilities) already in place. It
seems to follow from both of these arguments that imagery cannot be the
fundamental form of representation, and thus cannot be basic to
thought.
Both these arguments are probably sound provided that, like Berkeley
(and, admittedly, like nearly all theorists until rather recently), we
take mental images as being analogous, in the relevant respects, to
physical pictures. However, as we shall see, the book under review
rejects that assumption, and provides a quite different account of the
nature of image representation.
A third argument that one sometimes encounters, and that probably
originated with Frege, points out that the images that different people
have of the same sort of thing (or even that the same person may have at
different times) may vary widely. My image of a cat today may be of a
black cat, where yours is of a marmalade one, and mine tomorrow may be
of a calico. Thus no such image can possibly constitute the meaning of
the word "cat", which means the same thing in my mouth as it does in
yours, and the same thing tomorrow as today. (There is a related
argument to the effect that imagery cannot be essential to thought
because a small percentage of people, who appear to be able to think
perfectly well, claim to experience no imagery at all. There are,
however, good reasons for not taking these claims entirely at their
face value (Thomas, 1989).) The 'Fregean' argument may be sound, but it
seems to be directed at a straw man. Imagery theories of thought and its
relation to language, including Locke's theory and, I think, the theory
to be considered below, have generally not been intended to be
theories of meaning in the Fregean sense (Lowe, 1996). It may very well
be the case that such 'Lockean' theories do not tell us all we might
wish to know about the nature of linguistic meaning, but they might tell
us something that is true, relevant, and important nonetheless.
The fourth, and perhaps the most telling, argument (or family of
arguments), which probably originated with Wittgenstein, points out that
many of the things that we can think are really quite unimageable, and
even in cases where it does seem to be possible to picture something
appropriate, we can make distinctions in thought that we would not seem
to be able to make in imagery. Surely we cannot have images of
abstractions like justice, or evil, per se, or, say, the presidency (the
office, as opposed to some particular president); yet we can certainly
think about these sorts of things. Furthermore, pace Titchener (1909),
logical and syntactic operators and connectives ("if", "but", "not",
"because", "therefore", "or" etc.) cannot be imaged, and neither can
grammatical and logical properties like tense, mood, mode, and
quantification. I might have an image of a cat on a mat, but (it is
asked) does this correspond specifically to the thought that "the cat is
on the mat", or to "a cat was (or will, or might, or should be) on the
mat", or "if there were a mat, some cat might possibly be on it", or any
one of innumerable further possible thoughts? Is it possible to form an
image at all that will correspond to a thought like "If the presidency
did not exist, liberty might come under threat"? These are all thoughts
that are thinkable, and easily expressible in language, but it would
seem that either they cannot be visually imagined at all, or else that
there is no possible image that could correspond to them specifically.
In the light of such considerations, language, not imagery, came to be
seen as the fundamental, indeed the only adequate medium for cognition.
But although the anti-image argument is very persuasive, the view that
we are offered in its stead, of the mind as an entirely linguistic
system, is surely highly counter-intuitive to almost anyone who has not
been thoroughly indoctrinated into the relevant philosophical tradition,
or its psychological counterparts (Price, 1969).
Of course, these days some of the more influential heirs of the analytic
tradition have moved on from taking natural language as
representationally basic to giving that role to some sort of
language-like computational representation system (on the analogy,
originally, of LISP data structures), but although they are less
inclined than their predecessors to deny the existence or the cognitive
utility of images altogether, their inherited iconophobic prejudices
have really only become slightly attenuated. It has actually been these
philosophers, much more than the computational modelers themselves, who
have really (and, I should say, rightly) made it clear that the sort of
quasi-pictorial images championed by cognitive scientists such as
Kosslyn cannot be the fundamental form of mental representation in a
computational cognitive system, even though there might be the
theoretical space, and good empirical reasons, to incorporate them
somewhere within it (Fodor, 1975; Tye, 1991). There has been a
considerable synergy between philosophy in this sort of vein and the
sort of computational cognitive science that has relegated consciousness
and imagery to the mental sidelines; the two traditions have lent
enormous credibility to one another.
In this theoretical context, the book under review must be seen as a
very welcome new departure in philosophical thinking about cognition.
Ellis undertakes to give us the outline of a theory of cognition framed
in terms of imagery; that is, in terms of truly mental, conscious (or
potentially conscious) processes and representations, rather than in
terms of whatever non-conscious and (in any ordinary sense of the term)
non-mental, neurophysiological or computational operations and
structures might underlie them. Admittedly, there are psychologists
(notably Paivio, 1971/1979, 1986) who have already attempted this, and
other philosophers who have rejected the prevailing iconophobia (e.g.
Price, 1969; Lowe, 1996; Martin, 1997), but Ellis is unusual in
elaborating a clear and positive theory that truly confronts the key
iconophobic arguments at their most powerful. This brings him also to
tackle the standard views of the mind-brain relation, rejecting not
only the various forms of dualism (these get dismissed fairly quickly,
as is usual) but also mind-brain identity theory and functionalism,
which, on its usual reading at least, implies that mental states are
computational states. Battling with entrenched orthodoxies on so many
fronts is a tall order indeed, and Ellis can surely be forgiven if his
own positive accounts are not always fully convincing in all their
details. But the fact that one may have reservations about some of the
specifics of Ellis's theories should not detract from the point that
this work is a major and most original achievement, and one that I hope
will prove to be an important trailblazer. Ellis shows that there are
promising ways forward along many theoretical paths which had long been
thought quite impassable, and it is to be hoped that others will now be
encouraged in the enterprise of opening them up more fully to the
progress of scientific understanding.
After a substantial and helpful introduction outlining the fundamentals
of his approach, Ellis, in chapter one, launches into an account of
imagery which understands it neither as a matter of having pictures in
the head (pace Berkeley -- and Kosslyn too), nor as a subset of
computational, quasi-linguistic representations, but rather as the
result of acts of selective perceptual attention. Perception, for Ellis,
is an active process of looking for features of the object or scene
before us (presumably features we, or our perceptual systems, expect to
be present on the basis of what has been previously found), and it is
the notion that this sort of directed 'questioning' of our (inner and
outer) environment is fundamental and essential to consciousness that
gives his book its title. Perception is conscious inasmuch as it
involves this sort of active 'questioning', as opposed to the mere
passive affection of the sense organs (or even the brain) by impinging
stimuli (c.f. Marcel, 1983; Gray, 1995). We experience conscious imagery
when we persist in our 'questioning' even though there is no positive
answer to be had; when we determinedly 'look for' features that are not
in fact there. Thus, if I am imagining what a pink wall would look like
if it were blue:
I focus on the wall as if trying to become intensely aware of any
amount of blue that is or might be mixed in with the pink . . .
There is a sense in which I look for blueness in the wall and do
not find it. (I.e. I look for blue and find pink instead). (p. 37,
original emphases).
In fact, a number of imagery theories of this general sort have been
sketched (admittedly often in the barest outlines) in the psychological
literature (Neisser, 1976, 1978; Hochberg, 1968; Hebb, 1968; Sarbin &
Juhasz, 1970; Farley, 1976; Janssen, 1976; Morgan, 1979; -- and I
confess that I myself favor such a view -- Thomas, 1994, in press),
but the computational bias of most cognitive scientists, and the dust
thrown up by the 'analog/propositional' imagery debate mentioned above,
has meant that these nascent theories have received very little
attention. Indeed, Ellis betrays no awareness of them. It would appear
that the actual source of his inspiration here is the phenomenological
tradition descending from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty; but I should say
immediately that Ellis's exposition is not marred by the arcane jargon
or the genuflections towards the heroes of the phenomenological movement
which so often make work in this tradition impenetrable, or at least
rebarbative, to the outsider. In fact, the writing throughout is as
clear and lively as one can expect in a serious academic work, and
jargon is kept to a minimum.
In his first chapter, and throughout the book, Ellis cites a certain
amount of experimental psychological evidence in support of his
position, and he also attempts to sketch a neuropsychological framework
for his theory (imagery, for example, is depicted as essentially a
parietal lobe function, but under the control of frontal cortex and
thalamus). This, however, I felt to be the book's weakest aspect. This
may be unfair, but I was not convinced that Ellis has a sufficiently
deep mastery of either the neuroscientific or the relevant psychological
literature to ground the ambitious, if rather generalized, claims he
wants to make. From a rhetorical perspective, it might have been better
to leave the neuropsychological material out altogether. I fear that if
it should prove excessively naive, or demonstrably wrong, to the
expert eye, then that might lead to the other elements of his views to
receive less consideration than they truly deserve. But in fact, even if
Ellis gets the story about the neural embodiment wrong (and I am not
saying he does; just that, as an amateur in this area myself, I was not
convinced), this is of little relevance to the value of the cognitive
and philosophical theories which are the book's main focus and
contribution. If Ellis is on the right track in these latter regards,
then putting the neuroscientific and experimental flesh on the bones of
his approach can, and probably should, be left to the experts.
In any case, having given us his account of the underlying nature of
imagery, in chapter two Ellis goes on to present an account of how such
imagery might be able to ground more abstract conceptual thought, and
how imagery might ultimately ground our use of language. In this and the
following chapter, Ellis is directly confronting the post-Wittgensteinian
orthodoxy and showing us a real alternative to its
exorbitant 'lingualism'. Admittedly, the theory he presents needs
further elaboration, and some of its structural components look a bit
flimsy (in particular, a lot of reliance is placed on the less than
clear notion of the "feeling of confidence" that we could generate
imagery relevant to some concept, even though we might often not
actually do so), but he has done quite enough to show that further
research in this area is likely to be very worthwhile, and has begun to
map out the territory that such work will need to explore.
In chapter three Ellis takes on developmental issues, and demonstrates
how an image-based theory of cognition might accommodate such things as
logical inference, negation, and conditionals. Although some aspects of
these issues have been explored before by psychologists such as
Johnson-Laird (1983), this has been in the context of the sort of
computational theory of mind that Ellis is at pains to reject. Ellis's
own treatment is most interesting and, to the best of my knowledge,
largely original. It appears to be rooted in his own experience as a
logic teacher, although some important theoretical debts, especially to
the work of Natika Newton (1982, 1993), are acknowledged. Particularly
interesting, to my mind, is Ellis' appeal to auditory and kinaesthetic
imagery in his account of how we learn to identify valid or invalid
argument forms by recognizing how they conform to what he calls "rhythm
patterns":
'This implies that; not that; therefore not this' is modus
tollens, whereas 'this implies that; not this; therefore not that'
is the fallacy of denying the antecedent. We can hear these temporal
rhythms just as we would a recognizable pattern in music. (p. 98)
Once again, one need not be convinced by all aspects of this theorizing
("feelings of confidence" play an ominously large role again) to realize
that Ellis has opened up potentially very important new territory here,
and has produced significant ideas that deserve further conceptual and
experimental exploration.
Chapter four introduces Ellis's account of the mind-body relation,
designed to ground his theory of conscious cognition. Again, in what is
already a crowded field, Ellis provides fresh and interesting ideas.
Standard psychophysical functionalist theories of mind are usually
understood as asserting the identity of token mental states with token
brain states, but Ellis avoids stipulating such static, internalistic
state-state identities. Rather, he suggests, we should think of the
mind-matter relation as a relation of a dynamic process (mind) to the
material substratum in which it operates (not only the brain, but also
the body's sensory and motor systems, and the environment with which
they are interacting). Much of the exposition here rests on an analogy
to the relation between a sound wave (process) and the material media
through which it travels (substratum).
This general picture of the nature of mind has real attractions, but
some of the details of Ellis's treatment remained obscure to me,
particularly as he attempts to develop and apply the process-substratum
idea in chapter five, which I found the least satisfactory part of the
book. The chapter is built around an extended discussion of the
relationship between literal, conscious desires and metaphorical
'desires' (as when we might say that a neuron 'desires', or 'wants', to
bring its ionic potentials into equilibrium). In this context Ellis
develops what (if I have understood him correctly) are intended to be
two necessary, and perhaps jointly sufficient, conditions for
consciousness:
We have reached the position that desire differs from 'desire' in
two important respects. (1) The aim of the desire is not the
aggregate of the aims of all the 'desires' that make up the
substratum for the desire; instead the aim of desire is to remove an
irresolvable internal conflict by changing the overall condition of
the organism. And (2) a conscious desire is a process which is
capable of appropriating, changing and reproducing elements of its
own substratum in order that the process may not only continue, but
also may expand in scope; it accomplishes this purpose by
imaginatively representing the missing elements or ideas related to
the missing elements. (p. 189)
The first criterion here is developed in quite an interesting way, and
may be relevant to understanding the notion of the 'unity' of
consciousness. However, it was not clear to me that it did much to
illuminate the crucial question of how desires (metaphorical or
otherwise), construed as bodily needs, can come to be subjectively
experienced. Indeed, Ellis holds that the metaphorical, unconscious
'desires' of the autonomic system to maintain bodily homeostasis fall
under this criterion, so it is certainly not intended as sufficient for
consciousness, and I am not convinced that it has been shown to be
necessary either.
The second criterion I found hard to understand. The claim seems to be
that mental processes are such that they can actually extend their
substrate as needed, as if a sound wave reaching the edge of the
atmosphere could somehow cause more air to be created to sustain its
outward propagation (this is Ellis' own example). But if this means
anything more than the truism that our cognitive capacities play an
important role in keeping us, and thus our brains, alive, then I cannot
say what. Worse, the second clause of the second criterion, which
recruits imagination to play a role in the characterization of 'true'
desires, would seem to render any attempt to explain consciousness in
these terms trivial or circular. Desires are conscious inasmuch as they
involve imaginative (i.e. conscious) representations -- well, we knew
that! What we want to know is why representations of the sort that Ellis
envisages (or, indeed, of any other sort) should be consciously
experienced, and that remains obscure. Since, in my view, the sort of
account of imagery defended by Ellis is much more appropriate to
understanding conscious representation than are most other extant
pictures of mental representation, I think he may well have brought us
close to the threshold of a solution to the problem of consciousness,
but he has not carried us over.
I also found Ellis's subsequent arguments, closely bound up with the
second criterion above, to the effect that consciousness and cognition
can only occur in an organic system puzzling and unpersuasive. Although
he defines "organic" in such a way that it does not necessarily imply a
biochemically based system, in practice he treats the term as if it does
carry such an implication (pp. 182-3). However, his critique of 'strong'
artificial intelligence (which seems intended to cover robotics too) is
really rather superficial, and I can see no good reason to agree that a
cognitive system of the general sort he proposes could not find its
substratum in a silicon and steel robot just as well as in a body made
of protoplasm. Of course, this would not be the 'good old fashioned'
symbolic AI, where mental contents (including conscious ones) are
identified with (some of) the data structures that the program
manipulates; neither would it be the sort of connectionism that would
identify such contents with weight matrices, unit activation patterns,
or the like. But recent work in robotics (e.g., Brooks, 1991), active
perception (Bajcsy, 1988; Ballard, 1991; Blake & Yuille, 1992; Swain &
Stricker, 1993; Aloimonos, 1993; Landy, Maloney, & Pavel, 1996), and
'dynamic' approaches to cognition (van Gelder, 1995; Garson, 1996) seems
to me to be groping towards an account of computational (or, rather,
'computer brained') systems that might be able to embody just the sort
of cognitive substrate that could support truly mental
representational processes of the type that Ellis envisages. In these
systems, no symbol or structure in the computer-brain need be taken as
representing any of the things in the world of which we might normally
be conscious, but the systems interact successfully with their worlds
nonetheless. Perhaps that is also how it is with our brains and our
interactions with the world. What these robotic and 'dynamic cognition'
theorists seem to be missing, however, is an account of how our normal,
contentful, conscious experience could fit into such a picture. Ellis'
discussions of imagery and consciousness seem to me to offer at least a
hint towards understanding how this vital theoretical gap might be
filled. Of course, this is all highly speculative on my part, and Ellis
himself might well reject it, but I think it is consistent with the main
thrust of his argument, and it has the advantage of pointing the way
toward the possibility of a new and powerful synthesis between the
computational approach to cognition, which is now so well entrenched,
and the phenomenological tradition that Ellis himself seems to
represent.
The last major chapter of the book (before a brief conclusion that
summarizes and draws together the principal themes) applies the theory
as developed so far to the topics of memory, emotion and symbolization.
Unlike the majority of cognitive scientists, Ellis does not use the
last of these terms to signify merely the way in which arbitrary (or
even 'natural') signs may be used to represent something; rather, for
him, 'symbolization' refers to a process by which an originally inchoate
emotion or desire is rendered fully conscious and brought to greater
definition through its expression in an imaginative representation. I
was somewhat reminded of Collingwood's (1938) account of artistic
creation, although, of course, Ellis is thinking of an everyday, and
purely mental, activity engaged in by even the least artistic among us,
and not just of the creation of concrete works of art.
Likewise, Ellis does not regard memory simply as a matter of storing and
retrieving facts (or even images) concerning the past; rather, it is a
matter of how current behavior (crucially including imaginative and
symbolizing behavior) is to be understood as displaying continuity with
the behavior and the associated symbolizing of the past. In this
chapter, the ideas of Eugene Gendlin, whom Ellis acknowledges in his
preface as a major influence, play a large and explicit role. In
particular, Gendlin's notion of "implicit bodily sense", seems to
underlie both Ellis' understanding of preconscious (pre-symbolized)
inchoate desire and emotion and his account of memory as essentially
bodily and behavioral. I am not familiar with Gendlin's work, but I was
somewhat concerned that Ellis might be making this interesting concept
of "bodily sense" (how expectations and emotions might be implicitly
represented in muscular tensions and the like) carry rather more weight
than it could plausibly bear. Also, just as the account of language and
thought in the earlier chapters relied heavily on "feelings of
confidence", the account of memory here depends on the similarly
bothersome notion of "feelings of recognition". However, I found the
explication given here of the latter sort of "feeling" actually helped
me better to understand what Ellis had had in mind when he invoked the
former. Thus, it somewhat increased my confidence that the "feeling of
confidence" might really be a coherent construct able to sustain the key
theoretical role initially assigned to it.
In conclusion, I ought to point out that Ellis himself does not
explicitly situate his work within the historical context of attitudes
towards imagery, thought, and consciousness that I described at the
beginning of this review. However, I hope that by my so situating it, I
have brought out the considerable potential contribution it may be able
to make to the development of consciousness studies and cognitive
science, showing us a possible escape route from the dead-end view of
cognition as mechanical, unconscious computation with which spurious and
quite ineffable 'qualia' just happen to be somehow associated. Not only
does the book provide a promising new general theoretical direction, but
there are also many points of detail that could be usefully tested,
explored, clarified, and reworked by experimental as well as theoretical
research. Despite my criticisms, I hope it achieves a wide audience and
significant influence.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Ralph Ellis, Kevin Korb, C.B. Martin, and John
Heil for comments and information.
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