ANALOG REPRESENTATION BEYOND MENTAL IMAGERY
abstract
Stephen Kosslyn has recently declared the debate on mental imagery to be over, and with it, the debate on the difference between analog and digital forms of mental representation. The object of this paper is to separate these two debates. What has confused the issue has been the failure to distinguish what is here called the "sense" interpretation of the analog from the "model" interpretation. A number of traditional criteria for understanding the analog are first reviewed and criticized; it is argued that each has been too restrictive, and that relational identity (on which the model- interpretation is based) is sufficient to qualify a representation as analog. This would permit non- propositional (analog) mental states to exist in abstract thought (in abstract analogies, for example) without any contribution from sensory (spatial) imagery.