Thank you to everyone who has responded to my request for intuitions on the  
concept of visual imagining.  I look forward to reading everyone's comments  
in detail, but as I am in a bit of a rush now I'll just throw out a few  
remarks concerning the view offered by Gregory Currie.  Perhaps, this will  
help clear up the motives behind my request and better enable people to  
identify their intuitions.

I'll have to rush home and renew my acquaintance with _Image and Mind_ but  
as far as I remember, Currie attacks all versions of the Imagined Observer  
Hypothesis, i.e., the theory that the film experience involves a viewer  
imagining that he or she is seeing the fictional events depicted on screen  
(i.e., she imagines that she sees Indiana Jones running from a boulder).  To  
be unfairly brief, Currie argues that the Imagined Observer Hypothesis fails  
because it would make all of film going experiences highly disconcerting and  
incoherent, because we would find ourselves having to make believe that we  
move around a lot (i.e., whenever their is a change in shot or when the  
camera moves) and that elements in the story that were supposed to be private  
or secret (e.g., unseen murders) are witnessed after all (by us).

Now it is clear that we do not normally think about such things while we are  
watching movies.  So one thing we might try to do is take the observer out  
of the act of seeing, so that the story now becomes "Okay so I imagine that  
what I am seeing is Indiana Jones running from a boulder, but I do not  
imagine that I am doing any seeing (or that anyone else is really)".  Now,  
Currie blocks this move by claiming that what makes vision vision simply is  
the fact that information about the location of certain objects is being  
conveyed to an observer.  Therefore, you simply cannot take the observer out  
of vision.

This is why Currie turns to the notion of impersonal imaginings, as far as I  
remember.  Instead of imagining that we are watching the film's fictional  
events, what we do as viewers is use the film images to figure out what the  
filmmaker wanted us to believe is true in the story.  In other words, we come  
out with a set of propositions (e.g., Spielberg wants me to imagine that  
Indiana Jones ran from a boulder.)  We then go ahead and imagine these  
propositions by "mentally simulating" the beliefs of a person who believed  
that the propositions that make up the story are true.

Of course, this means that the main imaginative event of movie going is only  
indirectly connected to the images on the screen.  It is also not clear how  
we could say that this impersonal imagining is in anyway visual, assuming  
that it simply involves a list of propostions capturing the truths in a  
story.  So, I guess this is all just a long way of responding to Warren  
Buckland's suggestion that "visual imaginings" as I described it could be the  
same as Currie's impersonal imaginings.  I say yes it could, if you can show  
me how running propositions through a mental simulator is visual in any  
sense.  (You might say, for example, that some of the propositions are of the  
form "Indiana Jones looked just like that," but then we could ask if that  
"that" can sometimes refer to a mental image of some sort and this brings our  
debate right back to the beginning, i.e., to my question:

> Should we perhaps coin another term such as "visual
> imaginings" that can refer the imagination of the physical appearance of
> something without any reference at all to an observer? Would such an act of
> imagination be possible?

Thanks again for your responses,

Karen Bardsley

P.S.  Perhaps this debate is in danger of becoming a rehashing of "the old  
tree falling in a forest with noone to hear it" issue.


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