Thinking is Perceiving

November 3rd, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Cognition, Hearing, Imagination, Metaphor, Perception |

The contents of thought are not abstract, impressionless concepts, but are perceptions of various kinds. To test this one might simply try to imagine something; an idea, an object, etc and observe the impression it forms in the mind. One cannot imagine the concept chair without imagining a chair, or a sequence of chairs. These impressions are not always, or necessarily, visual; thinking on the concept of music will undoubtedly produce an auditory impression, sugar will entail the impression of a taste, and heat will most likely involve a tactile perception (quite possibly in addition to visual and other components; the sun, a fire, a hotplate; perception is, after all, usually a multimedia presentation). This perceptual nature of thought is also in evidence when we imagine concepts which have no literal or concrete analogue in physical embodied experience. Concepts such as justice, love, and truth, as well as speech components such as in (when used in phrases such as in trouble), or high (as in high performance or high anxiety) are abstract and do not apparently make direct appeal to the senses of perception. In such cases, even though we may not be consciously aware of it, our minds are conceiving of these abstractions through the imaginary perception of metaphors which stand in for these abstract concepts. So our ability to think about justice is due to our ability to form imaginary perception of the various metaphors which represent justice; visual images of scales and balances perhaps, or harmonic sounds, or perhaps other, more ideosyncratic sensory-based perceptions.