Imaginability as Representability: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Aphantasia
Christian Oliver Scholz

Abstract:
Aphantasia, i.e., the inability to voluntarily form visual mental images, affects approximately 2 to 5 percent of the population and plays an important role in a more general debate revolving around the role of imagery for our cognition. This thesis investigates aphantasia by means of an interdisciplinary approach, combining insights from contemporary neuroscientific research with historical philosophical arguments, with a specific focus on the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. A new theoretical concept, meta-imagination, is developed and it is argued that the concept can explain why aphantasics perform successfully on a wide range of visual imagery tasks, thus providing important implications for the more general debate about the connection between imagery and cognition.