Imageless thought

The claim that thoughts as such, made of neither words nor images, are present in consciousness. Psychologists at Würzburg in Germany put it forward in the early 1900s, and it set off a long dispute.

In 1907 Karl Bühler asked questions that could not be answered without thinking, to be answered yes or no, and then had the observer describe the experience in full. Asked whether thought can grasp the nature of thought, Oswald Külpe answered yes after six seconds; Hegel's objection to Kant had come to him, he said, but with no words in it and no images^[1].

At Cornell, Edward Titchener opened his 1909 lectures by saying that his own mind was full of images. Even meaning appeared to him as a picture: the blue-grey tip of a kind of scoop digging into a dark mass. Trained observers had given opposite answers on the most basic point, whether a thinking mind contains images^[1].

In 1913 John Watson named the controversy in a footnote. Unless introspection was given up, he predicted, psychology two hundred years on would still be divided, and he called for dropping introspection from psychology^[2].