How tight is the conceptual connection between imagination and perception? A number of philosophers, from the early moderns to present-day predictive processing theorists, tie the knot as tightly as they can, claiming that states of the imagination, i.e. mental imagery, are a proper subset of perceptual experience. This paper labels such a view ‘perceptualism’ about the imagination and supplies new arguments against it. The arguments are based on high-level perceptual content and, distinctly, cognitive penetration. The paper also defuses a recent, influential argument for perceptualism based on the ‘discovery’ that visual perception and mental imagery share a significant neural substrate: circuitry in V1, the brain’s primary visual cortex. Current neuropsychology is shown to be equivocal at best on this matter. While experiments conducted on healthy, neurotypical subjects indicate substantial neural overlap, there is extensive clinical evidence of dissociations between imagery and perception in the brain, most notably in the case of aphantasia.

想象力和知觉之间的概念联系有多紧密？从早期的现代派到当今的预测处理理论家，许多哲学家都尽其所能地打结，声称想象力的状态（即心理意象）是感知经验的适当子集。本文标记了这种关于想象力的“知觉”观点，并提供了反对它的新论据。这些论点是基于高级的感知内容，以及明显的认知渗透。该论文还驳斥了一种基于“发现”的，对感性论最近有影响的论点，即视觉知觉和心理意象共享一个重要的神经基质：V1中的电路，即大脑的主要视觉皮层。目前的神经心理学在这件事上充其量是模棱两可的。