Abstract

What kind of experience is reading a novel? They often said that it is seeing images with their minds eye which the verbal descriptions of things, incidents and characters etc. evoke. Such discourse is based on a traditional thought that the meaning of a word is an 'idea' as a kind of picture, i.e. a mental image. We must recognize that here is a compound problem consisting of two different questions. One question is whether the meaning of a word is indeed a mental image, and the other is whether imagination is actual perception in the mind. In terms of the first question, we could rely on Wittgenstein's investigation who says : it is not essential for understanding a sentence to imagine something. Imagining is a different activity from understanding the meaning. In terms of the second question, for the reason that mental images have no horizon, therefore no details nor multi-dimensional aspects as perceptions have, we should distinguish between both. Yet images could at times contribute to understanding sentences in their proper way. The act of reading a novel is not always imagining. But there are some cases where the text urges readers to imagine in order to understand the visual and complex descriptions of characters, places and things. Images can though not always but sometimes contribute to reading