ABSTRACT
T h e p s y c h o l o g ic a l controversy over imageless thinking that occurred in the first ten years of this century was never resolved. This is partly, I have implied, because underlying it was the conceptual problem of whether thinking should be treated as an active (or passive) form of awareness, fairly closely analogous to visual inspection, or whether it was more often a form of activity in which processes akin to moving, grasping, assimila tion and re-ordering predominated over those of a scanning nature. To those committed to the inspectionist view, ‘imageless thinking’ may have seemed nonsense, partly because it was tantamount to inspection of nothing. Those moving, later, towards an action or behavioural approach to thought, did not always avoid the danger of throwing out the recognizing baby with its bath water, leaving a sponge reacting in its place.
