Image and Picture
Two words that overlap in popular conversation: image and picture. You hear them used interchangeably; most of the time, each means the other. But I'm impatient with casual synonyms. In my experience, sloppy speech yields sloppy thinking, and when a word takes on many different meanings, or when two different words gradually come to mean the same thing, ideas get hidden. In this case, conflating "image" with "picture" is actually erasing something important, denying us access to a concept that can help us clarify what we're doing, who we are. Here's a thought (suggested by Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization ): let's use the word "image" when we're talking about the observed properties of light and mind, and "picture" when we talk about the human activity of making those observations physical, concrete. That is, the refractive and reflective properties of light described by Newton, and that Einstein used to measure