The second German word appearing on the English version of this Website describes another concept without any usable English word. Several possible translations are already occupied with much more common concepts. This article will present you one concept to connect to the word “Vorstellung”.
Vorstellung is a very important word in philosophy, because it is used by philosophers to make statements like: “All knowledge is only our Vorstellung” or “The world is our Vorstellung”. The most famous was likely Arthur Schopenhauer. What was he trying to tell us? What concept had he in mind, when using the word “Vorstellung”?
Schopenhauers central work “Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung” was translated to English with the title “The World as Will and Representation”. The word “Representation” is not connected with the word “Vorstellung” on Google Translate, no matter what direction you translate. Wiktionary lists as the seventh of nine definitions for “Representation”: “A figure, image or idea that substitutes reality”. This comes close to what we need, but it is not acceptable for this blog to connect a word to a concept that it is rarely used for. This will likely create more confusion than the introduction of the German word “Vorstellung”.
When we take our definition of knowledge and remove the requirement of truth, we get to a concept that is connected to the word “Vorstellung”. So the concept is a conviction or belief that is based on experience, but the correspondence to reality is uncertain or even denied. We have a Vorstellung how an object looks like, how something works or what a law of nature probably looks like, but we do not claim that it matches the reality and thus cannot name it knowledge. The experience can also be the written or spoken word, which we then take as an input to produce a Vorstellung.
It must be mentioned that Vorstellung is commonly used for three more concepts in the German language. The first concept can be translated with the English word “Introduction”. For this concept there is another, less common German word: “Bekanntmachung”. The second concept is a presentation of some sort, and the word “Aufführung” is used instead on this blog. “Show” would be a good translation to English. The third concept could be translated as a mental image. There are two ways of thinking. One with words or, to be precise, with concepts. This is called a thought. And another one with pictures or images. If I describe a painting, your thinking power will create a mental image of the painting. In German I call this a “Gedankenbild”. Check out the next article “Our Language is a Mess” to get a better overview of this.