If it is usable.
The phrase "inner picture" is correct and usable in written English. It is often used in a figurative sense, to describe a mental image someone has of something, especially an emotional one. For example, "She had a vivid inner picture of her future wedding day."
Of course, Pylyshyn was far from the first person to raise objections to the idea of inner pictures, or to criticize the standard interpretations of imagery experiments.
By contrast, in his Mental Images – A Defence, Hannay (1971) vigorously championed the reality of inner pictures (see also Hannay, 1973, and for a counterargument see Candlish, 1975).
The fact that the subjects and the experimenter may share similar assumptions about the causes of quasi-visual experience (the "folk theory" of images as inner pictures), so that both interpret the experiment in terms of operations on inner pictures in an inner space, is not evidence that those assumptions are correct.
There is some evidence that when people know relatively little about the theoretical issues and empirical evidence concerning imagery there is a correlation between their inclination to believe in inner pictures and the (introspectively reported) vividness of their imagery (i.e., people with more vivid imagery are more likely to believe in inner pictures).
Whatever Locke's true intentions may have been, many of his leading successors and critics, such as Berkeley and Reid, seem to have understood him as believing that ideas are inner representational entities, and, when visual, are like inner pictures.
This introspectively based argument against description theory, weak though it is, is often prelude to the even stronger claim that the phenomenology of imagery directly supports the view that mental images are inner pictures.
The analog/propositional debate concerns the nature of imagery itself (to put it very crudely, the analog side thinks mental images are inner pictures, and the propositional side think they are inner descriptions), whereas the dual/common coding debate concerns the functional role played by imagery in the cognitive processes of memory and thought.
Some modern scholars, it should be noted, have questioned the translation of "phantasma" as "image," in part because Aristotle does not always seem to think of phantasmata as inner pictures, and also because he seems to think of them as playing a role in perception itself (Nussbaum, 1978; Schofield, 1978; Birondo, 2001).
