Abstract
I examine a range of popular solutions to the puzzle of imaginative resistance. According to each solution in this range, imaginative resistance occurs only when we are asked to imagine something that conflicts with what we believe. I show that imaginative resistance can occur without this sort of conflict, and so that every solution in the range under consideration fails. I end by suggesting a new explanation for imaginative resistance—the Import Solution—which succeeds where the other solutions considered fail.
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Notes
The puzzle seems to arise not just for moral claims: Brian Weatherson shows how imaginative resistance can also arise for aesthetic claims, epistemic evaluations, attributions of mental states, attributions of content, shape predicates, and claims about constitution (Weatherson 2004, pp. 3–6). For simplicity however, in this paper I focus on moral cases.
Walton and others have argued that there are several distinct puzzles that go under the name of ‘the puzzle of imaginative resistance’ (Walton 2006; Weatherson 2004). In this introduction I focus on what Walton calls the ‘fictionality puzzle’—‘the most perplexing of the bunch’ (Walton 2006, p. 140).
This isn’t quite accurate, for it is not simply moral claims that cause imaginative resistance (see footnote 1), but I am putting this point to one side for simplicity.
You may not share my uncertainty here: you may believe that Lucy did do the right thing, or that she didn’t. If so, then you may prefer to think of another example that has the relevant feature for you—i.e. a story containing a moral claim that you do not believe to be either true or false. This should be easy to do, provided that you sometimes feel uncertain about which action in a given situation is morally right.
This modification does not seem to be open to Stock, because of the way that she characterizes conceptual impossibility. Stock suggests that for something to count as conceptually impossible, it must be ‘manifestly incoherent’ (Stock 2005, p. 617). I do not believe the moral judgment made in the Story of Lucy to be incoherent—for I have not ruled out the possibility of its being true. Though the moral judgment might (arguably) turn out on reflection to be incoherent, it certainly is not manifestly incoherent, and I know that. Thus, if I accept Stock’s use of the expression ‘conceptually impossible’, I recognize the moral claim made in the Story of Lucy as not conceptually impossible—and so presumably conceptually possible. Thus on the modified version of the Impossibility Solution—according to which we can imagine only what we recognize as conceptually possible—my imaginative resistance to the Story of Lucy remains unexplained.
The modified version of the Impossibility Solution that I discuss looks more promising given a different view of conceptual impossibility, according to which a claim can be conceptually impossible without being obviously untrue.
In fact, Yablo himself might well reject the claim that the limits he has placed on conceiving would also apply to imagining. For Yablo makes it clear that he is using ‘conceiving’ in a special sense. He writes: ‘far from trying to give the notion’s one true meaning, my aim right now is only to distinguish conceiving in the sense that matters from various other cognitive operations doing business under the same name’ (Yablo 1993, p. 5). Whilst we might normally assume that whatever can be imagined can also be conceived, this does not seem nearly so obvious when conceiving is understood in Yablo’s sense.
I say ‘directly imagine’ rather than just ‘imagine’, because it could be argued that we imagine these claims whenever these claims hold in a world that we imagine. For example, if you imagine a world in which rabbits can talk, then presumably −1 has 3 cubed roots in that world. Effectively, the claim that −1 has 3 cubed roots has been automatically imported into the imagined world. If this counts as imagining that −1 has 3 cubed roots, then of course we can imagine this claim.
In the same way, if we imagine a world in which rabbits can talk, then in the imagined world it is true that murdering innocent children is wrong. It could be argued that this counts as imagining that murdering innocent children is wrong.
I think there is a clear case for a more robust notion of ‘imagining’. For if we are stuck with a notion of ‘imagining’ such that a claim can be imagined simply by imagining a world in which that claim is true, then we would be forced to say that there is no such thing as a claim that we believe to be true but cannot imagine. For a claim that we believe to be true will be automatically imported into many worlds that we can imagine. In this paper I am assuming a more robust notion of ‘imagining’: under this more robust notion, we cannot imagine that −1 has 3 cubed roots, and (I claim) neither can we imagine that a particular general moral principle (whether we believe it to be true or not) holds.
The perspectives that we can adopt in imagination allow us to imagine many things that (given who, where and when we are) we could not really experience. For example, we can imagine Henry VIII having honey on toast for breakfast, perhaps by visualizing him biting into the toast from a nearby vantage point—a vantage point that we can’t actually occupy. We can even imagine an invisible ghost moving through the room—leaving no trace on human perception—by occupying (in imagination) the perspective of the ghost.
Christopher Peacocke (1985) has argued that the experience a person imagines having can fail to individuate the content of her imagining. Peacocke illustrates this with an example: ‘Imagine a suitcase. If you succeeded, now imagine a suitcase with a cat wholly obscured behind it. It seems that the same, subjective image will serve to meet both requests, even though in one sense what is imagined in each case can be different: in the second case, in the imagined world there is a cat behind a suitcase, whereas that may be left open in the imagined world of the first case’ (Peacocke 1985, p. 19).
As mentioned in footnote 1, the puzzle of imaginative resistance seems to arise not just for moral claims, but also for aesthetic claims, and various other sorts of claims. In this paper I have focussed on moral claims, but there is no obvious reason why the Import Solution could not be extended to cover imaginative resistance to other sorts of claims. To explain imaginative resistance relating to aesthetic claims, for example, we would need to claim that general aesthetic principles are unimaginable, and so can only be made true in a fiction by being automatically imported into it. This would explain why an author cannot make it true in her fictional world that something has a particular aesthetic value simply by stating that it has that value. For example, if a character in a fiction recites a terrible poem—or indeed a poem of dubious aesthetic value—and then the author simply states that the poem is beautiful, we experience imaginative resistance.
Again, to see the appeal of this position, we need to consider carefully what it is claimed we cannot imagine. We might well be able to imagine some context in which such a poem would be beautiful—much as we can perhaps imagine a context in which killing baby girls is the right thing to do. And of course we can imagine worlds where people react to the poem in all sorts of different ways. What I claim we cannot imagine is everything being much the same as it actually is, except that the aesthetic principles are different: e.g. the ugly poem being beautiful, with no change in context or in peoples’ reactions. Again, the thought is that bare aesthetic principles are not the sorts of things that we can imagine because there is no perspective from which they can be experienced.
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Mahtani, A. Imaginative resistance without conflict. Philos Stud 158, 415–429 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9678-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9678-x