Abstract
Imagination and belief are obviously different. Imagining that you have won the lottery is not quite the same as believing that you have won. But what is the difference? According to a standard view in the contemporary debate, they differ in two key functional respects. First, with respect to the cognitive inputs to which they respond: imaginings do not respond to real-world evidence as beliefs do. Second, with respect to the behavioural outputs that they produce: imaginings do not motivate us to act as beliefs do. I argue that this view is mistaken in one important respect. The distinction between imagination and belief does lie at the functional level; but the relevant functional difference does not concern behavioural outputs – since, in spite of appearances, imaginings and beliefs motivate us to act (and react) in the same ways. To see the difference, we need to focus on the inputs side – and, relatedly, on the sorts of inferential relations that imaginings and beliefs bear to each other. I show that this view does not have the absurd consequences that it may prima facie seem to have; on the contrary, it has important implications for our understanding of how the mind works.
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Notes
The characterization of belief’s motivating power with which I am working here, as I shall discuss at length in §2, is in terms of a dispositional connection via desire to action. My talk in terms of ‘motivating beliefs’ (and ‘motivating imaginings’), therefore, should not suggest that I take beliefs (and imaginings) to be motivational in themselves; but should rather be understood as referring to the cognitive part of a motivational cognition-conation pair.
An interestingly diverging view is defended by Langland-Hassan (2012), who questions the very idea that imagination and belief are distinguished at the functional level.
The lack of evidence-sensitivity and coherent integration may not be the only reason to question belief ascriptions here. Another reason that has been pointed out is that the actions performed in these cases are somewhat sui generis: for instance, superstitious or delusional subjects often behave in ways different from those in which we would expect them to behave if they had a wholehearted doxastic commitment towards their superstitions/delusions (cf. Currie and Jureidini 2004; Egan 2008). I will take up this point in §3.2 below, showing how my view can explain these peculiar action tendencies.
Here I am thinking of two main sorts of alternative explanations: doxastic explanations in terms of belief, and non-doxastic explanations in terms of ‘novel’ (i.e. not folk-psychological) mental categories. According to doxastic explanations, the cases I introduced – far from being cases of ‘belief-behaviour mismatch’, as I called them – reveal something important on the nature of belief itself: they require us to drop (or radically loosen up) the idea that sensitivity to evidence, reasons, and coherence constraints are necessary doxastic conditions, favouring instead ‘purely motivational’ accounts, according to which what crucially matters for belief is the capacity to motivate actions (and reactions) in relevant ways (see e.g. Schwitzgebel 2002; Bayne and Pacherie 2005). However, undercutting the necessary connection between belief and evidence is undesirable. Although we should not set the bar too high – i.e. we should not posit perfect evidence-sensitivity as a necessary doxastic condition, most authors agree that at least some relevant degree of such sensitivity is necessary for a state to count as belief. And, while an open question remains about what precisely the relevant degree of evidence-sensitivity is, many also agree that the ‘mismatch cases’ here in question include cognitive states that fall short of it – which is why they seem better described in non-doxastic terms. Of course, non-doxastic terms are not necessarily imaginative terms. At least some of those ‘mismatch cases’ might require us to introduce novel sui generis mental categories – like ‘aliefs’ (Gendler 2008), ‘bimaginings’ (Egan 2008), or other such states. But ontological parsimony suggests caution here. Whilst granting that the heterogenous territory of belief-behaviour mismatches might include cases that require non-folk-psychological explanations, I think this is true mostly at ‘lower’ sensory levels; whilst the cases I am interested in do not seem to be cases of this sort. In the cases I mentioned, indeed, the cognitive sates that motivate action jointly with desires are higher-level propositional attitudes that match the functional profile of paradigmatic imaginings with respect to (lack of) sensitivity to evidence and inferential integration, and seem therefore more economically explained in terms of directly motivating imaginings. For an extensive defence of my arguments against doxastic explanations (with a focus on cases of superstitious actions), see Ichino (2018). For an extensive defence of my arguments against non-folk-psychological explanations (with a focus on alief-based explanations) see Currie and Ichino (2012).
As it turns out, the argument that I am about to present is especially relevant to those who defend imagination-based accounts for at least some sorts of actions, since it points out an important consequence that follows from such accounts – a consequence that their advocates should be ready to accept. Those who are not yet persuaded about the existence of imagination-driven actions, on the other hand, can read the argument as the defence of a conditional claim about a consequence that would follow if such actions indeed existed, leaving the question about the truth of the antecedent open to further investigation.
For the sake of simplicity, I will focus on cases of daydream. It won’t be hard to see how my arguments apply to cases of engagement with fiction, as well as to other paradigmatic cases of non-motivating imaginings (as I will briefly show in footnote 17 below).
In the scenario just sketched, they do that jointly; but note that even just one of them might be enough.
The psychological literature on (clinical and non-clinical) confabulation may provide many real examples of this sort, where subjects with mistaken meta-beliefs about their own beliefs fail to act upon their first-order beliefs in a number of ways (see Carruthers 2009: §3 for discussion and references).
Note that the suggestion here is not that a meta-desire of this sort is always necessary in order for imaginings to motivate action; but simply that a meta-desire of this sort may explain why imaginings motivate action even in the presence of inhibiting factors that would otherwise undermine their motivational force.
In fact, here it is worth noting that the meta-belief that one is imagining p is not the same as, nor necessarily involves, the meta-belief that one does not really believe p – which is what my metacognition condition requires. For the sake of the present discussion, I shall allow my opponents to treat these two meta-beliefs as interchangeable; but I wish to highlight that in fact they are not, and that this is a further way in which the objection that I am addressing might be undermined.
Remember that the phenomena in question (i.e. superstitions, expressive behaviours, self-deception, etc.…) are very pervasive in our lives, so each of them potentially provides many instances of imaginings of the relevant sorts – that is, of imaginings not accompanied by relevant meta-beliefs.
Here note that it is generally accepted that many of our first-order beliefs are accompanied by relevant meta-beliefs about them. Why, then, being a priori sceptical on the existence of meta-beliefs about our own first-order imaginings?
Like when, being alone in my kitchen as I make bread, I talk to my grandmother’s picture on the wall and I show her that I’m shaping the dough as she taught me to do. I do that out of my daydream that she is still sitting there watching me; and the more I get immersed in the daydream, neglecting its purely imaginative nature, the more I may be moved to act and react accordingly. See Velleman (2000): 263–265 for other examples of this sort.
On the indeterminacy of imaginative contents (as opposed to belief’s contents), see Gendler (2003): 149–152.
Importantly, the ‘if’ here should not be intended in the sense of a material conditional: indeed, the satisfaction of one of the two disjuncts (1), (2) is not in itself sufficient to guarantee the behavioural manifestation of a belief/imagining, since – as we have seen – other independent excusing conditions may intervene to block it.
So, for instance, a competent spectator of Psycho, typically: (1) believes that she does not really believe that a murder has taken place; (2) desires not to act upon her imagining that a murder has taken place; and (3) does not form imaginings about how to act in order to satisfy her story-related desires (e.g. imaginings like: [In order to prevent that killer from killing other people, I should call the police]). This is enough to explain why she doesn’t call the police (cf. Matravers (2010) for a more extensive discussion of this sort of cases). Meta-cognitive factors are also likely to be what explains lack of behavioural manifestation of many imaginings occurring in modal thinking – such as counterfactual reasoning or thought-experiments. When we engage in that sort of thinking, indeed, we are typically well aware (hence, we believe) that the scenarios we consider are merely imagined, and – precisely for that reason – we are also likely to desire not to act upon them.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful discussions of the ideas in this paper, I am grateful to audiences at Philosophy of Mind and Language Seminars at the University of Milan, the 2017 SSPP Conference in Savannah (GA), the Queen’s College Philosophy of Mind Colloquium at the University of Cambridge, the 3rd International Conference on Natural Cognition at the University of Macau, the Belief, Imagination, and Delusion Conference at the University of Birmingham, and the Belief and Imagination in Fiction Conference at the University of Turin. I also owe special thanks to Tim Bayne, Greg Currie, Dimitria Gatzia, Alex Geddes, Aaron Meskin, Bence Nanay, Stefano Predelli, Lu Teng, and an anonymous referee of this journal, for their really helpful feedback on previous drafts of this paper.
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Ichino, A. Imagination and Belief in Action. Philosophia 47, 1517–1534 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00067-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00067-7