Abstract
Imagination has been assigned an important explanatory role in a multitude of philosophical contexts. This paper examines four such contexts: mindreading, pretense, our engagement with fiction, and modal epistemology. Close attention to each of these contexts suggests that the mental activity of imagining is considerably more heterogeneous than previously realized. In short, no single mental activity can do all the explanatory work that has been assigned to imagining.
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Notes
In The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle argues that “There is no special Faculty of Imagination” (Ryle 1984, 257) and then proceeds to give what is essentially an eliminativist account of imagining. But Ryle is motivated primarily by behaviorist worries about mental imagery, and this differs significantly from the worry about singularity (expressed in the quotation from O’Shaugnnessy) that is my concern in this paper. It is perhaps worth my noting explicitly that I do believe that there is a distinctive mental activity properly picked out as imagining. However, this comes with two qualifications: First, a commitment to a distinct activity of imagining is different from a commitment to a distinct faculty of imagination. Second, as I will argue in the text, I do not think that the distinct mental activity of imagining can carry all the philosophical weight that has been placed on it.
Related to the role that imagination plays in modal epistemology is the role that it plays in modal psychology. As Shaun Nichols notes, despite the diversity of views offered by modal primitivists, modal realists, modal fictionalists, and modal expressivists, “there is wide agreement about one aspect of modal psychology—that modal judgment depends crucially on the imagination.” (Nichols 2006, 238).
Kendall Walton, for example, claims that dreaming is a particular kind of imagining, one which is spontaneous and not deliberate, out of the conscious control of the imaginer (Walton 1990, 16, 47). Other philosophers who invoke imagination to explain dreaming include Ichikawa 2009 and McGinn 2004. McGinn (2004) also assigns imagination a role in delusion. Alvin Goldman argues that empathy requires us to use imagination in adopting the perspective of someone else (Goldman 1995); see also Goldie 2000, esp. Ch. 7. Timothy Williamson argues that the imagination has a “fallible but vital role in evaluating counterfactual conditionals.” (Williamson 2007) I should also mention that although my example above focuses on our engagement with fiction, the imagination has been invoked to explain our engagement with non-literary art and music as well.
See Yablo 1993 for the distinction between propositional and objectual imagining. I return to this distinction in Sect. 4, below. Nagel 1974 distinguishes sympathetic imagining from perceptual imagining in a footnote; see Hill 1997 for a nice discussion of this distinction. Moran 1994 distinguishes hypothetical from dramatic imagining.
See also Stevenson 2003.
This roughly corresponds with the tenth and twelfth senses of imagination distinguished by Stevenson 2003.
But see White 1990, 147–148.
Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft call this imaginative capacity the creative imagination: “We see it when someone puts together ideas in a way that defies expectation or convention: the kind of imaginative ‘leap’ that leads to the creation of something valuable in art, science, or practical life.” (Currie and Ravenscroft 2002, 9) They explicitly note that we might be creatively imaginative without exercising our imagination, i.e., what they call the recreative imagination (see Sect. 2, below).
Not everyone agrees that we can distinguish a “primary” sense of the vocabulary of imagination. Roger Scruton claims that “there are links of an important kind between the various phenomena grouped under the heading of imagination … [I]n effect, there is only one concept expressed in the use of this term.” (Scruton 1974, 91). And Alan White has argued that any acceptable theory of imagination must be able to account for all common uses of the term in ordinary language (White 1990, 85).
Simulation theory contrasts with what’s called the theory theory of mind. Proponents of the theory theory argue that we possess a tacit body of knowledge—a tacit theory—which underlies our mindreading abilities. See, e.g., Carruthers 1996. How exactly we are to delineate the difference between the theory theory and the simulationist theory has been the matter of some dispute (see, e.g., Davies 1994; Stone and Martin 1996; Carruthers and Smith 1996) and many hybrid theories have also been proposed; see, e.g., Perner 1996. For my purposes here, I can sidestep many of these issues—what’s important for me is not how exactly to distinguish the simulation theory from the theory theory or whether simulation must be accompanied by some theorizing; rather, I’m interested in the simulationists’ invocation of the imagination.
For other simulationist accounts, see Gordon 1986 and Currie 1995. On Gordon’s view, it’s important that when Carole simulates her opponent, she doesn’t first determine what she herself would do in the projected situation and then make an inference to what her opponent would do; rather she imaginatively transforms herself into her opponent. For this reason, he worries about Goldman’s description of simulation in terms of putting oneself in another’s shoes. See, e.g., Gordon 1995.
Insofar as there are any substantive differences between E-imagination and recreative imagination, that will only add to my argument about the heterogeneity of the imagination.
The i-desire terminology comes from Doggett and Andy (2007), although they do not use the corresponding notion of i-belief. Currie sometimes refers to these states as beliefs I and desires I, with the superscript-“I” for imagining (Currie 1997, 67) and sometimes as belief-like and desire-like imaginings (Currie 2002). Alternatively, these states are sometimes referred to as pretend desires and beliefs (Goldman 2006a, 48) and sometimes as off-line desires and beliefs.
Davies also sees simulation theory as making at least this commitment (Davies 1994, 117).
Some simulationists reject what’s known as the off-line simulation theory, that is, they do not like to think of simulation as requiring us to take our action-generating mechanism off-line (see, e.g., Heal 1998). They still agree, however, that the substitute states produced by simulation do not lead to action.
These points can be granted because my argument does not rely on facts about our pre-theoretic understanding of imagination; rather, it relies on facts about imagination gleaned from the four contexts discussed.
To give just a few examples, see, e.g., Doggett and Egan 2007; Chalmers 2002; Gendler 2000; White 1990 and Peacocke 1985. For a particularly well-developed discussion of some differences between supposition and imagination as these notions are used in “ordinary practice,” see Meskin and Weinberg 2006, 193.
Although Descartes is here concerned to distinguish the faculty of imagination from the faculty of pure understanding, his point also seems relevant to the distinction between imagination and supposition.
In fact, the simulationists take it to be a virtue of their treatment of the imagination that they explain our engagement with fiction in terms of a conjunction of belief-like and desire-like imaginings, for they think this account enables them to solve two much-discussed puzzles that arise in this context. The first is what’s become known (following Gendler 2000) as the puzzle of imaginative resistance: Why are our powers of imagination considerably more constrained when it comes to moral falsehoods compared to non-moral falsehoods? For example, we can easily imagine a world in which an alien species inhabits the moon, and we can even imagine that these aliens hold monthly infanticide parties. But when we’re asked to imagine that this practice is morally acceptable—not just believed to be morally acceptable, but actually morally acceptable—we’re stymied; in fact, it’s hard to see how we’d even go about imagining this at all. The second is what’s known as the paradox of fiction: How can we be rational in having emotions about fictional characters that we know do not exist? For example, given that we know there is no such being as Voldemort, how can we rationally be scared by him? I do not have the space here to discuss how the simulationist treatment of the imagination purports to solve these problems, nor to assess whether the proffered solution is adequate. But even if it is, the point I make in the text about heterogeneity will still apply.
See footnote. 4, above.
Peter Carruthers, for example, argues that we can easily explain movie-goers’ inaction without invoking i-desires; we don’t act to stop fictional danger because “real desires will normally lead to real action only when interacting with real beliefs.” (Carruthers 2006, 99) Movie-goers typically do not believe that the events being depicted before them are real. Thus, there is no problem attributing to Dennis the desire that Harry Potter get away safely. The reason that this desire doesn’t lead him to take any action is that he doesn’t believe that there is any real danger; rather, he only imagines the danger.
But see Kind, forthcoming.
This theory of pretense behavior—that it is best explained by the postulation of i-desires—has been defended by some non-simulationists as well, most notably, Tyler Doggett and Andy Egan (Doggett and Egan 2007) and David Velleman (Velleman 2000), though he calls the relevant states “wishes.” Doggett and Egan have also invoked i-desires in the context of our engagement with fiction.
For an alternative, non-simulationist explanation of pretense, see Nichols and Stich (2003), who argue that we can explain pretense behavior in terms of belief-desire pairs. On their view, a pretender typically has (1) the desire to behave similarly to how one would behave were an imagined situation actual; and (2) beliefs about what the relevant behavior would be in an actual situation. (Nichols and Stich 2003, 39) For example, in our example of Pretense, Nichols and Stich would explain Christopher’s action in terms of his desire to pretend to be Obi-Wan Kenobi and his various beliefs about how Obi-Wan Kenobi would act in a light saber battle with Darth Vader.
For related discussion, see Funkhouser and Spaulding (2009).
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Acknowledgments
Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2010 meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the Conference on Imagination and Imaginings at the University of Tübingen, and the Mind and Perception Workshop series at Rice University. I’m grateful to the audiences there for their insightful comments. Thanks also to my colleagues in the Claremont Colleges Works-in-Progress group for helpful discussion and feedback, and especially to Peter Kung and Peter Ross. The paper has greatly benefitted from the astute comments of an anonymous referee for Erkenntnis; the feedback helped me to better understand my own argument. Finally, I’m indebted as always to Frank Menetrez for his support throughout this project.
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Kind, A. The Heterogeneity of the Imagination. Erkenn 78, 141–159 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9313-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9313-z