Abstract
George Eliot strikingly describes one of her characters as making a mistake because he has gotten his thoughts “entangled in metaphors,” saying that we all do the same. I argue that Eliot is here giving us more than an illuminating description, but drawing our attention to a distinctive kind of mistake—a form of irrationality, in fact—of which metaphor can be an ineliminable part of the correct explanation. Her fictional case helps illuminate both a neglected function of the imagination, and a pervasive way in which metaphor can affect it. The function is the creation and maintenance of what I call imaginative expectations, which are relatively stable imaginative representations of future events or experiences, analogous to latent memories. These imaginative expectations have a distinctive causal profile and distinct ways of interacting with other mental activities. I argue that their formation is subject to at least two norms—a “source” norm and an “experience” norm—and show how metaphorical framing can give rise to violations of either.
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Notes
Camp (2020) offers an account of metaphor specifically in terms of an activity of the imagination (see e.g. Camp 2009), though she construes imagination quite broadly (“in the synthetic sense identified by Kant, of uniting a manifold of disparate elements into a coherent whole,” p. 29), in order to distinguish it from activities like pretense.
For example, many expectations probably do not derive from specifically future-oriented thinking: some may be mostly derived from memory, while others are based on assumptions about what things are like at present, or on instinctive extrapolations of present experience (e.g. estimating the trajectory of a moving object). Thus, I expect to find milk in the fridge when I open the door, but only because I think that there is milk there now. Other expectations, such as a drive to work, probably involve integrating past experience with information about the present (e.g. the weather) or other expectations about the future. Some of these, but only some, would be “inductive” in the sense related to the classic Humean problem of induction. I only wish to claim here that an important class of expectations, one worth investigating in its own right, has the features I describe below. (All of the types mentioned should also be distinguished from the kinds of norms or standards marked by a different use of ‘expectation’: we expect all students to be on time, but are not surprised when some are late.)
She also seems to describe his disturbance as partly due to his emotional response to images: “Mr. Casaubon did not find his spirits rising; nor did the contemplation of that matrimonial gardenscene, where, as all experience showed, the path was to be bordered with flowers, prove persistently more enchanting to him than the accustomed vaults where he walked taper in hand”(78).
On this problem, see Kind (2013).
By ‘non-discursive’ I only mean that, as they are not beliefs, they also differ from beliefs in their content and structure.
The distinction is also applied to memories, reinforcing the analogy I wish to pursue; for a recent study of the distinction as applied to memory, see McCarroll (2018). The other most prominent type of imagination treated in recent work is the propositional imagination, but just as it seems odd to treat Casaubon as believing that pleasure is like money, it seems unpromising to think of him as imagining that proposition to be true in the way such imagination is typically described.
See Atance and O'Neill (2001) for a presentation; they define it as “an ability to project the self forward in time to pre-experience an event” (537). They do not distinguish between observer and field perspectives in such thinking, but the distinction seems compatible with their view. I do not wish to assume the particulars of this sense of ‘episodic’, nor of their notion of “pre-experiencing,” so will continue to the use the terminology of experiential imagination and imaginative expectation.
These features are not, of course, held to be universal, but they are paradigmatic, and departures from them tend to be rare and only partial. Walton (1990) rightly distinguishes between occurrent and non-occurrent imagination, and between deliberate and spontaneous imagination, noting that the distinction is not a sharp one. However, he treats the notion of non-occurrent imagination as something like the implicit background beliefs, or quasi-beliefs, involved in acts of occurrent imagination (16–18). Similarly, he treats deliberate and spontaneous imagination as substantially the same, differing only as to their locus of control (13–16).
This much is the consensus of recent work; debate has centered around which further features are needed to distinguish hope from other attitudes. Martin (2014) contains further reasons to distinguish hope from expectation (pp. 29–33).
On quasi-desires, see Doggett and Egan (2012), who introduce the notion of an “i-desire,” which “stands to desire as imagining stands to belief” (278). Likewise, they are distinct from the various desiderative and affective states which have received more attention in recent debates about practical irrationality, such as alief, besire, and so on. In general, the states discussed in the self-deception literature aim to explain the way in which the self-deceiver is motivated to represent things a certain way, despite knowing, or also believing, that they are not. I am interested here, by contrast, in ways our imaginative representations go askew by accident, whether or not the resulting states also run contrary to what we believe.
It is not described in Wiltsher (2019), despite his aim of being as broad as possible, nor in other attempts to grapple with the variety of phenomena described as the work of imagination, such as Kind (2013). Church (2016) does describe what she calls “predictive imagining” in a way that seems broadly consistent with what I say here, but her focus is on ways in which such imaginative activity, when occurrent, can infuse perceptual experience. It would fit naturally with much of the view laid out in Langland-Hassan (2015), especially section 3.2, but he does not describe it. There is, as usual, a vivid precedent in Plato, in the description of the two craftsmen in the soul: the scribe, who writes down what we judge to be the case in words, and the painter who follows the scribe, creating images (eikonas) in the soul of what the scribe writes (Philebus 39a-d), which bear particularly on the future. But whereas Plato’s description has the painter follow the scribe, on the proposal below there can be influence both ways, and the imagination may yield expectations autonomously. It also, I think, bears a resemblance to the kind of stable grasp of an essence (eidos) that Husserl thinks eventually results from our imaginative “free variation,” though applied to anticipated events or experiences rather than essences of types. (For an overview, see Jansen 2016, pp. 76–78).
Formal work has obvious reasons to use a bare notion of belief, for example, and much discussion of action makes use a simple belief-desire schema. A good example closer to the present topic is Lazar (1999), who discusses the influence of affect and imagination in self-deception, but under the general rubric of belief (see esp. Sect. 4). Miceli and Castelfranchi (2015) contains substantial discussion of expectation (esp. 31–46), which they treat as a part of a cluster of anticipatory representations, all defined as either beliefs or belief-goal compounds. They are well aware, though, of the importance of imagery and memory in thinking about the future, and note that “future-oriented thinking is in need of further specifications” (130).
As noted above, not all expectations need be states of the imagination, and there are likely substantial inter-relations between what I have described and other sources and types of expectation.
A comparison to Gendler’s (2010b) view about the role of imagination in self-deception may also be in order, since she argues that in cases of self-deception an imaginative pretense can occupy the role typically played by belief, despite the fact that the person does not believe what the pretense represents. In her account, imaginative pretense still appears to be a kind of propositional imagination (“the self‐deceiver imaginatively pretends that a certain proposition is true,” 168), and imagination is treated as an essentially “projective attitude,” in that it is not subject to norms of accuracy, evidence, or rational scrutiny (162). By contrast, I am describing a state which is non-discursive, but still representationally sophisticated, which has what Gendler would call an essentially “reality-sensitive” function, in that it plays a belief-like role as a matter of course, not by accident (and which has the other distinguishing features noted). As noted here, I think it is often, but not always, misleading to characterize such representations as beliefs; nevertheless, they are at least commitments, unlike Gendler’s imaginative pretenses.
For an overview of attempts to taxonimize the imagination, see Kind (2016b).
For a clear instance of this kind of assumption, see Langland-Hassan (2020, § 1.1).
This, in turn, might have further theoretical value, if we were able to develop a more unified picture of the imagination, rather than one that bifurcates rather sharply between sensory and propositional imagination.
Ichino (2019), for example, accepts as part of the standard view that imagination is not subject to norms of reasons or evidence.
The notion of imaginative contagion may also be helpful in this context, insofar as it applies to a way in which imaginative activity may have deviant effects on behavior (see Gendler 2010a), though she applies it to occurrent phenomena in line with standard examples such as pretense and engagement with fiction.
Kind (2016a) elaborates some reasons for thinking that, when we aim to imagine what things will be like under certain circumstances, we are capable of constraining our imaginings by the way things are, and respecting the consequences of making certain changes, such that skepticism about imagination in general is unwarranted. These constraints differentiate epistemically significant from insignificant imaginings (146), performing a function similar to my Experience norm. Her proposal offers a useful contrast with mine, since it presents a different account of norm-governed instructive imagining, and since her main examples are predictive. Though they serve a similar epistemic function, the norms she describes as well as the epistemic significance of the results of our imagining are different from the ones I propose. This is at least in part because her claims are independent of the ones I argue for here. Her discussion relates to deliberate acts of imagination as sources of knowledge or justified belief, whereas I have attempted to describe a non-episodic function of the imagination which is usually non-voluntary, and which does not aim, at least in the first instance, at justified beliefs or knowledge of the future. More significant, perhaps, is the methodological difference I describe immediately below. (I thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this parallel.)
Appropriate norms for such cases include: do not believe contradictions; do believe what sense perception and reliable testimony present unless you have reason to question them; ignore irrelevant features such as the order in which equivalent options are presented; if you judge something to be the overall best thing to do, do it; if you desire to X, and Y is a means to X, do Y, other things being equal. The standards of paradigmatic inductive inference would also be in this category.
I do not wish to endorse one or another account of metaphor here, though I am partial to the one propounded by Black (1954, 1977) and recently developed by Camp (2009, 2020), the broad outlines of which I more or less follow here. I will also continue to assume that experiential imagination is non-discursive, even though it is possible to develop a view according to which sophisticated features of imaginings are the result of their being “hybrid” states with both imagistic and conceptual components. For a view along these lines, see Langland-Hassan (2015).
Black (1977) introduces a notion of metaphorical thought, though he discusses it only briefly, focusing on some examples of deliberately thinking about one type of thing as another, which seem in fact to be examples of conceptually sophisticated imagining (447–448). In a broader and more suggestive context, Black (1962) argues for an essential similarity or continuity between metaphors, theoretical models, and what he calls archetypes (241), though it is not clear whether we ought to treat these cases as matching the key features of metaphor, as opposed to other kinds of framing device.
Some accounts (prominently, Davidson 1978) wish to dispense with the distinction between literal and non-literal meaning, but the overall phenomenon is the same: assertions containing metaphors do not function in the same way “ordinary” cases of assertion do.
He refers to systems of “associated commonplaces,” as well as systems and patterns of implications (287f.). His own metaphor for such systems and patterns, looking at the night sky through smoked glass on which some lines have been left clear, is taken up and elaborated in Camp (2020).
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments and discussions, thanks to John Schwenkler, Joshua Knobe, and especially Elisabeth Camp, as well as two anonymous reviewers for this journal. Work on this project was partly supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH). Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed therein do not necessarily reflect those of the NEH.
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This article belongs to the topical collection "Imagination and its Limits", edited by Amy Kind and Tufan Kiymaz.
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Stein, N. Imagination, expectation, and “thoughts entangled in metaphors”. Synthese 199, 9411–9431 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03208-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03208-2