Abstract
This essay argues that there are theoretical benefits to keeping distinct—more pervasively than the literature has done so far—the psychological states of imagining that p versus believing that in-the-story p, when it comes to cognition of fiction and other forms of narrative. Positing both in the minds of a story’s audience helps explain the full range of reactions characteristic of story consumption. This distinction also has interesting conceptual and explanatory dimensions that haven’t been carefully observed, and the two mental state types make distinct contributions to generating emotional responses to stories. Finally, the differences between the mental states illuminate how a given story can be both shared with others and at the same time experienced as personal.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Walton (1978, 1990) famously denies that the emotions one experiences in response to fictional works are genuine emotions; rather they, as mental states, constitute props on the basis of which one is prescribed to imagine having the genuine emotions. I needn’t for purposes of this essay, however, take a stand on the correctness of Walton’s particular position on this matter, since it is obvious that in consuming fictions one often feels something. I will just call that something “emotion,” while leaving it open that Walton (at the end of the day) may or may not be right about its ontology.
I don’t undertake to argue here against other cognitive architectures that might be presented as a solution to this puzzle. Since I’m the first (as far as I know) to explore this puzzle, the main work here lies in my developing my own solution to it. I do suspect, however, that any good architectural solution to it will have structural features that resemble the distinction I work through here.
I use “fictional” in a general way throughout. I don’t use it in the technical sense developed by Walton (1990) and others, according to which “it is fictional that p” means it is true-in-a-certain-work-of-fiction that p. That is a fine usage, but mine is broader (mine encompasses the technical use but isn’t limited to it). When I say “humans process some contents as fictional,” I mean we mentally deal with those contents in a more or less playful way that doesn’t involve (though it also doesn’t exclude the possibility of) believing they describe reality.
A terminological note on “believe” and “belief.” In my writings on religious cognitive attitudes (2014a, 2017), I use terms of art to distinguish religious credence from factual belief, since in the context of that discussion, the word “belief” (or cognates) by itself would run those two very different mental states together. Here, however, I see no such risk, so I just use “believe” and “belief” as most philosophers of mind and epistemologists do, which corresponds fairly well to the phrases “factually believe” and “factual belief” in those other works on religious psychology; it is the same basic attitude to which I’m referring using slightly different terminologies. In any case, the terminology I use here corresponds exactly to my terminology in other works that are more explicitly on imagining (2009, 2011, 2013, 2014b).
As indicated, this distinction is not new to me, but many of the ways I develop it here are new. Currie and Ravenscroft (2002: 8), for example, make the distinction, but they don’t go on to develop it as I do.
Some externalists about content, like Taylor (2000), say that mental (and other representations) that deploy fictional (or “empty”) names don’t actually have propositional content, even if they are sentential in representational structure. I don’t hold this view, so I still refer to story contents as propositions. But note that the main psychological points of this essay could be translated into terms that Taylor would find germane. That is, differences in attitude type (belief versus imagining) toward story contents whatever those are, along with the presence of the in-the-story operator, will still make differences in downstream processing of the sort I discuss here.
I am, of course, thinking of this great passage from the Enquiry, Section V, Part II: “Wherein, therefore, consists the difference between such a fiction and belief? It lies not merely in any peculiar idea, which is annexed to such a conception as commands our assent, and which is wanting to every known fiction. For as the mind has authority over all its ideas, it could voluntarily annex this particular idea to any fiction, and consequently be able to believe whatever it pleases; contrary to what we find by daily experience.” I take the work in Sect. 3 of this paper to address Hume’s puzzle, which I also address more directly in (2014b).
Cuarón’s (1998) adaptation.
Several thinkers, myself included, have argued that mental imagery can be incorporated into larger representational structures that have propositional contents. Hence, it can make sense to talk of imagining that such-and-such is the case also when some of the constituents of the representation are imagistic. See Kaplan (1968), my (2013), Langland-Hassan (2015).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for this suggestion.
See the passage quoted in footnote 8. I am thinking specifically of this sentence: “It lies not merely in any peculiar idea, which is annexed to such a conception as commands our assent, and which is wanting to every known fiction.”
As an anonymous referee has pointed out, the notation “Ba <s−i> <s−i′> p” (along with the corresponding mental state) does not involve an iteration of the exact same operator, since the index is different. A similar point can obtain for “Ia Ia′p” and the mental state it represents, if a and a′ are different. One might therefore object to calling this “iteration.” I note, however, that both Nichols (2003) and Hayaki (2009)—among others—use iteration in this non-strict way for repetition of like but not identical components of pretense/imaginative states (broadly construed), so I follow their usage and trust that my notation makes it clear what I’m talking about more precisely.
There is one wrinkle worth noting here, though it doesn’t make a difference to anything I say. I pointed out above that in “Ia p” the “Ia” refers to a manner of processing and not to a thought constituent. However, that point applies without qualification only to the outermost attitude operator in iterated expressions. For example, in “Ia Ia′ p”, the second imagining operator (for a′) in fact does describe a thought constituent of the mental state of a (though not of a′), since a is taking an imaginative attitude toward a representation of the form a′ imagines that p. Thus, what the operator in the formal notation refers to is not exactly the same in each case. I do not see any problem with this, though it may strike one as peculiar. The issue is, in any case, endemic to epistemic logics that use attitude operators and embed them, and it seems endemic to attitude reports in natural languages as well. I thank an anonymous referee for calling this to my attention.
Note that the contents of imaginings can still be true or false. But imagining something false is not normatively incorrect in the way that believing something false is.
To see how source of evidence about a story and source of correctness about a story come apart, consider an unreliable narrator, such as the self-deceived butler in Remains of the Day.
Inconsistent fictions of course challenge such constraints. But here I characterize the general pattern, the challenging of which is precisely what makes inconsistent fictions interesting.
See Sinhababu (2013) for discussion of this point.
I should note that the conceptual differences discussed in this section hold up even if, following Walton (1990), we choose to analyze the in-the-story operator in terms of prescriptions to imagine in the context of a game of make-believe. This is because the relevant belief [believing that there is a prescription to imagine that p in the context of a certain game] is not identical with the relevant imagining [imagining that p]. Accordingly, all five conceptual points here can be translated into Walton’s framework in fairly straightforward ways, though they do not imply that framework. In other words, the conceptual points made here should be adopted, regardless of whether or not one is a Waltonian. To put this another way, epistemic norms that obtain for beliefs about what one is prescribed to imagine do not automatically apply to those imaginings, since violating the prescription and violating the epistemic norms are two different things: I could violate the make-believe prescriptions all day long without thereby violating the norm of true belief (I can still believe truly that there are such prescriptions).
See Predelli (2008) for an even more elaborate set of distinctions concerning the fictional operator.
Hypothesizing is different from imagining in the sense under discussion, since hypothesizing aims at the eventual formation of belief, whereas imagining in the sense identified so far does not (I am not trying to figure out whether Magwitch had a De Niro face; I just imagine it). One could, of course, use “imagining” as a more general term that encompasses both the attitude of hypothesis and the attitude of imagining in a fictional/playful way, but then one would just need other terms to mark the differences between those two things. In any case, using “imagining” that way is not the terminology I’ve chosen. Rather, I call the larger category “non-belief cognitive attitudes” and use “hypothesis” and “imagining” for two distinct mental phenomena within this larger category.
Some claim that they don’t have rich imaginings as they read along with novels. But that doesn’t change the present point, which about the difference in explanatory value between belief and imagining. Imaginings explain mental states of the people who do represent further embellishments in ways that beliefs don’t. Furthermore, there is reason to suspect that people who deny it might be imagining more than they realize. The psychologist Adam Zeman (email communication) has discovered that people with aphantasia (inability to have mental imagery) can lose their interest in novels without losing interest in movies. A good explanation for this is that some low-grade imagining goes on for just about everyone who likes reading stories, even if they don’t always have good metacognition of this fact, and once that goes away the text loses interest.
Ichikawa (2009) argues that sleeping dreams are imaginings. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m certain that daydreams are.
Compare: if I believe <s−i> I own a spaceship, I take there to be some independent story i in which I have a spaceship; that belief is incorrect if it’s not the case that I own a spaceship in the world of story i. But daydreaming I own a spaceship involves no such commitment to an independent story world when it comes to the truth of the contents of the daydream. Now, contents of a daydream can be true or false. Most daydream contents are probably false. But having false contents doesn’t make the daydream itself, or any component of it, incorrect in the way that it makes a belief incorrect.
Taylor (1999) points out that imaginary friends can be based on pre-existing fictional characters.
At what point has one stopped imagining embellishments to the same story and just started creating a new story? Answering this question requires solving the dishwasher problem, which I raise in the Appendix. The dishwasher problem is difficult and wide open. But it is at least progress that we can pose it clearly.
Peter Langland-Hassan has independently put forward similar arguments on the scholarly blog about imagination called The Junkyard. See his “Choosing Your Own Adventure?”: https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2019/10/18/choosing-your-own-adventure.
I doubt Doggett or Egan would disagree with most of the points I make about belief and emotion. Rather, I suspect they just didn’t think of deploying the distinction I make in a way that is relevant to explaining emotional responses to fiction. So I take myself to be correcting an oversight (which is also common in the literature), rather than saying something with which they would disagree.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this bonus argument.
We can also come at this from a different angle. Suppose you happen to guess the outcome of a story in advance of getting there. Going through the story in this case will still be more suspenseful than if you had had a spoiler that just tells you the outcome. And the reason for this is that spoiler-induced beliefs about what will happen kill suspense, fear, excitement, etc. much more than guesses do. So it is important to view spoilers as inducing beliefs. So insofar as spoilers make an emotional difference to the story experience, they do so by way of beliefs about the story. So a belief that in-the-story p can make a difference to emotional experience of a story that imagining that p or guessing that in-the-story p just wouldn’t make; the latter two states aren’t spoiling (or aren’t so to nearly the same extent).
References
Bratman, M. (1992). Practical reasoning and acceptance in a context. Mind, 101(401), 1–15.
Cuarón, A. (1998). Great expectations [flim]. USA: Twentieth Century Fox.
Currie, G. (2014). Standing in the last ditch: On the communicative intentions of fiction makers. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 72(4), 351–363.
Currie, G. & Ravenscroft, I. (2002). Recreative minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dickens, C. (2001/1861). Great expectations. New York: Dover Publications.
Dickens, C. (2002/1840–1841). The old curiosity shop. New York: Penguin.
Doggett, T., & Egan, A. (2012). How we feel about terrible, non-existent Mafiosi. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 84(2), 277–306.
Dostoyevsky, F. (2002/1880). The brothers Karamazov (R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky, Trans.). New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Doyle, A. C. (2001/1901-1902) The hound of the Baskervilles. New York: Penguin.
Fitzgerald, F. S. (2004/1925). The great gatsby. New York: Scribner.
Flynn, G. (2012). Gone girl. New York: Crown Publishing Group.
Friend, S. (2008). Imagining fact and Fiction. In K. Stock & K. Thomson-Jones (Eds.), New waves in aesthetics (pp. 150–169). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gendler, T. S. (2000). The puzzle of imaginative resistance. Journal of Philosophy, 97(2), 55–81.
Hayaki, R. (2009). Fictions within fictions. Philosophical Studies, 146(3), 379–398.
Hume, D. (1777/1993). An enquiry concerning human understanding. In E. Steinberg (ed.), Seven masterpieces of philosophy. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.
Ichikawa, J. (2009). Dreaming and imagination. Mind and Language, 24(1), 103–121.
Ishiguro, K. (1989). The remains of the day. London: Faber and Faber.
Kaplan, D. (1968). Quantifying In. Synthese, 19, 178–214.
Langland-Hassan, P. (2015). Imaginative attitudes. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 90(3), 664–686.
Leslie, A. (1987). Pretense and representation: The origins of ‘theory of mind’. Psychological Review, 94(4), 412–426.
Lewis, D. K. (1978). Truth in fiction. American Philosophical Quarterly, 15(1), 37–46.
Matravers, D. (2010). Why we should give up on the imagination. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 34(1), 190–199.
Matravers, D. (2014). Fiction and narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Meskin, A., & Weinberg, J. (2003). Emotions, fiction, and cognitive architecture. British Journal of Aesthetics, 43(1), 18–34.
Miyazono, K., & Liao, S. (2016). The cognitive architecture of imaginative resistance. In A. Kind (Ed.), The routledge handbook of philosophy of imagination. New York, NY: Routledge Press.
Nichols, S. (2003). Imagination and the puzzles of iteration. Analysis, 63(3), 182–187.
Nichols, S. (2004). Imagining and believing: The promise of a single code. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62(2), 129–139.
Nichols, S. (2006). Why imagining doesn’t behave like believing. Mind and Language, 21, 459–474.
Pickett, R. (2004). Sideways. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
Predelli, S. (2008). Modal monsters and talk about fiction. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 37(3), 277–297.
Rowling, J. K. (1997). Harry Potter and the philosopher’s stone. London: Bloomsbury.
Schroeder, T. & Matheson, C. (2006). Imagination and emotion. In S. Nichols (ed.), The architecture of imagination (pp. 19–40). New York: Oxford University Press.
Sinhababu, N. (2013). Distinguishing belief and imagination. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 94(2), 152–156.
Skolnick, D., & Bloom, P. (2006). What does Batman think about Spongebob? Children’s understanding of the fantasy/fantasy distinction. Cognition, 101(1), B9–B18.
Spaulding, S. (2015). Imagination, desire, and rationality. Journal of Philosophy, 112(9), 457–476.
Stock, K. (2017). Only imagine: Fiction, interpretation, and imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, M. (1999). Imaginary companions and the children who create them. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, K. (2000). Emptiness without compromise: A referentialist semantics for empty names. In A. Everett & T. Hofweber (Eds.), Empty names, fiction, and the puzzles of non-existence (pp. 17–36). Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Thucydides (c. 404 BCE/1954) History of the peloponnesian war, tr. Rex Warner, Penguin Classics.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (2012/1954) The fellowship of the ring. Boston: Mariner.
Van Leeuwen, N. (2009). The motivational role of belief. Philosophical Papers, 38(2), 219–246.
Van Leeuwen, N. (2011). Imagination is where the action is. Journal of Philosophy, 108(2), 55–77.
Van Leeuwen, N. (2013). The meanings of ‘imagine’ part I: Constructive imagination. Philosophy Compass, 8(3), 220–230.
Van Leeuwen, N. (2014a). Religious credence is not factual belief. Cognition, 133(3), 698–715.
Van Leeuwen, N. (2014b). The meanings of ‘imagine’ part II: Attitude and action. Philosophy Compass, 9(11), 791–802.
Van Leeuwen, N. (2016). The imaginative agent. In A. Kind & P. Kung (Eds.), Knowledge through imagination (pp. 85–109). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Leeuwen, N. (2017). Do religious ‘beliefs’ respond to evidence. Philosophical Explorations, 20(Issue sup1: False But Useful Beliefs), 52–72.
Walton, K. (1978). Fearing fictions. Journal of Philosophy, 75(1), 5–27.
Walton, K. (1990). Mimesis as make-believe: on the foundations of the representational arts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Weatherson, B. (2004). Morality, fiction, and possibility. Philosophers’ Imprint, 4(3), 1–27.
Weisberg, D. S. (2013). Distinguishing imagination from reality. In M. Taylor (Ed.), The oxford handbook of the development of imagination (pp. 75–93). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Weisberg, D. S., & Goodstein, J. (2009). What belongs in a fictional world? Journal of Cognition and Culture, 9, 69–78.
Weisberg, D. S., Sobel, D. M., Goodstein, J., & Bloom, P. (2013). Young children are reality-prone when thinking about stories. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 13(3–4), 383–407.
Acknowledgements
For discussion and feedback on the earliest draft of this paper, I’d like to thank Stacie Friend, Tamar Gendler, Grace Helton, Amy Kind, Josh Landy, Shen-yi Liao, Derek Matravers, Paul Noordhof, Andrea Scarantino, Shannon Spaulding, Kathleen Stock, Kendall Walton, and Deena Skolnick Weisberg. At the invitation of Bence Nanay, I also circulated a draft for discussion at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp, and I thank all participants in that discussion. I presented a slightly later draft at the Imagining Fictional Worlds workshop at the University of Konstanz in the summer of 2016, so I thank Magdalena Balcerak Jackson and Julia Langkau for inviting me and the other attendees for their feedback. Finally, I thank one anonymous referee of Philosophical Studies for pushing me to make numerous improvements, and I most heartily thank Aaron Meskin and Bence Nanay for giving me advice on how to rework the paper in light of that referee’s comments. (Extensive work on this project was completed with the support of a Horizon 2020 Marie Skłowdowska-Curie Fellowship from the European Commission [call identifier: H2020-MSCA-IF-2014; contract number: 659912].)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Appendix: Three open research questions for philosophers of imagination
Appendix: Three open research questions for philosophers of imagination
One additional virtue a theoretical perspective can have is that it opens up further interesting questions for inquiry, beyond those that had to be addressed in arguing for it. A solid theory gives resources not just for answering some questions but also for asking others more clearly or even at all. So as further advertisement for the theoretical views in this paper, I offer here three questions that they open up.
First, does imaginative resistance, whatever that turns out to be, concern resistance to having (or inability to have) certain Ia p states, Ba <s−i> p states, or both? The literature on imaginative resistance generally talks in terms of what people can’t or won’t “imagine” and, for the most part, doesn’t distinctly ask what might be going on with beliefs about the stories that induce resistance. And Gendler, as we saw, uses “make-believing” in a way that conflates things. But it is at least a reasonable hypothesis that the resistance-inducing stories affect beliefs about stories and imaginings differently. It is an open question whether this hypothesis is true.
Now to be fair, some parties in the literature, e.g., Miyazono and Liao (2016), do draw the relevant distinction between resistance on the part of imagining and resistance on the part of belief. Characterizing the “Fictionality puzzle” they write: “Why does the reader have difficulty accepting that it is fictional, or true in the story world, that Giselda [who in the story killed her baby because it was a girl] did the right thing?” I take it that by “accepting” they mean something close to believing, and they differentiate this puzzle from the “Imaginative puzzle,” which is about why one has difficulty imagining such things. But it is fair to say that it is not common in the literature to draw the relevant psychological distinctions so clearly, and the few authors that do have not fully answered the question. So it is open. Note also that their Fictionality puzzle, as Miyazono and Liao describe it, is different from Weatherson’s (2004) “alethic puzzle,” which he describes like this: “The first puzzle, the alethic puzzle, is why authorial authority breaks down in cases like Death on the Freeway. Why can’t the author just make sentences like the last sentence in Death true in the story by saying they are true?” (Weatherson’s bold text). This is a puzzle about metaphysical limits on what authors can make fictionally true, whereas as the Fictionality puzzle is a puzzle about the psychological limits on what story consumers can believe/accept—one puzzle is metaphysical and the other psychological. Perhaps the alethic puzzle and the Fictionality puzzle at the end of the day stand and fall together. But we cannot just assume this, so I hope the work of this essay makes it possible to address the Fictionality puzzle with greater clarity.
Second, do we get Separability in the other direction? We saw that it is perfectly normal, for a given p, for one to have Ia p while consuming a story without also having Ba <s−i> p. But is it also normal or even possible, for a given p, for one while consuming a story to have Ba <s−i> p without Ia p? That is, can one believe that something is true in a story without also imagining it? Potential examples include cognition of stories, like in the poem “Jabberwocky,” in which many of the words, like “brillig,” are remembered but not understood. So perhaps we can believe that in-the-story it was brillig without imagining this. But—to put it mildly—many other issues must be sorted out before such a conclusion can be reached. So this is another open question.
Third, a question comes up that has been labeled in one circle (people who read earlier drafts of this essay) “the dishwasher problem.” When I wash the dishes, I imagine many things (places, conversations, etc.). And these imaginings have nothing to do with my dishwashing. So when I cognize a story and form beliefs about what happens in it, why is it the case that various imaginings I have as I’m doing this count as being at all linked to the story? Why isn’t it the case that my imaginings, especially the unprescribed-yet-appropriate ones, are as irrelevant to the story cognition as my imaginings during dishwashing are to the dishwashing? What is it that binds my imaginings to the story? Having done some preliminary work on this issue, I can say it is not as easy as it at first seems (and note also the echo here of Wittgenstein’s example of imagining King’s College on fire: how do you know it’s King’s College you’re imagining?). So this is another open question.
The dishwasher problem also arises in the background of the daydreaming, fan fiction, and play acting explananda discussed earlier. Presumably, when one takes enough liberties, what one is daydreaming, writing fan fiction about, or play acting is altogether a different story from the one that initiated the fantasy. So there is a psychological question here and a metaphysical question. The psychological one is: what psychological structures bind my imaginings (in imaginative elaborations of a story) to beliefs about the initial story? The metaphysical one is: what makes distinct representations all representations of the same story? The dishwasher problem is the psychological question; if it can be answered, that might go some way to answering the metaphysical question as well.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Van Leeuwen, N. Imagining stories: attitudes and operators. Philos Stud 178, 639–664 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01449-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01449-4