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Edward
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<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/imagination/>.
Imagination
First published Mon Mar 14, 2011
To imagine something is to form a particular sort of mental representation of that thing.
Imagining is typically distinguished from mental states such as perceiving, remembering
and believing in that imagining S does not require (that the subject consider) S to be or have
been the case, whereas the contrasting states do. It is distinguished from mental states such
as desiring or anticipating in that imagining S does not require that the subject wish or
expect S to be the case, whereas the contrasting states do. It is also sometimes distinguished
from mental states such as conceiving and supposing, on the grounds that imagining S
requires some sort of quasi-sensory or positive representation of S, whereas the contrasting
states do not.
Contemporary philosophical discussions of the imagination have been primarily focused on
three sets of topics. Work in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology has
explored a cluster of issues concerning the phenomenology and cognitive architecture of
imagination, examining the ways that imagination differs from and resembles other mental
states both phenomenologically and functionally, and investigating the roles that
imagination may play in the understanding of self and others, and in the representation of
past, future and counterfactual scenarios. Work in aesthetics has focused on issues related to
imaginative engagement with fictional characters and events, identifying and offering
resolutions to a number of (apparent) paradoxes. And work in modal epistemology has
focused on the extent to which imaginabilityand its cousin conceivabilitycan serve as
guides to possibility.
Because of the breadth of the topic, this entry focuses exclusively on contemporary
discussions of imagination in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. (For an overview
of historical discussions of imagination, see the sections on pre-twentieth century and early
twentieth century accounts of mental imagery in the corresponding Stanford Encyclopedia
entry; for a more detailed and comprehensive historical survey, see Brann 1991. For a
sophisticated and wide-ranging discussion of imagination in the phenomenological
tradition, see Casey 2000.)
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When a subject imagines X-ing, she simulatively represents to herself some sort of activity
or experience. So, for example, Ophelia might imagine seeing Hamlet or getting herself to
a nunnery. To imagine in this sense is to stand in a first-personal mental relation to some
(imaginary or real) behavior or perception.
A final way of thinking about imagination treats imagined as a decoupling or facsimile
or counterpart operator (cf. Leslie 1987; Goldman 2000; Budd 1989) that can, in
principle, be attached to any (mental) state. So, for example, one might speak of imagined
perception (or perception-like imagining), imagined belief (or belief-like imagining),
imagined desire (or desire-like imagining), imagined action (or action-like imagining), and
so on. On this sort of account, a taxonomy of imaginative attitudes would share whatever
shape governs experience more generally.
No particular taxonomy has gained general currency in recent discussions.
thoughts about the ways in which sensory and cognitive imagination may be related, see
McGinn 2004, chapters 12 and 13; cf. also Kind 2001; for discussion of potential relations
between perceptual imagination and objectual imagination, see Chalmers 2002, 150151;
Yablo 1993.)
A detailed discussion of the topic of mental imagery and its attendant debates can be found
in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on mental imagery.
structure. (A possible exception is guided imagination of the sort generated by stories and
works of art; for discussion of these issues, see section 5.1 below.)
This distinction is sometimes expressed by saying that whereas believing some content
involves taking the content to be true in the actual world, imagining that content involves
taking that content to be true-in-fiction, or make-believe-true, or pretend-true. (Discussion
of the relation between truth simpliciter and truth-in-fiction goes beyond the scope of this
entry. For further discussion of some of these issues, see the Stanford Encyclopedia entries
on truth and fictionalism and Zalta 1992.)
On the basis of these sorts of considerations, a number of theorists have proposed cognitive
models on which belief and imagination (or pretense) involve distinct but structurallysimilar psychological mechanisms that act on similar sorts of representational content. The
most prominent of these is Nichols and Stich's (2000, 2003) cognitive theory of pretense,
according to which belief and imagination are psychological attitudes that operate on
propositional content stored in different mental boxesa Belief Box in the case of
beliefs, and a Possible World Box in the case of imaginingseach governed by
characteristic set of rules that regulate its relation to behavior and to other mental states.
For general discussions of the relation between imagination and belief, see Currie and
Ravenscroft 2002; Nichols and Stich 2000; Walton 1990; and Velleman 2000 as well as
essays collected in Lopes and Kieren eds. 2003 and Nichols ed. 2006.
Antony, that leads me to take actions such as embracing you. Relatedly, on such accounts,
just as I may imagine that Romeo and Juliet both die (and thus imagine something about
them in a belief-like way), I may also want them to go on living (and thus imagine
something about them in a desire-like way.)
Objections to such accounts contend that the notion of desire-like imagination (or i-desire)
is unnecessary to explain the phenomena for which it is intended to account. On such
views, rather than desiring-in-imagination that Romeo and Juliet live, what I desire(-inactuality) is that in the fiction Romeo and Juliet live.
For further discussion of desire-in-imagination/i-desire, see (defenders) Currie 1990, ch.5;
Currie 2002; Currie and Ravenscroft 2002; Doggett and Egan 2007; Velleman 2000;
(dissenters) Carruthers 2003; Nichols and Stich 2000, 2003; Funkhouser and Spaulding
2009
For additional discussion of the relation between supposition and vivid imagination, see
Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, Doggett and Egan 2007, Gendler 2000, Moran 1994, Nichols
2006, Weinberg & Meskin 2006.
Domhoff (2003) and Hobson (1988, 2002). For a review of recent empirical work on the
nature of daydreaming, see Klinger 2009.
Currie 2002; Gendler 2003; Harris 2000; Harris and Kavanaugh 1993; Leslie 1994; Lewis
1983b; Nichols and Stich 2000. Related issues are discussed below in section 3.3 below.)
Quarantining, is manifest to the extent that events within the imagined or pretended
episode are taken to have effects only within a relevantly circumscribed domain. So, for
example, the child engaging in the make-believe tea party does not expect that spilling
(imaginary) tea will result in the table really being wet, nor does a person who imagines
winning the lottery expect that when she visits the ATM, her bank account will contain a
million dollars. More generally, quarantining is manifest to the extent that proto-beliefs and
proto-attitudes concerning the imagined state of affairs are not treated as beliefs and
attitudes relevant to guiding action in the actual world. (The failure to quarantine imaginary
attitudes in certain contexts is often taken to be a mark of mental illness; see section 6.3
below.)
Some (Nichols and Stich 2000, 2003; cf. Leslie 1987) have suggest that mirroring and
quarantining fall out naturally from the architecture of the imagination: mirroring is a
consequence of the ways in which imagination and belief share a single code and
quarantining is a consequence of the way in which imagination takes place off-line
(Nichols 2004; 2006.)
A number of philosophers have proposed explanations for how imagining might give rise to
emotional and behavioral responses typically associated with belief, despite the imaginer's
explicit avowal that she does not take the imagined content to be real.
One recent explanation of this phenomenon makes appeal to what Tamar Gendler has
dubbed alief. (Gendler, 2008a, 2008b; see also Dennett and McKay 2009) To have an alief
isroughlyto have an innate or habitual propensity for a real or apparent stimulus to
automatically activate a particular affective and behavioral repertoire, where the behavioral
propensities to which an alief gives rise may be in tension with those that arise from one's
beliefs. So, for example, while a subject may believe that drinking out of a sterile bedpan is
completely safe, she may nonetheless show hesitation and disgust at the prospect of doing
so because the bedpan renders occurrent an alief with the content filthy object, disgusting,
stay away. Since aliefs, by their nature, are source-indifferent, imagined content may give
rise to alief-driven reactions. As a result, the notion of alief may explain how content that
we explicitly recognize to be purely imaginary may nonetheless produce powerful
emotional and cognitive responses. (Gendler 2008a, 2008b; see also section 5.3 below.)
Andy Egan (2001) explains similar phenomena in terms of what he calls bimagination, a
mental state that has some of the distinctive features of belief and some of imagination:
bimagination is both action-guiding (and hence belief-like) and inferentially highly
circumscribed (and hence imagination-like.) On Egan's view, this distinctive mental state
can be invoked to explain a number of cases that other philosophers have described as
involving imagined content that gives rise to belief-typical responses (particularly
delusions, see section 6.3 below.)
Further discussion of related issues can be found in Perner, Baker, and Hutton 1994;
Schwitzgebel 2001; and Zimmerman 2007. Additional discussion of contagion in the
context of fictional emotions can be found in section 5.3 below.
Renaissance theories of emotions and on 17th and 18th century theories of emotions; for an
overview of some recent work in this domain, see Gendler 2008b.)
These issues have been explored extensively in work in sports psychology, where
researchers have demonstrated the efficacy of mental imagery practice in domains ranging
from table tennis and golf to kayaking and dart throwing. (For references to studies of the
efficacy of mental imagery in more than forty sports, see Kosslyn and Moulton 2009, 38.)
Mental imagery also plays a central role in a number of therapeutic practices, including
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (cf. Beck 1993; Ellis 2001.) For further discussion, see the
Stanford Encyclopedia segment on the mental imagery revival.
version of this account (which, for reasons discussed below, no one holds), whatever can be
conceived is possible (sometimes called the C-P thesis) and whatever is possible can be
conceived (sometimes called the P-C thesis).,
Possibility in this context is generally understood as metaphysical possibility, where a
proposition is metaphysically possible iff it describes some way things might have been.
(Cf. Gendler & Hawthorne 2002; Fine 2002). Conceivability here is generally taken in a
broad sense, where conceiving is something like the capacity that enables us to represent
scenarios to ourselves using words or concepts or sensory images, scenarios that purport to
involve actual or non-actual things in actual or non-actual configurations (Gendler &
Hawthorne 2002, 1; for an overview of some of the distinctions that this characterization
brushes over, see Yablo 1993).
Given these clarifications, it is clear that the P-C thesis is a non-starter, at least without
heavy idealization: the range of metaphysical possibilities certainly outruns the range of
propositions that we ordinary humans can represent to ourselves. But versions of the C-P
thesis, according to which the fact that we can represent P to ourselves provides
(probabilifying or decisive) evidence in favor of P's metaphysical possibility, have played a
central role in a number of traditional and contemporary discussions, particularly in the
context of mind-body dualism (for details, see relevant sections in the SEP entries on
zombies and dualism.)
Descartes famously offered one such modal argument in the Sixth Meditation (CSM II, 54),
reasoning from the fact that he could clearly and distinctly conceive of his mind and body
as distinct to the real distinctness between them. Contemporary advocates of related
argumentsdetails of which can be found in relevant sections in the SEP entries on
zombies and dualisminclude Saul Kripke (1972/80), W.D. Hart (1988), and David
Chalmers (1996, 2002). One form of such argument takes as a premise something implying
or implied by the following:
Zombie-conceivability: It is conceivable that there could be an exact physical duplicate of
me who lacked consciousness.
And, relying on some suitably strong C-P-style principle, concludes from this that:
Zombie-possibility: It is possible that there could be an exact physical duplicate of me who
lacked consciousness.
Both defenders and critics of such modal arguments have suggested that appeal to the
notion of imaginingas distinct from mere conceivingmay play a role in such
arguments' soundness.
On the defenders' side, David Chalmers has argued that even those who hold that there are
propositions that are not epistemically accessible on the basis of a complete qualitative
description of the world should still accept that what he calls ideal primary positive
conceivability entails what he calls primary possibility. Primary (as opposed to
secondary) possibility concerns the question of whether there is some world W that makes
P true when W is considered as actual. (For a discussion of the relation between this notion
and the notion of metaphysical possibility, see Chalmers 2002.) Ideal (as opposed to mere
prima facie) conceivability concerns the question of whether P is conceivable on ideal
rational reflection. And positive (as opposed to negative) conceivability concerns the
question of whether P is imaginable: to positively conceive of a situation is to in some
sense imagine a specific configuration of objects and properties (Chalmers 2002).
According to Chalmers, then, a certain sort of C-P thesis holds for states of affairs that are
conceivable on reflection in the positive sensethat is, for states of affairs that are, on
reflection, imaginable. (For discussion, see Byrne 2007; Levin 2008; Stoljar 2007;
Stalnaker 2002; Yablo 2002.)
On the critical side, Christopher Hill (Hill 1997; Hill & McLaughlin 1999), following a
suggestion of Thomas Nagel (Nagel 1974, footnote 11), has argued that if we distinguish
properly between sympathetic imaginingwherein one imagines oneself undergoing a
certain experienceand perceptual imaginingwherein one imagines oneself perceiving a
certain event or state of affairs, then Descartes/Kripke/Chalmers-style modal arguments
fail. He contends that in the Zombie argument, the exact physical duplicate is imagined in
one way, whereas the lacking consciousness is imagined in another: the conceiving that
goes on with respect to the relevant physical features involves perceptual imagination,
whereas the conceiving that goes on with respect to the relevant phenomenal features
involves sympathetic imagination. As a result, the relation between the physical and
phenomenal features will appear contingent even if it is necessary, because of the
independence of the disparate types of imagination (Nagel 1974, footnote 11). So the
argument cannot get off the ground. (Chalmers' response can be found in Chalmers 1999.)
For a comprehensive discussion of the major philosophical positions concerning the
relations among imagination, conceivability and possibility, see the entry on the
epistemology of modality; for related discussion, see relevant sections in the entries on
zombies and dualism. A detailed introduction to the issues in question can be found in
Gendler & Hawthorne 2002b or Evnine 2008; recent papers on this topic can be found at
PhilPapers Conceivability, Imagination and Possibility. See especially Byrne 2007 and
Stoljar 2007.
When we engage with a fiction, by watching a play or reading a book or viewing a work of
visual art or playing a game of make-believe, we take certain things to be fictional, or true
in that fiction. One way to understand this is to explain what is fictional in terms of what
we imagine or are directed or supposed or intended to imagine.
Influential accounts by Kendall Walton (1990) and Gregory Currie (1990), for instance,
contend that there is an intimate connection between imagination and fictionality. On
Walton's view, what is fictional is what is to be imagined given the conventions
governing the game of make-believe or the world of the story. If you and I are putting on a
production of Twelfth Night and we decide that I'll play Viola and you'll play Sebastian,
then we will have established a convention by which what I say and do is what, in the
fiction, Viola says and does, and what you say and do is what Sebastian says and does. On
Walton's account, this will be the case regardless of whether the members of our audience
do in fact imagine that what I'm saying is what Viola says; what is important is that it is
prescribed, by the conventions of our production, to be imagined that what I say is what
Viola says.
On Currie's account, which is similar to Walton's, what is fictional is defined as that which
the author (or actor, or creator) intends the audience to make-believe or imagine. Related
discussion in the context of literature can be found in Lamarque and Olson (1996).
The intimate relationship between imagination and fictionality is illustrated by the puzzle of
imaginative resistance (see Section 5.2). When we resist imagining something, we also tend
to resist accepting it as fictional. And conversely, what we imagine is often (particularly in
the context of art and games of make-believe) what we take to be fictional.
For related considerations in the context of film, see the entry on film. For empirical work
in this area, see the writings of Ed Tan passim (under Other Internet Resources).
has argued that resistance puzzles arise not only for normative concepts (including thick
and thin moral concepts, aesthetic judgments, and epistemic evaluations), but also for
attributions of mental states, attributions of content, and claims involving constitution or
ontological status.
As Kendall Walton (2006) notes, the questions addressed under the rubric of imaginative
resistance turn out to be a tangled nest of importantly distinct but easily confused puzzles.
Indeed, it has been argued (Weatherson 2004) that there are at least four such puzzles: those
of aesthetic value, phenomenology, fictionality, and imaginability.
In its most general form, the aesthetic value puzzle is the puzzle of why texts that evoke
imaginative resistance are often aesthetically compromised thereby; this puzzle is typically
discussed specifically in the context of morality. (See, for example, Bermdez & Gardner
2003, Gaut 2003, Walton 2006.) The phenomenological puzzle is the puzzle of why
passages that evoke resistance tend to involve a particular phenomenology, described by
Gendler as doubling of the narrator or pop-out (Gendler 2000, 2006). The fictionality
puzzle is the puzzle of why, in certain cases, the default position of authorial authority
appears to break down, so that mere authorial say-so is insufficient to make it the case that
something is true in a story. And the imaginability puzzle is the puzzle of why, in certain
cases, readers display a reluctance or inability to engage in some mandated act of
imagining, so that typical invitations to make-believe are insufficient to bring about the
requisite response on the part of the reader.
The bulk of philosophical discussion has been devotedoften without distinguishing
between themto the puzzles of fictionality and imaginability, with accounts of the
phenomena falling into two main categories.
The first groupsometimes called can't theories (Gendler 2006)trace the puzzles to
features of the fictional world: they maintain that readers are unable to follow the author's
lead because of some problem with the world the author has tried to describe.
Simple can't theories often embrace some sort of impossibility hypothesis, suggesting that
propositions that evoke imaginative resistance are impossible in the context of the stories
where they appear, and that this explains why readers fail to imagine them as true in the
fiction. (For discussion and criticism, see Gendler 2000; Stock 2005; Walton 1994.) Brian
Weatherson (2004) offers a more sophisticated version of a can't theory, suggesting that
resistance puzzles arise in the face of a certain type of impossibility: they arise in cases
where the lower-level facts of the story and the higher-level claims of the author exhibit a
particular kind of incoherence. (See also Yablo 2002.)
The second groupsometimes called won't theoriestrace the puzzles to features of the
actual world: they maintain that readers are unwilling to follow the author's lead because
doing so might lead them to look at the (actual) world in a way that they prefer to avoid
(Gendler 2000, 2006). Advocates of such views tend to stress the distinctive role of
imagination in imaginative resistance, focusing on ways that imagination may implicate the
subject's actual beliefs and desires. (For discussions see Currie 2002; Doggett & Egan
2007; Matravers 2003; Nichols 2006; Stokes 2006.)
Views in the second subgroup maintain that when we engage with fiction, our emotional
responses are directed not towards the characters or events within the imaginary context,
but rather towards appropriate real-world surrogates for or counterparts of those characters
and events. So, for example, we don't feel sadness for Romeo and Juliet, but rather for
people in the actual world who have led relevantly similar lives. (Cf. Charlton 1984)
A second family of response rejects the Belief Condition (b), denying that the situations and
characters to which subjects have emotional responses are situations and characters that
they believe to be fictional or merely imaginary. Advocates of such confusionist or
illusionist or belief-suspension views maintain that when we engage emotionally with
fictional characters and situations, we temporarily cease to represent them as imaginary,
instead representing them (as the result of some confusion, or an illusion, or a suspension
of disbelief) to be real and mind-independent. Such views have few adherents among
contemporary philosophers (a possible historical advocate is Coleridge 1817) and are
generally discussed only to be subsequently dismissed (cf. Currie 1990; Radford 1975;
Walton 1978; for partial exception in the case of dreaming, see McGinn 2004).
The most popular family to responses rejects the Coordination Condition (c), allowing that
it is possible or permissible to have emotional responses towards a character (or situation)
that one believes to be purely fictional or merely imaginary.
Such non-coordination theories take a number of different forms. Advocates of so-called
thought theories argue that it is false to think that, in general, our emotional responses are
directed only towards things that we take to be real. Versions of this sort of theory have
been advanced by, among others, Nol Carroll (1990), Susan Feagin (1996), Peter
Lamarque (1981; 1996), and Richard Moran (1994); objections to the thought theory are
explored in Walton 1990. A recent version of this sort of account makes appeal to the notion
of alief (Gendler 2008a, 2008b, see section 3.3 above), according to which emotional
responses to fictional characters are the result of cognitive mechanisms that are indifferent
between content that is represented as real or as merely imaginary.
A second family of anti-coordination views rejects (c) on empirical grounds. Gendler and
Kovakovich 2005, following Harris 2000 suggest that work done by cognitive
neuroscientists (Damasio 1997, 1999) has shown that emotional engagement with imagined
scenarios is integral to human practical reasoning. Potential decisions are tested out in the
imagination, and are accepted or rejected partly on the basis of emotional reactions to
imagined outcomes. Thus, it is argued, if we could not have genuine emotional responses to
imagined scenariosand by extension fully developed fictionwe would not be able to
engage in practical reasoning. (Related views are explored in Weinberg and Meskin 2006;
Currie 1997.)
Finally, according to irrationalist accounts, although subjects tacitly endorse all three of
(a), (b) and (c) as normative constraints, as a descriptive matter, they violate (c): they have
genuine emotional reactions to fictional characters and events that they believe to be purely
imaginary, while (tacitly) holding that they should have genuine emotional reactions only to
characters and events that they believe to be real. These reactions are thus irrational. (cf.
Radford 1975).
Influential anthologies on the fictional paradoxes include Bermdez & Gardner, eds. 2003;
Hjort & Laver, eds. 1997; Kieran & Lopes, eds. 2003; Nichols, ed. 2006; collections of
essays include Currie 2004; Levinson 1998. Book-length treatments include Carroll 1990;
Currie 1990, 1995a; Feagin 1996; Robinson 2005; Scruton 1974; Walton 1990; see also
Brann 1991. Discussion in this section is indebted to the thorough review found in Neill
2005, as well as in Levinson 1997 and Schneider 2006.
experience outweighs the cost of the negative emotional experience. (Cf. Aristotle's
Poetics; Carroll 1990.) Closely related are rich experience explanations, according to
which art that is ultimately painful may nevertheless be valuable because of the richness of
experience that it provides (Smuts 2007).
A view that can be understood either as an anti-avoidance view or an anti-negative emotion
view is the control theory explanation (Morreall 1985.) Advocates of such views argue
what explains our relative desire to engage with fictional tragedies is that we have more
control over our experience of fictionswe can get up and leave any time we wantthan
we do over real life. (For criticism, see Yanal 1999.)
For a comprehensive recent overview of responses to the paradox of tragedy, see Smuts
2009.
maintains that the pretence box account provides a general solution to the puzzle of
preserved iteration. To imagine about imaginings is to have a representation in one's
pretence box that attributes imagining (Nichols 2003).
The Puzzle of Collapsed Iteration
The puzzle of collapsed iteration is the puzzle of how it is possible for pretending to
pretend to collapse into merely pretending.
Consider The Taming of the Shrew which, for almost the entirety of the main plot, is
framed as a performance for a drunkard. Here, audiences will typically watch the play, not
as a play within a play, but as having one level of pretense, and those playing Bianca and
Katherina will (typically) be pretending to be Bianca and Katherina, not pretending to be
actors pretending to be Bianca and Katherina.
Greg Currie (1995c) who raises the puzzle, suggests that collapsed iteration may result
from limitations in our cognitive resources; on his account, imagining imagining requires a
simulation of a simulationa capacity that human beings may simply lack. Nichols (2003)
counters that such an account makes it difficult to explain how, in some cases (as above),
iteration is preserved. Instead, he suggests, in some cases of imagining we relocate
ourselves into the position of another person, imagining what they imagine (resulting in
collapsed iteration), while in others, we do not engage in such relocation (resulting in
preserved iteration.)
The puzzle of collapsed iteration provides a useful foil for thinking about the relation
between imagination and belief. While in imagining that you imagine something I might
end up thereby imagining what you imagine, I will not come to believe what you believe
simply by coming to believe that you believe it. (Cf. Currie 1995c, 161)
conceive them existing out of the minds of all spirits. (First Dialogue between Hylas and
Philonous)
The notion of conception assumed here seems tied closely to mental imagery: it appears
that what Hylas sets out to do is to visually imagine an unperceived tree; in so doing, he
constructs a visual image of a tree, thereby rendering it conceived. A number of
philosophers, including Bernard Williams (1973), have dismissed the argument as
incapable of achieving its stated goal on the grounds that it fails to distinguish between
conceiving of something and visually imagining it. John Campbell points out that one can,
for example, describe in writing an unseen tree (Campbell 2002, 128; contra Williams,
Campbell argues that there is something importantly correct in Berkeley's challenge with
respect to conceivability).
According to Williams, the more interesting challenge raised by Berkeley's puzzle concerns
whether one can visualize the unseen. It might seem that, almost trivially, one cannot
visualize an unseen object, in virtue of the apparent fact that to visualize, say, a tree is to
think of oneself as seeing a tree, and I can hardly think of myself as seeing a tree that is
unseen. Against this view Williams argues that even if to visualize a tree is to think of
myself as seeing a tree, nevertheless I need not include my seeing in what is visualized. In
cinema and theater, it need not be true in the fiction that the camera or audience sees what
the scene contains, so too, Williams argues, even though I can visualize my seeing a tree
such that my seeing is part of what is visualized, I can also visualize a tree without doing
so, and therefore can visualize an unseen tree (Williams 1973).
Against Williams' arguments, Christopher Peacocke has defended the view that one cannot
visually imagine the unperceived, on the grounds that the content of what one imagines
may contain more than what is depicted in the image (Peacocke 1985). To make this point
Peacocke introduces the notion of S-imagination, with the S standing for supposition
(25). S-imagined content is supposed to account for the difference between visually
imagining, say, a briefcase, and visually imagining a cat that is wholly obscured by a
briefcase; though they share imagistic content, they differ in S-imagined content. Peacocke
acknowledges that in visually imagining a tree it may not be part of what is visualized that
it is being seen, but, he argues, that the tree is seen will inescapably be part of what is Simagined. (Note that Peacocke's use of the term S-imagine differs from Goldman's notion
of the same name (see Section 2.4 above.))
For additional discussions of Berkeley's puzzle, see Walton 1990, 2379; cf. also Szab
2005. Further discussion of Berkeley's master argument and its role in his philosophical
program can be found in the entry on Berkeley (sect. 2.2.1).
special bedtime pillow. (Instances of unconscious symbolic representation may occur much
earliersee Piaget 1945/1962, 96 and chapters 6 and 7.) By 18 months, many children
show signs of tracking rather elaborate games of pretense initiated by othersfor instance,
being able to identify which of two dolls that have been washed by an adult experimenter
is still wet and engaging in the requisite drying activity (Walker-Andrews and KahanaKelman 1997). By 22 months, these skills become quite widespread (Harris 2000, chapter
2; Harris and Kavanaugh 1993), and by 2428 months, most children are able to participate
fully in such gamesfor example, pouring tea for a stuffed cow from an empty plastic
teapot, feeding a toy pig some cereal from an empty bowl, giving a toy monkey a banana
when there are no (real) bananas in sight, and so on (Harris 1994; Harris 2000, chapter 2;
Walker-Andrews and Kahana-Kelman 1997).
Around this same age (2428 months), children show themselves readily able to generalize
on the basis of others's pretend stipulationsif they are told, for instance, that a particular
yellow block represents a banana and a particular red block represents a cookie, they
require no further prompting to engage in a pretense where yellow blocks in general
represent bananas, and red blocks in general represent cookies (Harris 2000, chapter 2
reporting Harris & Kavanaugh 1993; Walton 1990). They show themselves readily able to
suspend such stipulations as soon as a new episode of pretense beginsthe bricks that
represent bananas or sandwiches in one game can without difficulty come to represent bars
of soap or pillows in the next game. (Skolnick and Bloom 2006a, 2006b) They show
themselves ready to credit imaginary objects with causal powers much like those of their
real-world analoguesif Teddy eats one of the (wooden brick) bananas, he will no longer
be hungry; if he is bathed in a (cardboard-box) bathtub, he will emerge wet (Harris 2000).
And they are ready to describe situations from the perspective of the imaginary world
when asked to express what happened after (literally) an experimenter holds a stuffed
animal in such a way that the animal's paws grip an empty plastic teapot and hold the teapot
above the head of some other stuffed animal, children are happy to report the event as:
Teddy poured tea on Monkey's head or Monkey's all wethe's got tea on his head (cf.
Harris 2000).
During the year that follows, most children develop the capacity to engage in complex
coordinated games of joint pretense with others (Perner et al 1994, 264). And well before
the age of four, they have figured out how to keep track of different individuals
simultaneously engaging in different games of pretenserecognizing, for instance, that if
you pretend the pebbles are pears and I pretend the pebbles are cherries, you will be baking
a pear cake while I bake a cherry cake (Perner at al 1994, 264).
These capacities are accompanied by a parallel conscious capacity to keep track of what is
pretend, and what is not. Even children as young as 15 months show few signs of what
Alan Leslie has termed representational abuse, that is, there is little indication that the
child comes overtly to believe that actual-world objects have or will come to have features
of the pretend objects that they serve to represent (Leslie 1987). By the age of 3, children
are able to articulate explicitly a number of the differences between real and pretend
noting, for instance, that a child with a real dog will be able to see and pet the dog, whereas
a child with a pretend dog will not (Estes, Wellman and Wooley 1989; Harris 2000,
chapters 2 and 4; Wellman and Estes 1986; see also Bouldin and Pratt 2001 and references
therein).
In recent years, there has been intense debate among psychologists concerning exactly what
this capacity for pretense amounts to, in light of the fact that children of this age are (a)
generally incapable of solving standard (Smarties-box) false-belief tasks (though see
Onishi and Baillargeon 2005); (b) fairly limited in their capacity to distinguish apparent
from real identity in the case of visually deceptive objects; and (c) generally willing to
attribute the behavior pretending to be an X to an individual unaware of the existence of
Xs. For further discussion, see Harris 2000, chapter 3 and the papers collected in Goswami
ed. 2002; Lewis and Mitchell ed. 1994; Mitchell ed. 2003.
behavior; (3) the role of imagination in enabling empathy and perspective taking; and (4)
the role of imagination in counterfactual reasoning, and in planning for the future.
Regarding the first (the relation between imagination and memory), a sizable literature has
been devoted to the phenomenon of imagination inflation (Garry et al. 1996; Goff and
Roediger 1998), whereby imagining an event can cause a subject to remember having
experienced it. (For a more general discussion of intrusion errors of this kind, see Loftus
1979 and Fiedler et al. 1996). An overview of recent discussions of this topic can be found
in Bernstein et al 2009.
Regarding the second (the role of imagination in the mental simulation of action and
behavior), work by Jean Decety (Decety and Stevens 2009), Marc Jeannerod (Jeannerod
2006, 1997), and others suggests that simulated or imagined action activates the same
cortical structures that are responsible for motor execution (Markman et al. 2009, viii).
The implications of this overlap have been a central topic in discussions of, among others,
implicit memory and learning (Kosslyn and Moulton 2009), imitation (Hurley and Chater,
eds. 2005; Meltzoff and Prinz, eds. 2002), and social understanding (Decety and Stevens
2009; Goldman 2006; Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2008).
Regarding the third (the role of imagination in enabling empathy and perspective taking), in
addition to the work just mentioned, a sizable research program has been devoted to
exploring the general issue of the role played by imagination in empathy, perspective
taking, and the theory of mind. An overview of some of this work can be found in the
essays that appear in Markman 2009, section V.
Regarding the fourth (the role of imagination in counterfactual reasoning and planning for
the future), systematic treatments have been offered of the general structures that appear to
govern human counterfactual thinking; the influence of past-directed counterfactual
thinking on creativity, emotion, problem-solving and motivation; and the role of simulation
in planning and preparing for future contingencies. (For an overview of these issues, see the
essays collected in Markman 2009, sections III and VI, and references therein.)
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