Moral imagination, fiction, and meaning-making

A post by Eileen John

The term ‘moral imagination’ commonly refers, in my usage, to something nebulous: activity that goes beyond argument and direct experience, somehow concerns the moral dimension of life, and is somehow a good thing. My philosophical work often deals with morally interesting literary texts, and ‘moral imagination’ can be handy for gesturing at what readers do when engaging with morally charged fictional or figurative content. But is immersing oneself in such content in itself a moral activity? If I construe moral imagination, albeit hazily, as a morally good thing, the activity ought to be more demanding of a reader’s moral resources. Maybe it counts as moral imagining if imaginative activity leads readers to exercise moral judgment or to generate moral understanding in response to the work. I remember realizing, in the middle of reading a short story, that I had behaved terribly to someone exactly as the self-absorbed central character in the story had – would re-understanding myself in light of moral understanding of a character count as moral imagination? That seems a bit accidental (depending on readers happening to have an autobiographical realization) and still not especially deep in terms of demands on moral resources. Maybe these are slightly good outcomes, and the morally imaginative potential of literature is slightly good. I will approach this issue, of how there could be morally demanding potential in what readers do, first by raising a few general questions about moral imagination.

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From doxastic obligations to obligations to imagine – An initial case study

A post by Christopher Badura

According to Aaron Smuts prescriptions to imagine are rare:

we might ask if we are ever morally required to imagine something or another. Some might think that we are occasionally morally required to imagine ourselves in another’s shoes, so to speak. But this kind of prescription is unusual. Prohibitions on imagining are far more familiar, though still rare. (Smuts, 2016, p. 381)

I’ll discuss an example, suggesting that obligations to believe entail obligations to imagine. Since similar cases occur frequently, prescriptions to imagine are quite common – counting tokens.

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Designing Our Futures

A post by Magdalena Balcerak Jackson

Many of our everyday decisions – small and big – involve thinking about what it would be like to live a certain future in order to figure out whether this is indeed a future one would want to live:

It’s a hot humid afternoon in Miami. An ice cream sounds like it will hit the spot. You open the doors to the Azucar Ice cream company on Calle Ocho. Sure, you could just get a scoop of chocolate, but now that you are here, your eyes are drawn to the board with the signature flavors: Would you enjoy olive oil, orange zest and dark chocolate? Or maybe sweet potato, ancho chile and chocolate chip? And how about banana and red hots?

You can’t actually taste the ice cream. So, you would likely answer the question of which ice cream you would like best by imagining how each ice cream tastes. If your gustatory imagination is good enough, this imagining will be an essential part of making a rational choice, that is, a choice that best satisfies your preferences. This is so because absent the possibility of actually experiencing the taste, imagination is the only capacity we have to obtain information that is essentially experiential, information about how things look, sound, taste or feel.

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Book Symposium: Schellekens Commentary and Response

This week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Greg Currie’s recent book: Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction. See here for an introduction from Greg. Commentaries and replies appear Tuesday through Thursday.

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Commentary from Elisabeth Schellekens Dammann.

In many respects, some of the main philosophical achievements of the intricate and important work done in Imagining and Knowing lie in what it does not set out to do. It does not for example seek to define the notion of fiction, nor to provide conclusive evidence for the alleged relation between fiction and the development of empathic skills. It does not present a decisive case against the claim which constitutes its central target, namely that fiction can yield knowledge or understanding (hereafter Cognitivism), nor does it settle for it. What it does do however, is to carve out a distinct set of pressing concerns by developing this one striking point: if we grant that the imagination is central to our experience of fiction – as we ought to – then the numerous (hypothetical) connections which supporters of Cognitivism have relied on between works of fiction on the one hand and learning, truth and knowledge on the other can only be described as shaky. At best. Where, we are repeatedly asked, is the empirical evidence for positing these connections?

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Book Symposium: García-Carpintero Commentary and Response

This week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Greg Currie’s recent book: Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction. See here for an introduction from Greg. Commentaries and replies appear Tuesday through Thursday.

Commentary from Manuel García-Carpintero

Greg Currie’s Imagining and Knowing makes a compelling case for a mild skepticism about learning from fiction. Far from rejecting that fictions offer knowledge (which adds to their artistic merit), the book offers a partial defense. It argues that better support is needed than personal impressions, highlighting the significance of empirical research. The book is packed with original ideas and sharp arguments; I enjoyed every page.

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Book Symposium: Atencia-Linares Commentary and Response

This week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Greg Currie’s recent book: Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction. See here for an introduction from Greg. Commentaries and replies appear Tuesday through Thursday.

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Commentary from Paloma Atencia-Linares.

Greg Currie’s recent book Imagining and Knowing, is an engaging (and imaginative) non-fiction book from which we learn—or which seriously persuades us—that we should be cautious of overestimating the power of fiction to convey knowledge. This is not to say that Currie repudiates the value of fiction as a source of knowledge. On the contrary, because he takes it very seriously, he invites us to be more thorough when endorsing certain views.

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Book Symposium: Introduction from Greg Currie

This week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Greg Currie’s recent book: Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction. Today we begin with an introduction from Greg. Commentaries and replies will appear Tuesday through Thursday.

Common opinion connects fiction and the mind in two ways: via our capacity to imagine, and via our capacity to know things. Imagining and Knowing argues that the value of the imagination for explaining what fiction is and how it works is sometimes underestimated, and that the capacity of fiction to provide learning is often exaggerated.

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Imagination and Team Reasoning

A post by Alma Barner

We sometimes rely on imagination when making decisions about what to do. I wonder what I should do, later this afternoon. I imagine going swimming in the nearby pool. Or, if it doesn’t rain, I could go to the park to play badminton.

In decision-making, imagination can help us bring salient alternatives to act to mind. It can help us decide which options are realistic, which actions feasible. Imagining what I could do can help me get clear on what my preferences are; it might even bring to the surface preferences I had forgotten I have. It is well-established that imagination plays an important role in future-oriented planning.

It is also well-established that purely self-interested decision-making is not our only or even typical way of going about. Humans are social. We don’t usually spend our weekends all by ourselves, but with families and friends. After all, I need somebody else to play badminton with. And it might be fun to go swimming together.

Planning a family holiday or a Saturday afternoon activity that we all are happy with involves joint decision making. You might prefer to play badminton indoors instead of going to the park. So we need to coordinate our individual preferences. In such cases, humans display a systematic bias towards cooperative behaviour. We decide together on the basis of which option is best for the group, not for us individually.

Contrast individual decision-making with joint, cooperative, decision-making. If we at times rely on imagination when deciding what to do, we might plausibly also rely on imagination when deciding what to do together. Which role does imagination play here? If it plays any role at all, does it differ from the one it plays in individual decision-making? To be clear, this post is not primarily about psychology. It is rather for those who are into formal theories of decision-making, as well as imagination.

There are different decision-theoretic approaches to explaining rational cooperative decision-making in humans. In this post I focus on what I consider to be a plausible candidate: the theory of team reasoning. As we will see, it allows for imagination to play a special role in joint-decision making.

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Collecting our thoughts

A post by María Jimena Clavel Vázquez

Imagination has been a common topic in coronavirus-related reads, both in the form of invitations to mobilize our imaginative powers and complaints about our lack thereof. This shouldn’t be surprising. Imagination is often summoned when confronted with social and political challenges. We are invited to join efforts to envision possible solutions to the problems faced by society, in general, or by a specific group of citizens. These exercises are considered an important aspect of political projects and one first step towards political change. For instance, in his 2009 Inaugural Address, former US president Barack Obama reminded his adversaries of: “what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose” (Phillips 2009).

There are two ways to make sense of this call. We might think that we are summoned as individuals to put our imaginative capacity to good use and to think about our future. Although what is at stake here is collective, the exercise is, ultimately, individual. Or, we might think that we are invited, instead, to participate in a collective exercise of imagination. We are asked to put our heads together to come up with a solution or build a project. It’s not only relevant that we think about our future but that we do so together. Collective imagination is a good candidate to make sense of at least some cases of political imagination.

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Ideal pleasures

A post by Uku Tooming

The following lines are from John Cale’s song “Paris 1919”:

Efficiency efficiency they say

Get to know the date and tell the time of day

As the crowds begin complaining

How the Beaujolais is raining

Down on the darkened meetings of Champs Élysées

The album with the same title, described by Cale as “an example of the nicest ways of saying something ugly” is full of wonderfully impressionistic imagery, centered on the theme of Europe around World War I. One (presumably unintended) effect that this album has on me is a rather intense pleasure when thinking of the last two lines in the excerpt. The imagery of experiencing Beaujolais (which I rarely drink) falling down on me on the streets of Paris (where I have never been) is surprisingly enjoyable.

However, when I start to think more closely about the imagined situation, then a complication arises. I quickly come to realize that if I actually were to experience wine raining on me, the overall experience would not be that wonderful, given that my clothes would get soaked in wine, which is far from pleasant. By trying to imagine the scenario more accurately, I come to enjoy it far less. Only by avoiding this, I can reap the maximal hedonic reward. This might be an idiosyncratic response on my part, but I am sure that many people delight in some imagery that upon further scrutiny wouldn’t be so pleasing.

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Plato and Hobbes on Imagination and Political Instability

A post by Avshalom M. Schwartz

Although the imagination is often seen as the most neglected mental faculty in the history of Western political thought (Ezrahi, 2012, 7; Bottici and Challand 2011, 4), pre-modern scientists and philosophers took the imagination to be a significant mental faculty. From antiquity, through the middle ages and Renaissance and up until early modernity, political philosophers viewed the imagination as not only central to sense perception and knowledge, but also as presenting a significant threat to political order and stability. This is perhaps most clearly evident in the works of Plato and Hobbes. In this post, I will explore their accounts of the imagination as a mental faculty and point to their similar fear of the corrupting role the imagination can play in destabilizing a political regime, especially a regime whose authority and legitimacy are grounded in reason. As I will argue, since both thinkers attempted to solve the endemic problem of disorder by grounding absolute political authority in reason, they both viewed imagination’s susceptibility to deception and corruption by irrational sources as representing a significant threat.

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Controlling (mental) images and aesthetic perception of bodies

A post by Adriana Clavel-Vazquez.

The aesthetic evaluation of human bodies is part and parcel of our everyday lives. Not only do we judge, for example, the elegance of Isaac Hernández as he dances in Le Corsaire, but we take notice of a stranger’s beauty while walking down the street, or even a colleague’s scruffiness as they walk into a meeting. These evaluations concern human bodies treated as aesthetic objects, that is, objects that cause experiences of pleasure or displeasure, that are perceived as having specific aesthetic properties, and that invite certain responses as a result of having these properties. Unfortunately, we find an asymmetry in our aesthetic evaluation of racialized bodies. Take, for example, public attitudes toward Serena Williams. Her body is derided as intimidating, aggressive, and even hyper-sexual; her clothes are criticised as tacky, risqué and distracting. These comments stand in stark contrast to the treatment of Maria Sharapova or Anna Kournikova, whose sexual attractiveness has been repeatedly celebrated.

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Justifying Imaginings

A post by Jonathan Gilmore.

“We . . . become . . . aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs.”

—Pauline Kael, review of The Sound of Music

Among the tv shows I’ve binged on while locked down during the pandemic is Mrs. America, a fictionalized portrayal of Phillis Schlafly, an American conservative whose claim to fame (that is, infamy) was her staunch and ultimately successful role in organizing opposition to the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. Played by Cate Blanchett, the television Schlafly is a fount of regressive politics and bigotry, yet for stretches of the series, garners a politically liberal viewer’s uncomfortable allegiance, even while pursuing her decidedly reactionary aims. Some reasons for aligning with her would justify a sympathetic attitude to her counterpart in real life—she’s condescended to by virtue of her gender, she’s clever and creative—but other reasons could count only within the context of an audience’s engagement with the quasi-fictional drama. Blanchett’s beauty as an actor is “imported” into the story as the beauty of the character she plays, and some of our rooting for her likely stems from a positive bias toward people occasioned by their physical attractiveness. (Dion, Berscheid, and Walster, 1972). Also, we initially see things through her eyes, inviting the natural affiliation we are disposed to form with those whose mental perspectives we simulate—a tendency that can generate identification on even arbitrary grounds (Kaufman and Libby, 2012; Goldstein and Cialdini, 2007).

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Rationalization is Imaginative

A post by Jason D’Cruz.

My own cheating just levels the playing field a bit. Most people cheat even more.

I simply couldn’t meet the deadline. It’s so hard being a perfectionist.

I just had to fudge those charitable donations because last year I overpaid my income taxes.

Spurious and self-justifying rationalization is such a commonplace that it is easy to miss just how finely wrought it can be. In recent years, both philosophers and psychologists have paid closer attention. (Fiery Cushman’s new target article – “Rationalization is Rational” –   in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, together with 26 commentaries, is sure to ignite more research).

Rationalization is a remarkable cognitive achievement. It consists of the mental processes of crafting and rehearsing a narrative that has the credible appearance of genuine reasoning, but whose narrative arc inevitably bends toward exculpation or self-justification. The causal effect of rationalization is typically to mitigate negative feelings of guilt or shame and clear away hurdles of conscience. In contrast to truth-directed inquiry, rationalization is an inherently creative undertaking.

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If sensory imagining is not a double content, what is it?

A post by Steve Humbert-Droz.

We know, since Descartes (1641), that exercises of sensory imagining (S-imagining) are not purely imagistic: they possess multiple aspects. This much is agreed upon among philosophers but, when the question of the intentionality of S-imaginings arises, agreement seems to unravel.

According to the Two Content View (TCV), S-imagining “has two kinds of content, qualitative content and assigned content” (Kung, 2010:632) – e.g., my image of an apple is about both (i) shapes and colors and (ii) about the fact that it is an apple, rather than a perfect imitation thereof. Advocates of TCV claim that the imagistic content does represent something, but it is not enough to individuate the imagining of an A rather than a B (Kung, 2010; Langland-Hassan, 2015; Martin, 2002; Noordhof, 2002; Peacocke, 1985; Tooming, 2018; White, 1990).

Some, however, have expressed skepticism about TCV. As Sartre claims, “despite some prejudices […] when I produce in myself the image of Pierre, it is Pierre who is the object of my current consciousness.” (1940/2010:4) The intentional object of our S-imaginings is exhausted by a single content treated in a specific way (Currie & Ravenscroft, 2002; Goldman, 2006; Hutto, 2015; Mulligan, 1999; Soteriou, 2013; Stock, n.d.; Wiltsher, 2016,2019).

In the following, (1) I sketch one of the most efficient pleas for the TCV by Peter Langland-Hassan, (2) I give two reasons to doubt the decisiveness of his arguments, and (3) suggest that S-imagining can be captured by the attitude/content distinction.

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Imagination and Hypothesis Generation

A post by Joshua Myers.

Peter Medawar, in his “Advice to a Young Scientist,” writes that

every discovery, every enlargement of the understanding, begins as an imaginative preconception of what the truth might be. The imaginative preconception—a “hypothesis”—arises by a process as easy or as difficult to understand as any other creative act of mind; it is a brainwave, an inspired guess, a product of a blaze of insight. (Medawar 1979, p. 84)

Medawar gets things exactly right. The imagination plays a crucial role in hypothesis generation: to form a hypothesis is to imagine a way the world could be. Despite being highly intuitive, and despite many scientists, like Medawar, explicitly stating that they use their imagination to come up with hypotheses, this view has received surprisingly little philosophical attention.

In this blog, I’ll motivate the imaginative account of hypothesis generation, explicate some of the mechanisms by which the imagination plays this epistemic role, and briefly speculate about norms on hypothesis generation.

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THE IMAGINATION ARGUMENT AGAINST PHYSICALISM

A post by Tufan Kıymaz.

Mary is a super-scientist who knows all facts about human visual experience that are expressible in physical/functional terms; however, she has never seen colors since she lives in a black-and-white room. If physicalism is true, then her physical/functional knowledge is complete knowledge about human visual experience. One day, she leaves the room, sees a red tomato and exclaims “So, this is what it is like to see red!” She learned a new fact, which means that her physical/functional knowledge was not complete knowledge, and therefore physicalism is false. This is Frank Jackson’s (1982, 1986) knowledge argument against physicalism.

Some philosophers, such as Churchland (1985:25), Maloney (1985:36), and Dennett (2007), interpret this argument to be about Mary’s inability to imagine red while she was in the room. However, Jackson writes:

the knowledge argument claims that Mary would not know what the relevant experience is like. What she could imagine is another matter. (Jackson 1986: 295, also see 292)

… So, the interpretation of his argument by the objectors, which states that Mary’s inability to imagine what it is like to see red implies that physicalism is false, is a strawman. Let’s call this strawman “the imagination argument.” As far as I can see in the literature, the imagination argument is criticized and rejected but I have never seen an explicit defense of this argument. In my paper “What Gary Couldn’t Imagine” (2019), I presented the most powerful version of the imagination argument that I can think of and evaluated its strengths and weaknesses. I believe that the imagination argument deserves more attention than it has received so far.

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Marching, boxing, pretending

A post by Greg Currie.

When their nests are threatened, plovers and lapwings behave in ways suggesting wing damage and consequent inability to fly, thereby distracting predators from the nest. People, experts even, describe this as “pretending that the bird has a broken wing that hinders flight”. Anscombe objected: “you cannot ascribe real pretence to anything unless you can ascribe to it (a) a purpose and (b) the idea ‘can be got by seeming to--‘”. Broken wing displays fail (b); the most one could say is that the bird has the idea that the predator can be distracted by having one wing drag on the ground.

Anscombe contrasts this purposive pretence with unpurposive pretending, when we pretend “just for fun” or “to tease”. Unpurposive pretending requires neither (a) nor (b), so is not ruled out as a description of distraction behaviour. Perhaps Anscombe assumes that non-humans don’t pretend for fun. She also distinguishes plain and non-plain pretending. The plain pretender “unreflectively knows that he is pretending” (292). A “great deal of unpurposive or only very vaguely and diffusely purposive pretending is non-plain“.

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Is philosophy of imagination socially isolated?

A post by Nick Wiltsher.

I had a great plan for this blog-post. See, I was meant to speak at a disaster studies conference last week. Disaster studies, it turns out, is a firmly established field, combining hard-headed analysis of actual disasters and their mitigation with speculative fictionalizing about possible disasters and dystopias. They wanted a philosopher to come talk about imagination, disasters of the future, and the future of disasters; I was local, cheap, and available. I was going to gather and share with you all some observations of how imagination figures in the thinking of disaster studiers, and make some comparisons with how we here think of imagination. “Field notes from the interdisciplinary wilds”. Something like that. Writes itself, practically.

Unfortunately, the disaster studies conference was cancelled. You can write your own punchline. And so there I was, devoid of field notes, socially isolated, inspirationally bereft, and yet dedicated to the provision of imagination content. Take all that as an apology for the state of what follows.

…So here’s an observation: based on a tiny, unrepresentative sample, I can confidently say that the way in which imagination is thought of in a range of broadly humanistic disciplines is pretty different from the way imagination is thought of in philosophy—both in terms of what imagination does, and what imagination is. Following the observation, here’s a question: what might explain this difference? I now present a range of cursory attempts at an answer.

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Imagined Smells

A post by Benjamin D. Young.

Imagine the smell of freshly baked cookies. Can you smell them right now? Unsurprisingly this is rather difficult but not impossible for some of us. Our ability to imagine smells is similar in many respects to our capacity for perceiving smells in general. It is affected by our attention to them and their importance within our daily lives. Over the years, I have used the unique features of olfaction to question general issues such as the anatomical realization of consciousness (Young, 2012), the difference between phenomenal consciousness and awareness (Young, 2014), as well as the representational format or formats of cognitive architectures (Young, 2015, 2019a). Smell is special and that carries over in cases where we lack direct sensory stimulation. Olfactory imagery, I have argued (Young, 2019b), is best conceived of as a form of mental imagery that inherits many of its properties from olfactory perception. What follows is a general overview of what we know about our imagined experiences of smells and how this suggests further directions of research exploring the boundaries of mental imagery.

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