Alon Chasid is a senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan University. His main research interests are the cognitive structure of belief-like imaginings, the cognitive penetration of perceptual experience, the relation between perception and imagination, and pictorial experience.
A post by Alon Chasid.
Suppose you’re imagining a proposition, e.g., that Bernie Sanders is the current US President, that the price of coffee beans is falling, or that there are gold nuggets in a certain river. Ordinarily, you can correctly recount what you’ve imagined. But suppose you are asked whether the proposition you imagined was true in the relevant ‘imaginary world,’ the ‘world’ of your imaginative project. This question, without further qualification, may strike you as odd, probably because you take the answer to be trivial: it is obvious, you assume, that the proposition you imagined was true in the relevant imaginary world (henceforth: ‘i-world’). After all, you imagined it to be true. Imagining that p, you assume, renders p true in the imaginative project’s i-world.
This view is mistaken. Imagining a proposition doesn’t render that proposition true in the pertinent i-world. I don’t deny that to imagine a proposition is to imagine it to be true in the i-world. My claim is that it doesn’t follow from this that the imagined proposition is true in the i-world. Compare: to believe a proposition is to believe it to be true (i.e., true simpliciter, in the real world), but believing a proposition does not render the believed proposition true.
To see that imagining a proposition does not entail that the proposition is true in the pertinent i-world, consider how we engage with works of fiction. Sometimes a work of fiction guides us to imagine propositions that are false in the work’s fictional world. Reading a work, we might, for instance, imagine that A is the villain, a certain building is about to explode, etc., whereas the work eventually reveals that B is the villain, not A, the building was not about to explode, etc. In such cases, our initial imagining involves a fictional or imaginary falsehood.
It might be argued that a work’s fictional world—the set of propositions that the work takes to be true—differs from the i-world, or i-worlds, that we posit in response to engaging with the work. This distinction is similar to the distinction drawn in Walton (1990, 215ff; 2015, 33ff) between ‘work worlds’ and ‘game worlds.’ But distinctions of this sort do not support the claim that imagining a proposition ipso facto renders it an imaginary truth. For even with respect to the i-world that we posit in response to engaging with a fiction, we don’t imagine true propositions only. When we imagine that A is the villain, and then that B is the villain, not A, we take the propositions we imagine to be either true, or false, in the posited i-world, i.e., to be putatively assessed for truth in that i-world. Our imaginings are not directed at two different i-worlds, but at one and the same i-world. When we finish reading the work, we realize that some of the propositions we imagined were false, and others, true, in that i-world.
Perhaps imagining in response to fiction differs from other sorts of imagining. A work’s fictional world—what the work takes to be true—serves as a ‘standard of truth’ for the imaginative project to which it gives rise. But what happens if there are no external or explicit standards? To show that imaginings do not, in themselves, render their content true in the relevant i-world, we should examine imaginative projects in which there is no explicit standard of imaginary truth.
Such extemporaneous imaginative projects are commonplace. For one thing, scenarios depicted by works of fiction can, in principle, also be imagined spontaneously, or at least without answering to external standards of imaginary truth. We might find ourselves imagining that a certain building is about to explode, and then imagining that it is somehow revealed that the building wasn’t about to explode. For another, we can spontaneously imagine evolving scenarios, e.g., that there’s a gold nugget in a certain river, and then that the sun sets, revealing that the shiny object isn’t a gold nugget, but a pebble illuminated by the sun. Such imaginative projects involve a shift from imagining one proposition to imagining an incompatible proposition, both imaginings being directed at the same i-world. In these cases, we shift from imagining an imaginary falsehood to imagining an imaginary truth; this shift explains the ‘revelation’ we experience when we imagine the second proposition. Cases of this sort demonstrate that even where no standards of imaginary truth have been explicitly set down, imagining a proposition does not, in itself, render the proposition true in the i-world. Moreover, they demonstrate that, since imaginings do not render their content true in the relevant i-world, imaginative projects must involve, in addition to imaginings, a mental state whose role is to posit imaginary truths.
It might be claimed that in cases where no standards for truth in the i-world have been explicitly set down, the i-world is indeterminate. That is, it might be argued that absent a clear-cut criterion of imaginary truth, such as directives specified by a work of fiction, nothing determines whether it is true (false) in the i-world that, e.g., the building was about to explode, the pebble is a gold nugget, etc. Though we freely speak of ‘what happened’ in the i-world of our project, we do so—so it is claimed—by virtue of our awareness that the content of our imaginings is putatively assessed for truth in the i-world, not by virtue of positing specific imaginary truths. Without explicit standards, the imaginary-truth value of an imagined proposition remains undetermined.
This suggestion might seem compelling for other reasons too. It could be claimed that to describe the mental activity associated with imagining (emotional reactions, conative or conative-like states, etc.), we need not refer to specific imaginary truths, but only to the fact that the imagined propositions are either true or false in the pertinent i-world. Our reactions to imaginings are explained by the fact that we shift from imagining one proposition to imagining another. Whether the imagined propositions are specifically true (false) in the pertinent i-world has, so it is argued, no descriptive force or explanatory value. Imaginings are like beliefs in this respect: our reaction to believing a proposition doesn’t entail that the believed proposition is true, only that we believe it to be true; likewise, our reaction to imagining a proposition need not entail that the imagined proposition is true in the i-world, only that we imagine it to be true.
Granted, specific imaginary truths can be explicitly posited to obtain. Such positing may even be necessary, either to guide our imaginings, or to restrict an imaginative project in some way so as to achieve a certain goal (e.g., to learn from imagining; see Kind 2016; 2018). But aside from such intentionally imposed restrictions, so it might be claimed, the determination of specific imaginary truths is superfluous. The ‘core’ mental imaginative activity—the mental activity common to deliberate and spontaneous imaginative projects—does not involve positing specific imaginary truths.
Although this view may seem appealing, I find it problematic. In imaginative projects, in addition to imagining various propositions, we often posit that certain propositions are true in the i-world. For one thing, upon reflecting on a spontaneous project, we can generally recount which propositions were posited—probably implicitly and without much awareness—to be true in the i-world. If asked about, say, a daydream’s i-world, we don’t usually respond: ‘I don’t know anything about the world of my daydream’; rather, we can say what that i-world was like, which propositions it encompassed, and in which respects it was indeterminate. In describing our project, we may err about the i-world, but there is no reason to think that we always err.
Moreover, the determination of imaginative content often requires the positing of imaginary truths. What we imagine is often determined by the i-world’s ‘design,’ i.e., by what we (implicitly, spontaneously) posit it to be like, and specifically, by the extent to which we take it to be similar to the real world. In imagining, e.g., ‘I’m playing golf with the current US President,’ aspects of the content—my identity, what playing golf involves, the current president’s identity—can be determined by real-world facts, ad hoc assumptions, or by what I implicitly posit to be true in the i-world. The imagined president could be the real president (Trump), someone I’m assuming ad hoc to be the president, or someone I implicitly posit to be the i-world president (e.g., Sanders). Each of these three options is tantamount to a different imaginative project; the project arising from the latter option is constituted by an implicitly posited imaginary truth.
Beyond this constitutive role, positing imaginary truths in imaginative projects may also have other roles; this issue merits further elaboration. In general, that ‘truths’ are often posited in imaginative projects, and that such positing is carried out in addition to imagining, can’t be ignored. If, in an imaginative project, there are no explicit posits, imaginary truths are posited non-deliberately: the i-world is ‘designed’ spontaneously, just as the ‘script’ our imaginings follow often unfolds spontaneously.
References
Kind, Amy (2016). “Imagining Under Constraints,” in Kind, Amy and Kung, Peter (eds.) Knowledge Through Imagination. Oxford: Oxford UP, pp. 145-159.
Kind, Amy (2018). “How imagination Give Rise to Knowledge,” in Macpherson, Fiona & Dorsch, Fabian (eds.), Perceptual Imagination and Perceptual Memory. Oxford: Oxford UP, pp. 227-246.
Walton, Kendall (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Walton, Kendall (2015). In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence. New York: Oxford University Press.