Image Credit: Allison Gould
As we return from our winter hiatus with our first posts of the decade, this week The Junkyard gets into the retrospective spirit. We asked five friends of the blog – Peter Langland-Hassan, Margherita Arcangeli, Shen-yi Liao, Aaron Meskin, and Bence Nanay – to reflect on the previous decade and give us a “Top Five” list relating to imagination. There were no other requirements – we thought we’d give them free rein to come up with whatever they wanted, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s an interesting set of ruminations. We’ll be running one of these lists each day this week. Next week, we’ll resume our regular weekly postings.
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A post by Peter Langland-Hassan.
The iDecade
In the wake of seminal works in the twenty-aughts by the likes of Nichols & Stich (2003), Currie & Ravenscroft (2002), and Weinberg and Meskin (2003; 2006), philosophers deepened their interest in the ontology of imagination. Most (notoriously, not all) agreed that belief-like imagining is a sui generis mental state, irreducible to other folk psychological or cognitive states. The question keeping them up at night: should their reasons for believing in such lead them to posit additional imaginative states as well—including imaginative desires, imaginative intentions, imaginative acceptances, and more? The question was foreseen and nicely posed by Liao & Doggett (2014), in response to Schellenberg’s (2013) proposal that there are a great many states lying between imagination and belief.
A kind of spectrum emerged, exemplified by the works on my Zeitgeist list. On the Quinean end is Langland-Hassan (2012), who, focusing only on pretense, argued for doing without any sui generis state of imagination at all. On the Meinongian end is Arcangeli (2018), who promoted a framework where almost every non-imaginative state has its imaginative Doppelganger: a world replete with i-states. Between these gleaming poles of self-consistency lies the miasma of compromise, half-measures, and, indeed, adulthood itself, represented by figures such as Kind, Spaulding, Doggett & Egan, and Schellenberg.
(Note: these are by no means offered as the “best” papers of the last decade; but neither were they the worst.)
Quinean end: Langland-Hassan, P. (2012) “Pretense, Imagination, and Belief: the Single Attitude Theory,” Philosophical Studies. (See also preemptive pushback from Van Leeuwen (2011)). [No to imagination and other i-states].
Kind (2011) “The Puzzle of Imaginative Desire,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy. (And also: Spaulding (2015) “Imagination, Desire, and Rationality,” Journal of Philosophy). [Yes to imagination; no to i-desire and other i-states].
Schellenberg, S. (2013) “Belief and Desire in Imagination and Immersion” Journal of Philosophy. (And also important reply from Liao and Doggett (2014)). [Yes to imagination and many states in between imagination and belief; no to i-desire and other i-states].
Currie (2010) “Tragedy,” Analysis. (And also: Doggett & Egan (2012) “How we feel about terrible non-existent Mafiosi, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research). [Yes to imagination and yes to i-desire].
Meinongian End: Arcangeli, M. (2018) Supposition and the Imaginative Realm (Routledge). (Or, for a somewhat lighter shade of purple: Balcerak Jackson, M. (2016)). [Yes to imagination and yes many other sui generis i-states, or “hypothetical attitudes”].
Peter Langland-Hassan is Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati. His book ‘Explaining Imagination’ will be published this year.