Stacie Friend is a Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, the President of the British Society of Aesthetics, and an organiser of the London Aesthetics Forum. She is currently a co-investigator on a Leverhulme Trust research project on Learning from Fiction, with Gregory Currie (Philosophy, York) and Heather Ferguson (Psychology, Kent).
This week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Peter Langland-Hassan’s recent book Explaining Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2020). The book is available as an Open Access download. See here for an introduction from Peter. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
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Commentary from Stacie Friend
In this thoughtful, carefully argued book, Peter Langland-Hassan defends a reductive account of imagining in the attitudinal (as opposed to imagistic) sense. By contrast with the standard view that imagining is a sui generis propositional attitude on a par with, but distinct from, other propositional attitudes such as beliefs, desires, or intentions, Peter maintains that imaginings can be explained in more basic folk-psychological terms: that is, reduced to these other attitudes. Peter’s systematic and thorough arguments render the view surprisingly plausible.
Key to these arguments is the (correct) observation that reducing imagining that p does not require either reducing it to the same mental state(s) in every context or assuming that the mental state(s) to which imagining is reduced must have the content p. If we grant this, Peter’s strategy is to ask: Can other mental states perform the functions attributed to imaginings in various contexts? He argues that they can, so there is no reason to postulate irreducible imaginative states.
In these comments I focus on this strategy as it relates to fiction. Peter argues that various features of engagement with fiction typically attributed to imagination can be explained in terms of more basic propositional attitudes. Here I limit myself to one argument that clearly illustrates Peter’s reductive project, the argument in Chapter 9 that we need not appeal to imagination to understand the nature of fictional truth.
Peter’s target is the Waltonian position that for a proposition p to be fictionally true is for a work to prescribe imagining it. Peter asks, “but what is it to imagine that p in response to a fiction?” (p.206). He answers:
Limiting ourselves to the context under discussion—that of recovering content from a fiction—a plausible reductive analysis suggests itself: imagining that p in recovering fictional content from a fiction F amounts to judging that, in the fiction F, p. (p.206)
Let’s set aside Walton’s (2015) argument that a work’s prescribing imagining that p is necessary but not sufficient for p’s being fictionally true, and assume that the two formulations—the one invoking prescriptions to imagine, the other a fictionality operator—deliver exactly the same fictional truths. It still does not follow that imagining that p in response to a fiction is nothing over and above judging that in the fiction, p.
Consider Peter’s own characterization of the kind of imagining he aims to reduce: “rich, elaborated, epistemically safe thought about the possible, unreal, or fantastical” (p.44 and elsewhere). I’m happy to accept this description of the phenomenon to be reduced. However, we need not engage in it to judge that in a fiction, p. We can make such a judgment without having thoughts that are (i) rich or elaborated or (ii) about the unreal, fantastical, or [merely] possible. (I set aside the third condition: Although judgments that in the fiction, p are not epistemically safe insofar as they are ordinary judgments, p itself is rendered epistemically safe by the intensional operator.)
Suppose that I am reliably informed by a friend who has read Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer that the sister, Ayoola, murders all her boyfriends. I judge that in the novel, Ayoola murders all her boyfriends. This thought is (i) neither rich nor elaborated, given how little I know about the story. Now suppose I have read the novel myself and I judge that in it, some policemen are corrupt. At the same time, I know this is true; the novel is accurate in this respect. So, my judgment concerns nothing (ii) unreal, fantastical, or merely possible.
Peter might reply to (i) by reiterating that his reduction is specific to the context of “recovering content from a fiction.” If such recovery requires direct acquaintance, judging that in the fiction, p, on the basis of testimony would not constitute imagining that p. I think this is too restrictive, however. One can easily think of circumstances in which a friend’s re-telling of the story would prompt (what would naturally be described as) imagining that p.
Peter might reply to (ii) by denying that the policemen in the novel are real policemen, or that fictions can contain truths. I find these replies totally implausible. In any case, Peter’s definition of fiction—“a set of sentences S, put forward by an author with the expectation that readers will believe that much, if not all, of what is said and implied by S is not true” (p.208)—allows that at least some content of a fiction can be true, and thus about the real.
The lesson of (i) and (ii) is that imagining as Peter characterizes it cannot be reduced to judgments of fictional truth, because those judgments are atomistic. A single judgment that in a fiction, p, is unlikely to be rich or elaborated; and since at least some of what obtains in a fiction is true, it need not concern the unreal. It is a mistake to construe imagining that p as an atomistic propositional attitude. When we read fiction, we don’t imagine propositions in isolation (cf. Stock 2017).
In my view, in response to fiction we imagine a storyworld. This means constructing a mental model of the characters, events, and situations that the fiction is about. Mental models are postulated by psychologists to explain narrative comprehension: they are how we go about “recovering content from a fiction.” They are to varying degrees rich and elaborated. And Peter himself appeals to them to explain counterfactual reasoning (Chapter 5).
However, as Peter points out (Chapter 9), we also construct mental models in response to nonfiction and lived experience. So unless imagination is ubiquitous, we need a way to differentiate “imagining a storyworld” from representing the real world. The solution is simple: We imagine a storyworld whenever the mental model contains at least some representations that we don’t believe (Stock 2017 argues for a version of this claim without the appeal to models). The world represented is thus distinct from reality.
On this account, we imagine that p in response to a fiction when p is part of the mental model we construct concerning that fiction. This is consistent with our believing that p and with p’s being entirely true, for any individual p. It is also consistent with our learning of the fiction’s content indirectly, such as via testimony.
The above may be considered a reductive account of imagining; that’s fine with me. My objection to Peter’s reduction is the specific form it takes. If p is included in the mental model for a fiction F, then (let’s assume) we will also judge that in F, p. But the content represented within the mental model—that is, when the imagining has already been reduced—is p, rather than in F, p. There is no reduction to a mental state with an operator-prefixed content; the judgment is distinct from the imagining.
Extrapolating from an argument in Chapter 10 concerning i-desires, I suspect Peter would reply that not only the content of the judgment, but also the content of the imagining, must be in F, p, no matter the account of imagining on the table. Here is a version of the argument:
Suppose that I am currently reading both Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Divine Comedy. In response to the former I imagine that Odysseus returns to Penelope; call this content o. In response to the latter I imagine that he never returns to Penelope (not-o). I agree with Peter that imagining need not be occurrent, so that I can imagine these simultaneously. What accounts for the fact that my imaginings are not contradictory? It cannot be a difference in attitude—as when there is no conflict between believing that p and desiring that not-p—since the attitude is imagining in both cases. So, Peter concludes, it must be a difference in content: I imagine that in Homer’s epic, o and in Dante’s epic, not-o.
This implausible conclusion follows only if our explanatory resources are restricted to the attitude toward, and content of, an isolated propositional attitude. (To be fair to Peter, this is assumed in the debate over i-desires.) I claim instead that the two imagined contents are quarantined within distinct mental models. In Chapter 10 Peter rejects such an approach on the grounds of circularity: his opponents standardly explain quarantine by appeal to a sui generis attitude of imagining. But that is not the explanation I would give. Peter must accept that different mental models are already kept cognitively distinct in counterfactual reasoning. So long as the contents I imagine are represented in distinct models, there is no conflict.
There is much more I could say about this and other dimensions of Explaining Imagination. Although Peter’s arguments are directed against sui generis imaginings, they repay careful attention from anyone interested in the imagination.
References
Stock, Kathleen. 2017. Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Walton, Kendall L. 2015. ‘Fictionality and Imagination--Mind the Gap’. In In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence, 17–35. New York: Oxford University Press.
Response from Peter Langland-Hassan
Stacie Friend’s excellent work on imagination and fiction was influential in the development of my own thinking on these topics. I’m very glad to have her feedback on the project.
Stacie focuses on my reductive analysis, in Chapter 9, of what it is to imagine that p in the service of recovering fictional content (i.e., when we imagine as a means to registering what is true in a fiction). Because I hold that imagining that p can be different things in different contexts—a point on which Stacie agrees—the analysis in Chapter 9 is limited to cases where someone is recovering fictional content. I propose that “imagining that p in recovering fictional content from a fiction F amounts to judging that, in the fiction F, p” (p. 206). I argue that arriving at such judgments only involves reasoning with one’s beliefs.
Stacie’s first criticism of this claim that there are cases where one judges that, in the fiction F, p, that are not cases of imagining that p. She gives the example of judging that, in Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, the sister Ayoola murders all her boyfriends, when this judgment is made on the basis of a friend’s testimony about the book. However, my claim is not that all cases of judging that, in F, p, are cases of imagining that p. The entailment goes in the opposite direction: all cases of imagining that p, carried out as a means to recovering content from a fiction F, are cases of judging that, in F, p. On my view, it is only when we have satisfied ourselves that someone is imagining that p, as a means to recovering content from F, that we should be able to reduce her doing so to her judging that, in F, p. Stacie hasn’t given us reason to doubt this entailment.
The same reply can be made to Stacie’s second criticism. She holds that there are cases of judging that, in F, p, that are not cases of thinking about “the unreal, fantastical, or possible,” and that therefore fail to satisfy my superficial characterization of what it is to imagine. In her example, she judges that, in My Sister, the Serial Killer, some policemen are corrupt. Because some policemen really are corrupt, this judgment seems not to be about the unreal or fantastical. However, again the proper question is whether an entailment holds in the other direction: are there cases of imagining that p, in the service of recovering fictional content from F, that are not cases of judging that, in F, p? While it isn’t obvious that there are, Stacie seems to think I am committed to there being such on the grounds that, when reading a fiction, we often imagine propositions we believe true, and my account of what this involves—viz., judging that, in F, p—does not satisfy my own superficial criterion for what it is to imagine (when the imagined propositions are true). However, I think that whenever we make a judgment about a fiction, we are thinking about the “the unreal” and “the fantastical” in a suitably significant sense simply because it is in the nature of fiction to record unreal or fantastical events; this holds even when the propositions we are to imagine happen to be true.
Why has Stacie misread the direction of entailment in these cases? I think she must be assuming that once we limit ourselves to the relevant context—e.g., the recovery of fictional content—any entailment from imaginings to judgments must be bi-directional for it to hold at all. While the assumption is faulty, it is reasonable to ask: if not all cases of judging that, in F, p, are cases of imagining that p, what is the difference between those that are and those that aren’t? I probably didn’t say enough in response to this question in the book. The answer is that the differences will be shallow and contextual, consisting in facts such as whether only one such judgment was made in isolation (this is probably not imagining) or whether very many were made in succession in a situation where one was closely attending to the narrative. Such features modulate whether we are inclined to call what occurs ‘imagining,’ even if they do not mark a deep difference in the kind of cognitive states underlying the activity.
Stacie ends by sketching a competing positive account of what goes on in the recovery of fictional content, where one imagines “a storyworld” through the use of “mental models.” She suggests this account may circumvent problems I raise, in Chapter 10, for views that appeal to a sui generis attitude of imagining. As she notes, mental models are posited by some psychologists (most notably, Philp Johnson-Laird and Ruth Byrne (Johnson-Laird, 1983; Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 2002)) as states by which we carry out conditional reasoning. I look closely at Johnson-Laird and Byrne’s understanding of mental models in Chapter 6, on conditional reasoning (pp. 113-117), concluding that the use of mental models in cognition is consistent with my reductive project. It is true, as Stacie emphasizes, that, on the Johnson-Laird and Byrne account, a mental model may represent a proposition one doesn’t believe. But this is only in the shallow sense in which someone who doesn’t believe that p represents that p in tokening a belief with the content if p, then q. Of course, I never deny that people represent (and believe) conditionals of that sort. On the other hand, contemporary psychologists offer no proposal at all concerning what distinguishes one mental model from another with the same content, and thus no guidance on how the “quarantining” of one fiction from another should be understood, which was the question at issue in my chapter 10 critique. Having looked closely at the empirical literature on mental models, I think we should be wary of jumping ship from imagination to mental models, where we are destined to revisit the same battles already fought over imagination.
References:
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental models: Towards a cognitive science of language, inference, and consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Johnson-Laird, P. N., & Byrne, R. M. J. (2002). Conditionals: A Theory of Meaning, Prgamatics, and Inference. Psychological review, 109(4), 646-678.