Nathanael Stein is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He works mainly in Ancient philosophy, especially on questions related to causality and causal explanation.
A post by Nathanael Stein
I’m grateful to be invited to contribute to The Junkyard, first because philosophy of imagination is a new area of research for me, and it’s especially due to resources like this that I’ve been able to find my way around, and second because I ended up thinking about imagination in very much the way implied by the “junkyard” quote. I’d like to use the opportunity to pick out a couple of threads from what I’ve done so far that I think might be both controversial and worth developing, and I’d be interested to hear any reactions.
I came to the topic by way of thinking about irrationality in two different ways which converged. One was in relation to the “classic” Davidsonian puzzle of accounting for irrationality without having it collapse into covert rationality, insanity, or plain stupidity. The other was in relation to a passage from George Eliot’s Middlemarch that simply stuck with me over the years as nailing something important about the way we sometimes go wrong, but which I didn’t see being discussed in the philosophical literature. The passage involves a dried-up academic whose sense of having passed up all sorts of happiness in his youth for the sake of esoteric research (no comment!) has led him to expect a happier future as something owed to him—as though he’s stored it up on credit and can now look forward to drawing on it in middle age.
Eliot’s diagnosis is that his thoughts have gotten tangled up in metaphors, and besides finding that description a compelling metaphor in its own right, it’s often struck me that much irrationality might actually be explained in this way—as due to an implicit and unnoticed way of mistakenly treating one thing as though it were something else, such that our thinking follows in the traces of our framing metaphor rather than the target. Often this wouldn’t rise to the level of discursive thought—though certainly we can make similar mistakes there too—and it doesn’t seem to fit with the kinds of irrationality (e.g. akrasia) usually discussed in the philosophical literature. Likewise for metaphor.
So I ended up at the junkyard, specifically thinking about ways in which our habits of imagining future experiences—of our lives, our relationships, our politics—might get entangled with other conceptual arrays. Working out the nuts and bolts of this kind of explanation was the main focus of my paper, “Imagination, Expectation, and ‘Thoughts Entangled in Metaphors’”.
My main hypothesis is that one of the most common uses of imagination is in the production and maintenance of a kind of expectation which needs distinguishing from belief about the future. Despite being non-discursive, these expectations can be more or less rational in their own right, and the operations of forming, maintaining, and adjusting them are susceptible to a number of types of interference, including the kind of metaphor-induced deviance I started with. It can be easier or more pleasant, to follow up on Eliot’s example, to use a credit-debit metaphor for teaching someone how to give up a short-term good for a long-term one. But the metaphor can persist even when it’s no longer useful, or when its very usefulness gets in the way of our developing a better approach to prudential reasoning. And the resulting expectations can persist alongside perfectly respectable beliefs that run contrary to them. As Eliot says, I think we do this all the time.
I also think this hypothesis helps fill an explanatory gap in explanations of irrational thinking. Of course, for example, we might think a lot of irrationality is driven by wishful thinking or anxiety, but that doesn’t by itself explain how the thinking works. Wishful thinking, like other kinds, uses tools, and metaphor is a handy tool. Sometimes we use it to ratchet our way up to a clearer insight into an unfamiliar domain, but sometimes we just use it lazily, or in a self-stultifying way.
Along the way, I came to a few tentative conclusions about the imagination itself that I want to develop. A lot of my other work has focused on issues related to definition, taxonomy, and explanation, and the considerations I raise here are related to those, especially the question of the extent to which there is a single phenomenon that all philosophers of imagination are attempting to study. (For various difficulties in giving an affirmative answer see Moran 1994; Stevenson 2003; Kind 2013; Langland-Hassan 2020.)
One conclusion relates to the importance of paradigm examples in our theoretical approaches to imagination, especially when we try to say at the broadest level what imagination is, what fundamental types there are, and how they relate to one another. I don’t expect the existence of the kind of imaginative expectation I describe to be especially controversial (though I’m often wrong about that sort of thing). However, these expectations, and their broader genus of experiential imaginings as I understand them, have features which I think go either unrecognized or underappreciated when philosophers try to give a general account and taxonomy of imagination.
The kind of imaginings I’m concerned with are experiential wholes: they may have various aspects—visual, auditory, desiderative, and so on—but they are not mere aggregates of those aspects. Rather, just as the experience of tracking a frisbee while running and trying to catch it isn’t simply an aggregate of visual, bodily, and desiderative components, so my experiential imagining of that action has its own integrity. But if I’m correct, imaginings like these are central to the ways in which we think rationally and act morally in our daily lives (just think about how we run through a talk or imagine a difficult conversation beforehand).
The examples of imagination we tend to focus on as paradigms look, from this angle, like they cluster around the extremes: deliberate acts of imagining with simple sensory contents, imagining that a certain proposition is true, or extended acts of pretense. These examples are especially vivid or clear for some purposes, but if I’m correct they differ in key ways from a central use of imagination in the course of our lives. An approach to imagination that gave conceptual priority, or at least parity, to the most functionally central uses would look different from one that starts with the most explicit, simple, or vivid cases and builds out from there. (An analogous worry for moral theorizing may be more familiar, if we think there are distorting effects of building theories around vivid but rare dilemmas, rather than the less vivid but central problems of living rightly and well under normal circumstances.)
Another feature of these imaginative expectations is that the kind of centrality they have, I suggest, is teleological. Teleological claims are often controversial, and this is probably a stronger one than I need for my earlier point, but I think it’s worth entertaining. The suggestion is that the link between imagination and rational expectation is not just a regularity: rather, a well-functioning imaginative system produces rational imaginative expectations in the same way that a well-functioning perceptual system produces accurate perceptual representations.
Both of these conclusions, I would argue, open up new possibilities for thinking about the ways in which imaginative phenomena resist or admit being treated as a natural unity.
All of which has got me thinking more about the history of the philosophy of imagination, going back especially to ancient philosophy, which is where I do most of my work. The shape of that history—reflecting the “junkyard” tendency yet again—sometimes makes it hard to see how to bring contemporary work into contact with it.
In the end, though, my points about Eliot’s diagnosis of her character’s mistake are a long way around to get back to a Platonic thought. For all his love of the abstract and formal, Plato never loses sight of the fact that images, however dangerous and slippery, are not just useful but inevitable, and that a lot of our rationality consists in having the right relationships between discursive and non-discursive modes of representation. All the more puzzling, then, that for all he says about images, he says very little about imagination, and that it’s rather Aristotle who brings the topic into the discussion of the mind.
Right from the start, in fact, we get what looks like a version of the distinction between propositional and sensory imagination, but with a twist. In one of his rare explicit considerations of mental imagery, Plato has us imagine two workers in the soul: a scribe who writes down what we believe, and a painter who follows the scribe, creating pictures of what the scribe says (Philebus 39a-d). Roughly, that is, Plato posits a faculty of imagery whose contents are parasitic on discursive thoughts. Aristotle argues that it’s the other way around: imagination (phantasia) is a quasi-faculty dependent for its contents on perception, and is itself a source of content for thought (De Anima III 3).
But whereas we now tend simply to distinguish sensory and propositional imagination, Aristotle thinks his view of imagination is opposed to Plato’s. If that’s right, then he thinks there’s a tension that our “divide and conquer” strategy is missing. I’m not sure what to make of that yet, but one of the things I like about the history of philosophy is that it often makes simplifying assumptions more difficult to maintain. Here, at least, I’m hopeful that there are some rich connections between contemporary philosophy and its history that will be worth the trouble of working out.
References:
Kind, Amy. 2013. "The Heterogeneity of the Imagination." Erkenntnis 78 (1):141-159. doi: 10.1007/s10670-011-9313-z.
Langland-Hassan, Peter. 2020. Explaining Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moran, Richard. 1994. "The Expression of Feeling in Imagination." The Philosophical Review 103 (1):75. doi: 10.2307/2185873.
Stevenson, Leslie. 2003. "Twelve Conceptions of Imagination." The British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (3):238-259. doi: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/43.3.238.