Michael Omoge is an assistant professor at the University of Alberta. He is interested in questions about perception, imagination, and modal epistemology.
A post by Michael Omoge
In his insightful review of the volume, Epistemic Uses of Imagination (2021), edited by Christopher Badura and Amy Kind, Tom Schoonen (2022) raised a problem for the view I defended in the volume. I’ll quote him at length:
Another issue with respect to the justification use of imagination is that it is not often explicitly considered whether it is really the imagination that is doing the epistemic heavily lifting, or whether it is something else that does […] We also see this in the contribution of Omoge. He extends Nichols and Stich’s notion of scripts to, what he calls, modalizing scripts. ‘For example, to imagine whether zombies are possible, the relevant modalizing script (call it, a zombie script) is that which details how thoughts involving “consciousness” typically unfold’ (p. 84). However, as Langland-Hassan (2012) points out, merely suggesting that there is a mechanism that fills in the details and labelling it ‘scripts’, ‘does little more than provide space for an explanation to come’ (p. 162, emphasis added). This is especially problematic for Omoge’s project of presenting an imagination-based epistemology of modality, for it is the scripts, which consist of theoretical knowledge, that are doing all the epistemological work, not the imagination (Schoonen 2022: 3, original italics).
For a bit of context, let’s begin with what scripts are. Scripts have a long history in cognitive psychology as components of beliefs, which guide both reasoning and acting. According to Schank & Abelson, “a script is a structure that describes appropriate sequences of events in a particular context” (1977: 41). Thus, there is a restaurant that details how events in a restaurant typically unfold. My view, as Schoonen correctly describes it, turns on extending this notion of ‘script’ to metaphysical modalizing, e.g., the phenomenal zombie. Schoonen’s problem with my view, however, is that by relying on scripts, it becomes unclear whether imagination is doing the required work. Perhaps scripts are doing the “epistemic heavy lifting”, and so it is unclear to what extent I’ve described an imagination-based epistemology of modality. In short, Schoonen is saying that “scripting is not imagining”. This contribution is a first attempt[i] at showing why scripting is imagining. My submission is that if Schoonen is correct, then we would have to forfeit what we mean by ‘imagination’.
No doubt, imagination is heterogeneous (Kind 2013). Even within the belief-like kind, which is operational in the current debate, there are the creative, suppositional, attitudinal, inward-looking, cognitive, conceptual, and propositional varieties, to mention but a few. Whatever one means by ‘belief-like imagination’, however, Langland-Hassan has given a clear characterization: “[belief-like imagination] is a way of engaging in rich, elaborated cognition about the possible, fantastical, pretended, and so on, that is epistemically compatible with things not really being the way they are being thought about, and with one’s not believing things to be that way” (2020: 5). If so, then belief-like imagination (hereafter, simply as ‘imagination’) is not cognitively free-floating: it doesn’t float above the mind á la the cloud that floats above/around the earth. Rather, like all other cognitive faculties, imagination is anchored in the cognitive architecture of the mind, as evident in talk of the cognitive architecture of imagination that’s now a mainstay in the philosophy of imagination.[ii] My imagination-based epistemology of modality was given against the backdrop of this cognitive architectural framework.
Generally, architecture talk about our cognitive faculties affords mapping out the interconnectedness between the faculties as well as between them and other mental components. Though the controversial yet standard practice is to couch this interconnectedness in terms of ‘boxes’ and ‘arrows’—the infamous boxology approach—some theorists (e.g., Nichols & Stich 2003; Weinberg & Meskin 2006) go further to describe the psychological processes involved in the boxes. This implies that cognitive attitudes—imagination in our case—are just their underlying operational psychological processes. Of course, care must be taken to clarify how this claim doesn’t return us to the old days of classic psychologism of Mills, Frege, and Husserl,[iii] but I take it that whatever we think of classic psychologism, some form of naturalistic psychologism (Quine 1969) is true for our cognitive faculties. Unless we mean by ‘imagination’ some mysterious free-floating cognitive faculty that is unconstrained by the rich and complex connectivity that constitutes the human mind, imagination must be identical to the relevant cognitive psychological processes that realize it. And if the term ‘psychologism’ bothers you, Pelletier et al. (2008: 5–6) have clarified that the form of naturalistic psychologism I say is true for imagination (and other cognitive faculties) here “is most naturally seen as a type of physicalism.” My qualm with Schoonen’s statement then is that accepting it means forfeiting this naturalistically psychologistic or physicalist picture of imagination.
Schoonen says that given my (and Nichols & Stich’s) reliance on scripts, it is unclear whether imagination is doing the epistemic heavy lifting. This, as I’ve said, just means that scripting and imagining come apart. But Schoonen agrees that the cognitive architecture of imagination won’t be complete without scripts, which just translates into scripts being a proper part of imagination just as object identification is a proper part of perception. Imagining is not something in addition to scripting, such that scripts serve to set up the stage for imagination; rather, imagination spans both before and after scripts. If so, then unless the “explanation to come”, which Schoonen takes as evidence that scripts have stopped playing their role, describes some mysterious cognitive faculty beyond the psychological processes operational in imagination, such that scripting and imagining come apart, scripting is imagining. More worryingly, the mystery is that imagination, remaining cognitively free-floating and unencumbered by any epistemic constraints, somehow retains its epistemic functions. Schoonen has a tough decision to make.
In fact, Schoonen needs and doesn’t have the support he thinks he has. Though I realize that a book review doesn’t allow one to develop one’s point to the required length and breadth, there is nonetheless an ambiguity in Schoonen’s statement that must be pointed out. The culprit statement is this: “merely suggesting that there is a mechanism that fills in the details and labelling it ‘scripts’, ‘does little more than provide space for an explanation to come’”. The latter part of the statement (i.e., ‘does little more than provide space for an explanation to come’) is from Langland-Hassan, and he was talking about the Script Elaborator there, not scripts. So, we must ask: is Schoonen then saying scripts are mechanisms? Surely not, scripts are states, not mechanisms. Is he saying the details that get filled in are scripts? Surely not, scripts are the paradigms that afford the filling, they are not the details that get filled in.
Ambiguity aside, I am inclined to read Schoonen in the latter sense. His point seems to be that scripts, now read as the details that get filled in, complete the imaginative act, and, so, they, not imagination itself, are doing all the important work. But this isn’t what I (and Nichols & Stich) say. Here is a clear statement to the effect that there is imagination post-script (pun intended!): “So, Nichols and Stich argue, second, that there must be a mechanism, which teases deviations out from scripts, and they take these deviations to be the details that are left which scripts do not supply” (Omoge 2021: 85, emphasis added). Put vividly, scripts (and the Script Elaborator) are cogs in the psychological machine that drives/is imagination. Scripting is imagining.
Notes
[i] By this, I mean/hope that with this blog contribution (and comments from readers), the idea might blossom well enough to end up in a journal publication.
[ii] Of course, ‘whether imagination is a cognitive attitude at all’ and ‘whether imagination has its own cognitive architecture’ are both contested. See Langland-Hassan (2012) and Carruthers (2006), respectively.
[iii] Psychologism may have been bad for logic, but psychologism can be about anything, and we can’t know upfront that it would be bad for those other fields or objects just because it was bad for logic. As I’ve said in the text, whatever the fate of logical psychologism, some form of cognitive psychologism is true.
References
Badura, C., & Kind, A. 2021. Epistemic Uses of Imagination. New York: Routledge.
Carruthers, P. 2002. Human Creativity: Its Cognitive Basis, Its Evolution, and Its Connections with Childhood Pretence. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 53(2): 225–49.
________. 2006. The Architecture of the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kind, A. 2013. The Heterogeneity of the Imagination. Erkenntnis, 78(1): 141–159.
Langland-Hassan, P. 2012. Pretense, Imagination, and Belief: The Single Attitude Theory. Philosophical Studies, 159: 155–79.
________. 2020. Explaining Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nichols, S., & Stich, S. 2003. Mindreading. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Omoge, M. 2021. Imagination, Metaphysical Modality, and Modal Psychology. In C. Badura and A. Kind (Ed.), Epistemic Uses of Imagination, New York: Routledge, 79–99.
Pelletier, F., Elio, R., Hanson, P. 2008. Is Logic all in our Heads? From Naturalism to Psychologism. Studia Logica, 88: 3–66.
Quine, W. 1969. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press.
Schank, R., & Abelson, R. 1977. Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding. New Jersey: L. Erlbaum Associates.
Schoonen, T. 2022. Review of Epistemic Uses of Imagination, The Philosophical Quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqab073
Weinberg, J., & Meskin, A. 2006. Puzzling Over the Imagination: Philosophical Problems, Architectural Solutions. In S. Nichols (Ed.), The Architecture of Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 175–204.