Steve Humbert-Droz is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Geneva (Switzerland) and a member of Thumos (the Genevan research group on emotions, values, and norms). He is currently working on a taxonomy of imagination in light of the mode/content distinction. His other interests are aesthetics and aesthetic values, organic unities, and emotions. Outside of academia, he likes pen-and-paper RPG, German expressionist films, Oscar Wilde, and tasty whiskies.
A post by Steve Humbert-Droz and Juliette Vazard
According to contemporary philosophical accounts of hope, a hopeful emotion involves an element of imagination as input, part, or output of hope. A typical description of a hopeful episode often goes with mental imagery or immersion into the hoped-for scenario: as Ariel is hoping to win the dance competition on Saturday night, he projects himself in the scenario where he visualizes his name appearing on the screen display, quasi-hears the crowd cheering, feels proud, and starts thinking about the national dance competition.
This raises the question: how does hope exactly interact with the processes required to produce a mental image or even an immersive exploration of the desired reality? This is the question we tackle in this post. Rather than putting forward a new account of the nature of hope, we explore the interactions between hope and the different kinds of imagination.
Juliette Vazard is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Geneva (Interdisciplinary Center for Affective Sciences). She earned a PhD in Philosophy and Cognitive Science from the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris and the University of Geneva. She is currently working on hope, anxiety, and the emotion-cognition interactions at play in our apprehension of future possibilities and their value for us. In 2022-2024 she will be a Postdoc Mobility fellow at City University of New York (CUNY).
The views
Several authors have proposed to move beyond the "orthodox definition" of hope, which originally reduced hope to a belief-desire pair. In trying to capture the nature of hope more adequately, these authors have highlighted the importance of imagination for hoping, sometimes giving it center stage, as we will now see.
A widely discussed definition is Luc Bovens's (1999) idea that, beyond a belief for an outcome and a desire that this outcome obtains, occurring hope necessarily involves "mental imaging" about the desired outcome. Is the relation between hope and sensory imagination a necessary one, then? We challenge Bovens' claim by objecting that if mental images are necessary for hoping, then this implies that individuals unable to create and entertain mental images (aphantasics) are also unable to experience hope - which seems doubtful.
Let us then move on to Adrienne Martin's account (2011; 2013), one of the most elaborate philosophical accounts of hope in contemporary philosophy. She proposes an analysis of hope as a "syndrome," according to which hoping provides us with practical reasons to engage in a series of "hopeful activities."[i] According to her, fantasizing is a central (but not necessary) "hopeful activity." How does Martin's notion of fantasizing fit within the contemporary taxonomy of imaginings?
Martin emphasizes the importance of the narrative structure and the elaborate nature of hopeful fantasies (2011: 158-159), which indicates that what she has in mind is a kind of cognitive imagination rather than a sequence of mental images. Martin presents the example of a writer who hopes to become a mother. The writer fantasizes about how becoming a mother would change her life and impact her writing in interesting ways by giving her access to a new range of experiences (2011: 163). If her fantasizing is to provide the writer with all of this information, we suggest, then the writer doesn't just sensorily imagine "the face of a child" or "the baby giggling", she imagines a whole sequence of events "whose total content exceeds anything conveyable in a mental image alone" (Stock, 2017: 26).
For this reason, hopeful fantasizing à la Martin seems to correspond to what scholars call "dramatic imagining" (Moran, 1994) or "immersion" (Schellenberg, 2013). As Richard Moran puts it,
imagining along these lines involves something more like genuine rehearsal, 'trying on' the point of view, trying to determine what it is like to inhabit it. (1994: 105)
In other words, immersive imagination allows us to engage with a whole scenario and understand its wide-ranging implications on our lives. In opposition to hypothetical imagining (i.e., supposition), immersive imagining is an activity – it takes time and cognitive resources – and involves a commitment towards p that is deeply engaging (Gendler, 2000). We believe that what Martin has rightly identified as a paradigmatic hopeful activity is immersive imagination into the hoped-for scenario.
The epistemic function of imagination in hopeful activity
So far, so good. But Martin also attributes an important epistemic function to the fantasizing involved in hoping. As she suggests:
Fantasies are a kind of free-play of imagination, which can lead the fantasizer to notice or posit features she had not considered before. Because of their narrative structure, fantasies propose more or less complete accounts of how the world might be. They can thereby provide a hopeful person with new data that she may take as relevant to her situation. (2013: 88)
As we note, it is questionable how fantasizing could provide "new data" if it is a "free-play." There is a tension between Martin's characterization of fantasizing as an unconstrained and unfettered form of imagining, and the epistemic value she attributes to it.
Fantasies understood in this sense are disconnected from our beliefs about reality – they are a form of "indulgent" or "easeful" imagining (Currie & Ravenscroft, 2002: sec. 2.5). The exemplar of such free-play of imagination is when we indulge in imagining a passionate romantic encounter with a sexy neighbor, whom we perfectly know is uninterested, unavailable, or otherwise entirely out of reach for the sheer purpose of hedonic pleasure (Stock, 2009).
In the case of hopeful imagining, we argue that it is not an unfettered fantasizing but a reality-constrained immersion. Indeed, as Amy Kind (2016) highlighted, it seems to be precisely the constrained nature of some of our imaginings that provides them with their epistemic value. In particular, Kind claims that two important constraining factors determine the epistemic relevance of our imaginings: the reality and the change constraints.
First, our imaginings are epistemically valuable insofar as our knowledge of current reality guides them. For instance, when Ariel imagines winning the national dance competition, his imagination ignores an important feature of the current reality, namely his total absence of a sense of rhythm. Second, our imaginings must be constrained by the consequences that we believe an event could imply. If, upon imagining that he wins the competition, Ariel further imagines that this makes him so famous that he gets invited on national talk shows and ends up running for President, his imagining is not in line with correct beliefs of the plausible changes that this event could bring about.
Constraints and the cognitive base of hope
In our view, hope is an emotional state which leads us to constrain our immersive imagining in a way that respects the criteria introduced by Kind. This is because hopes are themselves constrained by one's beliefs in the probability of occurrence of the desired outcome and its possible implications for us. Indeed, as Milona & Stockdale (2018) point out, we seem to calibrate our hopes on the probability that we assign to the given desired outcomes. In fitting cases, I have little hope when I believe that p is highly unlikely. Second, hopes are also guided by our desires. We do not hope for affairs we are averse to and tend to hope strongly for what we consider to have a great positive impact on us. Therefore, the rationality of hope seems to depend on the conjunction of the two factors of desirability and probability,
One persists rationally in such hopefulness if one continues to incorporate one's probability and attraction to the outcome into one's rational agency. (Benton, 2019: 147, emphasis added)
The fittingness of hope depends on these two factors, and the epistemic value of the imaginary output is dependent on the fittingness of our episodes of hope.
How does it work? We suggest that our beliefs in the probability of occurrence of the desired outcome constitute the cognitive base of both hope and immersion (Deonna & Teroni, 2012: 5). When hope triggers an episode of immersive imagination, it inherits its cognitive base as a starting point. Consequently, when our hopes are based on false beliefs, this "contaminates" the epistemic status of the imaginings thereby triggered. For instance, if Ariel's hope to win the dance competition is based on a drastically false belief regarding his sense of rhythm, his hope may be unfitting. Ariel's imaginings of winning the competition are, thus, incorrectly constrained due to his misguided epistemic evaluation of his chances. By contrast, when hope is based on accurate evaluations of the probability of occurrence and attractiveness of a given outcome, then the immersive imagining triggered fits the criteria for epistemic relevance and provides us with exploitable information on how a desired scenario could realistically unfold.
Now, contrast our view with Martin's. In a short passage of her monograph, she incidentally agrees that:
a more realistic fantasist is more likely to discover genuinely attractive features of the hoped-for outcome and, therefore, genuine reasons to pursue that outcome. (2013: 93)
However, Martin lacks an explanation for why that is the case, and where the fantasies draw their "realistic" properties from. It seems almost coincidental that those fantasies happen to be "realistic" and serve in our deliberations on her account. Our story explains not only why there is a privileged connection between hope and immersive imagination, but also why fitting instances of hope trigger imaginings that fulfill the criteria for epistemic relevance introduced by Kind.[ii] It is because these imaginings inherit the constraints proper to fitting hope that they can have epistemic value.
References
Benton, M. A. (2019). Epistemological Aspects of Hope. In C. Blöser & T. Stahl (Eds.), The Moral Psychology of Hope (pp. 135–151). London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Bovens, L. (1999). The Value of Hope. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 59(3), 667–681.
Currie, G., & Ravenscroft, I. (2002). Recreative Minds. Oxford University Press.
Deonna, J. A., & Teroni, F. (2012). The emotions: A philosophical introduction. Routledge.
Gendler, T. S. (2000). The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance. In Intuition, Imagination, and Philosophical Methodology (2010th ed., pp. 179–202).
Kind, A. (2016). Imagination Under Contraints. In Knowledge Through Imagination (pp. 145–159). Oxford University Press.
Martin, A. (2011). Hopes and Dreams. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 83(1), 148–173.
Martin, A. (2013). How We Hope: A Moral Psychology. Princeton University Press.
Milona, M., & Stockdale, K. (2018). A Perceptual Theory of Hope. Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 5(20201214).
Moran, R. (1994). The Expression of Feeling in Imagination. The Philosophical Review, 103(1), 75–106.
Schellenberg, S. (2013). Belief and Desire in Imagination and Immersion. Journal of Philosophy, 110(9), 497–517.
Stock, K. (2009). Fantasy, Imagination, and Film. The British Journal of Aesthetics, 49(4), 357–369.
Stock, K. (2017). Only imagine: Fiction, interpretation and imagination. Oxford University Press.