A post by Josh Myers

Imaginings can justify empirical beliefs about the actual world. For example, you can get justification for believing that your suitcase will fit into the trunk of your car simply by imagining trying to fit your suitcase inside and finding that you imagine succeeding.

But not all imaginings are created epistemically equal. Consider two variations of this case:

(1)  You imagine the suitcase fitting into the trunk clearly and vividly. Your imagining is intense, richly detailed, and precise. Although you do not mistake your imagining for perception, its sensory phenomenology is highly perception-like.

(2)  You imagine the suitcase fitting into the trunk blurrily and faintly. Your imagining is weak, sparsely detailed, and imprecise. The sensory phenomenology of your imagining stands in stark contrast to the comparative vivacity of your perceptual phenomenology.

Intuitively, (1) confers more justification than (2). This motivates the view that imaginative vivacity can make a difference to the justificatory force of the imagination.[i] We can formulate this thesis as follows:

Vivacity: Imaginings with a greater degree of vivacity confer a greater degree of justification.

Vivacity has not been explicitly discussed in the literature on the epistemology of imagination. Nevertheless, I suspect that it is sometimes tacitly assumed. For example, Kind (2018) argues that imaginings can justify beliefs by appealing to extraordinarily skilled imaginers such as Nikola Tesla and Temple Grandin. I take it that at least part of the motivation for appealing to extraordinary imaginers is that their imaginings are extremely vivid and that this makes them good candidates for conferring justification.

In this blog post, I will argue that, despite its intuitive appeal, Vivacity is false. The vivacity of an imagining plays no role in determining its justificatory force.

There is vast disagreement over what exactly vivacity amounts to. Kind (2017) goes as far as to argue that the concept of vivacity is so confused that it should be excised from our philosophical terminology altogether. Other recent discussions concede that vivacity is unlikely to correspond to a single phenomenal property and instead opt for a healthy pluralism. For example, Tooming & Miyazono (2021) argue that vivacity is a property cluster correlating with detail, clarity, perception-likeness, and intensity. Similarly, Langkau (2021) argues that imaginings are vivid to the extent that they accurately imitate perceptual content, and that “visual mental images can imitate perceptual content more or less accurately along several dimensions: the degree of clarity, amount of detail, brightness, color intensity, and possibly more” (p. 41).

I will not presuppose any particular account of vivacity. Instead, I will attempt to show that Vivacity is false on any plausible precisification of the notion. I will do this by posing a dilemma. Either vivacity is a matter of imaginative content, or it is a matter of non-contentful imaginative phenomenology. If vivacity is a matter of content, then it is relevant to which beliefs are justified, but not the degree to which those beliefs are justified. If vivacity is a matter of non-contentful phenomenology, then it is simply epistemically irrelevant. Let me explain each horn of the dilemma in turn.

On the first horn of the dilemma, imaginative vivacity is a matter of content, or what is represented by the imagining. This is suggested by theorists’ appeals to detail, clarity, and precision. The amount of detail in an imagining is a matter of the amount of information that the imagining represents and the clarity or precision of an imagining is a matter of how determinate, specific, or fine-grained that information is. Let us call this conception of vivacity content-vivacity.

Plausibly, for an imagining to justify a belief that p, it must itself represent that p. Your imagining only justifies the belief that the suitcase will fit in the trunk because it represents the suitcase fitting into the trunk. Thus, everyone can agree that how content-vivid an imagining is will determine which beliefs it can justify. Imaginings with more detailed contents will be able to justify beliefs with more detailed contents, imaginings with more determinate contents will be able to justify beliefs with more determinate contents, and so on.

But Vivacity says that imaginative vivacity determines not just which beliefs are justified but the degree to which they are justified. It is much less plausible that content-vivacity can play this role. As long as your imagining is content-vivid enough to represent your suitcase fitting into the trunk, then no amount of extra content-vivacity will increase the amount of justification you get for this belief. Adding in fine-grained detail with respect to the color, texture, and shape of the suitcase might allow the imagining to justify additional beliefs about the suitcase, but it will not give you any additional justification for the belief that the suitcase will fit in the trunk.

 On the second horn of the dilemma, imaginative vivacity is a matter of non-contentful phenomenology, or how an imagining feels independently of what it represents.[ii] This is suggested by some of the other criteria that theorists give for vivacity, such as the intensity or strength of an experience. It is natural to think of intensity as a non-representational aspect of phenomenology; the very same content might be represented by an imaginative episode of greater or lesser intensity. Let us call this conception of vivacity phenomenal-vivacity.

While content-vivacity at least makes a difference to which beliefs an imagining can justify, phenomenal-vivacity is entirely epistemically irrelevant. As evidence, note that phenomenal-vivacity does not correlate with epistemic goods such as reliability or accuracy. Many inaccurate imaginings are highly phenomenally vivid. For example, I might form a phenomenally vivid mental image of an alien invasion of New York City. Conversely, even subjects who score low on measures of imaginative vivacity are able to perform well on reasoning tasks that implicate imagination, such as mental rotation or mental scanning (Dean & Morris 2003, Pounder et al. 2022). Instead, phenomenal-vivacity correlates with features of our psychology that are at best epistemically irrelevant and at worst epistemically pernicious. For example, emotionally valenced imaginings tend to be experienced as more intense than emotionally neutral imaginings (Bywaters, Andrade, & Turpin 2004). But the mere fact that an imagining is emotionally charged should not result in it conferring a greater degree of justification. If anything, we might expect emotionally charged imaginings to be more biased and thus less reliable in certain respects.

What about the intuition that there is a justificatory difference between (1) and (2), which motivated Vivacity in the first place? This intuition can be explained away by appealing to the fact that imaginative vivacity tends to correlate with one’s prior information. All things being equal, it is more difficult to vividly imagine things that you have had no prior experience with. For example, you might find it easier to form a vivid imagining of your suitcase fitting into the trunk if you have traveled with this suitcase many times before and owned the car for years than if they are both brand new. This is because prior experience gives rise to more raw materials, such as beliefs and memories, to draw on in constructing an imaginative representation. This prior information acts as “scaffolding” that makes it easier to construct a detailed and intense imaginative experience of the relevant object.

This correlation between imaginative vivacity and prior information explains away the intuition that vivacity makes an epistemic difference. This is because it is the prior information itself that determines the justificatory force of the imagining, rather than the vivacity that it tends to correlate with.[iii] It is natural to assume, given the description of the case, that the imagining in (1) is more vivid than the imagining in (2) precisely because it is constrained by better evidence about the size and shape of the suitcase and trunk. But suppose we hold constant the quality of the information that both imaginings are based on. Perhaps the difference in vivacity is instead explained by individual differences in imaginative ability. In this case, it is no longer obvious that the more vivid imagining confers more justification than the less vivid imagining. As long as both imaginings are constrained by good evidence about the size and shape of the suitcase and they both represent the suitcase fitting into the trunk, then they both confer the same degree of justification. In short, prior information is a third factor that simultaneously correlates with an imagining’s vivacity and determines its justificatory force, and this explains why imaginative vivacity might appear to determine justificatory force.

Notes

[i] An additional motivation for Vivacity comes from the widely discussed and relatively popular epistemological view that perception justifies belief solely in virtue of its phenomenology and the Humean view that perception and imagination phenomenally differ only in their degree of vivacity.

[ii] Strong representationalists about phenomenal consciousness will deny that there is any non-contentful phenomenology. They will still be subject to the first horn of the dilemma.

[iii] I have argued elsewhere that the justificatory force of an imagining is determined by the evidence it is based on (Myers 2021).

References

Bywaters, Michael, Andrade, Jackie & Turpin, Graham (2004) Determinants of the vividness of visual imagery: The effects of delayed recall, stimulus affect and individual differences, Memory, 12(4):479-488

Dean, Graham M., & Morris, Peter E. (2003). The relationship between self-reports of imagery and spatial ability. British journal of psychology, 94(2):245-273.

Kind, Amy (2017). Imaginative Vividness. Journal of the American Philosophical Association 3 (1):32-50.

Kind, Amy (2018). How imagination gives rise to knowledge. In F. Dorsch & F. Macpherson (eds.), Perceptual memory and perceptual imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.

Langkau, Julia (2021). Two Kinds of Imaginative Vividness. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (1):33-47.

Myers, Joshua (2021). The Epistemic Status of the Imagination. Philosophical Studies 178   (10):3251-3270.

Pounder, Z., Jacob, J., Evans, S., Loveday, C., Eardley, A. F., & Silvanto, J. (2022). Only minimal differences between individuals with congenital aphantasia and those with typical imagery on neuropsychological tasks that involve imagery. Cortex, 14:180–192.

Tooming, Uku & Miyazono, Kengo (2021). Vividness as a natural kind. Synthese 199:3023-3043.