A post by Max Jones

I imagine that, if you’re reading this, you probably think the imagination is a good thing. If, like me, you find the imagination fascinating, you may have become fond of it over years of wondering about it, and may have been awed by the things that it can do.

I’ve recently been thinking a lot on Ryle’s “Thought and Imagination” (1979, 51-64) (which may account for the somewhat arcane style that I’ve decided to write this in, channelling an imagined hybrid of myself and Ryle!). Thinking about Ryle’s posthumously published work on imagination has made me begin to worry about the apparent goodness of imagination. I worry that we may have been missing something in failing to see that the imagination is often considered to be a good thing in and of itself.

Why is it good to use your imagination? There are obviously lots of benefits that can come from using one’s imagination, but we often talk as though there is something intrinsically good about using one’s imagination and perhaps even about imagination itself.

When we say that someone used their imagination, this tends to be in the context of praise. This seems different from when we say that they used their eyes or their hands. When we say that someone lacks imagination, this tends to be pejorative. It’s certainly not a description of aphantasics, who some might characterize as lacking a key component of imagination. As Ryle puts it, “except on the barrack-squares of life the epithet ‘unimaginative’ is always somewhat disparaging” (1979, 63). Someone who lacks imagination isn’t someone utterly incapable of imagining, rather, they have less of some valuable quality that it’s good to have more of.

There are obviously some cases where attributions of imagination can be pejorative. If someone were to tell you that their accountant used their imagination when helping them with their tax returns, you’d probably get the joke (and hopefully also be disappointed in your interlocutor for dodging taxes!). However, the fact that this can even be understood as being a joke (albeit not a great one) highlights that we usually have an expectation for attributions of imagination to implicitly involve some kind of praise. Similarly, Ryle points to the case of school reports where “if a schoolboy’s terminal report described his multiplication as imaginative […] it would describe it as very bad” (1979, 55). However, this is again an exception that proves the rule, since school reports (like job references) are contexts where one is expected to use praiseful terminology even when one is being critical. Even pejorative attributions of imagination serve to emphasise the praise inherent in more straightforward uses.

Attributions of imagination to a person or as a part of some activity that they are engaged in seem to have a partially evaluative character to them. It’s good to have an imagination, and it’s good to use it. This evaluative aspect seems slightly odd if the imagination is an innate mental faculty that most or all of us possess and are readily able to use. We don’t usually praise people for merely perceiving, thinking, or believing, independently of the content of these states. However, merely imagining, in a sense, seems good and worthy of praise. Apart from cases of imagining things that are bad in some other sense, such as imagining morally abhorrent scenarios, what we imagine seems to make little difference to its apparent underlying goodness. We talk as if imagining is a good thing to do, whether or not you get something out of it.

It’s obviously important not to pay too much attention to ordinary language. The way we talk about the imagination may tell us very little about its nature if our folk theories of the imagination are incorrect. It also seems plausible that we can recognize evaluative imagination talk based on context and pragmatics. Some explicit attributions of imagination may come with an implicit attribution of praise for the quality of the imagination in question, determined by context.

That all makes good sense, but I think it’s still worth exploring where one might end up by taking the idea of an evaluative aspect to imagination attributions more seriously.

An interesting and radical proposal immediately appears on the horizon. What if all attributions of imagination are evaluative? What if the imagination is more like gumption than like perception or cognition? Perhaps, when we label any mental process as imagination, we are merely saying that there is something that we value about it. Imagining may just be a form of good thinking, and imagination just a way in which thinking can be good.

Ryle hints at such a view when he says “Imagining is, I am maintaining, not an activity to be contrasted with thinking; nor yet a species of thinking. It is the innovating, inventing, exploring, adventuring, risk-taking – if you like, creative, vanguard or scout patrol – of thinking” (1979, 63). This could be interpreted as merely saying that imagining is a certain way of thinking (a view that I am very keen on), which needn’t be evaluated as a good or bad way of thinking. Yet, the terms that Ryle uses to characterise imaginative thought all have a somewhat positive spin.

On this kind of picture, attributions of imagination may even be highly subjective evaluative judgements. Whether a particular person’s mental activity qualifies as imagination may depend on one’s personal tastes when it comes to which mental activities are valuable. Imagination, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder (even if it happens to be the case that most/all instances of imagination aren’t directly observable to any eyes).

One implication of the radical proposal would be that many philosophers of imagination may be pursuing a hopeless path in attempting to provide reductive descriptions or explanations of imagination (scientific or otherwise). If attributions of imagination are evaluative or normative then, at least for those that take the is/ought or fact/value gaps seriously, investigating and describing the processes that underlie imagination may not be as fruitful as expected. If imagination is an ought then it might be better to refrain from worrying about what it really is.

I certainly don’t want to endorse this radical position. I’ve spent much of my time thinking about how to provide naturalistically plausible explanations of the imagination, and I hope I haven’t been wasting my time (any more than I do with any of my other philosophical projects!). But I think that the possibility that imagination is like gumption is worth worrying about.

How might we account for the apparent goodness of imagination, while maintaining that it’s worthwhile to describe and explain the imagination? One option is to see these as two entirely separate goals, because when we talk about imagination, we’re talking about two very different things. Sometimes, when we talk about the imagination, we are attributing some value to a person’s character or to one of their acts. Other times, we are talking about a kind of mental process or mental action that is characterised by imagery, counterfactuals, or whatever. All we need to do is be careful to recognise when we are using “imagination” in an evaluative sense and when we are using it in a descriptive sense. We just need to sort the imaginativeness from the imagination.

Perhaps we already do this with ease and I’m fretting too much, but I can’t shake the sense that there’s still something to worry about here. Often, we may have both senses of imagination in mind. We might be praising someone for “using their imagination”, while also stating that they actually used their imagination in the process, all in one breath. The worry is that this may mean that the evaluative and descriptive senses of imagination are very hard, if not impossible, to disentangle or to disambiguate.

The two senses of imagination could also come apart in confusing ways. There might be cases where we appropriately praise something as imagination in the evaluative sense but which don’t involve the imagination as a faculty. For example, when I praise a footballer for using their imagination, I might not intend to be describing the nature of their mental processing, as much as the way that they manipulate a football. There will also be cases where one is using one’s faculty of imagination, perhaps involving mental imagery of a relatively mundane sort, that might not be worthy of praise. One can utilise one’s faculty of imagination in a way that no-one would praise as a case of “using one’s imagination”.

Again, maybe there’s nothing to worry about here, but I get a sense that we may not always be clear on when we are using “imagination” evaluatively and when descriptively (and when both). Maybe imagination is an irreducibly thick concept (I don’t know enough about the philosophical debates about thick concepts to have a strong view on this, but I can imagine someone who did might have something to say and it certainly sounds like an interesting research angle to pursue). At the very least, we may need to be careful not to look for imagination (as a value) in the brain or its processes, and not to look for imagination (as a process/faculty) in every case where use of imagination is valued.

Part of me hopes that readers will be able to come up with easy solutions to these worries. I’d certainly like to think that we can and should carry on trying to understand the imagination without having to worry about perhaps idiosyncratic evaluative connotations of the word “imagination”. At the same time, the exciting avenues for research that appear if one takes the evaluative sense of imagination more seriously are beguiling, even if they make things more challenging and muddy the water.

Reference

Ryle, G. (1979). On Thinking. Blackwell