Felipe is a postdoctoral research at Universidad de Chile. He works on modal epistemology, know-how, and philosophy of the social sciences.
A post by Felipe Morales Carbonell
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about an idea I found in R.G. Collingwood, which is that understanding is not only the grasp of propositions, but also, and perhaps more crucially, of questions. The idea is rich in consequences, but here I want to focus on one aspect of it that raises some interesting issues for the philosophy of the imagination. Specifically, I want to explore how Collingwood’s idea can apply to the problem of understanding people through the use of the imagination.
In his Autobiography, Collingwood raises the following point:
[…] you cannot find what a man means by simply studying his spoken or written statements, even though he has spoken or written with perfect command of language and perfectly truthful intention. In order to find out his meaning you must also know what the question was (a question in his own mind, and presumed by him to be in yours) to which the thing he has said or written was meant as an answer (31).
While Ryle had most famously mounted an attack on the idea that intentional action presupposed the consideration of propositions, Collingwood takes a different approach on the (in)sufficiency of the possession of propositional attitudes as an explanatory basis for intentional action.[1] In Collingwood’s proposal, regardless of whether propositional attitudes play any such explanatory role, it is crucial to grasp the relevant question-oriented attitudes, which cannot be simply reduced to propositional attitudes of the usual kind. In this, he anticipated recent interest in models of cognition where such attitudes play a prominent role (for example, Friedman (2013), Carruthers (2018), and Hoek (2022), among others).
By ‘question’, Collingwood meant something that someone can address, care for, look for an answer to. Most importantly, a question in this conception is not something that a person simply understands intellectually, but something that arises to the person, something that becomes a living concern. Collingwood distinguishes between what we may call basic questions, which are questions that are specific to a situation, and complex questions, which bundle and summarize basic questions (the terminology is not his). Suppose we try for an afternoon to fix a problem with an argument we are working on. There is, of course, a way to describe us as engaged with the complex question ‘how do I fix the problem in the argument?’. But more precisely, through this time I am engaged with more specific basic questions such as ‘if I assume this or that principle, would that be enough to make the argument go through?’, ‘what is my support for this premise really?’, and so on. And my solution will be the answer to some or other basic question: the overall problem will get sorted out by finding one or many specific fixes to the argument.
If something like this is right, understanding someone’s actions will require that we are somehow able to grasp the basic questions that arise for them. I will propose that the way in which we can do this is through the use of the imagination. But first, let me make some observations about the relevance of this Collingwoodian idea for the philosophy of the social sciences.
There is a long tradition of thinking that argues that understanding human phenomena requires not only a grasp of their general features and patterns, which can be repeated, but also a grasp of their specific or individual features, which may not. Some people have suggested that this can be provided by narrative understanding, the grasp of how events articulate in the sequence of a particular story.[2] The Collingwoodian idea suggests a different (although perhaps complementary) way to particularity: because the questions that arise to people are specific, and because they play a role in the explanation of their action, understanding people must also focus on the specific questions that present to them in their specific context. In fact, we can see narrative understanding as a device to produce understanding of the questions that our subjects confront: by presenting the events that lead up to a problem, we are able to grasp the problem as it presented to our subjects. Collingwood (1946) indeed argues that this is the core of historical knowledge. We are told that Louis and Susan have fallen in love with each other, and that they are now engaged, and that in a chance event Susan has met Lily, and that Susan has fallen for Lily, and somewhat out of love with Louis, and we see how Susan must now face a question (or, more realistically, a series of questions). It is not even necessary to state the question—we get it. But to make it explicit, let’s assume that the question is whether she should stay with Louis or go with Lily.
If this rough description of how we understand what goes on in this case is plausible, it seems that sometimes we deploy our imagination in order to grasp questions, on the way to understanding people. The question I want to raise now is: how is the imagination involved in this process? What are the mechanics of question-imagination?
One approach, let’s call it Reductionism, would say: question-imagination is imagination of beliefs concerning a topic plus imagination of desires to address the concern. So, for example, to imagine Susan’s question is to imagine her beliefs about their situation and her dilemma, and her desire to solve it.
Another approach, let’s call it Anti-Reductionism, would say: question-imagination is a matter of having certain question-oriented attitudes (i-questions), but these are not to be reduced to other forms of imagination. When we imagine Susan’s question, we imagine her dilemma in a way that goes beyond our grasp of her beliefs and desires.
These theoretical options are subject to a dialectic that in many ways replicates the discussion people have had concerning the postulation of so-called i-desires (see Kind (2016) for discussion). In favor of Anti-Reductionism, it could be argued that i-questions have to be isolated from real questions. When I read a narrative and imagine that its subject faces a dilemma, it seems that I do not thereby feel the dilemma as a question that arises to myself (although maybe I can see it as something that could arise as a live question for myself in similar circumstances). In a specific sense, it is not my question. In response, the Reductionist can offer an argument that reuses their response against the postulation of i-desires (à la Carruthers 2006). If we take question-imagination as a complex attitude that involves real desires but imaginary beliefs, we can expect it to be naturally isolated from action (which requires interaction between real desires and real beliefs), and there is no need to postulate i-questions just to ensure this isolation.
I feel, however, that this response does not acknowledge the (potential) autonomy of question-directed attitudes. One could adopt instead a view where instead of mixing with real desires, imaginary beliefs mix with real questions (and potentially, also with real desires). When I engage with a narrative such as Susan’s, a certain basic question becomes live to me, and it becomes the focus of my attention, at least for a little while.[3] The energy I expend pursuing it is balanced with the energy I am expending on the overall task of understanding the narrative it is embedded in (a task which in the case of narratives can be summarized as an attempt to answer the question of ‘what happens next?’).
All of this is, of course, merely preliminary. My intention here is just to raise awareness about the problem of accounting for the possibility of question-imagination. The importance of this problem, I feel, stems from the appeal of a certain view of human existence and our capacity to understand it. According to this view, people are not closed entities, so they cannot be described just in terms of their given beliefs and desires, however unsettled those are. They are themselves not solved riddles that we only fail to recognize as such. Rather, they are open to questions. To understand somebody requires to see them as engaged in the questions that arise to them, and that give structure to their lives. To see this we need to engage in our imagination, to make their questions our questions.
Notes
[1] In his later papers, such as ‘The Thinking of Thoughts: What is Le Penseur Doing’, Ryle also recognized the importance of questions.
[2] On both ideas, see Mink (1987).
[3] Going back to Collingwood, it may be worth pointing out that his theory of historical re-enactment could be construed along these lines. See Dray (1995).
References
Carruthers, Peter (2006). Why Pretend. In Shaun Nichols (eds.) The Architecture of the Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 89–109.
Carruthers, Peter (2018). Basic Questions. Mind and Language 33 (2):130-147.
Collingwood, R.G. (1946). The Idea of History. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Collingwood, R.G. (1978). An Autobiography. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dray, William (1995). History as Re-Enactment: R.G. Collingwood’s Idea of History. London: Clarendon Paperbacks.
Friedman, Jane (2013). Question-Directed Attitudes. Philosophical Perspectives 27 (1):145-174.
Hoek, Daniel (2022). Questions in Action. Journal of Philosophy 119 (3):113-143.
Kind, Amy (2016). Desire-Like Imagination. In Amy Kind, ed., Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination. London: Routledge, 163-176.
Mink, Louis O. (1987) Historical Understanding. Cornell University Press.