Margherita Arcangeli is a member of the Institut Jean Nicod as maîtresse de conférence (associate professor) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. She is the author of several articles and a book on imagination, and other topics in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and aesthetics. Recently, she has published a mystery novel co-written with her mother.
A post by Margherita Arcangeli
Sometimes it is a good time to take stock: at the end of the year, when some anniversary is coming up, but also after a long summer break.
I have been recently prompted to reflect on what has been done on imagination over the last few years: an impressive amount of work! Trying to summarise what scholars have recently written about the imagination may seem like trying to empty the sea with a spoon: an impossible and vain task. So I started to look for a useful compass to navigate the growing literature, and a powerful analogy advanced by Anna Abraham in the concluding note to The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination gave me a hint. She points out that imagination bears striking similarities with water:
“Imagination can manifest in wildly different forms from the tangible to the intangible. Its workings range from calm and predictable to volatile and unpredictable. It is a fundamental part of our physiological make-up, permeating our very being, and it is essential to our mental life. It is nourishing and constructive yet can also be overwhelming and destructive. It is quiet. It is dogged. It shapes. It wields. It fits. It flows. It pushes against fault lines. It breaks away. It lacks definition, yet it is formidable.” (Abraham 2020: 814)
I realized that comparing imagination to water can help us see different attitudes scholars have taken, and may take, towards it. At least three categories can be recognised: 1) imagination chemists, 2) imagination engineers, and 3) “imaginographers”.
Chemists are interested in the deep structure of substances, studying how to identify them, their properties and composition. As there are water chemists, there are imagination chemists, who deal with ontological issues revealing the nature of the imagination. There is an interesting parallelism between water chemistry and imagination chemistry: the latter is going through a phase where essentialists and componentialists conflict, analogous to the notable confrontation between elemental and compound views of water. That debate concerned whether water was a fundamental, indivisible element, or a mixture, a composition, of such elements. Quite similarly, imagination chemists are opposing two views. According to essentialism, imagination is a basic building block of human mental economy, possessing distinctive features which make it irreducible to other mental phenomena. The challenge is, thus, to uncover the essence of the imagination, and this can be done by individuating those properties which allow us to isolate bona fide samples from apparent ones. Yet essentialism is not a unitary position. Scholars debate not only the properties relevant to capture the essence of the imagination (e.g., a specific phenomenology, truth-independence, will-dependence), but also how many varieties of imagination there are (see Langland-Hassan on The iDecade), and the right framework for interpreting this heterogeneity as an ontologically coherent whole.
Componentialists contend that there is no structure shared by all (true) instances of imagination, which form a cluster of phenomena characterised by the frequent co-occurrence of some features, but without a cohesive essence. Imagination is not an element, like gold, but a compound, like air or water, so we should identify the elements that compose instances of imagination, and understand how they work as imaginative composites – see Van Leeuwen on this blog and Langland-Hassan 2020, who puts forward the most detailed componentialist account, according to which folk theoretical posits (like beliefs, desires, intentions, etc.) are, to pursue the water metaphor, the hydrogen and oxygen that constitute the imagination.
Engineers are concerned with the mechanics, rather than the ultimate nature, of a phenomenon. Water engineers study its behaviour in different contexts, with an eye to its exploitation and management. In a similar vein, some scholars abstain from ontological concerns and examine how imagination functions in particular contexts. These are imagination engineers. This engineering approach typically takes the form of prioritising a specific context, usually those that are considered to centrally involve imagination (e.g., fiction, pretense, mindreading – Liao’s “potted history of developments in the philosophy of imagination” is a great overview of the many channels that opened up for imagination engineers to explore), and to analyse how imagination works within it, possibly with an eye to adjusting or improving its function therein.
Imagination engineering is not free from ontological commitments, but these are quite often assumed without further analysis. Obviously, in studying the dynamics of a phenomenon we might be led to discover something about its structure, so imagination engineering can throw light on imagination chemistry, and sometimes drawing a clear boundary between the two is not so simple. That being said, it is important to keep imagination chemistry and engineering apart, insofar as they are driven by different concerns.
Hydrographers take care of detecting and describing regions that are home to water. Likewise, imaginographers map where imagination can be found, they are explorers confronted with hitherto unmapped imaginative environments: sometimes they know that they are located in (or near) an expanse of imagination, like early hydrographers; sometimes they do not, and have to seek out territories that are home to imagination, like a kind of scientifically-minded water diviners. For instance, promising lands stand at the frontiers of human cognition: What about imagination in non-human animal cognition? Do artificial systems have imagination?
In their explorations, imaginographers are likely to draw on at least some basics of imagination chemistry and engineering, but they need not be experts in these fields. They might be scholars mainly specialised in other domains who discover imagination in their enquiries (research on aphantasia originated in this way: imagination was not the main focus of neuroscientists who found such a spectrum condition affecting mental imagery). This does not mean that imaginographers cannot become imagination engineers or chemists: it happened to me. I was a philosopher of science interested in thought experiments and found imagination there, although I had little knowledge of its nature and workings, and I became so passionate about it, that I decided to take up imagination chemistry and engineering.
To sum up, the water analogy is extremely helpful in articulating different approaches we may have in studying the imagination, which can be connected to different questions. Here I have focused on three of them: imagination chemistry (what is imagination?), imagination engineering (how can imagination be used?), and imaginography (where can we find imagination?). Are there any others? My intuition is that there is space for further categories.
Thaleticians, for example. Just as Thales of Miletus believed that all is water, so these philosophers see imagination everywhere. For them, imaginography is driven by a misguided question: there are no places where the imagination is not present, it is everywhere.
There are not only scholars of imagination, but also users of imagination – like there are users of water –, and even among them it may be possible to distinguish between different categories. Water may come unexpectedly from the sky, we may want to swim in it or drink it. How good is it to be hit by drops or to be completely immersed in someone else’s imagination? Because I can glue myself to a bottle of water and drink as if I were breathing, my mother calls me “the water scoop”. I suspect I’m also an “imagination scoop”: I love to drink straight from a novel or an idea for hours on end. I strongly recommend swimming, whenever possible, and having more than two litres of imagination per day.