Sofia Pedrini is a PhD student in philosophy at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Her research lies at the intersection between the phenomenology and epistemology of imagination, exploring topics such as imaginative justification, the role of imagination in thought experiments and scientific inquiry, and its significance in practical knowledge.
A post by Sofia Pedrini
Imagine standing in Ikea, wondering if the table you’re looking at will fit through your front door. To answer this, you imagine, as realistically as possible, the table passing through the doorway (Dorsch 2016; Kind 2013; see Williamson 2016, Myers 2021 for similar examples). After careful imagining, you may come to believe that the table will indeed fit through the door. But does your imagining justify the belief that this is indeed the case in a way similar to perception? Can we rely on imagination to support our beliefs about the actual world?
In “Knowledge by Imagination” (2016), Dorsch examines how and to what extent sensory imagination can be the source of justification for our beliefs about contingent, empirical facts, such as in our Ikea example. An experience is the source of justification for a belief if that belief is based or grounded on that experience. Beliefs are grounded in experience if that experience rationally determines their content and attitude (cf. Dorsch 2016, pp. 2-3). Paradigmatic examples are perception-based beliefs: for instance, we come to believe that it’s raining because we see the rain or that it is raining.[1] In the case of perception:
A. The content of the belief (i.e., which proposition is endorsed, e.g. “that it’s raining”) is “rationally determined by how the experience presents things as being” (ivi, p. 3), while
B. The attitude we adopt towards that propositional content, the attitude of belief, i.e. taking the content to be the case, is “a function of what kind of experience is concerned (i.e., perceptual experience)” (ivi).
Can an imaginative experience ground (in the above sense) a belief? Let’s consider the Ikea example again. In this case,
We begin with our perception of the table and our recollection of the appearance of the door. […] Then, we visualise the two objects as being together in the same space, thereby making sure that how large we present them together as being stays true to how we see or recall them individually as being. Finally, we change their location and orientation relative to each other [mental rotation], while keeping their sizes constant. (Dorsch 2016, pp. 7-8)
The imaginative experience—here consisting of visualization and mental rotation—enables us “to visually compare the relative sizes of the two objects” (ivi, p. 6). This shows that the content of the belief (that the table fits through the door) is rationally determined by how the imaginative experience presents things as being. Yet, merely imagining that the table fits through the door would not rationally determine the belief that that’s the case. If we sit in a room without any window and we merely imagine that it is raining, we are not justified in believing that that’s the case: that is, the imaginative experience does not rationally determine the attitude of belief (see Husserl 2005, text no 15; and Hopp 2011).
To understand what is responsible for the determination of the attitude of belief, Dorsch draws an analogy with the experience of realist portraits, i.e. pictorial experience. In front of e.g. Hans Holbein the Younger’s Anne of Cleves:
Hans Holbein the Younger, Anne of Cleves, Detail (1539), The Louvre, Paris.
A. We endorse the content that Anne’s eyes were brown because of how the portrait presents her eyes as being, yet
B. We come to believe that that was the case thanks to the “ancillary belief” that Holbein’s painting is an accurate portrait of Anne (cf. Dorsch 2016, p. 11).
According to the view, the same happens in the Ikea example:
A. We endorse the content that the table fits through the door because of how the imagination presents their dimensions relative to each other as being, yet
B. We come to believe (rather than merely entertaining) that the table fits through the door thanks to the “ancillary belief that the imaginative experience concerned is veridical in a reliable or safe manner” (Dorsch 2016, p. 11).
To sum up, both the content and the attitude of a perceptual-based belief are rationally determined by the perceptual experience. On the other hand, the content of the imagination-based belief is rationally determined by how the imaginative experience presents things as being, while the attitude of the imagination-based belief is rationally determined by an ancillary belief on the accuracy of the imaginative content itself (see Kind 2024). In the Ikea example, imaginative accuracy means properly representing both the dimensions of the table and the door in our imagination, as well as realistically imagining how the table would fit through the doorway (e.g., not imagining the table as bendable or made of soft material). Using Kind’s (2016) terminology, we may say that, according to Dorsch, imagination can have a justificatory role when it operates under the reality and the change constraints. To satisfy the reality constraint, the imagining must align with the laws and properties of the actual world. Similarly, the change constraint requires that any changes imagined (such as rotating the table to fit it through the door) must be done within realistic parameters (cf. Kind 2016, 2024). In other words, if imagination ‘behaves’ in a way that is constrained as perception is, then it can justify beliefs almost in the same way.
If the foregoing analysis is right, then it is vital to ask whether imagination can—or does—actually ‘behave’ like perception.
The phenomenological tradition provides several descriptions of how objects are ‘given’ or ‘appear’ in imagination in contrast to their perceptual givenness. In contemporary terms, we may say that phenomenology analyzes how the imaginative content unfolds in a temporally extended imaginative episode. One important feature of imaginative content, underscored by Husserl (2005) and later developed by Sartre (2004) and Casey (2000), is its inherent instability. Unlike perceptual content, which tends to have a degree of stability, imaginative content is more fluid and subject to change. Husserl uses the term Phantasie—describing it as quasi-perception (cf. Drost 1990; Jansen 2005)—which corresponds to what contemporary philosophers call sensory imagination (Jansen 2016). The objects given in phantasy continuously fluctuate in form, color, details, and forcefulness (cf. Husserl 2005, p. 13). Similarly, Casey contends that:
Although we normally apprehend an imagined object with remarkable facility, we do so only for an instant, since it tends to elude us in the very next instant: “one glimpse and vanished,” says Beckett. An imagined object does not remain present to us in abiding manner, as do many perceptual objects. (Casey 2000, p. 7)
Contrary to perceptual content, which is fixed by the object in the world, the imaginative content is unstable. Controlling the imagined content requires a particular effort (cf. Casey 2000, pp. 33-34). Husserl describes the “protean character of the phantasy appearance” (2005, p. 66) in contrast to pictorial experience. In the latter case,
[T]he image in question is usually a stable image, which therefore possesses its level of adequacy once and for all. But in phantasy presentation the image is something fluctuating, unsteady, changing, now growing in fullness and force, now diminishing, hence something continually changing immanently in the scale of perfection. (Husserl 2005, p. 65)
The instability of the imaginative content as described by the above phenomenological analyses requires further investigations, but for our purposes, these remarks are sufficient to cast doubt on the epistemic accounts provided by Dorsch and Kind. In order to show why, let’s consider two scenarios:
S1. You’re looking at the table and you imagine it fitting through the doorway. Your imagination respects all the necessary constraints;
S2. You’re looking at the table and you imagine it fitting through the doorway. Yet, the dimension of the door is mistakenly presented in your imagination, or you represent all the dimensions correctly but when you’re imagining the table passing through the doorway, the mental image of the table shrinks a bit, without you noticing, with the result that your imagination does not respect all the necessary constraints.
How do you know whether you are in S1 or S2? Unless we consider imagination to be a luminous mental state—in Williamson’s (2000) terms, a state where, if condition C obtains, one is in a position to know that C obtains—the subject cannot introspectively know whether her imaginative exercise respects the relevant constraints. Of course, in either case, the subject may end up with a true belief—which may be proven only when she actually tries to fit the table through the door. However, since she cannot know whether her imaginative exercise has respected the relevant constraints, she cannot rely on imagination as a source of belief justification.
I take the aforesaid to illustrate how deeper reflections on the phenomenology of imagination may enhance our understanding of the epistemic powers of the imagination, its scopes and limits.
Notes
[1] Some, like Dretske (1979), argue that we perceive facts such as “that it is raining”, while others disagree and contend that all seeing is simple (e.g. Burge 2010). For reasons of space, I will gloss over this complication here.
References
Burge, T. (2010). Origins of Objectivity. New York: Oxford University Press.
Casey, E. (2000). Imagining: A Phenomenological Study. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Dorsch, F. (2016). Knowledge By Imagination — How Imaginative Experience Can Ground Factual Knowledge. Teorema: Revista Internacional de Filosofía, 35(3), pp. 87–116.
Dretske, F. (1979). Simple seeing. In D. F. Gustafson & B. L. Tapscott (Eds.), Body, mind, and method, Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 1–15.
Drost, M. (1990). The primacy of perception in Husserl’s theory of imagining. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1(3), pp. 569–582.
Hopp, W. (2011). Perception and Knowledge: A Phenomenological Account. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Husserl, E. (2005). Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925). J. Brough, trans. Dordrecht: Springer.
Jansen, J. (2005). On the development of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology of imagination and its use for interdisciplinary research. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (2), pp. 121–132.
— (2016). Husserl. In A. Kind (Ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination. New York: Routledge, pp. pp. 69–81.
Kind, A. (2013). The Heterogeneity of the Imagination. Erkenntnis 78.1, pp. 141–159.
— (2016). Imagining Under Constraints. In A. Kind & P. Kung (Eds.), Knowledge Through Imagination, Oxford University Press, pp. 145–159.
— (2024). Accuracy in imagining. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 5. https://doi.org/10.33735/phimisci.2024.10447
Myers, J. (2021). The Epistemic Status of the Imagination. Philosophical Studies, 178(10), pp. 3251–3270.
Sartre, J.-P. (2004). The Imaginary, trans. J. Webber, New York/London: Routledge.
Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
— (2016). Knowing by Imagining. In A. Kind & P. Kung (Eds.), Knowledge Through Imagination, Oxford University Press, pp. 113–123.