A post by Felipe Morales Carbonell

I want to consider the following idea: sometimes it happens that after becoming acquainted with a topic, one becomes less able to imagine certain things about it. What could this really mean? How could this happen, and why? Here some thoughts:

One possibility is that what one once imagined as possible (and thus judged as imaginable) was then judged to be impossible. A novice in woodworking might have a mistaken idea of what procedures can be done to achieve certain results, just because they do not know any better, and imagine themselves achieving those results by performing these mistaken procedures. Having learned that those procedures are faulty, they will not attempt to imagine themselves trying to achieve those results by imagining themselves following those procedures (this is all separate from the question of whether they can learn the right procedures).

Would we say that in this case the subject has lost the ability to imagine x? I think it is probably more natural to say that they were mistaken about their abilities. They could imagine something that wasn’t what they thought they could imagine, so they were able to imagine something. But they were unable to imagine what they thought they had imagined, and they came to discover their inability.

Maybe we have to say that the subject never had the ability to imagine the procedure. A lot, of course, depends on how we define the relevant abilities. One idea is that we define abilities in terms of what we may call their satisfaction conditions. For example, the ability to breakdance is satisfied in breakdancing, the ability to paint in paintings, the ability to imagine a specific situation in imaginings of that situation, and so on. Now, it is important to note that what matters isn’t that one actually succeeds in performing the actions one is able to do—one can have the ability to do something one never actually does—but that at the very least, if one tried to exercise those abilities, one would perform those actions and not others. But there seems to be a complication: when we attribute an ability to someone, we don’t just read satisfaction conditions off from the descriptions of these abilities in isolation, we select some contextually relevant set of satisfaction conditions based on what we understand of the topic under discussion. In this case, we should consider, for example:

1)    S has the ability to imagine the right procedure to achieve this result

2)    S has the ability to imagine a way to achieve this result

3)    S has the ability to imagine (themselves) achieving this result in a certain way

4)    S has the ability to imagine (themselves) trying to achieve this result in a certain way

5)    S has the ability to imagine someone trying to achieve something like this result in a certain way

And so on. The point is that given some context C, ‘S has the ability to imagine the procedure’ should be read in some of these ways. But of course, all of these are subtly different in terms of what they require, and some of them depend on the conversational background (for example, how do we define what is the ‘right’ procedure to pursue in a given context, or what counts as ‘a way’?). In many cases, a bunch of viable readings will be available, and we will have to navigate what makes more sense in context.[i]

So in a given context with a series of available readings, we might want to relax the relevant satisfaction conditions in a way that could allow us to attribute the ability even if for some other plausible reading it is inappropriate to do so. This matters in many cases because often we don’t, as attributors of ability, know exactly what it takes for someone to do something. In these cases, we base our attributions on less specific grounds. We say that a pupil is able to execute a more difficult piece based on our evidence about their grasp of the fundamentals—we inductively reason that having grasped them, they can also grasp the more difficult thing (or even, that they should grasp it—think of the phrase ‘they should be able to’). These inferences are of course fallible, but the expectations they form are reasonable.[ii]

The same goes for the case of imagination. We could say that someone is able to imagine a procedure even if the procedure they imagine is not right, on the grounds that they have a general ability to imagine similar things. So an alternative to the idea that the subject was never able to imagine the procedure is that it was true (or at the very least, appropriate to assert) that they were able, but the grounds for the attribution were faulty in terms of an alternative reading that became more salient. They were able to imagine it if we think of what they were able to imagine in a broad way, but unable to imagine it in a more specific way, and the second reading became more salient.

Now, the more interesting question is: can we go from a situation where we are first able to imagine something in a determinate sense, and then, in the same sense, become unable to imagine it? Against this possibility, one may appeal to the idea that gaining abilities is strictly additive (call this the Additivity principle). Of course, this is false in general, as the possibility of becoming disabled testifies (for example: a pianist loses their hands in a car accident and becomes unable to play the piano). One strategy here would be to insist on the principle and add the relevant provisos to it (‘...unless by loss of physical requisites’, or something like that). I don’t expect this to be satisfactory, because specifying provisos in this manner soon becomes cumbersome. Rather, I think we should ask if specialized versions of Additivity can be true in some cases, and if this is one of them.

One reason to think that the ability to imagine is additive is that imagining seems to only require mental resources that can be abstracted away from things such as bodily and environmental circumstances. After all, it seems like a commonplace that exercising our imagination offers a kind of freedom that is specially resilient (you can put me in chains, but my imagination will still wander). This seems to rule out the kinds of disabling of abilities that undermine the general version of Additivity. However, the commonplace can only take us so far. Some externalists about the mind in general and the imagination in particular would not readily endorse this suggestion.[iii] Instead, they might insist that treating the idea that we can treat with the imagination in isolation of those circumstances is nonsense. Is the commonplace something we should give up on? Is there a way for externalists to accommodate the commonplace? And how should it be accounted for more precisely, anyway? For now, I don’t have answers to these questions.

In any case, this is not all one could mean by ‘losing (the) ability to imagine’, which was what prompted our discussion. Gaining knowledge about a topic, we may become less able to imagine things about it because we learn to engage in imagination under more strict constraints—less of our imaginings may then be successful by our own standards. But on the other hand, our own standards themselves become better—by relatively objective standards. So when we succeed in imagining by our own standards, there will be more cases of successful imaginings in this sense, even if overall fewer of our tries succeed or even get completed (this mirrors Kind’s (2020) idea that imagination can be skilled in different senses depending on its use). A further question is if by those relatively objective standards we should be able to imagine more things in some absolute kind of sense—this leads to questions about what kind of norms we should adopt for the practice of imagining.

Notes

[i]Cf. Lewis (1976; also 2023). I defend a contextualist model of ability attribution in Morales Carbonell (2023).

[ii]Another option is that the relevant abilities get masked, see Fara (2008).

[iii]This externalist response is not new. Gassendi raises something like it in his objections to Descartes’ Meditations: “Moreover, when the body to which these limbs belong is growing, are not you growing also? And when the body is weak, are not you weak too?” (AT VII 261).  Descartes replies: “Your inference here is no more valid than if you were to infer from the fact that a craftsman works badly whenever he uses a faulty tool that the good condition of his tools is the source of his knowledge of his craft”  (ATX VII 353-354). Does a craftsman who uses faulty tools not do anything wrong, however?

References

Descartes, René (2017) Meditations on First Philosophy, with Selections from the Objections and Replies. John Cottingham (ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Fara, Michael (2008). Masked Abilities and Compatibilism. Mind 117(468), 843-865.

Kind, Amy (2020). The Skill of Imagination. In Ellen Fridland & Carlotta Pavese (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Skill and Expertise. Routledge. pp. 335-346.

Lewis, David (1976). The Paradoxes of Time Travel. American Philosophical Quarterly, 13, 145-152.

Lewis, David (2023). Philosophical Manuscripts. Oxford University Press.

Morales Carbonell, Felipe (2023). ¿Quién sabe cómo? Re-examinando las Atribuciones de Know-how en Contexto. Palabra y Razón, 24, 15-32.