Anatolii Kozlov is a philosopher and writer interested in emotions, imagination, and practices shared between science and art. He is currently a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the IJN and UCL STS.
A post by Anatolii Kozlov
“There is something hinky in the local junkyard.” – What is it? What? A strange phrase evokes a sense of intrigue and anticipation. As if indeed there’s a fuzzy pile of rusty junk at a distance, and something – or someone – is about to spring out from the side of it. Will it? I scroll further through the list of writing prompts:
“Someone has a much-needed conversation with an A.I.”
“A garden statue comes to life.”
“An artist cannot finish their masterpiece.”
“A pet whose owner treats them like a human child.”
These are startling, amusing, evocative prompts, very different from the ones found in a philosopher’s paper on imagination. “Imagine there is a horse”. “Imagine a flying horse”. “Imagine a purple horse”. Suppose I did. So what? What did I learn in this less-than-miniscule moment of imagining? At the same time, what hides behind the other strings of words that makes them so appealing to engage with and start imagining? This is not to say that the classification of imagination through ordinary language is somehow philosophically idle. Still, something valuable seems to be lost if a philosopher’s exercise in imagination ends right there.
Walton (1990, 23) says prompts for imagination have an advantage over direct instructions to imagine something because they induce imaginings while sparing one from decision, reflection, or deliberation of what to imagine. Prompts induce us to imagine. His prominent theory further advances by building upon the reasonably realistic likeness of prompts, that is, their mimetic features, which can be decoded through the “principles of generation”: e.g., appeal to reality and mutual belief (i.e. convention). These principles essentially come forth as the constraints upon the freedom to imagine whatever one wants. They spread across philosophical literature under different guises: e.g. sensory construction thesis and belief governance thesis (Van Leeuven 2013); inferential accuracy and representational accuracy (reviewed in Stuart 2020). Freedom of imagination needs to be constrained if one wants to learn something from imagination.
And fair enough. What I’m failing to understand is this induction of imaginings by prompts. What does it mean that prompts induce? Is induction an ontological feature that defines prompts? Can one not imagine in response to prompts? I leaf through Walton’s book in search of hints and find the story of Fred, who, poor thing, feeling unsuccessful and unappreciated embarks on a daydream in which he is rich and famous (Walton 1990, 13). Fred’s imaginings are said to be deliberate: he chose to daydream. They are not spontaneous. Yet, they are not prescribed through instructions either. Moreover, according to the story, they are detailed and intricate. If prompts spare us from having to think what to imagine, then I’m compelled to think that Fred’s imaginings are also prompted, though instead of a physical object or a phrase, they are prompted by his state of dissatisfaction. He may have tried to counter or quench this dissatisfaction through his imaginative exercises, so in this specific case, the induction comes forth as a form of desire or motivation to experience a more optimistic version of life. I may be mistaken, but the example of make-believe behaviour, which Walton is interested in, would also need some form of motivation – for example, motivation to play.
I leave Walton aside and think. So much for the motivation to imagine. There’s something hinky about it. Can we really imagine intentionally? – I mean imagine in an interesting and productive way. Or must it be a part of some other action? Like motor images are couched in the intention to perform a motor act. But this seems wrong. I can indulge myself in speculating about what happened at the local junkyard in purely imaginative terms, without recourse to any other action. If the prompts help to induce imaginings, I suppose the only difference between the philosophical instruction to imagine “that horse” and the writing prompts is that the latter has just enough details to induce a sense of a situation and some possible implications (without actually spelling them out). While philosophical instruction prescribes the exercise of intentional control over some hinges of imagination, an efficient writing prompt can induce a sense of curiosity, which becomes a vehicle for generating husky imaginings.
Does it matter that the prompt is fictive or factive? I’m not sure. “There is something hinky at the local junkyard” can be as factive as the rain outside my window right now. In fact, last week I went to the supermarket and when I went by the local junkyard, there was indeed something hinky there: I couldn’t stop wondering about it. Both, the phrase and the real situation can prompt imaginings, and if there is a similarity between them it is the sense of curiosity by which the prompting situation captivates the attention. So if prompts help to bypass reflection on what to imagine, it is not only because they offer concrete items or a situation that the imaginer uptakes; they induce a psychological situation of interest. We seem to exercise imagination when curious, surprised, or bored, when in wonder or awe when puzzled. For example, in the course of their inquiry, scientists experience a host of emotions, and in some cases, it also prompts them to exercise imagination (Kozlov 2023). Is it possible that the generativity of imagination necessitates some emotional prompting?
I pick up a pen and slowly scribble down in the notebook:
(1) Imagination and rationality
(2) Imagination and interests
(3) Imagination and skill
Something of that might be interesting to explore later... But on we go, to the train of thought driven by imagination.
An observation. As we use it, imagination does not exist in a vacuum: it operates in the prompting contexts and emulates the reasoning and experiential patterns habitual to that context, be it sports, crafts, science, or interpersonal relations. Clearly, one doesn’t need to deliberate about every single aspect of generated imaginings: the relevant sets of beliefs, commitments, and experiences are already presupposed by the context, in which imagination takes place. But one thing is not needing to choose what to imagine and the other is wanting to imagine. So we are back to square one: what induces imagination?
Perhaps a hint of the answer might be hiding in the following. There are tasks and contexts where the best or the only way of dealing with the situation is to rely on one’s imagination, situations where imagination is known to be useful. In sports, music, or medicine, mental rehearsal of the practice is said to be beneficial for fostering skills. In science, when a real experiment is impossible or not even conceivable, a speculative thought experiment becomes a means for unpacking qualitative intuitions. If imagination is some sort of ability, essential or componential, there are motivating conditions upon which the ability is used to generate imaginings. The more specific the motivation is, the more specific imaginings the must be. One might say that what induces imagination is the desire to imagine that specific thing. However, as Walton observes (p. 22), it may be difficult to put into words what one wants to imagine. If so, then a feeling or emotion can fill in as a cue that guides imaginings. Fred wanted to cheer himself up in his upsetting situation, and so he imagined himself to be a protagonist in a series of cheering scenes. Albert intuited a paradox in the existing ways of thinking in physics, and so he moulded it into a paradoxical pursuit of the light beam (Norton 2012). “There is something hinky in the local junkyard” and the other writing prompts seem to fabricate a certain feeling and at the same time provide a few concrete details so that the writer interested in exercising muscles to narrate an interesting story would follow the cue without having any prepared story in advance.
Having thought all of this, I became very drowsy and fell asleep. I dreamt about pieces of junk flying in space lit by the light beams and about garden statues coming to life as AI pets. When I woke up I realised that the page with my Junkyard post was still totally empty.
References
Kozlov, A. Scientific experiments beyond surprise and beauty. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 13, 38 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-023-00536-7
Leeuwen, Neil Van. 2013. ‘The Meanings of “Imagine” Part I: Constructive Imagination’. Philosophy Compass 8 (3): 220–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2012.00508.x.
Norton, John D. 2012. ‘Chasing the Light: Einstein’s Most Famous Thought Experiment’. In Thought Experiments in Science, Philosophy, and the Arts. Routledge.
Stuart, Michael T. 2020. ‘The Productive Anarchy of Scientific Imagination’. Philosophy of Science 87 (5): 968–78. https://doi.org/10.1086/710629.
Walton, Kendall L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe : On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. http://archive.org/details/ mimesisasmakebel0000walt.