“The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center […] is before all a difference of imagination.”
Alfredo Vernazzani is currently Vertretungsprofessor for Philosophy of Consciousness and Cognition at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. His research lies at the intersection between philosophy, psychology and cognitive science, focusing on perception, aesthetics, and the epistemology of understanding in the sciences and the arts. You can find out more about Alfredo’s work here.
A post by Alfredo Vernazzani
The imagination has long been regarded with ambivalence in science and philosophy. In Renaissance, and later until the 18th century, it was even conjectured that it could alter the course of normal biological development, and generate monsters. Scientists such as the physician Fienus (1608), and philosophers like Malebranche (1660/1871) speculated that the mother’s imagination could have such deep effects as to alter the fetus’ development, a doctrine called by its opponents ‘imaginationism’ (Dürbeck 1998). Whereas imaginationism populates the Wunderkammer of the history of science, contemporary philosophers wrestle with epistemic hurdles regarding the uses of the imagination (e.g. Myers 2023).
Recourse to the imagination, for example in thought experiments, can lead to uncertain philosophical speculations, give us the illusion of epistemic insight, or paralyze reflection into the labyrinths of phantasy. Arguably, the mistrust towards the imagination is at least partially fueled by its apparent freedom. Let me make a comparison with another constructive process, such as visual perception. To assemble visual representations of our surroundings, the visual system operates under several constraints, such as feature-object binding (Matthen 2005; Vernazzani 2022), Gestalt principles (Koffka 1936; Wagemans et al. 2015), and so on. But the imagination doesn’t operate in the same way, for we seem to be able to imagine whatever we want. In this respect, Hume’s words seem particularly apposite: “[n]othing is more free than the imagination of man” (1748/2009, p. 39). Hence the question: under what conditions does the exercise of the imagination improve our epistemic standing?
Some philosophers have sought to lay out the epistemic constraints that capture precisely such conditions (e.g. Dorsch 2016; Kind 2016; Pedrini 2024). This is a worthwhile project that should be pursued in tandem with a deeper appreciation of the phenomenology and operations of the imagination. Here, I outline some programmatic ideas regarding an aspect of the operations of the imagination that has direct implications for its epistemic uses, its cultural-historical inflection (cf. Zittoun et al. 2020). But before I proceed, I must first clarify what I mean by ‘imagination.’
The term ‘imagination’ denotes a rather heterogeneous class of (possibly different) phenomena. Some philosophers have argued for its inherently imagistic character (Kind 2001), or its dual nature (Peacocke 1985; see Wiltsher 2016 for criticism). Others propose to reject the concept of imagination in favor of the more scientifically respectable notion of mental imagery or sensory imagination (Nanay 2023; forth.). I stay neutral on such vexed questions here and refer exclusively to what Van Leeuwen (2013, 2014) calls constructive imagination; for someone to imagine c in the constructive sense involves the capacity or property of the imagination of ‘coming up with mental representations that have c content’ (Van Leeuwen 2013, p. 224). For example, if I prompt you to think about your grandma’s face, you may conjure up her face and visualize it — metaphorically speaking — through your mind’s eyes (though, see Scholz 2024). I hasten to add that the mental representations so generated can be in different formats, and elsewhere, I and a colleague have argued for a form of pluralism about the format of cognitive representations (Coelho Mollo & Vernazzani 2024; forth.).
Now, the products of our exercises of the imagination may just feel compelling, intuitively plausible, and coherent, even when in fact they aren’t. Compare this with the feeling of understanding that, as persuasively argued by Trout (2002), can be completely divorced from any actual epistemic achievement. At least in some cases, what triggers the epistemic feeling of ‘correctness’ may have less to do with a virtuous epistemic exercise and more with our cultural backgrounds. This may be due to a sense of recognition or feeling of familiarity that comes from culturally sanctioned ways of exercising the imagination.
Reference to cultural background demands that I further clarify what is exactly meant by culture. Needless to say, there is considerable literature on the topic (e.g. Palacek 2020; Risjord 2023, ch. 4; see also Geertz 1973 for a classic); for my purpose, I avail myself of a rather elastic, threefold connotation of culture due to Raymond Williams (1976), according to whom culture may refer to “a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development,” or to “a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group,” or finally to “the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic creativity” (ivi, p. 80).
Time to weave these different threads together into a more coherent narrative.
There are different ways in which culture can shape the imagination. In the passage cited above from Hume’s Enquiry, the Scottish philosopher suggests that the imagination cannot exceed the “original stock of ideas [representations] furnished by the internal and external senses” (1748/2009, p. 40). Hume’s empiricism may be easily embedded within a situated approach to the imagination. Trivially, the cultural milieu we live in furnishes our minds and replenishes the reservoirs of memory, and since the latter is the source from which the imagination draws, it seems obvious enough that people belonging to the same cultural group draw from largely overlapping sources.
Of course, this is a simplified picture, for it leaves out a great deal, not least the fact that some items may be more frequent in a given cultural milieu, or that may come up more often in the life trajectory of some people rather than others. This may be due to their careers and training, their tastes, or even their subaltern status, e.g. either because they are members of a minority, which may be cognitive (e.g. individuals with Asperger syndrome), racial, and so on. Furthermore, not all cultural products affect us in the same way. Some artworks — such as Hu Bo’s (2018) An Elephant Sitting Still, Clarice Lispector’s A hora da estrela (1977/2020), or Anna Maria Ortese’s L’iguana (1965) — may spellbind us in a way that leads to long-lasting changes in the way we perceive, and therefore interact with the world (Vernazzani 2023; see also Felski 2020).
All of this can explain a great deal of how the imagination may be culturally inflected, but I doubt this can be the whole story. For one thing: so far, I have sketched a rather ‘passive’ picture, leaving out precisely that more active capacity of conjuring up mental representations with a certain content.[1] A capacity can be exercised with different degrees of proficiency. Here is an obvious example. When I first put my hands on a guitar, I had to learn how to coordinate the movements of the left and right hands, exert control of my fingers, learn to read music, and much more. It is only with practice that a capacity reaches a certain level of skillful competence until we strike a balance between automaticity and control. The fingers on my left hand can now fly more fluently over the frets, and I can direct my attention towards other aspects of the execution.
Automaticities can be of different kinds: reflexes are an innate form of automaticity, but others are acquired, like habits (Wood & Rünger 2016). When habits are widely shared among large groups of people, they are properly called customs (Crook 2013). What I want to suggest is that besides frequency and the impact that certain cultural products or practices exert on us, it is the very ways we have learned to exercise our capacity to conjure up mental representations that can be culturally inflected into customs of the imagination, i.e. sclerotized ways in which individual members of a culture tend to exercise their imagination in a way that is widely shared across the group they belong to. The process by which we attune our ways to exercise the imagination to others plunges its roots in the multifarious ways we interact with each other, and reinforce certain ways of acting and thinking.
I began with some observations about how the apparent freedom of the imagination justifies the search for constraints that may sanction its appropriate epistemic uses. But there is another reason for being suspicious about the imagination, which is precisely that our imagination is not free but fettered by the chains of our culture and upbringing. At this juncture, my considerations cross paths with themes familiar from standpoint epistemology, post-colonial studies, and microhistory (e.g. Fisher 2009; Ginzburg 1986/2023; Haslanger 2012; Said 1993). Ultimately, it is auspicial that philosophy of mind and cognitive science of the imagination can enter more stably in dialogue with the cultural, ethical, and political spheres of research, not least because the imagination plays such a vital role in the process of what Nelson Goodman called worldmaking (1978).
Notes
[1] According to Hume, the operations of the imagination are exclusively combinatorial of ‘mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision’ (Hume 1748/2009, p. 40). It seems to me that this is still the prevalent view in contemporary philosophy, though I’d like to add that it is an empirical question to ascertain whether the imagination is purely combinatorial.
References
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