Alyssa Walker is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Tulane University. She works in philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science, with specific interests in imagination and mental representation.
A post by Alyssa Walker
In an Instagram post, lyricist Sophie Hunter tells viewers that the title for her debut rap album, Stereoscope, came from the rediscovery of her grandparents 3D wedding photos in the wake of their passing. Two photos are printed on each slide, and when they are viewed through binoculars, they merge into a single, 3D image. Hunter reports having struggled to find a theme for her album, which includes both “unserious and fun” and “dark and earnest” tracks. The memory of the stereographic images presented an opportunity to unite the range under a single heading. She says, “via stereoscope, we gain dimension by looking at two different perspectives of the same thing. The truth of me, and the music, and maybe life, was not one side or another but the space between. The collage made of their distance, like a left and right eye, their difference creates depth – turns two dimensions to three” (Hunter @sophiehunter.mp3 2026).
I think the right way to think about Hunter’s process is as imaginative. However, my understanding of what this entails departs from the common understanding expressed in the literature. It is typical in papers on imagination to refer to imaginative states, imaginative attitudes, imaginative projects, imaginative experiences, etc. In these exchanges, what seems to be meant is that the imaginative just is an instantiation of a state of imagination or an attitude of imagination, and so on. The assumption at work thus seems to be that what it means for something to be imaginative is entirely reducible to instances of imagination.[i]
I think we should reject this reductive picture as well as the underlying assumption that imagination and the imaginative are simply interchangeable. We can’t get at what it means to say that Hunter is imaginative by saying that she is in, e.g., a state of imagination. Like Jones and Wilkinson (2021), I will suggest that we should pull the imagination and the imaginative apart from one another.
One reason for this is that there are clear instances of imagination that are not imaginative. Let’s say that imagination involves mental images essentially. Some mental images are not imaginative because they are simple. I can imagine a color – say, blue. Nothing seems imaginative about my imagining of blue. And I think this generalizes beyond imagistic theories of imagination: no matter what one takes to be the necessary and sufficient conditions of imagining, imagining blue just isn’t imaginative.
My goal in the rest of this post is to articulate a way of defining the imaginative that does not reduce it to the imagination. Before I do that, I want to put aside some other interesting ways that these concepts might be distinguished.
In his 2023 Junkyard Post, Max Jones suggests that imaginativeness has an evaluative sense and imagination has a descriptive sense. This distinction can be highlighted by considering what we mean by saying someone “lacks imagination”. We don’t mean that someone lacks the faculty or the ability to be in a certain kind of mental state. For, as Jones claims, we don’t apply this sense of the phrase to aphantasics. Rather what we mean is that someone lacks the capacity for being imaginative, and this lack is in something that is good to have.
I think that this is on the right track, but it doesn’t yet tell us what the evaluative sense tracks that the descriptive sense doesn’t. Jones also raises a concern that the two senses are too entangled to truly come apart. But I think we can get a handle on this sense of the imaginative.
Another way to separate the imagination and the imaginative is that the former is a mental act and the latter is a person-level trait. There might be something to this line of thinking, but it can’t be our bottom-line distinction. Talk of being imaginative is not restricted to persons; books or plots can be imaginative. Specific instances of imagining can be imaginative. The way a person thinks can be imaginative, or we can say specific instances of thought are imaginative. Even if the imaginative is best understood as a trait, traits still require instantiating mental acts over time. Thus, the best starting point for understanding the imaginative in a non-reductive manner is not as a person-level trait in contrast to a mental act.
I contend that the imaginative should be understood as the manipulation of information by moving it among settings. Being imaginative consists in flexible thinking. This explains the intuition that simple imaginings are not imaginative. Merely conjuring the image (or some mental content with an attitude of imagination) of a color does not involve moving information among settings. This understanding of the imaginative is also consistent with a variety of ways of understanding the representational (or non-representational) nature of the imagination. As such, we can remain agnostic about what kind of vehicle is required in the manipulation of information across settings (at least at this juncture), while also noticing that no matter how one represents some content in the imagination, not all of it will count as imaginative.
I want to highlight just one experimental datum to motivate this position. Veraksa, Gavrilova, and Veraksa (2022) compared findings on an imagination task with measurements taken from a cognitive flexibility task (a Wisconsin Card Sorting Task). Provided with simple images, 206 6-7-year-olds were instructed to complete a drawing by adding details or additional objects. For example, a participant who received the image of a circle might add spikes around it to create an image of a sun, or they might use the circle as tires on a car (5). The authors discovered that the number of categories into which the completed drawings fell correlated with cognitive flexibility as measured by the WCST: the higher the number of categories, the more cognitively flexible.
The importance of Veraksa et al.’s experiment turns on the fact that the imagination task requires moving information among settings. In order to complete the drawing, participants had to move the information about a circle, for example, to settings where circles, or globes, or spheres, are component elements. Since they found that this correlates with cognitive flexibility, we have at least a motivating reason to think that manipulating information in a move among settings is flexible thinking.
If you follow me in thinking that what the children are doing is imaginative, then we also have a reason for discounting another way of defining the imaginative. Grant (2011, 2013) thinks the imaginative is synonymous with creativity, which requires non-obviousness and plausibility. I think we can agree that the children probably come up with plausible drawings where circles are components, but a drawing of the sun and a car are not non-obvious ways of doing this. So, the imaginative doesn’t seem to reduce to creativity either (at least not as how Grant defines it).
Let’s return to the example of Sophie Hunter. What makes her imaginative? She moves information about her grandparents’ wedding photos to the setting of her debut album. Before she was reminded of the wedding photos, they were not a part of the same set of considerations and elements that make up her album. She had to bring this information to bear on information about her album. She reconceived of what made her album an integrated whole on the basis of the stereographic images. This is flexible manipulation of information from one setting to another.
My claim here has clear connection to what Kind (2022) has argued regarding learning to imagine. Being a good imaginer involves knowing when to impose or release oneself of certain constraints, exercising our “combinatorial capacities”, and developing a store of experiential resources (39). The difference, I would maintain, is that the combinatorial capacities are the focus and have to be used in the right sort of ways. Only when we move information among settings are we more than just a good imaginer – we are imaginative.
Notes:
[i] Alternatively, we might think, like Wiltsher (2023), that the reductive relationship goes the other way.
References
Grant, James. 2011. “The Value of Imaginativeness.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (2): 275–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2011.574143.
Grant, James Eric. 2013. The Critical Imagination. Oxford University Press.
Hunter, Sophie [@sophiehunter.mp3]. “STERESCOPE, my debut album out July 17…”. Instagram, 16 July 2026, https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZqFajxxYMB/?stkn=ZnRqY3AxbDltYzdu
Jones, Max. 2023. “Why Is It Good to Use Your Imagination? And Is This Something to Worry About?” The Junkyard, December 6. https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2023/12/2/why-is-it-good-to-use-your imagination-and-is-this-something-to-worry-about.
Jones, Max and Wilkinson, Sam. 2021. “Which Came First? Creative Practices or Imagination?” The Junkyard, 27 October. https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2021/10/23/which-came-first-creative practices-or-imagination?rq=imaginative
Kind, Amy. 2022. “Learning to Imagine.” British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (1): 33–48. https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayab037.
Veraksa, Nikolay, Margarita Gavrilova, and Aleksander Veraksa. 2022. “‘Complete the Drawing!’: The Relationship between Imagination and Executive Functions in Children.” Education Sciences (Switzerland) 12 (2): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12020103.
Wiltsher, Nicholas. 2023. “Imagination as a Process.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (2): 434–54. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12861.