Uku Tooming is an Associate Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Tartu, Estonia. His research focuses on philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and epistemology, with particular emphasis on the role of imagination and memory in cognition, on the relationship between desire and imagination, and on aesthetic reasons and values.
A post by Uku Tooming
Introduction
Recently, I had the pleasure to edit a special issue on imagination and value cognition for Studia Philosophica Estonica, one of the few journals on academic philosophy that is published in Estonia. The issue explores some of the various connections between imagination and evaluative cognition. In this blog post, I organize the papers around three themes: how imagination provides evaluative access to what we cannot directly experience, how values operate in imagining, and the extent to which we can rely on imagination in our evaluations.
Imagining what we cannot directly experience
Much of what we evaluate is absent, future, or otherwise out of reach, and imagination is one of the ways in which we may nevertheless get an evaluative grip on it. In “Deliberative Imagination,” Katja Vogt argues that imagination plays a crucial role in good decision-making. Her discussion focuses on the role imagination plays throughout various stages of deliberation. Imagination helps us gain a better grasp of our circumstances through what Vogt calls ‘diagnostic imagination’. It also helps us anticipate the outcomes of possible actions through ‘anticipatory imagination’. Finally, imagination contributes to the assessment of those outcomes through what Vogt calls ‘imagination tests’, where we evaluate imagined futures by considering how we would feel about them. The contribution of imagination to valuation in Vogt’s account is thus fundamentally forward-looking. Imagination enables us to explore possible futures and assess them before acting.
A comparable thought, applied to a different domain, underlies my own contribution, “Layered Imaginative Acquaintance: A Roadmap.” It focuses on aesthetic value, and in particular on how imagination can contribute to aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgment. I argue that imagination can enable aesthetic acquaintance in two distinct ways. First, imagination can provide what I call ‘basic acquaintance’. This occurs in cases involving properties such as suggestiveness or allusiveness, where more direct forms of experience may not be available. Second, imagination can provide surrogative acquaintance. In these cases, imagination recreates aspects of the experience of the work, provided that such imagining is permitted by the work-specific artistic standards.
Both Vogt and I are concerned with imagination as it serves a task at hand: in making a decision, in judging an artwork. The volume also includes a contribution that looks at a more distant influence of imagination on our values, and the only one written in Estonian: “The Science-Fiction Argument and New Knowledge,” co-authored by philosopher Henrik Sova and literary scholar Jaak Tomberg (since most readers of this blog probably can’t read Estonian, I will devote a bit more space in this blog post to this contribution rather than others). This paper also concerns the direction from imagination to valuation, though more indirectly than the previous ones. It addresses a question that has long interested both philosophers and literary theorists: can science fiction provide genuinely new knowledge? Using Sue Burke’s novel Semiosis as a case study, Sova and Tomberg argue that successful science fiction makes plausible to the reader phenomena that diverge quite radically from the reader’s conception of reality. Following terminology familiar from science-fiction studies, such a reality-divergent phenomenon is referred to as ‘novum’. By rendering such phenomena plausible, science fiction can generate new forms of understanding. For instance, the reader may come to recognize that a seemingly fantastic novum is nevertheless consistent with a broadly naturalistic worldview.
How does this bear on value cognition? Semiosis depicts an intelligent species of bamboo with whom human beings must learn to cooperate. By making such a creature imaginatively plausible, the novel encourages readers to rethink their relation to non-human forms of life. Here imagination does not supply reasons for a particular evaluation but rather reshapes the background against which we evaluate. By inviting readers to imagine novel forms of communication and cooperation with non-human beings, science fiction can put us in the position to understand that these forms might be actually feasible and perhaps even worth pursuing.
Values at work in imagining
If imagination can help us evaluate, the reverse is also true: evaluation is not only a product of imagining but also values shape what we imagine and how we imagine it. This is the central theme of Julia Langkau’s “The Role of Value in Creative Imagining.” Her claim is that when imagination is used to explore possibilities, the imaginative process itself can be guided by our values. To be sure, values can operate retrospectively in the evaluation of ideas once they have been produced. But according to Langkau, values also guide imagination prospectively. They shape which possibilities we attend to and which possibilities we reject. The construction of an imaginative scenario is therefore often value-guided from the outset. Our sense of the felt value of different possibilities affects how imagination unfolds. In presenting her argument, Langkau also makes a distinction between constraint and value-guidance. The idea of constraints on imagination has been at the center of attention in recent literature on imagination but, as Langkau argues, being constrained is not the same as being value guided. An imaginative process can be constrained without being value guided. Conversely, a process may be guided by one value while also be constrained by some other value.
Can imagination be relied on?
Different contributions give different answers to the question of whether imagination is a reliable means of valuing. For instance. Vogt acknowledges the well-known worries about the reliability of imagination, but her overall assessment of imagination’s relevance is positive. Imagination emerges as one of the primary inputs to good deliberation and, at least under suitable conditions, a reliable guide in practical reasoning. While Vogt represents a rather optimistic picture, in his contribution, “Sub Specie Boni, Sub Ratione Boni: Imagination and Estimation in Aquinas's Guise of the Good”, Francesco Orsi presents a more guarded view of imagination that he finds in Aquinas’s work. For Aquinas, it is estimation, a cognitive capacity distinct from imagination, that is closer to the intellect than to imagination and capable of providing us with an understanding of which action is appropriate in a given situation. Imagination, on the other hand, only plays the lesser role of presenting and organizing perceptual information and does not itself have evaluative content. Furthermore, when imagination influences our evaluations, it can easily lead us astray. Orsi’s (or Aquinas’s) picture is therefore considerably more pessimistic on the question of imagination’s reliability than Vogt’s.
In the aesthetic domain, my own paper offers a conditional answer to the question. Imagination is a legitimate means of acquaintance only when its use is authorized by the prescriptive framework and artistic standards relevant to the artwork in question. Whether imagination can be relied on, depends on whether the imagining is something that the work itself calls for. However, assuming that we can at least sometimes rely on imagination in our aesthetic judgments, this raises a further question: for us to be able to rely on imagination in making aesthetic judgments, must imagination itself have (aesthetic) value? Piotr Kozak’s “Aesthetics of Imagery: The Quixotic Dilemma” answers affirmatively: he focuses specifically on mental imagery and argues that if imagery can be relied on in aesthetic evaluations, then imagery itself must possess aesthetic value. Otherwise, it becomes difficult to explain how imaginings could influence aesthetic judgments in the first place. The fact that imagery enables aesthetic appreciation is thus explained by its own aesthetic value. However, this conclusion creates a reverse challenge for many accounts of aesthetic appreciation that assign a significant role to imagination in the aesthetic evaluation of perceptual objects. According to Kozak, accounts that understand mental imagery experientially, rather than in terms of representational content, cannot adequately explain cases in which aesthetic value is misattributed through imagery. As a solution, Kozak proposes understanding imagery in terms of content instead. Only then, he argues, can we explain both how we can rely on imagery in our aesthetic judgments and how misattribution is possible.
Conclusion
Taken together, the contributions to this volume reveal the richness of the relationship between imagination and value. Imagination gives us evaluative access to what we cannot directly experience, whether a possible future, an allusive artwork, or a non-human form of life. Values in turn shape what and how we imagine. The contributions also differ on how far imagination can be trusted. If there is a common thread running through the volume, it is the probably not very surprising idea that understanding value cognition requires taking seriously the many ways in which imagination shapes, and is shaped by, what we value.