Kerry Clark is a philosophy graduate student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is currently working on her dissertation focused on how creativity can provide meaning in our lives.
A post by Kerry Clark
Introduction
Imagination is used in many ways—whether in daydreaming, anticipating future outcomes, or engaging in creative works. I take imagination to be (roughly) the mental faculty that allows individuals to form images, ideas, and sensations without direct input from the senses. This mental faculty supports important human activities, whether it be for practical purposes like imagining how to organize furniture, daydreaming for entertainment purposes, or imagining to better understand the world around us. This post explores imagination within two distinct but related processes: learning and creativity.
A helpful way to clarify imagination’s separate roles is to distinguish two uses: transcendent and instructive (Kind and Kung, 2016). First, the transcendent use of imagination involves imagining significant departures to the world as it is, for example, a world with different laws of nature. Transcendent imagination can contribute to the creative process because an individual may exaggerate or distort reality to develop a novel idea. Second, imagination can be instructive in the sense that one constrains imagination to reality, for example, by constraining imagination to the current laws of nature. This use of imagination can help one learn about the world around them. While both uses of imagination are valuable, their effectiveness depends on context. Since learning is generally aimed at accurate knowledge or practical action, instructive imagination typically supports learning better than transcendent imagination. By contrast, creativity is typically aimed at producing something novel and valuable, and therefore, transcendent imagination tends to support creative thinking better than instructive imagination.
Imagination in the Learning Process
The purpose of learning is to acquire knowledge, understanding, or to develop a skill. Since imagination does not require direct input from the senses, it can facilitate learning by allowing one to mentally represent phenomena and possibilities that are not directly observable. For example:
Imagination helps when one mentally rehearses information, like visualizing states to remember capitals.
Imagination helps when picturing the various phases of cell division to better understand biological processes.
Imagination helps a dancer practice a new routine by visualizing the movements.
These examples illustrate how imagination effectively helps the agent learn something without direct contact with the phenomena. It seems that imagination can also help organize and support one’s memory.
Imagination seems to be most helpful for learning when it tracks reality. Consider evaporation, the phase of the water cycle when liquid water turns into water vapor. A student does not need to directly observe evaporation to understand it; she can use instructive imagination to visualize liquid water becoming gas, thereby reinforcing her grasp of the process.
However, imagination may stray from reality (transcendent imagination) and hinder learning. If a student imagines water flowing up into the sky turning into clumps of glitter and exploding into ashes, the mental image no longer corresponds with the phenomena being learned. Because imagination can depart from reality, it may lead to a misunderstanding that prevents the student from acquiring knowledge that constitutes learning.
This raises an important qualification: there are cases in which transcendent imagination appears to facilitate learning, but typically this works only insofar as the imaginative project contains some element of truth. For instance, a child interacting with a fantastical imaginary friend may learn how humans work (bodily and socially), even though the friend is invented. The child may develop social skills or learn the value of friendship with others, but this only works if the imagination is tracking some truth about how humans operate. Learning occurs not because the fantasy is accurate, but because the child’s imaginative project still reflects real features of social interaction.
Imagination is not sufficient for a person to acquire knowledge or understanding because there needs to be some form of evidence, justification, or some reality-based constraint that imagination cannot provide. As a result, imagination can only play an enabling role for learning factual knowledge. Jonathan Egeland (2024) makes a similar point that imagination cannot generate new knowledge and Shannon Spaulding (2016) contends that imagination whether it is spontaneous or deliberate cannot provide knowledge of contingent facts. While it is true that imagination alone cannot generate new factual knowledge, imagination may support learning in other ways. Imagination can support learning by providing a mental place where an agent can explore or practice their skills. For instance, a writer imagining possible plots, or a scientist gaining understanding by imagining a concrete example of a general natural phenomenon. In these cases, imagination is most effective when it is instructive because it can guide accurate understanding, or other aims of learning.
However, if imagination is a skill like some philosophers claim (Kind 2020, Blomkvist 2022), then not just the instructive use, but also the transcendent use can contribute to developing the skill of imagination. While the transcendent use can contribute to strengthening this skill, as Paul Hager (2005) notes, successful learning (of any kind) should enable an agent to act effectively in the world. Therefore, the instructive use of imagination is typically more effective for learning overall.
Imagination in the Creative Process
Unlike learning, creativity requires novelty. Most accounts of creativity posit novelty and value (of some kind) as necessary conditions (Runco 2012). Thus, it is widely held that creativity aims to produce something new and valuable. In the creative process, imagination likely helps generate novel ideas because the freedom of imagination allows agents to visualize possibilities unconstrained by reality. For instance, it seems that transcendent imagination would play a direct role in the aspiring writer. A writer’s imagination may facilitate the development of the story, picturing different characters, and internally acting out dialogue. The newness imagination brings is the ability to create unfamiliar places, people, and narratives. These new aspects satisfy the novelty condition which is necessary for the creative process. In this way, transcendent imagination clearly supports the development of new ideas, which is essential for creativity.
Even the instructive use of imagination can lead to creativity. For example, a writer gets inspiration for a historical fiction novel, while imagining historical events. The writer constrains her imagination to a particular event, then blends that factual event with a realistic narrative. The result is a creative novel developed from imagining an authentic setting and dialogue based on history. In this case, instructive imagination can be the spark that leads to a new idea.
Rigidly constraining imagination to reality, however, may hinder creativity by preventing the possibility of visualizing new ideas. Imagination facilitates creativity because of its mental playfulness. Since novelty is an essential feature of creativity, imagination’s usefulness is primarily when it departs from reality. Even in the historical fiction case, creativity occurs because there is novelty present in the fictional narrative. Thus, there needs to be some sense of newness or freedom for creativity. As a result, imagination when used to track reality does not as easily lead to a creative idea, as this ability may hinder the aims of creativity. Instead, creativity typically thrives in breaking away from tradition and reality.
The Interaction Between Creativity and Learning
Have I oversimplified imagination? Within this post I separated the learning and creative processes, but the likely truth is that the two are deeply connected. There is disagreement in the creativity literature about the connection between learning and creativity. Maria Kronfeldner (2018) argues that originality is a core feature of creativity and contrasts it with learning. Kronfeldner clarifies that this is not a direct opposition, yet there are methods of learning that prevent creativity, like rote copying. Thus, these methods of learning can stifle creativity. However, Lindsay Brainard (2024) compares creativity to learning and exploring, which supports the claim that the two are not directly opposed. Brainard uses this analogy to support her view that creativity involves epistemic value, this suggests that creativity may be tightly connected to the learning process.
Just as imagination is not a strict dichotomy between instructive or transcendent use, creativity and learning are not polar opposites either. While both are distinct processes, they involve each other in a variety of ways. Learning may be partly creative, or the creative process may include learning. Often both learning and creativity happen together whether we are aware or not. For instance:
(A) A poet might learn something about herself while writing a whimsical poem.
(B) A student might develop a creative story while learning about honeybees.
These examples highlight the complexity of both processes and how they may operate amongst each other, not always in opposition. Imagination can spark creativity, and sometimes conflict with truth-directed learning. Focusing on the different aims of learning and creativity clarifies when each use of imagination is appropriate. Thus, developing the skill of imagination is beneficial for both learning and creativity.
References
Blomkvist, Andrea. 2022. "Imagination As a Skill: A Bayesian Proposal." Synthese 1-23.
Brainard, Lindsay. 2024. "What is Creativity?" The Philosophical Quarterly 1-23.
Egeland, Jonathan. 2024. "Imagination Cannot Generate Empirical Justification or Knowledge." Erkenntnis 2951-2970.
Hager, Paul. 2005. "Philosophical Accounts of Learning." Educational Philosophy and Theory 649-666.
Kind, Amy. 2022. Imagination and Creative Thinking. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—. "The Skill of Imagination." In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise, edited by Ellen Fridland and Carlotta Pavese, 335-346. New York: Routledge.
Kind, Amy, and Peter Kung. 2016. "Introduction: The Puzzle of Imaginative Use." In Knowledge Through Imagination, by Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 1-37. Oxford : Oxford University Press.
Kronfeldner, Maria. 2018. "Explaining Creativity." In Creativity and Philosophy, by Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran, 213-229. London: Routledge.
Runco, Mark A., and Garrett J. Jaeger. 2012. "The Standard Definition of Creativity." Creativity Research Journal 92-96.
Spaulding, Shannon. 2016. "Imagination Through Knowledge." In Knowledge Through Imagination, by Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 207-226. Oxford: Oxford University Press.