Julia Langkau is an Assistant Professor at the University of Geneva. She’s leading the SNFS Prima project “Creativity, Imagination and Tradition”. Her main research areas are philosophy of mind, philosophy of fiction, epistemology and aesthetics.
A post by Julia Langkau
Suppose you are preparing for a difficult conversation with a friend. You imagine how the exchange might unfold: what you might say, how your friend might respond, and how the conversation could end. As you do so, your imagination is constrained by what you believe about the world: you picture the actual situation, the personalities involved, and the kinds of things the friend will likely say. But your attention is also directed by what you care about: fairness, honesty, or empathic understanding. These values shape which possibilities you consider, which ones you ignore, and which ones don’t even come to your mind. You focus on ways of speaking that are respectful or constructive, and you avoid imagining saying things that would feel cruel or unjust. Your imaginative process is guided by moral values.
Now consider Judith Jarvis Thomson’s (1971) famous thought experiment, in which you are asked to imagine waking up in a hospital bed and discovering that you have been connected, without your consent, to a famous unconscious violinist whose life depends on your kidneys for nine months. To engage with the thought experiment, you imagine the scenario as it is described: the hospital room, the violinist, and the unusual medical situation. Your imagination is constrained by the details of the fictional scenario and by some general assumptions about how people and hospitals work, but not by others. For instance, there is unlikely to be a musical society who would kidnap you in the real world, and there’s unlikely to be a hospital that would allow them to hook you up. But whatever the exact constraints of the scenarios are: The imaginative process you are engaging in is not guided by moral values. Instead, you are asked to imagine things you would evaluate as morally wrong: the kidnapping and the use of your body. Moral evaluation enters only when you are asked to judge whether you are obliged to remain connected to the violinist and how this bears on the question whether abortion is morally permissible.
A common view in the imagination literature is that we can distinguish between constrained and unconstrained uses of imagination. The relevant constraints are epistemic in nature: our imagining must remain faithful to what we believe about the world, which is why imagination can help us gain knowledge about the world (Kind 2016). In other contexts, imagination is thought to be free of epistemic constraints. I wish to introduce a new distinction which does not run parallel to the distinction between constrained and unconstrained uses of the imagination: Whether (epistemically) constrained or not, imagination may or may not be guided by values.
We can apply this to various kinds of values and to familiar cases. The classic sofa or luggage case is a good example of constrained imagining which is also guided by epistemic values (e.g., Myers 2021). As I am imaginatively trying to fit my suitcase into the overhead compartment, my imagining is guided by attention to size and spatial relations. For example, I pay attention not to shrink the suitcase in my imagination, and not to extend the compartment as I imaginatively store the suitcase in it. In Einstein’s thought experiment about light, which helped him develop special relativity (see Stuart 2020), by contrast, the imaginative process is neither constrained nor guided by epistemic values: We imagine traveling at the speed of light, and wonder what a parallel light wave would look like. As Stuart notes, the scenario is imagined without regard for epistemic accuracy. Epistemic considerations enter only at the end, when the thought experiment is evaluated.
This distinction is particularly interesting when applied to creative uses of imagination. Creative thinking is often described as involving two phases: idea generation and idea evaluation (e.g., Finke et al. 1992). The generation phase relies on divergent thinking, where thinkers produce combinations without worrying about, for instance, beauty or usefulness. However, on its own, divergent thinking will lead to irrelevant, valueless ideas. The evaluation phase is therefore essential, as it involves assessing ideas based on criteria such as beauty or adequacy. For example, an artist may produce several first versions of a painting and then choose the most beautiful one to proceed with. Or a scientist may consider different possibilities of doing an experiment before choosing the most adequate one. Both artist and scientist may either test their options in reality, or in imagination, or partly in reality, partly in imagination.
However, in creative processes, imagination can also itself be guided by aesthetic values such as beauty. As the artist imagines different color combinations, they do not consider all possibilities equally. They are drawn to certain contrasts or harmonies without imagining others. Their imagination is not first random and then assessed; it is, from the beginning, directed by attention to what strikes them as beautiful.
Aesthetic values, like moral and epistemic values, can thus shape not only evaluation but also generation. Introducing this distinction is not only to say that what we value matters during the process of imagining, but also to explain why certain possibilities become salient at all, and why they are being developed, while others are ignored. Value-guidance helps explain the directedness of imagination. It explains why, with so many possible ways of continuing, some possibilities stand out to the subject as worth pursuing. What guides imagination need not be objective value, but what the subject sees as valuable or worth pursuing in the moment. In aesthetic cases in particular, what draws attention and shapes the imaginative process may depend on the subject’s own sense of beauty or aesthetic significance.
This allows us to say something more precise about active creativity (see Gaut 2003). While passive creativity involves the display of new ideas but can happen subconsciously, active creativity involves a conscious search. With the distinction just introduced, active creativity can take at least two forms. In one form, imagination is used to generate possibilities in an unguided way, with value entering at the stage of evaluation. In the other, imagination is value-guided from the start, so that attention to what matters shapes which possibilities are considered and how they are developed.
We can now see how the distinction between constrained and unconstrained imagination relates to value-guided and unguided imagining. Constraints are thought to be epistemic and determine whether imagination must remain faithful to the world. Value-guidance concerns how imagination proceeds. By “unguided imagination”, I do not mean imagination that proceeds without any structure at all. The process may still have an aim or a task. The point is only that it is not guided, during the imaginative process itself, by attention to any relevant values. While the two distinctions are independent from one another, it seems that when imagination is guided by a certain kind of value, e.g., epistemic value, it is at least implicitly constrained by corresponding beliefs. To follow a value in imagination requires remaining sensitive to what one takes to be possible, appropriate, or fitting in light of one’s beliefs.
One might want to object that all imaginative processes are, in some sense, value-guided, since even the decision of what to imagine or which task to pursue reflects the subject’s interests or aims. On this view, the distinction between value-guided and unguided imagination collapses. However, the present distinction is not concerned with the broader aims that motivate an imaginative project or even with ones that keep the project in check, but with what shapes the conscious unfolding of the imaginative process itself. Even if the overall task is motivated by certain values, the process of generating possibilities can proceed without attention to those values, as in Thomson’s thought experiment. In unguided cases, possibilities are explored without regard to whether they are good, beautiful, or epistemically appropriate, and only later subject to evaluation. By contrast, in value-guided imagination, attention to such values actively directs the possibilities considered and developed.
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A more elaborate version of this content can be found in: Langkau, Julia, “The Role of Value in Creative Imagining”, forthcoming in Studia Philosophica Estonica, special issue “Value Cognition in Imagination”.
References:
Finke, Ronald A., Thomas B. Ward, and Steven M. Smith. 1992. Creative Cognition: Theory, Research, and Applications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gaut, Berys. 2003. “Creativity and Imagination.” In The Creation of Art: New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics, edited by Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston, 148–173. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kind, Amy. 2016. “Imagining under Constraints”. In Knowledge Through Imagination, edited by Amy Kind and Peter Kung, 145-159. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Myers, Joshua. 2021, “Reasoning With Imagination”, in Christopher Badura and Amy Kind (eds.), 2021, Epistemic Uses of Imagination, New York: Routledge, pp. 103–121.
Stuart, Michael T. 2020. “The Productive Anarchy of Scientific Imagination,” Philosophy of Science 87 (5): 968-978.
Thomson, Judith Jarvis. 1971. “A Defense of Abortion”. Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (1): 47-66.