Nick Wiltsher is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He continues to claim that he's writing a book on imagination.
A post by Nick Wiltsher
Sometimes, you succeed at imagining. Sometimes, you don’t. How do you, we, or anyone work out whether or not you’ve succeeded?
Here’s a simple answer: establish what you were trying to do, and then see if you managed it. This, I think, is basically right, but also less simple than it seems. I’m here going to ramble through some of the complications, with no particular argumentative direction.
Talk of “what you were trying to do” implies that imagining is an intentional action, which in turn suggests that we’re after a description of what action you were intending to perform in imagining.[1] But this formulation is ambiguous, at least once a little bit of dogma has been digested, and both of the disambiguated formulations have surprising aspects.
Suppose I want to do some dancing. But, being a traditional soul, I don’t just want to flail around in a vaguely rhythmical fashion. I want, specifically, to dance the Gay Gordons (let’s assume the willing partner is present). What determines whether I succeed in doing so?
Some of the determinants are, as it were, internal. I decide what dance I want to do; I have some control over what my limbs are doing and when they’re doing it. But some of the determinants are external. If whatever my limbs are up to doesn’t conform closely enough to the standard steps: well, in that case, whatever my partner and I are doing just isn’t the Gay Gordons. (interesting: if I fail, we both fail?)
As with dancing, so with imagining; except, I say, more so (and here’s the dogma). You can be dancing, but doing no particular dance. If you’re imagining, however, you’re always doing some particular imaginative thing, such as fantasising, creating, empathising, or fictionalising. In a slogan: no imagining in the abstract.
So when we ask what you’re trying to do when imagining, we need to inquire not only about the things you’re intending to imagine, but also about the kind of imagining you’re intending to do; and we need to take both into account when we ask whether you succeeded.
Something like this distinction is discernible in some recent-ish work on “imaginative projects”. So far as I can tell, Bernard Williams was the first person to use this term (1966, p. 36ff). He suggests that the question of what you’re imagining is settled by what things you’re intending to imagine, your imaginative project, rather than by the contents of your imagining alone (at least sometimes, at least in part). If I imagine myself dancing the Dundee Whaler, I could be imagining myself doing that very dance, or I could be imagining myself doing some line dancing, and I could do either thing with the very same contents. It’s the project, not the contents, that say which I’m doing.
Now, part of Williams’ point is that, if I’m intending to imagine doing some line dancing and I try to do it by imagining dancing the Dundee Whaler, I’ve done a bad job of fulfilling my intention. Projects provide normative structure to imaginings, because they have goals, and so we can ask whether the goal has been reached.
Since Williams introduced the term, some people have more or less followed him in using “imaginative project” to just mean “what things you’re intending to imagine”. But others have used the term to also refer to the kind of imagining you’re engaged with, such as Dorsch (2012, 2015) and Goldwasser (2024a, 2024b).
The principal reason why kinds of imagining end up being invoked is that they make a descriptive and normative difference to your imagining. Suppose you imagine dancing Roaring Jelly. You could, in so doing, be fantasising, or engaging in imaginative rehearsal, or perhaps in some other imaginative activity; and we can’t say which you’re doing just by describing the manifest contents of your imagining. Further, if you’re fantasising about dancing Davy Nick Nack, it doesn’t really matter that much whether your imagining is especially accurate. But if you’re trying to imaginatively rehearse dancing the Lady Wynd, it really matters that the promenade starts just as the ninth bar begins.
All this suggests that we need to look at both your intentions and the kind of imagining you were intending to do in order to work out whether you succeeded in your imagining. I’m now going to say something I find interesting, and perhaps surprising, about each of imaginative intentions and kinds of imagining.
On the subject of imaginative intentions: the way in which we often talk about our intentions might lead us to assume a misleading default account of how imagining goes. On that account, there’s at least a logical separation between intention and action, if not a temporal one. I first form an intention to fantasise about dancing the Montgomeries’ Rant; I then try to imagine myself doing it; I then, optionally, assess whether my imagining matched the intention with which I started.
The main reason to think this is misleading derives from work on artistic creation. As R. G. Collingwood (1938) argues, genuine creation involves working out what you’re doing as you go; if you have a detailed plan of where you’re going before you start, you might be doing something worthwhile, but it isn’t creation. Of course, you need some idea of what you’re up to, but you can’t formulate a replete intention to produce precisely that. Since we should want our accounts of imagination and imaginative intentions to encompass artistic creation, it would be a serious problem if those accounts were to embed a misleading description of a basic aspect of creation.
Of course, you might just think that the open-ended nature of the motivating intentions is an oddity of creation, and not something that ought to be a component of an account of imagination generally. But if you think about it, a similar open-endedness is, or ought to be, an aspect of accounts of many other kinds of imagining. Anyone invested in the idea that imagination has epistemic uses ought to accept this claim. If you can fully formulate the relevant intention to imagine something before imagining it, it’s mysterious what you actually learn by then doing the imagining.
The slightly surprising thing here is that the role of intentions in determining imaginative success, or in constituting imaginative projects, might be rather less prominent than initially supposed. As Rohrbaugh (2017) argues with respect to artistic plans, we may have to keep the notion of imaginative intention loose and abstract in order to accommodate the right cases, and this might mean that the notion can do little substantial work on its own. Projects are complicated things.
On the subject of kinds of imagining: I really think these are action-types analogous to dances: that is, action-types whose shape is socially determined. For dances, whether you count as doing the action depends at least partially on whether your behaviour (broadly construed) conforms to the pattern of behaviour that a relevant group takes to be constitutive of the action-type. The Royal Scottish Country Dance Society gets to say whether or not you’re dancing the Posties’ Jig.
Likewise, kinds of imagining are socially-determined action-types. What it is to imagine is to engage in (mostly) mental activity that is fundamental to and shaped by some particular human practice, such as art-making, story-telling, empathising. It’s impossible to say what imagining is without reference to some such practices, and impossible to characterise the practices without some reference to imagining. (Awkward question: what is the practice to which fantasising is related?)
For each such practice, we have an action-type: a specification of what you have to do in order to count as doing that kind of imagining. Depending on the practice, this might tell us what end is being pursued, what value is meant to accrue in its pursuit, what means should be used to pursue it. This is where the external conditions on imaginative projects come from: we assess the success of imaginings in part by their conformity to the norms of the relevant action-type.
Is this surprising? I suppose it depends on how surprised you are to hear that whether you succeed in imagining isn’t just settled by what’s going on in your head. I’m not especially surprised by that, but then I’m quite deep down a rabbit-hole that I’ve dug for myself. Do let me know whether you’re surprised.
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Thanks to participants at the recent workshop in Bristol on imagining well for enduring the first pass of these thoughts and being very nice about it.
Notes
[1] It also suggests that we’re not after an analysis of the direction(s) of fit of imaginative mental states, as critically discussed by Langland-Hassan (2015); and it also suggests we’re not after a description of an “infrastructure” of “quasi-doxastic” states representing a fictional world, as elaborated by Chasid (e.g. 2019, 2021a, 2021b). It could be that one or both of these things is compatible with the ideas pursued in the main text, but neither is an auspicious starting point for pursuit.
References
Collingwood, R. G. (1938). The Principles of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Chasid, Alon (2019). “Imagining in Response to Fiction: Unpacking the Infrastructure”. Philosophical Explorations 23.1, pp. 31–48.
— (2021a). “Belief-Like Imagining and Correctness”. American Philosophical Quarterly 58.2, pp. 147–160.
— (2021b). “Not by Imaginings Alone: On How Imaginary Worlds Are Established”. Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7.2, pp. 195–212.
Dorsch, Fabian (2012). The Unity of Imagining. Frankfurt: Ontos.
— (2015). “Focused Daydreaming and Mind-Wandering”. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6.4, pp. 791–813.
Langland-Hassan, Peter (2015). Imaginative Attitudes. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (3):664-686.
Goldwasser, Seth (2024a). “Imagining as a Skillful Mental Action”. Synthese 204.38, pp. 1–33.
— (2024b). “Remembering is an Imaginative Project”. Philosophical Studies 181, pp. 2897–2933.
Rohrbaugh, Guy (2017). Psychologism and Completeness in the Arts. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75.2, pp. 131–141.
Williams, Bernard (1966). “Imagination and the Self ”. In his Problems of the Self (1973). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 26–45.