Megan Entwistle is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Memory at the Université Grenoble Alpes. She works in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, with particular interests in the role of perspective-taking in memory (solo and joint).
A post by Megan Entwistle
You’re reading a novel on the train. You’re engrossed in your private, fictional world of characters and intrigue. As you turn a page, you feel the person sitting next to you shift in their seat. Suddenly you realize: they’ve been reading over your shoulder!
Why is this so disconcerting?
For a number of reasons, surely. Perhaps it feels like they’re in your personal space. Perhaps you feel you’ve been observed for a long time without noticing. Or perhaps it’s that your imaginative experience was not, as you had assumed, so private after all.
That last reaction is a little odd. You aren’t the first to read that particular novel and you won’t be the last. You like to read book reviews, lend your favorite books to your friends, and swap interpretations. Nevertheless, there is something different about the very same words at the very same time evoking (the very same?) images in a very real person next to you.
This blog post is about that difference: the difference between imagining alone, and imagining with others.
There are a number of actions we undertake simply alongside, or in parallel with, others. Think how many people can shop for groceries at the same time. I might reach for a can of tomatoes just as you do. We have to coordinate our behavior to some extent, so as not to reach for the very same can. But we aren’t shopping together. That would require, according to Margeret Gilbert’s influential account of joint action, a joint intention or “commitment”, whereby we espouse certain goals as a collective body (2013).
These goals need not be particularly complex. Two children can commit to a pretense: one invites the other for a tea party. They take turns making moves in the game, relying on shared scripts, props and physical gestures to move the story forward. The first child pours the imaginary tea. The second child spits it out in imagined disgust. The first child can accept this elaboration of the story without exiting the pretense, say by cleaning up the tea, or offering a second cup with sugar. But if the other child continues to change the rules of the game in a way the first finds unacceptable, their diverging commitments will lead to a breakdown in joint action. “We’re not playing anymore”, the first child might declare.
Not all varieties of imagining are quite so action-like as pretense (Kind 2013). Joint imaginative activities often have clearly circumscribed goals, roles, and standards for cooperation – compare an acting troupe performing a play, a couple redecorating their living room, or an art class painting a community mural. However, once we narrow our focus to the individual psychological processes these activities recruit, the story about joint imagining becomes more complicated.
Take a purely experiential kind of imagining, like visual imagination. I can conjure up an image of a snow-covered, barren prairie winter landscape with ease. I can describe such scenes from my childhood to you, inviting you to picture the scene. Although it is an open question whether two people can truly imagine the same thing, and what the criteria for imaginative success are (see Nick Wiltsher’s recent Junkyard post on this topic), I am going to assume here a working conception of two different mental representations with shared contents. What I am interested in is not whether two people can imagine the same thing, but whether they can jointly imagine the same thing. What could this difference consist in?
Here’s what it is thought to amount to in the case of visual perception. According to John Campbell (2005), two perceivers form a triadic relation with an object of perception when, in addition to both attending to the same object, their respective experiences also contains an awareness of the other person as co-subject. Campbell’s classic example is the following:
Suppose that you are sitting on a park bench watching a swan and someone comes to sit beside you. Perhaps there is some rudimentary conversation. So you shift from solitary attention to the swan, through a condition in which both you and your neighbour are coincidentally watching the swan, to full joint attention (2005, p. 287).
The swan serves as a tether for the attentional resources of both viewers. This means, first, that they each selectively process some information in their visual field–such as the swan’s color and motion–at the expense of other available information–such as the patterns in the clouds above (Watzl 2011). Second, since the swan is an object in the public space occupied by the two viewers, they can each register the other as a fellow subject of perception by triangulating on the swan.
In contrast to Campbell’s purely perceptual model, Christopher Peacocke (2005) argues that the shift from parallel to joint attention requires, in addition, recursive mindreading capacities. In Peacocke’s view, attention is shared when each person attends to the swan, while knowing the other person is attending to the swan, while knowing that the other person, while attending to the swan, knows the very same thing…. And so on.
Although these theories are importantly different, they highlight a similar feature: jointness in the psychological realm is achieved when our respective mental states are made sufficiently public. Perceptual objects naturally afford the relevant publicity. They help us create a shared space. For instance, friends watching a movie together tend to be aware of the fact of each others’ viewership in such a way that attunes them to each other’s reactions in addition to the movie itself. Joint attention is a large part of why going to a cinema is a much different viewing experience than watching a movie at home.
What could play the role of objects of attention, for imagining? You might already be thinking that cinematic experiences exemplify not only joint attention, but joint imagining. For instance, it may be that I find a plot point or character more “believable” if I am aware of the crowd reacting as such; my imaginative engagement with the film is thus affected by the content of others’ engagement, and vice versa. If I go to a movie with my rather hard-to-impress coworker, I might encounter more imaginative resistance to the subtle moralizing than I otherwise would. Joint imagining is thus akin to joint attention to imagined objects, including the fictional worlds that films enjoin us to enter.
If the foregoing observations are on the right track, it would account for the greater comparative difficulty in making joint certain other, purely experiential, imaginings. My friend, with whom I am sharing my memories of a very cold childhood, lacks a tether to the relevant perceptual contents. I can describe my hometown at length to her, but I may fall short of making it fully accessible, a space she can visually recreate and project herself into. We might thus be unable to counterfactually imagine building snow forts as children together.
Other cases, by contrast, have featured the help of various “props”: think Campbell’s swan, the child’s teacup. On the view I’ve been gesturing towards, such props play an important role in establishing the shared space between imaginers that’s required for jointness.
This brings us back to the stranger on the train. Realizing they were reading over your shoulder does not suddenly make the imaginative experience joint. It rather makes the possibility of a shared experience salient, a possibility which can either be unnerving or welcome. You still have the option to ignore the other person, to not let your awareness of the publicly accessible written words include the other, in your mind, as a co-imaginer – even as it may include them, in your perceptual experience, as a co-attender.
What this reveals is that joint imagining is not just joint imaginative attention. It depends also on the attitudes one holds in undertaking an imaginative project. Like joint actions, you plausibly need to commit to entering a fictional world alongside the stranger, with all the emotional vulnerability that entails. And, depending on your personality, you just might! You can signal your openness by holding the book at a better angle for them, by engaging them in conversation about it, and myriad other ways. Or you might, as I did, prefer to keep the story to yourself.
References
Campbell J (2005) Joint attention and common knowledge. In: Eilan N, Hoerl C, McCormack T, Roessler J (eds) Joint Attention: communication and other minds: issues in philosophy and psychology. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Gilbert, M (2013). Joint Commitment: How We Make the Social World. Oxford University Press.
Kind, A (2013). The Heterogeneity of the Imagination. Erkenntnis 78 (1): 141-159.
Peacocke, C. (2005). “Joint Attention: Its Nature, Reflexivity, and Relation to Common Knowledge”. in Naomi Eilan, and others (eds), Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, Consciousness & Self-Consciousness Series (Oxford, 2005; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Sept. 2010)
Watzl, S. (2011). The nature of attention. Philosophy compass, 6(11), 842-853.