Review of Recreative Minds

The imagination is enjoying a burst of scholarly attention. Over the last decade, a number of researchers at the intersection of philosophy and psychology have explored the nature of the imagination. Gregory Currie has played a central role in these discussions, both as an insightful critic and as an apologist for a ‘simulation’-based account of the imagination. As a result, Recreative Minds, the new book by Currie and Ian Ravenscroft has been widely anticipated by those in the field. The book delivers. It stakes out an interesting, detailed, and provocative view of the imagination. The account that emerges has broad ramifications for central issues in aesthetics, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of mind. The book is also distinguished throughout by fair and balanced readings of their opposition. Like other work in this tradition, Currie and Ravenscroft do not attempt to give an account of the creative imagination, the capacity that led Einstein to discover relativity and Borges to invent Menard. Rather, Currie and Ravenscroft offer an account of what they call the recreative imagination, the imaginative capacity for putting oneself in another person’s place or ‘perspective shifting’ (p. 9). There are, according to Currie and Ravenscroft, a number of different aspects of another person’s perspective that might be occupied through recreative imagination. We can shift to take on beliefs, desires, perceptions. Crucially, these recreative states have the same ‘character’ as their counterpart states. So, belief-like imagining has the same character as belief, desire-like imagining has the same character as desire, and vision-like imagining has the same character as vision. Currie and Ravenscroft never define the notion of character very precisely, but they do make quite clear that character needs to be distinguished from content. What makes something count as belief-like imagining or vision-like imagining, they maintain, is not the content of the imagining, but the character of the imagining. This allows them to skirt familiar problems that face other accounts. For instance, visual imagining is sometimes characterized as imagining that has, as part of its content, I see X (e.g. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 28). This leads to obvious puzzles about whether, for example, it is coherent to visually imagine an unseen landscape. Currie and Ravenscroft easily evade these puzzles since they maintain that what makes something count as visual imagining is not that it has content that tags it as visual, but rather a visual character (pp. 30-1). Recreative Minds offers a far reaching account of the recreative imagination. One chapter sets out a state-of-the-art overview of empirical work on visual imagery, making a powerful case for close parallels between vision and visual imagery. However, the bulk of the book focuses on propositional imaginings, and in particular belief-like imaginings and desire-like imaginings. After setting out their account of the imagination, Currie and Ravenscroft explore the possibility that the recreative imagination is damaged in some clinical psychopathologies. They consider the now familiar view that autism involves a deficit in imaginative capacities. The evidentiary