The Heterogeneity of the Imagination

Imagination has been assigned an important explanatory role in a multitude of philosophical contexts. This paper examines four such contexts: mindreading, pretense, our engagement with fiction, and modal epistemology. Close attention to each of these contexts suggests that the mental activity of imagining is considerably more heterogeneous than previously realized. In short, no single mental activity can do all the explanatory work that has been assigned to imagining. Hume famously wrote in the Treatise that nowhere are we more free than in our exercise of the imagination. A review of the contemporary philosophical discussion of the imagination suggests what seems to be an odd corollary to Hume’s remark: Nowhere do philosophers take themselves to be more free than in the philosophical uses to which they put the imagination. Over the last couple of decades, imagination has been increasingly invoked across a wide swath of philosophical terrain—from aesthetics to epistemology, from ethics to philosophy of mind—and the list of philosophical problems in which imagination is implicated continues to grow. Though Hume took our powers of imagination to be virtually unlimited, I don’t think this is quite what he had in mind. Given the increasing importance that imagination has been assigned in philosophy, it is important to try to get clear on what this mental activity is. But, in Brian O’Shaugnessy’s words, to put the question this way is already to “assume too much”— namely, it is to assume that “there exists something that is the Imagination” and that “there is some one thing that is the phenomenon of Imagining.” (O'Shaughnessy 2000, 339-340) Thus we have the question that motivates this paper: is there such a thing as the phenomenon of imagining, i.e., is there a single mental activity that can do all the explanatory work that has been assigned to imagination?1 To help motivate this question, let’s consider the following four descriptions of relatively common activities: 1In The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle argues that “There is no special Faculty of Imagination” (Ryle 1984, 257) and then proceeds to give what is essentially an eliminativist account of imagining. But Ryle is motivated primarily by behaviorist worries about mental imagery, and this differs significantly from the worry about singularity (expressed in the quotation from O’Shaugnnessy) that is my concern in this paper. It is perhaps worth my noting explicitly that I do believe that there is a distinctive mental activity properly picked out as imagining. However, this comes with two qualifications: First, a commitment to a distinct activity of imagining is different from a commitment to a distinct faculty of imagination. Second, as I will argue in the text, I do not think that the distinct mental activity of imagining can carry all the philosophical weight that has been placed on it.