The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction
(Shaun Nichols (ed.))
Reviewed by Stacie Friend
Page 2
Source: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=9383
These results (and many others) support the hypothesis that readers keep track of information relevant from the perspective of the protagonist, presumably because it is important to understand the story. But they do not show that readers adopt that perspective in the stronger sense of simulating the character. There is no reason to expect that readers who inferred a character's emotional state by deploying a theory about how people in similar situations are likely to feel would be any slower in processing the relevant sentences than readers who made the inference by running an "off-line" simulation to discover how they would feel in a similar situation. That readers infer characters' emotional states is a datum; it does not tell us how readers manage the task.
The three chapters on imaginative resistance provide a good sense of how philosophical tools and empirical methods can contribute in complementary ways to our understanding of the imagination. In his wide-ranging and thoughtful contribution, Walton distinguishes among the various problems associated with "the puzzle of imaginative resistance (so-called)." The aesthetic puzzle is about the relation between aesthetic and moral values. The fictionality puzzlearises when we refuse to accept that an authorial statement is fictional, i.e., that it is supposed to be imagined. And there are two imaginative puzzles, one concerning our inability to imagine something, the other concerning our unwillingness. (This list follows the division proposed elsewhere by Brian Weatherson, but Walton's discussion differs in various respects.) While the aesthetic puzzle touches on psychological phenomena -- as when we take a morally deviant outlook to diminish a work's aesthetic value because we cannot imaginatively adopt that perspective -- it is essentially a normative question not amenable to empirical answer. Similarly, although Walton sometimes describes the fictionality puzzle in terms of an "imaginative inability" (145), the question is why we rightly refuse to recognize certain claims as fictionally the case (why there is a breakdown in "authorial authority," as Weatherson puts it). This is also a normative question, and Walton argues that it is the most philosophically challenging. Although I suspect that the fictionality and aesthetic puzzles are more closely related to the imaginative puzzles than Walton appears to think, this is no reason to ignore the distinctions.
Gendler's contribution focuses on the imaginative puzzles. Acknowledging critics who have claimed that imaginative resistance to morally deviant claims in fiction involves not just unwillingness but also inability (or comparative difficulty), Gendler now claims that such cases "evoke both feelings of imaginative impropriety and imaginative barriers, but . . . it is the imaginative impropriety that explains our failure to imagine the [deviant] world" (156). This is not to say that we always experience resistance to claims that are problematic, morally or otherwise; Gendler gives detailed consideration to the ways in which fictions can provoke or inhibit the experience of "pop-out" associated with imaginative resistance. Gendler's discussion clarifies a complex set of issues and (I believe) offers a persuasive defense of her position. She is surely correct, for example, that the troubling Problem of Nursery School Nomenclature -- the puzzle "of explaining why so many nursery schools have a Bumblebee Room, but no nursery schools have a Dung Beetle room, given that (in some reasonable sense of harder) it's no harder to imagine your child as a dung beetle than as a bumblebee" -- reflects an unwillingness rather than an inability to imagine in a certain way (151). This unwillingness can be explained, Gendler says, by the results of social-psychological research showing that mental representations (such as images of dung beetles) automatically trigger associated perception and action dispositions; presumably, these are dispositions we would not wish to have toward our children. The parallel with the moral cases is insightful.
Weinberg and Meskin claim that Gendler's (original) proposal is nonetheless limited by its restriction to folk-psychological intuitions about the conditions under which imaginative impropriety occurs. They are also critical of accounts that invoke metaphysical notions, such as Weatherson's argument that imaginative obstacles arise when we are supposed to imagine some higher-level claim but are forbidden to imagine any lower-level facts that would make the higher-level claim true. W&M provide good reasons to think that these and other accounts in the philosophical literature cannot offer a completely general solution to the imaginative puzzle. Their proposal is thus to "break out of the restriction to folk and philosophical resources" and adopt a more scientific approach (176). On their view, the source of imaginative obstacles is a conflict between pieces of the cognitive architecture. For instance, if a fiction instructs us to imagine both P and not-P, inference mechanisms automatically detect the contradiction and try to remove one or both of the contradictory propositions from the "imagination box" (IB), just as they would from the "belief box" (BB). (Here W&M adopt the conventional "boxological" means of distinguishing the functional roles of imaginings and beliefs.) In other cases we experience a block due to a conflict between the inputs of two components of the architecture, as when we are instructed to imagine P (e.g., 'murder of innocents is morally obligatory') by a fiction, but our moral judgment system places not-P into the IB. W&M make a compelling case that whatever causes our experiences of imaginative obstacles, there is no reason to think that it will be entirely accessible to introspection or intuition. Furthermore, they offer a plausible and unified account of the psychological mechanisms generating the experience of imaginative blocks consistent with a range of empirical research.
There is an obvious worry about W&M's proposal as so far described, however: the fact that we often have no trouble imagining offensive, impossible, and even contradictory fictions. Why, for example, are only some contradictory representations "kicked out" of the IB by the inference mechanisms? W&M answer that authors may show us "some trick, some means of redirecting our attention, that can prevent the automatic systems from doing their usual job," as when science fictions "hide their time-travel paradoxes behind an ink cloud of uninterpreted techno-sounding gobbledygook" (190). While this reply is certainly correct, it does not seem to be of a piece with the rest of W&M's proposal; they offer no account of the psychological mechanisms involved in imagining along with paradoxical stories (though they acknowledge the need for such an account). I suggest that their invocation of authorial devices highlights the way in which a purely psychological approach is incomplete. We want to understand not only the psychological mechanisms underpinning the experience of imaginative obstacles, but also the no doubt multifarious features of fictional works (or other prompts to imagining) that provoke or inhibit that experience. In my view, an account of such features is also important in addressing the aesthetic and fictionality puzzles. So there is plenty of room here for both philosophical analysis and empirical research.
In these comments I have highlighted just a few of the ways in which empirical evidence both can, and cannot, contribute to the resolution of philosophical puzzles about the imagination. There can be little doubt that theories of the nature, limits, and role of the imagination should take into account results in psychology and neuroscience; nor that the import of these results requires interpretation in light of broader theoretical concerns. This collection demonstrates the way in which essays that are both empirically informed and philosophically sophisticated can greatly improve our understanding of the imagination.
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