The Multidimensional Spectrum of Imagination
Nigel J.T. Thomas
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Page 10
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Imagining That
Let us turn, now, to the notion of imagining that. It raises difficulties for any attempt to produce a unified account of imagination, because, unlike the imaginative phenomena we have been considering up to now – dreams, hallucinations, and all the various forms of imaginative seeing – it is not, in any very obvious way, related to either imagery or perception. It is not absurd, for example, to suggest that someone might be able to imagine that pigs can fly without ever forming a mental image of a flying pig. Indeed, I can imagine that certain things might be the case without even being capable of imagining them (in the sense of forming imagery that represents them in a non-arbitrary way): for example, I can imagine that Goldbach's Conjecture, or, say, the correspondence theory of truth, is true, but I find myself quite unable to form images of those situations.
Perhaps a case could be made for locating imagining that in the region of our three-dimensional spectrum where vividness is at a minimum (indeed, where it has gone to zero), where stimulus constrainedness is also very low, but where amenability to voluntary control is high. However, it seems more likely that (as I have argued elsewhere: Thomas, 1997), when we talk of imagining that, we are actually using the word "imagining" in an extended or metaphorical sense. Philosophers have been aware for a very long time that "imagination" often is used metaphorically: Aristotle, at the very outset of the discussion, explicitly noted the point when he definedimagination as "(apart from any metaphorical sense of the word) the process by which we say an image is presented to us" (De Anima III.iii 428a). It is easy enough to see how a word with that literal meaning could quickly have come to be used also to mean the capacity that we have for entertaining propositions without regard for their truth value.
After all, the entertaining of imagery and the entertaining of propositions are both ways in which we are able to think about non-actual situations, and in practice we very often use both of them together. If you ask me to imagine that pigs can fly, it is very probable (in my case, at least) that I will not only entertain the proposition, but will also experience, at least dimly and fleetingly, an image of a wingèd pig flapping through the air. Although the image may not be strictly necessary in order for me to have complied with your request, it is psychologically likely. Of course, imagery is very idiosyncratic: perhaps some people have little or no tendency to form such an image when entertaining that proposition, and, very likely, others tend to form much more vivid and sustained images of flying pigs than I do. Furthermore, even for the same person on different occasions, imagery can vary greatly in vividness and copiousness, and different propositions are likely to vary in their tendency to evoke imagery in different people. I have never been to Samarkand, and have only the haziest idea of what the city might be like. If you ask me to imagine that I am in Samarkand, I can certainly entertain the proposition, but any imagery I produce is likely to be very weak, meager and vague, at best. On the other hand, someone who once spent many a happy hour exploring the streets of Samarkand may well produce vivid and copious imagery of it, even if they have very little tendency ever to produce imagery of flying pigs.
Now suppose you, with rich imagery of Samarkand swirling in your head, inform me that you are imagining being in Samarkand. The term "imagining" may seem appropriate to you (more appropriate than, say "thinking about") precisely because of the imagery you are having: to you, at this point, it means "having imagery of." But for me, although I can understand perfectly well what it is to entertain the proposition that one is in Samarkand, when I do so it evokes little or no imagery. Might I not carelessly conclude that, as you use the word, "imagine" sometimes means merely to entertain a proposition, and carries no particular implications about imagery? After a few such experiences, might I not come to use the word in this way myself, even perhaps when I am talking about the entertainment of propositions that may have little potential for evoking imagery in anyone. And, of course, more people would soon start to pick up this usage from me. Given the fact that we can never tell, independently of what they say, whether or not people are having imagery, it seems almost inevitable that things like this would happen, and that "imagining," even if originally coined to refer only to episodes of experiencing imagery (or other things along the spectrum), would very quickly extend its meaning to include the mere entertaining of propositions. (There is no reason to expect that this would displace the imagery meaning, however, because it is also likely that on many of the occasions when X tells Y that she is imagining that p, this will evoke p-appropriate imagery for Y, and that might even sometimes happen when X is, in fact, notexperiencing any relevant imagery, but merely entertaining a proposition.)
I thus find myself in at least partial agreement with those deflationists who hold that the verb "to imagine" is polysemous. It has two distinct, although easily confusable, meanings. I differ from them, however, in thinking that the sense that refers to the multidimensional spectrum of imaginative phenomena – imagery, hallucination, dreaming, interpretive perception, etc. – is conceptually primary, and of considerably more importance and interest. Throughout most of the twentieth century, most analytical philosophers seem to have been much more comfortable with the notion of imagining that than they were with mental imagery and its kin. This shift in emphasis has sometimes been presented as though it were a discovery, as if we now know that imagination is "really" a propositional matter, and Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant and the rest were not really talking about what they thought they were talking about when they discussed imagination (White, 1990; Lopes, 2003 p. 208). Far from being a discovery, it is scarcely even a claim: it is an attempt to change the subject. Imagining that is a linguistic, or at any rate a propositional matter, and, as such, lends itself to explication in terms of the characteristic tools of the analytical philosopher, logical and linguistic analysis. Those tools, however, provide relatively little purchase on something non-propositional like imagery (unless it can somehow be shown to be reducible to a propositional format) or imaginative perception. The upshot has been that most analytical philosophers (with occasional exceptions, such as Price (1953) and McGinn),have preferred either to ignore imagery, or to deprecate its importance to the mental economy (Thomas, 2008 §3.3; Nyíri, 2001).When one is highly skilled with a hammer, things tend to look like nails.
Thus, despite the manifest etymology of the word, and despite the way it was universally understood by earlier philosophers (Brann, 1991; White, 1990 pt.1), in the 20th century imagination came to be treated, by most analytically trained philosophers, as primarily a matter of imagining that, and only secondarily, if that, as having anything to do with imagery or perception. Implicitly, imagery came to be considered as a sort of mental luxury, serving no real purpose save the inconveniencing of philosophers of mind with the need to explain it away. From that perspective, deflationism became almost inevitable. The capacity to entertain propositions without assenting to them is scarcely a likely candidate for being that from which "not only all the good, universally, but also all the bad, can be derived," let alone "the living power and prime agent of all human perception, . . . a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM" (Pico della Mirandola, c.1500; Coleridge, 1817).[39] From the deflationary perspective, such claims are not just overblown, they are incomprehensible. From the perspective of the multidimensional spectrum, although they remain bombastic, we can make sense of them.
Creativity and Imaginativeness
In this article, I have tried to establish that there can be a cohesive, coherent and scientifically viable concept of a faculty of imagination, a faculty that plays a large and essential role in human cognition, and that can accommodate most of the mental phenomena, from memory images to dreams, and from hallucination to veridical perception, that have traditionally been ascribed to it.
What, then, of the creative imagination? That, after all, is what calls forth most of the hyperbole, but, like imagining that, it seems to fit in no particular place on our multidimensional spectrum. In this case, however, this is not because it is a different, metaphorical meaning of the word, discontinuous with the others, but because to call a particular piece of mental work (or its products, the ideas, actions or artifacts that result) creative is not to classify it psychologically, but to evaluate it in a certain way. It is to say that an idea, or the concrete products or practices to which it gave rise, was both original and effective in the context of the problem situation (artistic, practical, or whatever) in which it arose and was applied (cf. Barrow, 1988).
By no means all acts of the imagination are creative in this sense. There is nothing particularly original (or, indeed, effective) about seeing the duck-rabbit figure as a duck (or a rabbit), or recalling a mental image of your mother's face, or hallucinating an accusatory voice, or, indeed, having some hackneyed dream of flying, or falling, or being caught naked in public. Some confusion over this point may arise from the fact that the adjective "imaginative" (or phrases such as "shows a lot of imagination") has come to be used to describe people, or thought processes or products, that are deemed to be particularly creative. However, if imagination is essential to all thought and memory (as Aristotle, and many since, have held) and to all interpretive perception, including veridical perception, as I have suggested, then it is a fundamental cognitive function, and if it makes any sense at all to speak of one person having more of it than another (or applying more of it to some particular problem), it is certainly not clear how such vaguely specified quantitative differences might be responsible for the difference between creative successes and failures.
But the association between imagination and creativity is certainly not fortuitous. Although imagination is not always, or even usually, creative (in anything beyond a trivial sense), it may well be the case that creativity, when it does arise, necessarily springs from the imagination. In the central regions of our multi-dimensional spectrum, and thus at the heart of our concept of imagination, where experience is tied to stimulation, but not too strongly, and where our voluntary control over that experience is neither absolute nor entirely lacking, we find the various phenomena of imaginative perception, our capacity for seeing (and, more generally, perceiving) as. I have argued elsewhere that this is what makes creative insight, thinking that is both original and effective, possible (Thomas, 1997, 1999a; see also Blain, 2006). If our thought is not anchored in reality, not stimulus bound at all, or if it is quite out of our voluntary control, it is unlikely to be effective; if it is too closely bound to present actuality, or so much under conscious control that it cannot escape the confines of what we already explicitly believe, then it cannot be original. Imaginative perception, however, seeing as in both the literal and metaphorical senses of that expression, opens up the possibility of seeing things in new ways. If we are lucky and alert we may be able to see previously unnoticed aspects and possibilities in our world that open the path to a new understanding of some facet of our natural, social, or intellectual environment. If we also have the requisite skills, we may be able to convey this insight to others – to shape or bias their imagination, so that they are led to notice what we have noticed – through whatever communicative medium is most appropriate to the insight: painting or poem, scientific or philosophical article, or what have you.
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