Jay Richardson
Affiliation: Centre for philosophy of memory, Université Grenoble-Alpes
The imagination is often regarded as fundamentally heterogeneous. Mental imagery, propositional imagination, creativity are some of the many categories the term often designates. One traditional approach to understanding the imagination embraces this heterogeneity. It consists of cataloguing sui generis imaginative attitudes and canvassing their respective functional profiles (e.g. Currie & Ravenscroft, 2002). Recently, a total rejection of this recreativist approach has been pushed by Langland-Hassan. According to his reductionist approach, discourse about imagination can be reformulated in terms of non-imaginative attitudes and imagistic content. This framework eliminates the need for a distinct class of imaginative attitudes. But because this sophisticated reductionism must settle for a one to many mapping between reduced imaginative states and non-imaginative states in the reduction base, it too embraces heterogeneity. My aim is to fortify the sui generis understanding of the imagination in reaction to the reductionist assault. The crux of this project involves objecting to one of Langland-Hassan’s arguments against recreativism: Episodic memories (and, I add, simulations more generally) comprise a kind of occurrent belief involving mental imagery; recreativists view imagery as kind of sui generis, offline attitude; and so, recreativism implies the unsavoury idea that certain occurrent beliefs are also imaginings. One way of understanding the pull of this argument is to see it as revealing a strange consequence of recreativism: some mental states are imaginative in one sense and non-imaginative in another. From here, it is urged that the reductionist taxonomy of the imagination is preferable because it separates imagination as imagery and imagination as a kind of attitude into two merely overlapping classes. In response to this line of reasoning, I argue that recreativism can be saved by rethinking its central claims. They are the following:
(i) A given psychological attitude type φ is imaginative just in case it is the functional counterpart of some non-imaginative attitude type ψ.
(ii) φ is a functional counterpart of ψ just in case its functional profile reproduces that of ψ in an offline fashion, that is, without ψ’s typical outputs and inputs.
This version of recreativism was originally formulated with basic mental attitudes in view, namely, beliefs, desires, sensory experiences, etc. By contrast, episodic memory is a complex mental attitude that incorporates multi-modal sensory imagery, affective states, beliefs, and perhaps even other basic attitudes such as desires and intentions. Therefore, answering the reductionist challenge requires adapting it to explain episodic simulation. My proposal for doing so is to change (i) so that the counterpart relation holds not between attitude types, but between the component processes that combine to generate them. On this view, imagination constitutes a unified capacity, since the counterpart relation applies to underlying cognitive processes rather than to the resulting mental states themselves. In other words, this version of recreativism postulates one imaginative attitude-type, that can marshall different sub-processes depending on its aim. I will make sense of this by discussing how to best interpret claim (ii) in light of my revision of (i). After having sketched my proposal, I show that it is attractive because it builds a bridge between philosophy of imagination and cognitive neuroscience. Relatedly, it can serve as the basis of a promising treatment of the (dis)continuism debate in the philosophy of memory, namely the debate about the continuity between episodic memory of the past and episodic imagination of the future (e.g. Michaelian 2016; Perrin 2016). Specifically, this revised version of recreativism offers a precise and empirically tractable account of imagination, thereby addressing a key gap in the debate.
Currie, G., & Ravenscroft, I. (2002). Recreative minds: Imagination in philosophy and psychology. OUP Oxford.
Langland-Hassan, P. (2020). Explaining imagination (p. 336). Oxford University Press.
Perrin, D. (2016). Asymmetries in subjective time. In K. Michaelian, S. B. Klein, & J. Sutton (Eds.) Seeing the Future: Theoretical Perspectives on Future-Oriented Mental Time Travel (pp. 39-61). Oxford University Press.
Michaelian, K. (2016). Against discontinuism: Mental time travel and our knowledge of past and future events. In K. Michaelian, S. B. Klein, & J. Sutton (Eds.) Seeing the Future: Theoretical Perspectives on Future-Oriented Mental Time Travel (pp. 62-92). Oxford University Press.