The possibility norm

Identifying a functional role and place in the cognitive architecture is not the only way to answer the question “What is the imagination?” Trivially, this is true, as functionalism is relatively new, and philosophers have been offering definitions of the imagination for centuries. However, it’s also non-trivially true – answers that don’t appeal to cognitive architecture can reveal truths about the imagination that are just as important as its functional role. One non-functional way of defining the imagination is to define it normatively.

One way of doing this is to simply differentiate it from belief by denying that imagination aims at truth the way belief does. This is an important difference between belief and imagination that I will discuss further in the next section. However, as a view of the imagination, this only tells us something negative; we’re looking for something a bit more robust. Rather than differentiating imagination from belief by denying it aims at truth – or in another way of speaking, that it has as its intentional objects actual states of affairs – we can make explicit what imagination does aim at: possibilities.

That the imagination is closely linked with what’s possible is taken for granted in our everyday talk. Often such talk is primarily concerned with our own future possibilities, as seen in clichés about being limited only by our imaginations, or in the quotation – often wrongly attributed to Walt Disney – that “if you can dream it, you can do it.” But this idea also holds in a more general way. We come up with all sorts of imaginary scenarios and insist that, because we have imagined them, that they could be the case. Crop circles could be made by aliens. The Brewers could win the World Series. It’s possible. Unlike a

statement such as “crop circles are made by aliens,” these statements of possibility require no more evidence to be uttered with certainty beyond being imaginable.

In cognitivist views of the imagination, that possibilities are involved somehow is usually acknowledged or taken for granted without playing a central role in theorizing. For instance, in “A Cognitive Theory of Pretense,” Nichols and Stich originally called their imagination box the ‘Possible World Box,’ though made sure to note that their notion of a ‘possible world’ for imagination is broader than usual to include representations – such as

There is a greatest prime number – that are impossible, because such things are

imaginable.140 _{Currie and Ravenscroft, on the first page of Recreative Minds, name} imagination as the attitude that we have toward possibilities, along with goals and the thoughts of others.141 Paul L. Harris frequently equates the imagination with a capacity to conceive of alternatives to reality and pretend play as “an initial exploration of possible worlds.”142 _{Even Scruton notes that to “exploit the amusing possibilities” is, at least some} of the time, a feature of imagination in the creation of narratives.143

One case in which possibilities take center stage in a cognitivist view is in Perner’s multiple models account. Perner makes the case for the existence of what he calls ‘hypothetical situations,’ which he equates with possible situations.144 _{He distinguishes} between epistemic or informational representations that represent the actual world with both conative and pretend representations that represent possibilities. He uses an analogy with a sandbox in a military headquarters that represents the battlefield. The sandbox – containing sticks for soldiers, blocks for tanks, and so forth – is at first set up to be an accurate representation of the actual battlefield. This is an informational model; its analogue in the mind would be a belief model. In order to plan their moves, the generals start to move the pieces about in the sandbox. It no longer represents the actual battlefield, but it still represents something, some non-actual situation. Sometimes that situation is conative – it’s what the generals desire to be the case. Other times it’s pretend – it’s simply what could be the case without being hoped for.

140 _{Nichols and Stich, “A Cognitive Theory of Pretense,” 122.} 141 _{Currie and Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds, 7.}

142 _{Paul L. Harris, The Work of the Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 28.} 143 _{Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination (London: Methuen & Co., 1974), 99.} 144 _{Perner, Understanding the Representational Mind, 28.}

Perner does not make much of the relationship of hypothetical situations to possible states of affairs, nor does he dwell on what notion of possibility this is meant to be. He simply says that imaginary representations are “representations of how the world might be” rather than representations of how the world is.145 However, the basic point is there – ‘pretend’ or

imaginary models represent possible situations.

The connection between imagination and possibility, while not always overtly considered in theories of the imagination, has received significant attention in epistemology,

specifically regarding justification and modal arguments. I mentioned earlier that we, the ‘folk,’ take our ability to imagine something to mean that it’s possible. However, this is not just a quirk of everyday talk or unreflective or non-philosophical intuition. Taking a

situation or proposition’s imaginability as evidence of its possibility has a long history in the philosophical canon, perhaps most famously by René Descartes in his argument for mind/body dualism in his Meditations on First Philosophy. About a century later, Hume wrote that “[t]’is an establish’d maxim in metaphysics, That whatever the mind clearly

conceives includes the idea of possible existence, or in other words, that nothing we imagine is absolutely impossible.”146

It’s a project of epistemology to discover whether the inference from imaginability to possibility is justified, and the arguments for many positions in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind depend on this justification. Alarmingly for the devotee of Hume’s conceivability principle, it’s been observed that the inference from

imaginability to possibility fails in some cases, for example when we imagine that

posteriori necessary truths are false. Water is H₂O, but we can imagine that water is not H₂O but has some other chemical composition such as Hilary Putnam’s Twin Earth ‘water,’ XYZ.147 _{However, it’s not possible that water is not H₂O, no matter how}

imaginable (or conceivable) it is. So, we can imagine things that aren’t possible. Thus, the

145_{Ibid., 59.}

146 _{David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, eds. Sir Lewis Amherst Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford:} Oxford University Press, 1978), 32.

very strong reading of Hume’s conceivability principle – that nothing we can imagine is impossible – is false.

There have been several influential and nuanced defenses and reformulations of the conceivability principle, as well as many spirited objections. However, to delve too deeply into them would take us too far into the mind/body problem. Instead, I’d like to focus on just one influential view on conceivability and possibility, one that contains the kernels of my own view of imagination’s relation to possibility – Stephen Yablo’s view in “Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?”

For our purposes, I will put aside the focus of Yablo’s article – namely, the justification and fallibility of conceivability for modal conclusions. Instead, I want to zero in on what Yablo has to say about what it means to conceive, or which notion of conceiving gives us

prima facie justified beliefs about what is possible. It turns out that, according to Yablo,

the kind of conceiving that has the relevant link to possibilities is a kind of imagining. He says that “conceiving that p is a way of imagining that p; it is imagining that p by

imagining a world of which p is held to be a true description.”148

It’s important that the ‘worlds’ that we imagine do not map one-to-one onto possible worlds. Possible worlds are fully determinate, but our imaginings surely aren’t. Yablo, however, says that while our imaginings are not fully determinate in the way possible worlds are, neither are the objects of our imaginings (whether they be objects or situations)

indeterminate. He uses the example of imagining a tiger. We imagine the tiger as having

some determinate pattern of stripes, but not any particular determinate pattern. We imagine a determinate tiger, in the sense that its having the higher-order property of being

determinate is part of our imagining, while the specifics of all its determinants are left open.149 This is important when thinking about what the intentional objects of an act of imagining are. That our imaginary tiger is imagined as determinate – as some particular tiger – accounts for how, in one sense, we are imagining about just the one tiger. However,

148 _{Stephen Yablo, “Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53,} no. 1 (March 1993): 29.

because it is indeterminately imagined – its determinants are left unspecified – infinitely many possible tigers can serve as the subject of the true description. This will be important when we come back to the metaphysics of fictional objects in Chapter 4.

Of even more relevance is what Yablo notes about conceiving (of the correct imagining type) earlier in the article. He says that genuine conceiving “involves the appearance of possibility.”150 _{He partially analyzes this appearance in terms of the ‘truth conditions’ of} the state of conceiving and via an analogy with perception. If the truth condition of a perception of p is that p, then the truth condition of conceiving of p is that possibly p. An act of conceiving that satisfied this truth condition would be veridical on Yablo’s usage. However, he clearly allows for non-veridical acts of conceiving, in which it turns out that

not possibly p.

Though I find the language of ‘truth conditions’ and ‘veridicality’ somewhat awkward for acts of imagining, I think this is equivalent to saying that it’s a norm of imaginings that they represent possibilities. Intentional states such as beliefs and perceptions have a well- recognized veridical norm, in the sense that good cases of perception or belief will

coincide with actuality.151 A perception that a tree stump is a bear is a defective perception. In the case of imaginings, the norm is that they represent possibilities. However, that does not rule out the possibility that we can and do imagine impossibilities. It is not a necessary condition for individual imaginings that they represent possibilities. It is, I think, a

necessary condition for the faculty of imagination that it normatively represents possibilities. This norm partly constitutes what it is to be the imagination, just as a veridical norm partly constitutes what it is to be a belief.

There’s additional motivation for the view that representing possibilities is normative for the imagination if we consider its functions. Imagination surely has many functions of various types – developmental, cognitive, moral, social, aesthetic, and so forth – but I will focus on more basic or fundamental functions of imagination. I will define a fundamental

150 _{Ibid., 5.}

151 _{‘Good’ used here in the sense of good qua perception or good qua belief. Perhaps a non-veridical} perception could turn out to be good for something, but it’s not a good perception.

function as a function that exists independently of complex social practices. These are

functions of the imagination that we neither have to learn by instruction nor ones that are embedded in such social practices. I hesitate to use the word ‘innate’ due to its heavy metaphysical implications, but it helps to make the point. Fiction, music, science, philosophy, therapy and engineering all make use of imagination. These are not

fundamental functions. A feature of fundamental functions is, I will argue, that they bear directly on our navigation of and survival in the actual world.

I should clear up some conflation that I just indulged in between functions and uses. Imagination is used in the practice of fiction, but an individual fictional use of imagination can also function to teach us something about the actual world or to help us empathize with another’s situation. Individual fictions and what they ask us to imagine often come with such lessons attached. However, that is not the primary function of imagination in the practice of fiction, a position I will clarify and argue for in the next chapter. For now, it is enough to note that those functions of imagination exist independently of the practice of fiction. Gaining general knowledge and empathizing are each what I consider to be

fundamental functions. Decision-making is another key fundamental function that’s worth looking at in more detail.

In a case of decision-making, the imagination can give us conditional beliefs about the

actual world, beliefs that are the basis of our decision to act in this way or the other. Take

for example a decision between two alternatives: to cross a river by swimming or to cross by walking along a log that traverses the river. To make this decision, we create two imaginative models, or two ‘hypothetical situations’ to use Perner’s terminology. One has the initial premise “I swim across the river” and the other “I walk across the log.” These premises would be of no use unless the models were filled in with contents of the belief model. Thus, belief contents such as “I am a strong swimmer” and “The current is weak” will be central contributors to the inferential elaboration of the model that starts with the premise “I swim across the river.” Similarly, for the model that begins with “I walk along the log,” filled-in belief contents such as “My balance is poor” and “The log is narrow” will determine how the model is elaborated.

I mentioned in previous sections that a significant difference in the cognitive architecture of beliefs and imaginings is that imagination lacks the direct cognitive link with decision- making mechanisms that belief has. We do not eat the mud pie based on our imaginary representation that it’s chocolate pie, even if we have the desire to eat chocolate pie. But imagination does have an indirect link with decision-making: the elaboration of

imaginative models can give us conditional beliefs about the actual world, of the form “If the primary premise(s) were true, such-and-such would result.” In this example, we build our models and come to two conditional beliefs: “If I try to swim across, I will make it with little difficulty,” and “If I try to walk along the log, I will fall and hurt myself on the rocks.” These two beliefs, with the desire to cross the river, result in a decision to swim. In order to adequately fulfil its fundamental functions, imagination must represent

possibilities. If the states of affairs represented in the imaginative model – that is, any part of the hypothetical situation represented – were not constrained by what’s possible, then the resulting conditional belief about the actual world that forms the basis of a decision to act would be unreliable. Fundamental functions rely on the imagination building models of what could obtain in the actual world.

There will, however, be errors. Consistency is imperfectly kept by the UpDater and inferential mechanisms, we often lack knowledge to fill out our models, and sometimes impossible things will be imagined. Though the knowledge we gain from imagination is defeasible, it’s critical to basic activities like decision-making, mind reading, and planning. These capacities are, in turn, critical for increasingly complex activities. Fiction is one such activity, but the details of that practice are the topic of the next chapter.