On the Nature and Normativity of Imagination

Abstract

As a child, I often imagined that I was a space astronaut. Today I imagined what I could have for lunch and what I could wear for a concert. Pilots imagine performing water landings in an emergency. We might imagine full grown trees, while planting tree seeds. We use imagination to plan daily activities, prepare for important events, evaluate past choices and actions, predict other people’s mental states, and many more cognitive tasks. We imagine trees, while planting tree seeds, because we want to plant in a way that will leave enough space between the trees. We imagine what we could wear for a concert on our way home from work so that we know whether to do laundry first. The topic of this dissertation is the nature and normativity of imagination. While imagination plays a plethora of cognitive roles in reasoning, its nature and function is not very well understood. Moreover, it has received far less systematic attention from philosophers of mind than other mental states, such as beliefs, desires or perceptions. The dissertation aims to diminish this research gap. It has two parts, each of which contain two chapters. Part I focuses on the normativity of imagination, while Part II concerns the contents and phenomenology of imagination. It is a popular assumption in philosophy that imagination puts us in touch with the possible. The epistemic thesis that imagination is a guide to possibility has received a fair amount of attention in recent years. The normative thesis that imagination aims at the possible, like belief aims at truth, has only been discussed in passing. In Chapter 1 I give in-depth arguments against the normative thesis. Yet imaginings can only play cognitive roles, if they are normatively constrained in some way. In chapter 2 I present my own account of the normativity of imagination. On this view, imagination is not subject to intrinsic attitude-specific norms, but hypothetical norms, such as norms on intentions, and norms of instrumental rationality. I further argue that imagination shares semantic and normative properties with scientific models. Various prominent definitions of the nature of imagination appeal to perception. In Chapter 3 I critically evaluate the appeal to perception in defining the nature of imagination. I argue that common definitions of imagination cannot do justice to the nature of the contents and phenomenology of imagination, as the analogy to perception is taken too far. In the final chapter 4 I bring together the findings of the previous chapters and apply them to the case of imagining perceptual experiences. Here I argue that imagining perceptual experiences requires conceptual stipulations. This is designed to further illustrate and corroborate the views advanced. This dissertation highlights the uniqueness of imagination in many ways: Unlike beliefs, desires and perceptions, imagination is not subject to attitude-specific normativity (chapters 1 and 2). Imagination is akin to scientific model construction (chapter 2). Imagination is not always phenomenally similar to sense perception in important ways (chapter 3). Moreover, imagination contents involve conceptual stipulations, which further distinguishes them from perceptual states (chapters 3 and 4). Show more