Knowledge Through Imagination

r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 37, No. 2, April 2006 0026-1068

INTRODUCTION: KNOWLEDGE THROUGH IMAGINATION RENE´ VAN WOUDENBERG

Abstract: This introduction presents an overview of the articles in this special issue, within the framework of an argument for the conclusion that there are various roads leading from imagination to knowledge. Keywords: imagination, knowledge.

It is obvious and uncontroversial that when one imagines all people living in peace, one hasn’t thereby manipulated oneself into the state of knowing that all people live in peace. Imagining something to be the case is a state that differs from knowing it to be the case. Of course, it may happen that what one imagines to be the case actually is the case. You may imagine that Lizzy loves you, and it may be true that she does, but your imagining so doesn’t turn you into a knower of that fact. One way to spell out the difference between imagining and knowing is to say that whereas the latter involves assent, or endorsement, or judgment, the former does not. A related but different way to spell out the difference is to say that whereas knowing implies truth, imagining does not. So, knowing and imagining are distinct states. And one might therefore be inclined to think that they have roles in distinct realms of human life. The role of knowledge is in science, or, more broadly, in inquiry, while the role of imagination is in the artistic enterprise. This inclination should be resisted, however. The purpose of this introduction is to present and make plausible the idea that there are various roads that lead from imagination to knowledge. In order to do so, however, we need a somewhat firmer grip on what ‘‘imagination’’ and ‘‘imagining’’ are supposed to be. As is the case with thought in general, the imagination can be applied both to objects and to propositions. I can think about the Swiss mountains, but I can also think that the Swiss mountains have less snow nowadays than they used to have. The first thought is about an object, the second about a proposition. Likewise, I can imagine a talking donkey but I can also imagine that if I owned a talking donkey, I would

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take good care of it. In the first case the imagination is applied to an object, in the second to a proposition. A next thing to note is that the imagination always seems to concern what is either absent (at the time and place of the imagining) or what is inactual. If you are standing right in front of Rembrandt’s Nightwatch and looking at it, you cannot, at that time and location, imagine that painting. You cannot imagine what is present to you. But you can imagine Rembrandt working on this painting in his studio, for that event is not present to youFalthough it was present to various of Rembrandt’s friends. But there are also cases where what is imagined was never present to anybody, cases where what is imagined never was actualFfor example, when it concerns something that (as yet) does not exist but might come into existence at a later time. In Leibniz’s day many had thoughts of this sort about mechanical devices for making arithmetical calculations, and at later times others had similar thoughts about spaceships that go to the moon. These cases are related to imagining counterfactual situations, that is, situations that neither were nor are the case but could have been the case. I can imagine a situation in which I climbed the Matterhorn (and was caught by a blizzard) and didn’t go to that club (and accordingly, never met Lizzy). Imagination concerns what is either absent (at the time and place of imagining) or inactual. A further point about the imagination is that it involves mental images, often of a particularly vivid kind. It seems impossible to imagine a talking donkey without having before one’s mental eye images of a particular sort of animal, producing particular sorts of sounds. Likewise, it seems impossible to imagine that you are moving to London without having various mental images. We may ask whether ‘‘to imagine something’’ refers to something we do, to an action we perform, or to something that, without our willing it, just happens to us. It has sometimes been held that imaginings are unwilled and passive. And some cases of imagining do seem to be such that they happen to us without our doing the imagining. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the reading of novels: here our imagination is activated by a text, not by ourselves. But surely not all cases are like that. Often imagining is doing something, an activity. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the writing of a novel, but other examples abound: making vacation plans, considering how to surprise one’s friend, deciding what to doFin all of these cases imagining is involved as something we do. Iris Murdoch once described this activity as ‘‘a type of reflection on people, events, etc., which builds detail, adds colour, conjures up possibilities in ways which go beyond what could be said to be strictly factual’’ (Murdoch 1997, 198). All these points indicate that the imagination is a faculty of the human mind. It can be activated either by ourselves (in which case ‘‘to imagine something’’ is an activity) or by something external to ourselves (in which r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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case ‘‘to imagine something’’ is something that happens to us). We imagine either objects or propositions (about situations or states of affairs). What is imagined is either absent (from the location and time where the imagining takes place) or inactual. Activation of the imagination always involves mental imagery. However sketchy these remarks are, they must suffice for the purposes of this introduction. I shall now turn to the idea that there are various roads that lead from imagination to knowledge. That is to say, I shall make plausible the idea that application of the faculty of imagination plays a role in the cognitive enterprise. Within the framework of this argument I shall offer an overview of the ensuing articles. Let me begin by bringing to mind the fact that in the interest of gaining knowledge, or a well-grounded opinion, with respect to a great diversity of topics, many philosophers have conducted thought experiments, that is, experiments that don’t require one to leave one’s armchair. And that isn’t required because all one needs to perform them is one’s imagination. Here are some examples:  Does truth depend on human beings for its existence? Well, says Alvin Plantinga, imagine that, through whatever cause, there suddenly aren’t any human beings anymore. Would that mean that all truths have gone as well? No, says Plantinga, for if all humans vanish it would be true that there are no human beings. And if that is true, then there is a truth that for its existence does not depend upon human beings (Plantinga 1993, 117–18).  Is knowledge to be analyzed as justified true belief? Well, says Edmund Gettier, imagine someone S who believes that (p or q), and suppose that (p or q) is true. Suppose furthermore that S has lots of justification for p, which happens to be false, and no justification for q, which happens to be true. Then S has justified true belief that (p or q). But no knowledge. Hence, knowledge isn’t justified true belief (Gettier 1963).  Do computers think? Well, says John Searle, imagine you are a nonChinese speaker, locked in a room with Chinese symbols in boxes, and suppose you are given an instruction book in English for matching Chinese symbols with other Chinese symbols. Using the instruction book, you respond to the symbols that are coming to you through a window, by ordering the Chinese symbols that you take from the boxes. All the while you have no idea what ‘‘content’’ is transpiring. But people outside your room who have no inkling about what is going on inside will think that a competent user of the Chinese language is responding to messagesFfor the instruction book is so well made that by your matching the symbols in accordance with its instructions, the ousiders will think you have answered questions, solved riddles, and engaged in meaningful r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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conversation. What is going on inside the Chinese room is comparable to what is going on inside a computer. But what is going on inside the Chinese room is not thinking, for you have no idea what ‘‘content’’ is transpiring. Hence, computers don’t think (Searle 1980).  Does someone who knows all physical facts know all that is to be known? Well, says Frank Jackson, imagine someone, Mary, who is locked inside a black-and-white room and is taught physics by means of black-and-white books and black-and-white television screens. Suppose furthermore that the physics course is completed, and that after arduous study Mary has acquired complete knowledge of the completed physics course. Would she then know colours? Would she know, for example, what red and green look like? The right answers, Jackson maintained for a long time, seems to be no. Hence, someone who knows all physical facts doesn’t know all there is to be known (Jackson 1986).1  Do we value conscious life as objectively good for us? Well, says Richard Swinburne, suppose that throughout one’s life one has a machine available by pressing a button through which one can become unconscious for, say, an hour, during which one behaves as though one were conscious (and after becoming conscious again one knows what has happened in the interval). So pressing the button will shorten one’s conscious life. How many of us would press the button for long, in the face of adversity? ‘‘Not many would press the button very often,’’ Swinburne suggests, which reveals, he concludes, ‘‘that most of us value simply existing as conscious beings, whatever (within limits) life throws at us’’ (1998, 240).2 These thought experiments, as I have indicated, have been conducted in the interest of finding answers to specific questions. And if we suppose for a moment that to know is to know the answer, these imaginative proceedings will result in knowledgeFassuming the answers are correct.3 The questions philosophers have sought to answer by means of thought experiments are of a very special nature. They are questions that could not be answered by empirical inquiry.4 For what empirical 1 Recently Jackson reported that he no longer thinks this thought experiment is compelling. See Jackson 2003. 2 There are many more questions that could be added to the list, such as: (i) Molyneux’ problem of whether a man who was born blind but later acquired the power of vision would be able to identify through sight the cube that he formely knew by his power of touch; (ii) Condillac’s question about the senses with which a statue would have to be endowed in order to attain the conception of things distinct from itself. 3 This idea is forcefully put forth in Hintikka 1989 and Schaffer forthcoming. 4 This is certainly true of the first four thought experiments on the list. With respect to the fifth one, one might be hesitant. In order to figure out whether Swinburne’s thought experiment addresses a question that cannot be answered by empirical inquiry, we need to be

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investigation could answer the question as to whether truth depends for its existence on human beings? Which empirical tests could tell us whether knowledge is justified true belief, or whether computers think, or whether someone who knows all physical facts knows all there is to be known? Empirical investigation is lame on this score. So if we think answers are available, they have to be unearthed by other means. And so the imagination, performing non-empirical thought experiments, comes into view. Saying that the questions these philosophers have hoped to answer are such that they could not be answered by means of empirical inquiry, however, is only a negative characterization of them. Is it possible to describe them in a more positive and informative way? James Van Cleve, in his contribution to this collection, addresses this very issue. He considers various thought experiments that philosophers have conducted about beings with limited sensory capacities, including those of Thomas Reid and P. F. Strawson in relation to the following questions:  Would a blind man be able to collect the notion of extension from his tactile sensations alone?  Would a purely auditory being who has no proper conception of space be able to form the notion of objective particulars, that is, of things that exist when not perceived? Van Cleve argues that these questions are not best construed as modal questions, that is, questions about what it is possible for such beings to do, or what is necessary for them to do under certain conditions. They are best construed as normative questions in a broad sense, that is, questions about the conceptions these beings could reasonably form, given their limited sensory intake. With regard to Reid’s question, Van Cleve says that the moral of the thought experiment is that there would be nothing irrational about a man who was given tactile sensations and employed his reason about them without being led to form the conception of extension. He would not be like a person who fails to see the validity of an obvious inference. In short, says Van Cleve, the man would not be a person who clear about what the question he means to address is. Is it (a) How would individuals respond to the question whether, and if so how often, they would use the machine as described? or is it (b) Would individuals use the machine, and if so how often? It seems clear that (a) can be answered by means of empirical inquiryFfor instance, by taking polls; answering it through a thought experiment is just an insecure replacement for that. Swinburne’s question, however, appears to be (b), which cannot be answered by empirical inquiry. And so his thought experiment fits the general description given in the text. What the discussion in this footnote brings to light, however, is that thought experiments can be used as a short cut or (feeble) replacement for empirical inquiry. The questions, however, that philosophers typically address, and seek to answer through thought experiments, are not empirical questions, and hence their thought experiments are not short cuts or replacements. r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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fails to do something that (given the materials at his disposal) he ought (in some sense) to do. By means of thought experiments, then, the imagination is used to answer questions that are normative in a broad sense. But answers to questions of other types have also been sought with the aid of imagination. A very important class here is the class of modal questions, questions about what is possible and what is necessary. When someone tries to find out whether something can be red and green all over at the same time, she isn’t going to start an empirical survey of red objects, with the aim of seeing whether any one of them is also green all over. Empirical inquiry isn’t the way to find out. Instead, she will engage her imagination and try to depict to herself a scenario in which an object is red and green all over at the same time. If she can depict such a scenario to herself, she concludes its possibility. And if she can’t, she concludes its impossibility. In my contribution to this collection, I consider Hume’s maxim What is conceivable (or imaginable) is possible, as well as the principle What is inconceivable is impossible. I argue there that whereas the latter principle is spurious, Hume’s maxim can be defended against various old and recent criticisms by Thomas Reid and by Tamar Szabo´ Gendler and John Hawthorne. The value of the maxim, I maintain, is not that it helps us, for every question about what is possible, to make up our minds. Still, it is a helpful guide in a number of casesFnamely, all those cases where we can imagine or conceive of certain things. And where we can’t, the maxim simply gives no guidance one way or the other. In those cases, epoche is advised. Imagination as considered thus far, then, plays a role in answering questions that concern non-empirical matters. And if we continue supposing that to know is to know the answer, we may say that in so far as thought experiments (as well as conceiving certain well-specified scenarios) provide for answers, the imagination provides for knowledgeFa priori knowledge. Even so, the cognitive role of the imagination is not confined to the a priori. The history of the empirical sciences has seen many scientists who embarked on non-empirical thought experiments. Famous are those employed by Galileo, regarding the rate of fall of bodies of different weights, and by Harvey, regarding the greater circulation of the blood. Thought experiments in the empirical sciences, however, play a variety of roles. At least, that is the central claim of Tim De Mey’s contribution. Referring to Galileo, De Mey argues, first, that thought experiments can play a role in choosing a theory and in that context have evidential significance. Second, such experiments play a role in singular causal explanations, that is, explanations that aim to state which of a number of factors or causes was most important in bringing about a certain event. Some even think that thought experients are indispensable in historyFfor example, when one wants to find out whether the Treaty of Versailles or Hitler’s personality was more r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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important in bringing about World War II. Finally, De Mey argues that thought experiments may play a role in scientific discovery. An example of this might be the quantitative argument that, according to his own report, led Harvey to his discovery of the greater circulation of the blood. I began this introduction by saying that it is obvious and uncontroversial that when one imagines all people living in peace, one hasn’t thereby manipulated oneself into the state of knowing or believing that all people live in peace. Imagining something to be the case is a state that differs from knowing or believing it to be the case. Now we might suppose that this difference leads to a further difference. Knowing or believing that p, we might think, will lead to behaviour that differs from the behaviour that merely imagining that p will lead to. Knowing or believing that that’s my apple will lead to behaviour that differs from my imagining it to be my apple. Or so we might think. The fact is, however, that reality is more complex. There are well-documented cases where someone’s imagining something to be the case leads to the same behaviour as someone’s knowing or believing it to be the case. A young boy who has been imagining that there is a bear in the closet will hesitate before opening the closet doorFwhich is exactly what he would do if he knew or believed that there is a bear in the closet. And someone who affixes a label reading ‘‘sodium cyanide’’ to a bottle that she has just filled with water (and hence imagines that the bottle contains sodium cyanide) will be reluctant to drink from itFwhich is exactly the sort of behaviour she would display if she believed that the bottle contains sodium cyanide. Tamar Szabo´ Gendler, who discusses these cases, calls them cases of ‘‘imaginative contagion.’’ In cases of imaginative contagion someone who explicitly believes that not-p is disposed to act in ways characteristic of p-believers (and non-characteristic of non-p-believers). Drawing on a number of psychological studies, Gendler discusses a variety of such cases and highlights important differences among them. Throughout she brings home the point that the imagination performs functions that are mostly undreamt of by philosophers. In a response to Gendler’s article, Martijn Blaauw takes up the issue of what relevance the phenomenon of imaginative contagion has for epistemology. He argues that it is relevant in that it points to beliefforming mechanisms that are generally neglected by epistemologists. One important aspect, or activity, of the imagination that ever since the age of Romanticism is supposed to be its beating pulse is its creativity. The heart of the imagination, says Jeanne Peijnenburg in her article, is the element of shaping, creating, calling into existence. In creative activity there is always work being done by the imagination that conceives of something that does not as yet exist but that is already conceived. Peijnenburg draws attention to a very specific role that the imagination can play in the shaping of one’s own life. Assuming that we shape our r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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lives through our actions, she argues that in a sense we can determine some actions after they have been performed, and in that sense shape our own past. Her claim is not that we can now perform actions that took place, say, a week, or a month, or a year ago, or that we can now undo things that we did in the past. That would hardly be a coherent idea. Her much more cautious claim is that we can determine the character of acts that we have already performed. One of her examples may help to make this idea clear. She imagines being a happily married mother of four small children. One day she goes to a party and the following morning finds herself in a hotel room next to a handsome man whom she does not recall having seen before. Thus, there is a past action. Still, she argues, there is latitude as to its character. For she can make it the case that through her future actions this adventure will become either a mere incident or the beginning of a long and secret affair. Her claim is not just that an act can be described in various ways but also that it has ontological implications. Through one’s future actions one can make it the case that a past event acquires a certain character that it didn’t have before. Although Peijnenburg doesn’t consider the matter, what she argues does seem to have epistemological implications as well. For if her argument is correct, there are past actions that are as yet without definitive character, and hence are such that their character cannot be known. And they can be known only after future (or, at any rate, later) actsFacts that are creative and hence imagination involving. For a very special class of acts, then, if Peijnenburg is right, without imagination there would be no knowledge of their character. In making her case for the claim that we can shape past events, Peijnenburg refers to the literature on retrocausality, thereby suggesting that shaping one’s life involves backward causation. Cornelis van Putten takes issue with this and argues that Peijnenburg’s thesis is independent of the possibility of retrocausality. He distinguishes between two notions of ‘‘the past,’’ one being physical constellations that occurred in the past, the other a subjective interpretation of previous events. He then goes on to claim that the kind of shaping that Peijnenburg has her eyes on concerns ‘‘the past’’ in the latter senseFand that the shaping involved is not retrocausally influencing past physical constellations but is retrocausally influencing the narrative construction of our own life stories. A final area in which the imagination, understood as involving creativity, has cognitive functions is the world of fiction. Fiction, as has often been said, springs from an author’s imagination. It is about characters that never existed, events that never took place, and locations that are nowhere to be found. Still, reading works of fiction can be very rewarding, emotionally as well as cognitively. By reading a work of fiction one may get to know what it is like to be a priest, or the daughter of a drunkard, or a member of a group of boys stranded on a desolate island. One may get to know this by ‘‘vicariously living through’’ a character’s r 2006 The Author Journal compilation r 2006 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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narrated history. Reading fiction may thus become a means for acquiring non-propositional knowledge. Fiction has sometimes been distrusted for not affording propositional knowledge. While it may be true (but if so, only in a sense)5 that reading fiction gives no propositional knowledge, there is no reason to think that everything deserving of the name knowledge needs to be propositional in nature. Frank Jackson’s thought experiment about Mary mentioned above brings home this point forcefully. And there is the further point that in an indirect way novels may contribute to propositional, even empirical, knowledge. For instance, nineteenth-century Dutch literature includes a number of novels about women with suicidal inclinations (such as those by Louis Couperus and Frederik van Eeden). It would be possible, on the basis of an analysis of these novels, to form a hypothesis about the causes of such inclinations that might later on be empirically confirmed. It might be that novelists have ‘‘seen’’ and described connections, influences, regularities that previously went unnoticed. In such cases, reading their works can be cognitively rewarding, although, of course, one cannot say in advance whether the narrated connections, influences, and regularities are real or fabricated. To find out, there is no alternative to empirical investigation.6 The link between imagination, fiction, and knowledge is perhaps nowhere more tangible than in the area of morality. It is agreed on all sides that genuine morality requires more than mere assenting to moral principles and other moral truths. It requires having certain attitudes, dispositions, and emotions. These latter items, however, seem to be such that they cannot be adequately dealt with in moral treatises. It is here that reading fiction may come to the rescue. Reading fiction may provide us with aspects of moral knowledge that moral treatises typically won’t. Over the past two decades or so, no one has more forcefully put forth the claim that fiction has, or at least can have, a moral impact on people than has Martha Nussbaum. ‘‘Certain novels,’’ she says, ‘‘are, irreplaceably, works of moral philosophy’’ (Nussbaum 1990, 148). Now, if certain novels can contribute to moral philosophy, and to the formation of morally responsible persons, one wonders whether biographical and autobiographical texts cannot do the same. In his contribution to this collection, Ole Martin Skillea˚s addresses exactly this issue. He works out a twofold agenda. First he criticizes certain of Nussbaum’s 5 ‘‘Only in a sense,’’ for by reading Graham Greene’s A Gun for Hire, one may get to know many propositional truthsFfor instance, that its opening sentence reads, ‘‘Murder didn’t mean much to Raven,’’ that the location of events is the British Midlands, that this novel is ‘‘typically Greene’’ in that the reader’s sympathy is drawn towards a bad guy, and that the good guy is less than a hero. These, however, are truths about the book, not about the world. And those suspicious of novels have been suspicious because novels don’t give us truths of the latter sort. Which remains to be seen, however. 6 For this idea see Livingston 1988.

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remarks that are based on Aristotle’s distinction between ‘‘history’’ and ‘‘literary art’’ and that seem to suggest that biographies and autobiographies cannot contribute to moral philosophy the way fiction can. Next he makes a positive case for the claim that reading works of (auto)biography can and do contribute to the reader’s phronesis, or practical wisdom. Although Marie¨tte Willemsen endorses Skillea˚s’s second claim, that (auto)biographies may enhance the reader’s practical wisdom, she challenges his interpretation of Nussbaum. Willemsen considers the various arguments that Skillea˚s puts forward to substantiate his claim that Nussbaum is hostile to the idea that (auto)biographies can contribute to moral philosophy, and she finds them wanting. In effect, she argues that Skillea˚s downplays the cognitive import that the imagination may have even in reading non-fiction texts. In sum, then, the imagination, perhaps surprisingly, plays an important role in the process of obtaining knowledge: knowledge of certain normative issues, of possibilities, of moral truths, of certain physical matters, of one’s self, and more.7 Department of Philosophy Vrije Universiteit De Boelelaan 1105 1081 HV Amsterdam The Netherlands [email protected] References Gettier, Edmund. 1963. ‘‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’’ Analysis 23:121–23. Hintikka, Jaakko. 1989. ‘‘Knowledge Representation and the Interrogative Model of Inquiry.’’ In Knowledge and Skepticism, edited by Marjory Clay and Keith Kehrer, 155–83. Boulder: Westview. Jackson, Frank. 1986. ‘‘What Mary Didn’t Know.’’ Journal of Philosophy 83:291–95. FFF. 2003. ‘‘Mind and Illusion.’’ In Minds and Persons, edited by Anthony O’Hear, 251–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 7 For comments on an earlier version of the introduction I thank Martijn Blaauw, Marie¨tte Willemsen, Arianna Betti, Lieven Decock, Willem de Jong, and Cornelis van Putten. Ancestors of a number of the articles in this collection were presented at the Knowledge and Imagination conference held at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, in June 2004. That conference was made possible by grants from the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). A special word of thanks is due to Kiki Berk, who was a tremendous help in organizing the conference.

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Livingston, Paisley. 1988. Literary Knowledge: Humanistic Inquiry and the Philosophy of Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Murdoch, Iris. 1997. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. London: Chatto and Windus. Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Plantinga, Alvin. 1993. Warrant and Proper Function. New York: Oxford University Press. Searle, John. 1980. ‘‘Minds, Brains, and Programs.’’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3:417–57. Schaffer, Jonathan. Forthcoming. ‘‘Contrastive Knowledge.’’ In Oxford Studies in Epistemology, edited by Tamar Szabo´ Gendler and John Hawthorne, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swinburne, Richard. 1998. Providence and the Problem of Evil. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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