Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology
(GREGORY CURRIE, IAN RAVENSCROFT)
Reviewed by Peter Carruthers
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Source: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=1309
Now, as it happens, Currie and Ravenscroft explicitly and openly concede that some of our central mentalizing concepts — especially the concept false belief— can’t plausibly be thought to emerge in development through processes of simulation. And in their descriptions of how simulation actually operates, they take mental-state concepts as a given. But they say nothing about the nature of such concepts, nor about where they and their core inferential liaisons are supposed to come from. So if the only viable alternative to simulationism is some form of theory-theory, this looks like it gives the main victory in the current debate to the latter, after all.
Let me move on to another line of criticism. At various points in the book, the authors commit themselves to the existence of desire-like as well as belief-like imaginings. Just as there are states that are belief-like, but which aren’t beliefs (such as the state of supposing that the banana is a telephone), so (the authors claim) there are states that are desire-like, but which aren’t desires. These would be states that stand to the state of wanting to call grandma on the telephone, in something like the way that the state of supposing that the banana is a telephone stands to the state of believing that the banana is a telephone — they wouldn’t actually be desires (e.g. a desire to call grandma), but they would have causal roles significantly like those of desires. Notice that the claim here isn’t that we can, in imagination, suppose ourselves to want to call grandma on the telephone. For this would be a belief-like supposition which happens to have, as part of its content, that I possess a particular sort of desire. This isn’t what is in question. Rather, the idea is that we can engage in a kind of supposing that is relevantly desire-like with the content that I call grandma on the telephone.
The main difficulty for this sort of view is that we cannot, in our imaginings, adopt contrary-to-desire suppositional desire-like states at will, in the way that we can adopt contrary-to-belief suppositional belief-like states at will. It is easy for us to adopt alien beliefs while imagining. (Consider how easy it is for us to become immersed in a work of science fiction, in which people can totally transform their bodily size and shape as they wish — e.g. turning into an insect — or can have the strength to move a planet, or can travel faster than the speed of light.) But it is by no means equally easy for us to adopt alien desires and values in imagination. It is hard for us to identify with a character in a novel whose main desire is to kill and cook little children. And novelists will have to devote considerable effort and skill if they are to induce us to take a story seriously that requires the adoption of an alien moral system as one of its central background assumptions. Currie and Ravenscroft acknowledge these points, but make no real attempt to explain them.
Now, as is quite familiar, imagination can certainly evoke real emotions — imagined insults can make you angry; imagined danger can make you afraid; the death of a character in a novel or film can make you sad; and so forth. So why shouldn’t we also accept that imagination can evoke real desires? And indeed, imagined delicacies can make you hungry (wanting food), as imagined sex can make you sexy (wanting sexual relief). Our account can then be that suppositions (belief-like imaginings) aren’t just taken as input by a suite of inferential mechanisms that would otherwise be employed in generating new beliefs from old, or in practical reasoning, as Currie and Ravenscroft claim, but that they are also taken as input by a variety of desire-generating and emotion-creating mechanisms. Hence we can claim that the desire-like states that occur in imagination are actually real desires, produced by the normal operations of such mechanisms in response to suppositional input. And this is the only way in which such states can be generated — passively, in response to belief-like and perception-like imaginings.
But how can they be real desires if they don’t lead to real actions? (Although frightened by the film, I don’t run out from the theatre; and although saddened by a character’s death, I don’t go into mourning.) The answer to this is easy. It is that real desires will only lead to real actions when interacting with real beliefs. We are allowing that suppositions and belief-like imaginings aren’t real beliefs. They differ from real beliefs in crucial aspects of their functional roles. For example, the deduced consequences of suppositions are themselves merely suppositions, and aren’t stored in memory and reactivated in the manner of beliefs; and practical reasonings that may take place within the scope of belief-like imaginings don’t normally give rise to actions, nor directly to intentions to act. So it is easy to allow that the desire-like states that occur during episodes of imagining are genuine desires, while explaining why they don’t have all of the usual functional consequences of desires. This is because those desires aren’t, during the episode of imagining, interacting with real beliefs. (Notice, however, that once you finish fantasizing about the meal that you propose to order during your next visit to Paris — in the course of which you haven’t really tried to call a waiter, of course — the real hunger that you have generated may send you heading to the kitchen for a snack.)
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