Imagination

[gL.edu] This article gathers contributions by Hoang Long Le, developed within the context of the Conceptual clarification about "Information, Knowledge and Philosophy", under the supervisión of J.M. Díaz Nafría.

Summary

This paper covers the subject of imagination and related topics such as mental image with the two most relevant current views, which are supported by most philosophers: Pictorialism and Descriptionalism and the philosophical views of two well-known philosophers, Aristotle and Gilbert Ryle, who had dealt with the subject of the imagination.

Introduction

Imagination, a word that has an important role in the human life and its quest of self-optimisation and self-discovery. In general, the word imagination has many associations depending on the context, but the most commons points are: the association to the creativity and the ability to manifest a mental image like recalling a room or imagining possible outcomes of a certain situation. These two categorizations, which are the prime categorize for the general population, are a good example why imagination is important and has a purpose in life, but is it that simple to summarize and categorize it in just two categorize?

Definition

Per definition, the imagination is an ability or process to project a mental image, which also includes all the senses the person connects with the mental image. This ability/ process accompanies the human from birth until his demise and is crucial in his everyday life. For example, if the person reads the word apple, he images not only the object but also the taste, smell, feeling he connects with it. Another one would be to judge a certain situation and determine the action to reach a desired outcome by imagining possible actions and they re consequences. These mentioned examples can also be transferred to the process of perceiving pain. During this process, the imagination decides how the pains feels and how strong the pain is. All these can be influenced by the mood and the emotion the person has during the projection of any mental image and the emotion he already has connected with the mental image.

Purposes of the imagination

The imagination has many purposes in the human life and some were already mentioned in the sections before like the creative thinking and to determine the best possible outcome in certain situations. Other purpose of the imagination would be the act of the pretense, interpreting figurative language like metaphors, the ability to understand and empathize with foreign people and the engagement with the arts like movies or paintings.

Act of Pretense

Pretend is an action, where the user make something appears to be real, when actually its not. There are currently two theories that describe pretending. One is the behavior side, which says that the act of pretending can be performed as long as one acts to do it. The other side is the meta-representational which says that the act of pretending can only be performed if the mental state has a concept of it and the imagination carries out the concept. Recently, a theory has been created and mentioned in the book "Pretense, Imagination, and Belief: the Single Attitude Theory" by the philosopher Peter Langland-Hassan, which he states that the act of pretending can be determined and explained with the persons belief, intention and desires. He doesn't deny that pretending is a mental activity involving imagination, but also says that no concept of pretending is necessary to carry it out.

Connection with Art

Kendall Walton state in his book "Mimesis as Make-Believe", that the engagement with arts is similar to the children game of make believe. If someone engages with arts, the engaged person use the arts as an object in his own children game of make believe. As an object the art prescribed the imagination its scope of action and the content it should interpret and form. If done correctly, the engaged person thinks his image and it contents of the art was pre-determined.

Interpreting figurative language

It is wildly discussed, that the imagination and the created mental image is needed to interpret figurative languages like irony or the metaphor. Some philosophers like Herbert Clark and Richard Gerrig connect figurative language like the irony to the pretense, while the philosopher Kendall Walton treats the irony and the metaphor like objects in children game of make-believe. He further develop this by mentioning, that metaphors doesn't involve the actual image just the realization of the image.

Emphasize

Is an activity in which the user puts himself in the place of another person, tries to understand the person himself and his actions, anticipates possible actions and explores the reasons for them. This process is done by emulating the mental state of the person in the user's mind's eye.

Creativity

One of the first philosophers to connect imagination with creativity was Immanuel Kant, even if it was only in the realm of aesthetics. In his book Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant argues that the imagination, when used specifically for artistry, enables the user to go beyond their own limits. This thesis of Kant's was extended by later philosophers to encompass not only aesthetics but also other subject areas such as science, technology and everyday life.Imagination is particularly well related to creativity when two characteristics are considered, according to Berys Gaut and Dustin Stokes. The two points are the absence of the search for truth and the distancing from action. These two points makes the imagination a useful object of creativity.

Categories of Imagination

There are many Categories of imagination, that were discussed, proposed and established by certain philosophers during the times. For example the spontaneous and the deliberate(The nature of conscious and unconscious imagination), occurrent and non occurent(The nature of imagination, that occupied the attentions completely or not ) and the social and solitary imaginations(The imagination, which involved people or by himself) mentioned in the works of Kendall Walton in 1990. One of the most recent discussed categories were suggested by Amy Kind and Peter Kung in the book Knowledge Through Imagination. In this case, the categorisation was based on use. Thus, a distinction was made between the transcendent use of the imagination, which allows the user to look beyond the world and the instructive use of imagination, which allows the user to learn about the world as it is.

Two possible views of the Mental Image: Pictorialism vs. Descriptionalism

In the Section of the definition, the word mental image was mentioned and was established as an essential part of the imagination and that the mental image is a representation of an input the person experienced. Based on the input, the mental image can be categorized into special forms. Currently, there are two forms of the mental image favored, the pictorialism and the descriptionalism. The first one describes that the representation of the mental image is like a physical picture in a frame, the second one compares the mental image to a language, which is used to describe objects.

Pictorialism

Pictorialism as mentioned in the sections before describes the need of a physical object to create a mental image. It is one of the vastly supported form because of its intuitive application and its massive support from empirical experiments like identifying a pair of objects in different angles and determine the similarity of them. This form also comes with it downside, when a mental image is constructed without a physical object to origin from. To justify this form in these cases, the defender of the pictorialism suppose that the physical image is located in the brain, but it's currently unclear if there is a section in the brain capable of doing it.

Descriptionalism

Descriptonalism originated after many problems that occur with the concept of pictorialism a prime example for one problem would be the striped tiger problem. The striped tiger problem describes a scenario in which the person forms a mental image of a striped tiger and tries to answer the question of how many stripes a tiger has. This simple question seems impossible to answer, although the tigers and their pictures have a defined number of stripes. The reason for this is that the mental image does not contain the information of the number of stripes, making it impossible to answer it from the mental image alone. To solve this problem, which pictorialism couldn't solve, many philosophers advocated for the new alternative form the descriptonalism. Descriptionalism as mentioned in the sections before suggest, that the mental image is the same or equal representation form as the linguistic one. In other words, the mental images describe the object like the language does. This also includes forms of languages, that are not descriptive like the binary language from the computers, as long as the languages can represent a state of affair.

Philosophical Views

The Concept of the Imagination after Aristotle

The concept of the imagination has changed quite a lot over time and was started in ancient Greece in 350 BC. During this time the philosopher Aristotle described briefly the imagination in his book '"De Anima"', which means roughly translated '"On the soul"' as a process by which we say an image is presented to us"', which means: to create a mental image in front of the inner eye. Furthermore according to Aristotle's, the souls needs the imagination because for the thought a process of an mental image is necessary, which concludes, that the imagination is important for all forms of thinking like dreams and memories. The forms of thinking can be influenced by the perception, and can be a starting point for the imagination, which also influences it, but there are completely different and are not depend on each other. Aristotle distinguish this statement in these two points: Imagination can produce images without perception for example in dreams Not all living being have the ability of the imagination but have perception, which reinforce the statement, that there are not depended on each other. To summarize it all, for Aristotle the imagination is a process of creating an mental image of objects, which is used in cognitive process like thoughts, dreams and memories. Perception can be a stimulus for the one but are independent to each other.

The Concept of the Imagination after Gilbert Ryle

The philosopher Gilbert Ryle addressed the question of how the imagination makes mental images without having a physical input and whether the acts of visualizing, forming and imaging require physical inputs at all, since these acts are mental operations. Physical inputs include all inputs that the senses can perceive, this also includes mental images. Thus, he described the mental operations like a play:

"Much as stage-murders do not have victims and are not murders, so seeing things in one’s mind’s eye does not involve either the existence of things seen nor the occurrence of acts of seeing them":.

According to Gilbert Ryle, the brain should not be regarded as a place of collection for the input of mental images or as a collection of mental images.

To elaborate more on his statement, he addressed the question on how a person can see without realising that he actually does not see with the concept of pretending. The concept of pretending, according to him, does not need a second hidden action such as planning or visualising but consists of only one real action, namely the pretending itself. Thus, for example, the faking of a check, as long as no more actions are involved, requires no more than the action of signing.

Connection to other thematic areas

Desire: the paradox of fiction

People can feel emotions through fictions, knowing that they are only fictitious. For example, people can feel the emotion of anger and stress when a main character in a film murders his best friend or feel sadness when the main character stands in front of a grave in the rain. This phenomenon is called the Paradox of Fiction. Paradox of Fiction describes the unnatural state of feeling emotions for an action that does not take place in reality but in fiction. In order to feel emotions in a natural way, one needs the will and belief that something is real. For example, the emotion of hate or sadness can only be felt if the action in question is believed to be real. In order to explain the Paradox of Fiction, an attempt has been made to connect the imagination with other areas. Thus, the connection then arose with the desire and the concept of i-desire emerged, advocated by philosophers such as Dogget & Egan. According to the concept of i-desire, the fictional reactions are equal to those from reality. Reactions in reality arise from the interaction of belief and desire. So in fiction, the fictitious belief and the fictitious desire are taken. If this is applied to the above example of murder, the viewer believes that the main character is going to murder his best friend, but then demands that this is not true. This conflict between the belief and the desire finally creates the reaction to this event, which would have happened in reality. Analogously, an everyday example from reality can be taken. For example, a person can observe through a window how a presumed man approaches another man in a building. Through this event, the person who is observing this momentarily experiences stress. This stress arises from the conflict of belief and desire. Thus, the person on the street believes that the suspected man wants to harm the second man and at the same time desires that this is not true. Thus, emotions such as fear, panic or the like are evoked, as well as a desire to stop this event in the same way like the previous mentioned fictional event.

Conclusion

After all this, it can be said that the attitude and perception of imagination has changed and strengthened over time. Although it was denied presents or its importance in the times, the imagination has been established as one of the most important abilities/processes in the human life up to the present time. It is only through imagination that certain interactions or courses of action are possible, which have a great influence on the human beings.

Bibliography

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• Amy Kind; Imagery and Imagination, Retrieved December 28, 2022, from [3].
• Christopher Shields (October 12, 2020). Imagination. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved December 28, 2022, from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Julia Tanney (May 21, 2021). Ryle on Imagination. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved December 28, 2022, from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.