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26
I M A G I N AT I O N
AND
MAKE-BELIEVE
Gregory Currie
Imagination and make-believe, along with fantasy, pretence and play, make
regular appearances in theories of art and the aesthetic. Imagination is the
central idea; the others generally appear as forms of imaginative activity or
as its manifestations. In work on child development, ‘play’ and ‘pretence’
are often used as near-synonyms for ‘imagination,’ while recent theories of
inter-personal understanding appeal to a conception of imagination as
‘pretend-beliefs.’ I shall review some of these developments later. The special
importance of make-believe as a companion to imagination in recent aesthetic thinking reflects the influence of Kendall Walton’s work, and I shall
start with this.
Fiction and make-believe
Walton (1990) argues that fictions (among which he includes all forms of
pictorial representation) are to be understood as props in games of makebelieve. Games of make-believe, including those of children, are characterized
by the kinds of imaginings that they encourage, and generally include rules
that specify how what happens in reality determines what happens in the
game, and hence determines an appropriate imagining. In a game, pointing
a finger at someone and saying ‘bang’ may count as shooting them; when
that happens it is appropriate to imagine the person is shot. Having a copy
of Sense and Sensibility will enable me to engage in a game in which it is
make-believe that I am learning, from this text, about Marianne and Elinor
Dashwood and their problems.
In this system, imagination contrasts with belief. While the journalist,
historian or biographer presents a story that is a candidate for belief, the
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author of a fiction, however serious in other ways, does not present a story
that we should assess for truth.
One might agree with Walton that works of fiction are best understood in
terms of the opportunities for highly structured imaginings that they present,
and deny that the works in question are props. Novels have some un-proplike characteristics. First of all, I imagine, as part of a game, something
concerning the prop: that it is a sword, that it is dangerous. And I imagine
things about my relations to the prop: that I am holding the sword. It is not
obvious that my imaginative engagement with a novel generally requires
imaginings about the novel or my relations to it; my imaginings are about the
characters and their actions. Second, what is make-believe in a game is the
product of agent–prop interaction; it is make-believe that the sword is broken
because I do something that counts as breaking the sword. How is it with
novels and novel-readers? Finding out what is make-believe according to the
novel is not always easy; it can take some active engagement with the work.
But it does not follow from this that what is make-believe is determined
by the reader’s interaction with the text – that would be a significant and
disputable step towards relativism about interpretation. So we might agree
with Walton that fictional works are guides to imagining, and even agree that
the guided imaginative exploration of a narrative deserves to be called a game
of make-believe, without thinking of the narrative as a prop in the game.
Kinds of imagining
Walton does not undertake to explain the aesthetic in terms of makebelieve or imagination, but he does argue that an aesthetic encounter with
many art works (not all of them in the category of fictions as ordinarily
conceived) involves the imagination. Other accounts of the arts and of our
responses to them make some use of the notion of imagination: notable
contributions are those of Roger Scruton (1974) and Richard Wollheim
(1974). These and other authors have done much to clarify the very different
forms that imagination can take. Sometimes creativity is treated as a form
of imagination. But while creativity and imagination are related, it is best
to keep them distinct (Gaut 2003). As we shall immediately see, there are
enough kinds of imagination competing for our attention.
First there is the idea of a capacity that enables us to recognize and respond
to non-actual situations: to consider alternatives, to plan for contingencies.
This is related in complex ways to memory, dreaming, to the capacity to
make assumptions, to the capacity to use symbols and other sub-stitutes, and
representations of things. Second, there is the capacity to form mental images.
These are most usually thought of as visual, but are possible in other sensory
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modes; there is also motor imagery, or imagined movement of the body (there
are connections here also to memory and dreaming). Aristotle (1961) and
many later philosophers thought of imagery as involved in all or most thinking. Recent philosophy has insisted that much thinking is non-imagistic;
the sentence has largely taken over as the alleged vehicle of thought. Third,
there is the imagination as cognitive provocateur: a capacity, or perhaps an
infirmity, which results in our seeing things that are not there, overrating the
implausible, jumping to conclusions. In Hume, this is given the character of
immovable cognitive architecture: belief in the continued existence of bodies
is our attempt to reconcile what imagination suggests with what reason tells
us; but there is no thought that we could improve on this by reining the
imagination in and paying more attention to reason (1958: iv.2).
Kant goes further, in that he gives imagination a constitutive role in
perception itself (1933: 152), but without any implication that this is a
source of error; we are not, in his terms, mistaken or unjustified in thinking that objects continue. Yet Kant retains the idea that imagination has,
on occasions, to be restrained. He said of Newton’s atomism that it gives
too much freedom to the imagination “to supply by fiction the lack of
knowledge of nature” (1970: 92).
Returning to the idea of imagination as a response to the fictional, which
of these notions of imagination is in play when we say that a reader or
viewer of a fiction imagines in a way appropriate to the work? Note that
our three categories are not disjoint. Mental imagery is itself evidence of our
capacity to disengage from our present surroundings, as when we form the
image of an absent or invented scene. But while fiction depends upon the
capacity for disengagement, it is not obvious that it involves imagery in an
essential way. Reading a novel, it is important that I imagine that things are
as the novel says they are, but need this involve imagery? Certainly, the rich
visual and auditory stimulation provided by theatre and film make imagery
in those two modes redundant. It seems more promising to pursue the
thought that fictions require us to imagine occurrences or states of affairs:
things we might describe by means of a sentence. This takes us back to our
first kind of imagination: I can imagine that it is raining when it is not,
or that 2 + 2 = 5, which is not merely false but impossible, or that a pipesmoking detective called ‘Holmes’ lives in Baker Street, when I know that
there is no such person.
Imagination and mental simulation
This form of imagining – call it propositional imagining – is marked by some
important similarities to belief; these similarities have made propositional
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imagining the focus of recent work in the philosophy of mind and cognition. While imagining can take different kinds of objects, belief takes a propositional object only. While I can imagine rain, or being in the rain, I cannot
believe rain or being in the rain. But I can imagine, and believe, that it is
raining. Now this parallel is seized upon by Simulation Theory (ST) in order
to explain how we understand other minds: I try to imagine the things you
believe, and then see what, as part of that imaginative project, I am inclined
to decide; this is supposed to give me an insight into what you will do
(Gordon 1986, Heal 1986). Why would my imagining the things you believe
be any kind of guide to your decisions and actions? The idea is that theoretical and practical reasoning is dependent on content alone, and is blind to
the distinction between belief and imagination. So imagining P is substitutable for, and hence capable of simulating, believing P.
Full substitutability requires at least two things. The first is that the
proposition (P) makes the same contribution to our reasoning, whether it is
believed or imagined. The second requirement is that background knowledge is recruited to inference from belief in the same way it is from
imagination. Here’s an illustration. If I come to believe that it is raining I
shall conclude that the road outside is wet: after all, I already believe that
the road is exposed to the rain and that rain generally makes things wet.
Now suppose I am reading a fictional story according to which it is raining.
I will not believe there is rain in the place specified and I may even think
there is no such place; the appropriate response is to imagine that it is raining
there (Currie 1990, Walton 1990). But I draw the same conclusion as before:
the road will be wet. Here the conclusion is drawn within the scope of my
imagining – I do not end up believing the road in question is wet – yet the
conclusion draws on things I do believe about rain and roads in general.
This means that the authors of stories do not have to tell us everything
they want us to imagine; much of the time they rely on us using general
knowledge to draw our own conclusions. And psychological studies show
that children engaged in make-believe do exactly this from a remarkably
young age (Harris 2000).
The background knowledge condition is not one we can assert unconditionally, and its operation depends on contingent factors that vary from case
to case. When someone acquires a belief, s/he will not – and could not –
draw from it all the consequences that follow from the new belief along
with their other beliefs. There is also the question of how the new belief
affects the set of previous beliefs; a new belief may be inconsistent with or
in tension with some of what the person previously believed, and so belief
revision will take place. We know very little about the process, but interest,
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attention and motivation are bound to play a role: if I learn that it is raining,
the ways my beliefs get revised and the inferring I do from the new belief
and the now revised set of other beliefs will vary depending on whether my
current interest is in getting water on the garden or keeping water from
coming through the roof – or on whether I am simply distracted by some
other problem. So we may not say that I will draw the same conclusions
from a proposition, irrespective of whether I believe it to be true or simply
imagine it as part of an engagement with a fictional story. Works of fiction
themselves have the effect, often intended, of shifting our attention and concerns, and they often implicitly discourage certain lines of enquiry. As Walton
(1990) notes, there are many things that would be astonishing in real life
and hence the subject of intensive enquiry – the poetic imagination of
Othello, the placement of the diners on one side of the table at the Last
Supper. These things have, within fiction, explanations in terms of style,
genre or the limitations of a medium, and are simply taken as given.
Does this leave the substitutability thesis in tatters? No, the similarities
between our inferential practices with beliefs and with imaginings are striking
and certainly non-random. That there are divergences in particular cases is
interesting and may tell us something about the ways that different genres
of fiction work, but it does not challenge the idea that substitutability is a
basic feature of the imagination.
Fiction
An attractive conclusion at this point is that our responses to fictional works
can be accounted for by saying that they encourage us to engage in propositional imaginings that have the belief-like features postulated by ST.
I shall call this the ‘simulation-inspired theory of fiction.’ It is important to
distinguish between ST itself, and the simulation-inspired theory of fiction.
Some critics of this latter theory have suggested that it has the false consequence that our imaginings always involve us in empathetic identification
with fictional characters. They point out that while we do sometimes imagine
being this or that character – imaginatively recreating the beliefs s/he has,
according to the story – not all our imaginings are not like this. For example,
we often imagine that one of the characters is in danger when they are oblivious to the danger themselves (Carroll 1997). We all agree that some of our
imagining in response to fiction is empathic – an attempt to recreate the
character’s thoughts and feelings – and some of it is not; there is room here
for disagreement about how much is empathic and how important such
imagining is to fictional engagement (Currie 2004: ch. 9). But why would
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someone think that it is a consequence of the simulation-inspired theory of
fiction that all our imaginings are empathic?
This may be because ST is a theory about how we understand other people;
we understand them, it says, by modelling their beliefs within our own minds
through the device of propositional imagining. One way to put this is to say
that we understand other people by empathizing with them rather than by
theorizing about them, as we would when seeking to understand other kinds
of things. But our simulation-inspired theory of fiction merely says that we
engage with fictions by using the same cognitive mechanisms that we use
– according to ST – when we understand other people; it does not follow
from this that engagement with fiction is always or even usually by way of
empathy with the characters of the fiction. Reading the stories about Sherlock
Holmes, I imagine that Holmes solves the mystery of the speckled band; here
my imagining may count as a simulation of the belief that Holmes solves the
case, but it is not an act in which I empathize with any real or fictional
person, unless one wants to say that it is an act of empathizing with some
anonymous persona, the only identifying feature of which is the belief that
Holmes solves the case. It is certainly not an act of empathizing with Holmes,
Watson or any other character in the story.
What I have been calling a simulation-inspired theory of fiction is widely
accepted, sometimes by people otherwise critical of ST. It is appealed to by
Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich, in their account of pretence. They explain
how it is that we enact games of pretence partly by appealing to states which,
on the one hand, are not beliefs, but, on the other, are treated as if they
were beliefs by our inferential systems (Nichols and Stich 2003: ch. 2).
Theories of pretence have, of course, to explain behaviour, and we normally
explain behaviour by reference to desires as well as to belief. An agent cannot
be said to act merely on the basis of how s/he believes the world to be;
s/he needs also a conception of how they wants the world to be. What role
does desire play in the generation of pretence? According to Nichols and
Stich pretence is motivated by two things: the imaginings we have concerning
the unfolding of the pretend-scenario, and the desire – the genuine desire –
to behave in a way that is similar to that described in the scenario. This
raises a question: if imagination can be belief-like in the ways I have
described, might there be a need to postulate a kind of imagining that is
like desire? Might one, in playing a game, ‘desire’ to shoot your opponent
without really desiring to shoot him, just as one imagines him being shot,
without really believing that he is? Nichols and Stich will say that there
is only the genuine desire to behave as if you were shooting him. The case
for imaginings that are desire-substitutes is made in Currie and Ravenscroft
(2002: sections 1.4 and 2.4).
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Emotion and the body
Empathizing with people – either real people or characters of fiction such
as Anna Karenina – involves more than simply reproducing, in imagination,
their beliefs. For one thing, empathic contact with people generally involves
an aspect of feeling. This may be through the sharing of emotion: empathy
with a sad person involves a sharing in the feeling of sadness, as well as in
the thoughts that define the object of that sadness. I might empathize with
someone’s experience of fleeing from a charging bull. I might, to take some
fictional cases, share some of the bodily and mental turmoil of Fabrizio at
Waterloo or Anna Karenina at the railway station.
The idea of emotions directed towards fictional objects raises conceptual
problems. Can you really be afraid for Anna Karenina’s future when you
know that there is no such person (Radford 1975)? Walton has suggested
that what is involved in such cases is quasi-emotion: something qualitatively
like emotion, but differing from it in not requiring a belief in its object. We
say, of course, that we fear for Anna, without any such qualification, but
we also do not qualify when we say that Holmes solved the mystery of the
speckled band. Walton suggests that such unqualified remarks are to be
understood as expressive of our participation in games of make-believe. What
is true is that reading Tolstoy’s story generates feelings in me of quasi-fearing
for Anna, and my having those feelings generates the make-believe truth that
I really fear for Anna. Others have argued that genuine emotions can themselves be supported by imaginings rather than by beliefs, in which case my
anxiety for Anna counts as a genuine case of the emotion fearing for
(Lamarque 1981, Currie and Ravenscroft 2002: ch. 8).
So much for emotion. But empathy with a real person or fictional character might involve feeling by way of a sharing of perceptual states or bodily
sensations. What happens when empathy involves a shared perception or
bodily sense? I do not literally see what the character sees; instead I may
visualize the scene from the character’s perspective. Similarly I may have an
auditory image of what the character hears, or a motor image as of moving
my body in a way that corresponds to the character’s movement. Might
these kinds of bodily and perceptual imaginings play a role in our engagement with fictional works? Visual and auditory imagery play, I suggested,
little or no role in theatre and film, because these are media that give us
direct access to the relevant sights and sounds, and film may even present
its images from a character’s perspective. This is not merely a matter of
visual and auditory imagery being redundant; vision and visual imagery tend
to exclude one another, as do hearing and auditory imagery. However, tactile
and motor imagery are not yet replaced by virtual reality systems that provide
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convincing tactile and motor experiences, and written literature allows room
for imagery in all modalities, though some works are said to encourage
this more than others. Can we develop a theory of the role of sensory and
bodily imagining in our responses to narrative art, and of their relation to
propositional imagining?
There are unsettled issues in the theory of imagery we shall do well to
sidestep here. For example, it is disputed as to whether having a visual image
of a tree is always to be counted as an act of imagining seeing a tree. Since
I am here concerned with the role of imagery in empathizing with characters, I shall consider only cases of imagery that are imaginative explorations of experiences: cases where we imagine seeing or hearing or doing
what the character sees or hears or does. How do such imaginings relate to
what I have been calling propositional imaginings? In propositional imagining I imagine that it is raining; where imagery is in play I may imagine seeing
or hearing the rain, or feeling it on my skin, or I might imagine walking
through the rain.
Imagining that such and such is the case, even where the such and such is
intimately related to our bodies, does not necessarily involve sensory experience. I can imagine that I am in Venice for the purpose, say, of working out
how I would get back home, without having any imagined perceptual or
bodily experience as of being there. Nonetheless, imagining that I am in
Venice will naturally go with having some of these other kinds of imaginings,
and will generally be more interesting and rewarding if it does. And as I enrich
my set of propositional imaginings – imagining not merely that I am in Venice
but that I am looking down the Grand Canal toward Santa Maria della Salute
on a misty early evening in November – it would be extraordinary not to
have some sensory contact with the imagined scene.
The importance of this kind of imagining in a fictional context is somewhat obscured by the fact that propositional imagining fits neatly with the
idea of what is true in the fiction, or what is part of the story the fiction tells.
When we specify what is part of the content of a story, fictional or otherwise, we do so in terms of propositions; what is sometimes called the world
of the story is just the set of propositions true according to that story. It is
natural, then, to explain our engagement with stories in terms of propositional imaginings. I will suggest two ways in which sensory and bodily imaginings are connected with the propositional imaginings that fictions provoke.
The first thing to say is that propositional imaginings on their own seem
to do little to explain the extraordinary hold that fictional narratives have
on humans of all ages and conditions. It is common to say that what holds
us to a narrative is the emotions that it generates, or which are generated
through the acts of propositional imagining we engage in when we read or
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watch: I imagine that Anna is unhappy, and I feel sadness in consequence.
But where my sadness is empathic – where I share her sadness, rather than
simply being made sad by the thought that she is sad – this would seem to
depend on imagining myself in her place in a phenomenologically rich and
vivid way: imagining seeing and hearing things as she sees them, imagining
moving and holding back from movement as she does. Such imaginings
might be brief and they might go with thoughts I have from a quite distinct
perspective. Our capacity for imaginative exploration is powerful and flexible; I might be empathizing in the way just described with Anna while at
the same time contemplating the scene for a detached and to some degree
critical perspective, or even from that of another character. Richard Wollheim
(1984: 68) speaks of an empathic audience as one which
from the outset selects one character out of the dramatis personae,
responds to the mental states of this character by duplicating them,
and then goes on to respond to the mental states of all the other
characters – and for that matter to the narrative itself as it unfolds
– in the perspective of this one character.
Such an audience would be unusually steadfast in its adoption of a perspective. It is more common for audiences to shift perspective between the characters according to the needs of the dramatic moment, as well as to occupy,
a good deal of the time, a perspective that no character occupies.
The second point about the relations between sensory and bodily imagining on the one hand and propositional imagining on the other is that
imaginings of the former kind can serve to provide content for imaginings
of the latter kind. It is said that propositional imagining is very limited in
the possibilities it opens up for imagining about specific ways of doing things,
because we quickly run out of ways to describe these specific ways. How do
I specify, propositionally, Albert’s way of dancing the tango, for example?
But we should question the assumption that propositional imagining requires
us to formulate a fully descriptive thought. After all, imaginings can have as
their objects singular thoughts: thoughts like ‘that man is a spy.’ Comparably,
I can say to you ‘Albert dances this way,’ while dancing myself in the way
that Albert does: here ‘this way’ is a directly referring device, and it refers
to Albert’s way of dancing (Heal 1997). Perhaps, then, I can imagine Albert
dancing in that way, while having at my disposal something which
nondescriptively identifies (more or less) that way of dancing: a repertoire,
say, of imagined bodily movements. Both subjective experience and experimental research attest to our having capacities for these kinds of bodily
imagining. Imagining moving our bodies in various ways is not imagining
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that we move; it is a kind of imagining from the inside: the kind of imagining where one experiences, in imagination, moving that way. And we know
that underlying these capacities is the activation of neural systems that are
implicated in those very movements: it is as if we ‘mentally move,’ without
the activity in the control centre being passed along to the muscles and joints.
Through some poorly understood process (some say it involves an internal
model of the body) this kind of ‘off-line’ activity leads to an experience as
of moving. These mental movements are surprisingly realistic; we know that
times taken to perform then correspond closely to the times required for the
real corresponding movements and can reflect idiosyncrasies of performance
due to disability (see Dominey et al. 1995).
What I have just said about imagined actions holds for imagined perceptual experiences: I can imagine that Sherlock Holmes looks like that, where
the reference of ‘that’ is determined by my visual image of Holmes; similarly
for the case of imagining that the guns at Waterloo sound like that, or that
Dracula’s cool, dry handshake feels like that.
The limits of imagining
This discussion of the relations between propositional and other forms of
imagining may be helpful in thinking through a puzzle about the imagination that Walton (1994) was the first to highlight, though important work
was done on this around the same time by Richard Moran (1994). Walton
and Moran (and Hume (1985) before them) noted that we are oddly resistant to certain kinds of imaginings, cases of ‘fictional morality’ being the most
obvious examples. Fictions often construct wildly counterfactual scenarios
with talking animals, ghosts and other elements of fantasy and science fiction.
While these genres do not have universal appeal, we experience no special
barriers to imagining such contents. Yet fiction that asks us to imagine (not,
note, to believe) that slavery and female infanticide are good is likely to
create substantial imaginative resistance in an audience committed to the
view that such things are in fact immoral. A number of responses immediately
suggest themselves: perhaps we find it difficult to imagine things we firmly
reject; perhaps we worry that imagining strongly counterfactual moralities
will end up with our believing them. Both explanations would apply equally
to the science fiction cases, but here, as noted, there is no comparable resistance. Is the difficulty that asking us to imagine counterfactual moralities is
asking us to imagine an incoherence? Here opinion is somewhat divided,
but it is not easy to assimilate imaginative resistance to alien values with
the difficulties that might be encountered with incoherent narratives. For a
start, many mathematical propositions lead to inconsistency, but have been
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believed; it is difficult to claim that what can be believed cannot be imagined. Further, I think we need to look hard at exactly what kind of imagining is supposed to be resisted when we resist the fiction according to which
female infanticide is good. Do I really have difficulty imagining that female
infanticide is good? I seem to have no trouble in assuming or supposing this
proposition – I might do that in order to argue against it. One response to
this has been to suggest that propositional imagining is something distinct
from assuming or supposing (Gendler 2000). But it is not clear that we
need to abandon the economical idea that propositional imagining and supposition are the same thing. An alternative view is that resistance to the story
according to which female infanticide is right is resistance to certain kinds
of sensory and bodily imagining. In such a story one senses an invitation to
summons a certain repertoire of feeling and restraint from feeling: to have
certain emotions and bodily twinges rather than others, to feel imagined
regret at a failure to kill this female infant, gladness at the success of this
other killing and so on. These are responses over which we have a very
imperfect control, somewhat in the way that our capacity to imagine moving
our hands is constrained by our capacity to move them in reality. On this
view, we are perfectly capable of imagining that female infanticide is good,
but we resist the invitation to accompany this piece of imagining with the
kinds of feelings and bodily engagement required for a fully imagined
endorsement.
See also Interpretation (Chapter 25), Fiction (Chapter 27), Art, expression
and emotion (Chapter 34), Literature (Chapter 44).
References
Aristotle (1961) De Anima, trans. D. Ross, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carroll, N. (1997) “Simulation, Emotions and Morality,” in G. Hoffmann and A. Hornung
(eds) Emotions in Postmodernism, Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter.
Currie, G. (1990) The Nature of Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––– (2004) Arts and Minds, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
–––– and Ravenscroft, I. (2002) Recreative Minds, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dominey, P., Decety, J., Broussolle, E. et al. (1995) “Motor Imagery of a Lateralized
Sequential Task Is Asymmetrically Slowed in Hemi-Parkinson’s Patients,” Neuropsychologia 33: 727–41.
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Further reading
Davies, M. and Stone, T. (eds) (1995a) Folk Psychology, Oxford: Blackwell.
–––– (eds) (1995b) Mental Simulation, Oxford: Blackwell. (These two collections include
many important papers on simulation theory and related issues.)
Kieran, M. and Lopes, D. M. (eds) (2003) Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts, London:
Routledge. (A useful collection of essays on aesthetic uses of imagination.)
Rosengren, K., Johnson, C. and Harris, P. (eds) (2000) Imagining the Impossible, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. (Papers by psychologists on the relations between imagination
and belief.)
Strawson, P. F. (1970) “Imagination and Perception,” in L. Foster and J. W. Swanson (eds)
Experience and Theory, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. (Elegant and illuminating discussion of Hume’s and Kant’s theories of the imagination.)
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