ABSTRACT
Belief and imagination are both states of mind that represent things as being a particular way. So one way of trying to understand the nature of imagination is by considering how it resembles belief and how it differs. If a concise statement of the similarities and differences between imagination and belief helps us understand how imagination works, and perhaps how the mind works in general, it’ll provide a simple and illuminating theory of imagination. While some philosophers propose theories on which imagination and belief are fundamentally similar or on a continuum with each other, others see the differences between imagination and belief as too deep for unified approaches to explain, and argue that these mental states must be understood in fundamentally different ways. This chapter surveys theories of imagination along both lines. I’ll begin by considering the
view that belief and imagination are fundamentally different, which is widely accepted by philosophers working on imagination (including myself). Then I’ll consider more unified ones on which there are intermediate states between belief and imagination, or on which they’re similar except that we apply the normative aim of truth only to belief and not to imagination. Throughout, I’ll focus on propositional imagination, in which we imagine that some state of affairs obtains – for example, imagining that lava is flowing, as opposed to imagining lava. This may be the kind of imagination for which unified approaches are the most promising, since belief is a propositional attitude – one can believe that lava is flowing, but it doesn’t make sense to talk about believing lava. There are many other philosophically important topics that a chapter on belief and imagination might explore, including the complex relations between belief and imagination in supposition (Arcangeli 2014), aesthetics (Walton 1990), make-believe games (Walton 1993), and philosophical methodology (Gendler 2010). But here I’ll address such topics only insofar as they bear on general theories about what kind of mental state imagination is, and how much it’s like and unlike belief. First I’ll consider functional properties of belief which imagination doesn’t seem to share,
and which suggest treating them as broadly different mental states. Second I’ll consider functional properties of imagination which belief doesn’t seem to share, which also support seeing the two states of mind as fundamentally different. Third will be the view of Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich (Nichols and Stich 2000), which accounts for pretense by treating the cognitive mechanisms involved in imagination and belief as fundamentally different. Fourth will be Susanna Schellenberg’s (2013) arguments that cases of imaginative immersion
demonstrate imagination and belief to be on a continuum ranging from pure imagination to pure belief. Fifth will be Andy Egan’s (2008) arguments that accounting for psychological delusions requires mental states intermediate between imagination and belief. Sixth will be theories from John Urmson (1967), Lloyd Humberstone (1992), and Nishi Shah and David Velleman (Shah and Velleman 2005), which explain the differences between belief and imagination not by appealing to the intrinsic properties of the representational states involved, but in terms of whether we apply a norm of truth to them.
