Abstract
Imagining being someone else from the inside is something relatively easy to do. In Williams (Imagination and the self, problems of the self: philosophical papers, p 26–45, 1973), for instance, one finds Williams’s famous imaginative scenario consisting in imagining being Napoleon from the inside at the battle of Austerlitz. However, providing an adequate analysis for imagination reports like “(1) Williams imagines being Napoleon (from the inside)” is no easy task, because the logical form of such imagination report is controversial. Following Vendler (Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 84(2):161–173, 1979), the logical form of statements “X imagines F-ing” typically involve a PRO construction. Furthermore, it is generally acknowledged following Chierchia (Semant Contextual Exp 11:1–31, 1989) that PRO constructions require a de se reading. Consequently, (1) is argued to be an instance of de se imagination (this is the “genuine de se” analysis of (1)). Yet, (1) is also crucially about Napoleon and, as forcefully argued for in Williams (Imagination and the self, problems of the self: philosophical papers, p 26–45, 1973), it is not even clear that it is about Williams. So (1) cannot be an instance of de se imagination in the standard sense, because Williams does not self-ascribe the semantic content of the imagining episode (this is the “quasi-de se” analysis of (1)). In this paper, I vindicate the genuine de se analysis, based on some new data involving nested imaginings. I then investigate some consequences of the view, which, I argue, are not available to the quasi-de se theorists, including what the view says about failed imaginings.
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Notes
A philosophically-minded spectator may wonder: what happens should Malkovich go through this “portal”? I am not going to spoil this.
This paper generated numerous philosophical responses including the opposite view forcefully spelled out by Peacocke (1985). Several important distinctions were later drawn to make precise what Williams’s problems really are (these are systematically reviewed by Dokic and Arcangeli (2014)). “Imagination and the self” now labels a whole research area in which Dilip Ninan is a very influential contributor (see in particular his PhD dissertation Ninan 2008). I should add a caveat regarding my contribution here: the expression “from the inside” points to the notion of first-person (as opposed to third-person) perspective, but such notion is not central to my argument. As will become clear below, the imagination reports I am concerned with are all from the inside, and both theories I discuss acknowledge this fact. The expression from the inside is thus tacitly presupposed throughout. I simply use the expression in this section to construct the problem I here discuss, viz. who the imagination report is about.
In (Vendler 1979), there are examples ranging over all perceptual modalities, and also other attitude verbs including to remember and to forget.
In general the identity between the two subjects in a PRO construction “is presupposed” as (Higginbotham 2003) (p.518) puts it.
It should be noted that it is not without alternatives: (Montague 1970) and (Lewis 1979), for instance, theorise about this difference in perspective without postulating a PRO construction. Note also that the contrast between (2) and (3) might be accounted for at the level of pragmatics, on the ground that (3) takes more effort to pronounce than (2), thus prompting for the search of an alternative interpretation (thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion, which I do not know whether it has been pursued). This “standard” interpretation of Vendler’s examples is used here to make the debate I am about to present below more striking, and my argument below does not rest on the specifics of this interpretation, and so I safely leave this on the side.
There are further distinctions one can draw regarding the interpretation of a PRO construction (and correspondingly the ambiguity of non-PRO constructions), when we take into account the notion of error through misidentification, coming from (Wittgenstein 1958) (p.67) and greatly developed later. In particular, (Recanati 2007) (p.193) thus distinguishes between the implicit and explicit de se depending on whether the de se content at issue is, respectively, immune to error through misidentification or not. He then argues that “Reports using the PRO construction can only be reports of implicit de se thoughts”. Since nothing hinges on these finer distinctions in the following, I do not introduce these here and invite the reader to consult Recanati’s work for a finer grained theory of de se content.
I am not claiming here, on behalf of the pretend theorist, that (1) is equivalent “Williams is imagining pretending to be Napoleon”, but to “Williams pretends to be Napoleon”. I think that the phrase “imagining pretending to be” is a case of nested imagination report: more on these below. Thanks to Justin D’Ambrosio for his careful reading on this.
For a fascinating exploration of the idea there is an essential, conceptual link between identity statements and pretence in general, see (Crimmins 1998).
For purely illustrative purposes, “the desolation at Austerlitz” is here rendered as Jacques-François-Joseph Swebach’s painting representing Austerlitz’s battlefield, ordered by Napoleon on December 2, 1805. You can look at it and download it here. Again, the imagined content is in principle richer for it plausibly involves other modalities, emotions and a feeling of agency which neither the painting, nor the definite description I use adequately represent.
Williams endorses the assumption that it is impossible that Williams be identical with Napoleon, and that is why he does not self-ascribe the imagined content. Williams’s original intention was to talk about imagination and impossibility in (Williams 1973). However, Williams’s imaginative scenario can be extracted from this argumentative context. In fact, he is somewhat vague in his article because he uses a distinction between the “empirical self” and the “Cartesian self” which is confusing and unhelpful, as shown in (Ninan 2016). I thereby follow Ninan in the way he distinguishes between the problem of imagining an impossibility and the debate at issue here, i.e. about the place of the self in imagining being someone else. Maybe there are deep connections to be made between the different problems: for instance, Justin D’Ambrosio suggested to me that it might be because it is metaphysically impossible for Williams to be identical with Napoleon that he would rather pretend to be Napoleon; in other words, one might try and argue from a metaphysical vantage point for the pretend analysis. I leave this interesting suggestion for further work, and try to stick to the linguistic vantage point in this paper, though.
I should note here that (Recanati 2016) clearly uses a notion of pretence, and therefore the contrast between the identity and the pretend view is not as clear-cut as I here suggest. Eventually, Recanati holds that the quasi-de se is to the de se what pretence of the first-personal perspective is to the real first-personal perspective. More on this below.
It is simple to draw the alternative using the identity reading as a base.
This is the French translation of (Williams 1973) (p.43)’s narration: “I have conquered; the ideals of the Revolution in my hand are sweeping away the old world. Poor Maria Walewska, I wonder where she is now”.
Serge Haroche is one of the 2012 Nobel prize winner quantum physicist, and colleague of François Recanati at le Collège de France.
Readers who are familiar with the literature on imagination and the self might think I am calling “cognitive make up” what is denoted by “bare Cartesian I” in the literature. Maybe, but I am not so sure. Later on, I will insist on the fact that the relationship between the imaginer and the imaginee on the pretend view is to be understood as embodiment (understood primarily in the sense in which an actor plays a role, taking up Walton’s analogy). Embodiment does not sound to square well with Descartes’s idealist view of the mind, though I am not a Descartes scholar and could not say for sure.
He comments upon his (in)famous scoliosis, which is the reason of his surname "the Hunchback King".
Nothing hinges on the fiction / non-fiction distinction in what I say here. If you dislike my example because you think Richard III is not typically a fiction, please change the example for whatever you prefer.
If one wants to use (Friend 2016) (p.2)’s influential terminology for fictional content: such a detail is not a mandate, nor a prescription, but a mere invitation to imagine.
Here, one might very well connect my pretend account of imagining being someone else and Amy Kind’s general theory of imagination according to which “imagination is a skill” (Kind 2020).
I think this shows that part of the semantics of imagination reports involves the “what-it’s-like-ness” and my aim here has been to articulate this idea with the constraints of compositional semantics. As such, I think my paper is a special case of D’Ambrosio and Stoljar (2021)’s more general point about persepctival imagination.
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Acknowledgements
This paper has a long history going back to a first version in 2019. After a first not very successful period, it took a new shape when first presented in the (post)doctoral seminar of Institut Jean Nicod on March 24, 2022. For this occasion, I want to address special thanks to Géraldine Carranante, Philippe Lusson and Diego Feinmann for their friendly comments and support, as well as to Isidora Stojanovic for being my discussant. Subsequently, I presented the paper in the ESSLLI workshop “The Semantics of Imagination” in August 18, 2022. The atmosphere was both rigorous and very, very pleasant: this publication owes a lot to the workshop’s participants and, especially to their organisers (and editors of this issue), viz. Kristina Liefke and Jutin D’Ambrosio: thank you both, your help was much appreciated and makes a difference. For their careful re-reading of previous versions, many thanks to Bruno Leclercq, as well as two anonymous reviewers who greatly helped improving the structure and content of this paper. Finally, in June 29 2023, I shared the paper in François Recanati’s “Mind and Language” online research seminar: I want to thank all the participants in this group for their close reading of my work and the huge amount of feedback I thereby received.
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Rouillé, L. How Much of Your Self Do You Need to Imagine Being Someone Else?. Topoi (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09992-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09992-5