Abstract
This paper responds to two arguments that have been offered against the positing of ‘i-desires’, imaginative counterparts of desire supposedly involved in fiction, pretence, and mindreading. The Introspection Argument asks why, if there are both i-desires and desires, the distinction is so unfamiliar and hard to draw, unlike the relatively clear distinctions between perception and mental imagery, or belief and belief-like imagining. The Accountability Argument asks how it can make sense to treat merely imaginative states as revealing of someone’s psychology, the way we do with responses to fiction. I argue that carefully considering the relationship between other states and their imaginative counterparts sheds light on how we should expect i-desires to differ from desires, and suggests that we may often be in states that are indeterminate, in limbo between the two categories. This indeterminacy explains why the distinction is often hard to draw, and why these states can be revealing about us even without (determinately) being real desires.
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Notes
For defences of something like this idea, see Currie 1997, 2002, Walton 1997, Velleman 2000, Currie and Ravenscroft 2002, Doggett and Egan 2007. The term ‘i-desire’ is from Doggett and Egan; other authors speak of ‘desiresI’, ‘desire-like imaginings’, ‘offline desires’, ‘wishes’, or use other terms, but the essential idea of a conative state that is an imaginative counterpart to regular conative states is shared.
See, e.g., Currie (2010), Doggett and Egan (2011).
Many in this debate, following especially Walton (1990), treat pretence and fiction as continuous with one another: two ways to create a shared imaginary world, differing simply in what sort of actions are taken by the participants. Reading a novel, on this analysis, is engaging in a certain sort of pretence: pretending that the author is telling a true story, and pretending to believe it. Although some dispute this analysis (e.g. Langland-Hassan, 2020, p.144 ff), I find it congenial, particularly because it allows for a unified discussion of what is ‘true in’ a fiction or a game. So I will assume for convenience that references to ‘fictional truth’ or ‘fictional characters’ also cover truth in a game and characters in a game. Those who reject this analysis can mentally substitute ‘fictional-or-pretend’ as necessary.
It would be fairly natural to say that what we i-desire, we ‘imagine desiring’, and in a sense this is true: we are engaged in a certain sort of imagination which resembles desiring. But the phrase ‘imagine desiring X’ can be misleading, since it could be read as ‘imagine that we desire X’—i.e. i-believe that we desire X, imaginatively recreate the belief that we desire X. This is different from i-desiring X, just as believing that we desire something is different from desiring it.
Partly for this reason, I will in this paper use ‘desire’ broadly to cover attitudes we may have towards past events, which we cannot change or even hope for a different outcome to. If I desire that the June Rebellion succeed, that desire cannot be satisfied, but I still feel it. Some authors might restrict the term ‘desire’, and say what I have in this case is really a ‘wish’, or an emotion of regret or sadness: this will not substantially affect any of my arguments.
Another adjacent debate is about the causes and nature of imaginative resistance, our tendency to simply refuse to ‘go along with’ certain propositions we are asked to imagine, often seemingly because we find them repugnant in a way that merely false, or even self-contradictory, propositions are not (see, e.g., Gendler 2000; Liao et al., 2014). I think i-desires may play a role in this phenomenon, but I am doubtful that their role is essential: I am persuaded by Gendler’s argument (2000, pp.73–75) that purely factual propositions may elicit imaginative resistance when their connection to hateful beliefs in the real world is sufficiently salient.
This view has been called both ‘recreativism’ (Balcerak Jackson, 2018, p.216 ff, Tagliafico 2011, pp.63–76, cf. Currie and Ravenscroft 2002, p.11 ff,) and ‘simulationism’ (e.g. Goldman 2006a, 2006b; Kind 2013, p.4 ff, Balcerak Jackson 2018, p.216 ff). I prefer the former term to avoid confusion with simulationism about mindreading.
This way of distinguishing ‘online’ from ‘offline’, as roughly capturing ‘real’ vs. ‘imaginative copy’, is importantly different from another way of using the terms, on which ‘offline’ cognition is a broader category covering everything not focused on our current environment and activities, including quite genuine beliefs about, e.g. mathematics or the future. Lu Teng has my gratitude for pushing me to clarify this point. Moreover, ‘offline’ here is not intended to imply a specific picture of the neural implementation of the states involved in imagination (as in, e.g. Heal 1998); it is simply an adjective that means the same as the prefix ‘i-’ in i-desires, i-beliefs, etc.
For discussion of various instructive uses of imagination see, e.g. Yablo (1993), Gordon (1995), Chalmers (2002), Goldman (2006a, 2006b), Kung (2010), Dorsch (2012, 2016), Kind (2016b, 2018), Nanay (2016b), Williamson (2016), Steuber (2016), Van Leeuwen (2016a, 2016b), Balcerak Jackson (2018, Forthcoming), Arcangeli (2018), Egeland (2019), Myers (2021a, 2021b).
It might be objected that here, ‘imagining desiring X’ is plausibly taken just as meaning ‘imagining that I desire X’. But it is not: we can imagine that we have all sorts of properties, mental or physical or relational, but with mental properties there is a clear difference between this and imaginatively recreating the mental state itself—imagining seeing green, unlike simply imagining that I see green, has a visual phenomenology.
There is some plausibility to the thought that in such cases the imagining can cause action only ‘indirectly’, or only in conjunction with other, non-imaginative, states (Funkhouser and Spaulding, 2009 defend this account of pretence) but then we need to spell out the relevant sort of indirectness.
There is of course the common observation that sensory imaginings are typically ‘less intense’ or ‘less vivid’ in their phenomenology than their online counterparts. I think this is true as a tendency, just as it is also true that sensory imaginings are typically much less determinate in their content than their online counterparts. But it does not look like this is a matter of the two types of state varying within two markedly different ranges: rather, it is that perception is almost always close to the maximum of possible vividness and determinacy, while mental imagery varies widely, sometimes being incredibly faint and vague, sometimes virtually matching the vividness and determinacy of perception.
People often distinguish, in reasoning about possibilities, between merely ‘supposing’ and actively ‘imagining’ (and/or ‘conceiving’), where the former is a characteristically easier, ‘thinner’, activity than the latter. Explaining this distinction is a challenge for a unified recreativist account, since they have quite different properties despite both seeming to be in some sense belief-like (see, e.g., Kind, 2013, Balcerak Jackson, 2016, Arcangeli, 2018). My favoured view is that this distinction is not so much a matter of two distinct sorts of state, but of imaginative projects that activate multiple mental systems to enrich and unfold an imagined proposition, versus those that do not.
Clearly there is a difference between the criticism of a subject as epistemically irrational and the criticism of a perception as malfunctioning. But what unites them is that they are inherent norms, norms rooted in the sort of state that is at issue—it is part of being a perception to be sensitive to stimuli, just as it is part of being a belief to be the sort of state that can warrant epistemic criticism. They contrast with external standards, like usefulness or pleasantness. An unwarranted belief might do very well by these standards: it might be exactly what we want to believe, might be useful, might make us feel good. None of this would erase its unwarrantedness.
Note that by focusing on desire’s functional properties, and more specifically on its normatively-constrained functional properties, this approach thus evades the dilemma advanced by Tagliafico (2011), according to which a pretend desire must differ from a genuine desire either in its content or in the affect or emotion it involves.
There is room for different theoretical explanations of this fact and its significance: that desires by themselves provide reasons, or that they create agent-relative reasons, or that they make it seem as if a reason exists, or that talk of practical reasons just is talk of desires (for discussion see, e.g., Darwall, 2001). All I need for my point here is the pretheoretical observation that ‘because I want to’ is often an adequate response to ‘why are you doing that?’ in a way that ‘because I think so’ is not an adequate response to ‘why do you think that?’.
Katharina Anna Sodoma and an anonymous referee for Erkenntnis have my gratitude for pushing me on these points.
This point is somewhat complicated by the fact that moral evaluability might be thought to attach, not to desire itself, but to the pleasure that results from it—standard examples in this debate tend to involve ‘taking pleasure in innocent suffering’. If, as I’ve suggested, pleasure can result from both desires and i-desires, any difference between the moral evaluability of the two would risk being ‘washed away’ by the shared moral evaluability of the pleasure they yield. (Again, for my own part I am sceptical that either pleasure or desire in themselves warrant moral evaluation.) But this further blurring of the boundary between them is just more grist for my mill.
Perhaps I might most closely approximate, with a real person, the way I know fictional characters, by believing that I have read a long factual narration of a real person’s activities; but even this invites further questions, like whether I should reasonably trust that narration. After all, people are different when you meet than from how any story—whether written by them, or not—portrays them.
The degree to which I struggle to ‘put on’ this i-desire, or find myself ‘slipping naturally into it’, might perhaps be revealing (cf. Bailey, 2021)—though what it reveals about my conative dispositions will be confounded with what it reveals about my facility at simulating other people’s strange desires, or willingness to try. And it at least does not reveal that I secretly find something appealing about murder.
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Roelofs, L. Longings in Limbo: A New Defence of I-Desires. Erkenn 88, 3331–3355 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00505-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00505-7