Abstract
Imagination is widely thought to come in two varieties: perception-like and belief-like imagination. What precisely sets them apart, however, is not settled. More needs to be said about the features that make one variety perception-like and the other belief-like. One common, although typically implicit, view is that they mimic their counterparts (perception and belief, respectively) along the conceptuality dimension: while the content of belief-like imagination is fully conceptual, the content of perception-like imagination is fully (or at least partially) non-conceptual. Such a view, however, is not sufficiently motivated in the literature. I will show that there are good reasons to reject it and I will argue that both varieties of imagination involve fully conceptual contents (independently of whether either perception or belief has non-conceptual content). I will suggest an alternative way to draw the distinction between perception-like and belief-like imagination along the conceptuality dimension, according to which only perception-like imagination requires observational concepts.
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Notes
This argument parallels one of the arguments that distinguish belief and perception in terms of their contents. However, propositionality is arguably unfitting for providing a clear-cut distinction between belief and perception, insofar as the content of belief can be non-propositional (see Szabó 2003), and the content of (at least a type of) perception propositional (see Dretske 1969 on epistemic perception). Worries can be raised against propositionality also as a means to grasp the distinction between C-Imagination and S-Imagination (see Arcangeli 2018).
One might claim that differentiating the two kinds of tree on the basis of perception is already a way of grasping the corresponding concepts, albeit in a demonstrative way, as this or that kind of tree (see McDowell 1994). Then the question is whether demonstrative concepts count as bona fide concepts. Even if they do, a further question arises as to whether they are autonomous or must be grounded on a more primitive level of non-conceptual content. After all, in order to know that this tree is different from that tree, there must be different ways of presentation of the trees in perception that precede Jacob’s acquisition of the demonstrative concepts (see Evans 1982; Peacocke 1992; Campbell 2002, and many essays in Gunther 2003).
Beliefs involving demonstratives can be said to have contents with non-conceptual elements (see, e.g., Burge 1977). But such contents have only derivative non-conceptual elements based on some perceptual presentation (see fn 3). Thus, the main idea still holds, namely that for any belief, some conceptual content fully captures what is believed.
I won’t consider a fifth objection which moves from the idea that children (up to a certain age) and non-human animals do not possess concepts and claims that an infelicitous consequence of my view is that children and (most) non-human animals do not imagine, contra strong evidence showing that they do. This objection is based on shaky grounds. First, it is not obvious that either young, pre-linguistic children or non-human animals lack concepts, or at least proto-concepts (see Bermúdez 2003; Carey 2009). Second, to what extent non-human animals engage their imagination is still an open question (Mitchell 2016). Likewise, many central questions concerning the development of imaginative abilities in children have not been settled (Skolnick Weisberg 2016).
I am echoing Nelson Goodman’s distinction between black-horses pictures and pictures of black horses (see Goodman 1976).
The same can be said about mental rotation tasks, granting that this widely employed experimental protocol (notably by Shepard & Metzler 1971) relies on the exploitation of mental imagery qua S-Imagination (the two notions might not coincide, see Arcangeli 2020). Arguably, subjects involved in these experiments do not possess descriptive/theoretical concepts of the complex geometrical figures they are presented with, but they can deploy concepts anchored to perceptual presentations (e.g., demonstrative concepts).
Along similar lines it might be objected that there are cases of C-Imagination with partially non-conceptual content (e.g., I imagine that what looks like this [pointing to water] does not have the chemical structure H2O). It might be replied that these are mixed cases where C-Imagination is aided by perception.
In §4 I will specify that these concepts need to be observational.
McGinn claims that, like percepts, S-imaginings have non-conceptual content “in the sense that they are intrinsically belief-independent; certainly, they both incorporate ‘qualia.’” (McGinn 2004, p. 189 fn 2). However, both the belief-independence and the phenomenological aspects of S-Imagination can be treated independently of the conceptuality issue. More generally, I am assuming, contra purely intentionalist views (see Nanay 2015 for a reduction of the phenomenal similarity between perception and S-Imagination to the similarity between the structure of their content), that both the attitude and the content contribute to the overall phenomenology of a given mental state.
Arguably McGinn has a similar point in mind when he writes: “Of course, images [S-imaginings] become recruited by the conceptual system once it is in place, but it seems doubtful that they are constitutively conceptual. Certainly, imagery [S-Imagination] is consistent with the absence of anything deserving the name of belief and reasoning” (McGinn 2004, p. 170 fn 48). Contrary to McGinn, Langland-Hassan argues that visualization is the occurrence of a belief, but of a kind that might fail tests of compositionality and systematicity, and have non-conceptual content (Langland-Hassan 2011, p. 166). Yet, as he stresses, “everyone concerned to explain the usefulness of visualization has to account for the inferential interaction between visualizations and the beliefs that do satisfy tests of compositionality and systematicity” (ibid.).
These two levels of (non-)conceptuality echo the distinction between the state view and the content view (see Heck 2000). The former defines non-conceptuality as being a concept-independent type of mental state, the latter as having a specific type of content. Although these views have been taken as alternatives, it might be that we should think of them as highlighting different but compatible senses of “non-conceptual”, dealing with the aforementioned levels of (non-)conceptuality. Still, holders of the state view seem to be committed to a specific view of the content level and would not allow, as I am suggesting, concept-independent mental states with conceptual content.
This view is partly consonant with Currie and Ravenscroft’s preferred view. They claim that “imagery is nonconceptual, not in the sense of having an especially nonconceptual content, but in the sense of being a state, the functional role of which does not require of its possessor the kind of discriminatory and inferential powers that in turn depend on concept possession” (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, p. 106). However, if at the content level – as I am suggesting – S-Imagination conceptually differs from perception, such a difference fails to meet Currie and Ravenscroft’s demand of being alike along this dimension. Once again some pressure is put on the strong claim about the relationship between imaginings and counterparts with respect to the content level. The easy way out is to give up such a demand.
He specifies: “Though my take on qualitative content owes much to Peacocke, I remain neutral on whether qualitative content is ‘conceptual’ or ‘nonconceptual’” (Kung 2010, p. 623, fn 7).
Observational concepts can be demonstrative (“this shade of red”), but they need not (the concept “red” is observational but it is not demonstrative). Classical examples of observational concepts seem to be phenomenal concepts (like concepts of shapes and colours), but the latter might not exhaust the former. One might think that the notion of observational concepts hinges on the non-conceptuality of perception. For instance, one might argue that part of the possession conditions of an observational concept is that the subject’s deployment of the concept is sensitive to perceptual experiences with appropriate non-conceptual contents (e.g., Peacocke 1992). However, one can also give an account of the possession conditions of observational concepts while being neutral about the content of perception (see Bermúdez 2007, p. 71 fn 13).
To sensorily imagine a Gran Willy is to sensorily imagine hitting a Gran Willy. It might be that sensorily imagining an action involves concepts belonging to a specific class of observational concepts which require the acquisition of appropriate practical knowledge.
One might wonder what distinguishes a C-imagining that happens to involve only observational concepts from a S-imagining with the same content (e.g., I cognitively vs. sensorily imagine that bears are green). Here what has been said about having inferential roles can be helpful (§3.2): the former, but not the latter, will entail state-specific inferential abilities, at least if C-imaginings, like beliefs, can enter into inferential relations (see Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; Weinberg & Meskin 2006; Arcangeli 2018). An alternative proposal is that whenever the content of an imagining is fully observational, it counts as a case of S-Imagination.
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Dimitri Coelho Mollo, Jérôme Dokic, Uriah Kriegel and anonymous referees for critical and helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. This research has been funded by the SublimAE Project (ANR-18-CE27-0023-01), with the further support of the ANR-17-EURE-0017 FrontCog and the ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL.
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Arcangeli, M. The conceptual nature of imaginative content. Synthese 199, 3189–3205 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02930-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02930-7