On Imagination, Belief, and Action

I was reminded recently of the importance of my book Mindsight (2004), because it brings the imagination into the center of the philosophy of mind.[1] In that book I make the point that belief presupposes imagination (chapter 10): for you can’t believe something without entertaining it first—imagining the state of affairs that makes it true. Imagination is thus prior to cognition: the cognitive step of belief formation builds on the antecedent formation of an imagined state of affairs. Imagination thus precedes and conditions reason. It isn’t somehow independent of reason and possibly at odds with it, as the rationalist tradition supposes; it is foundational to reason. The theory of belief (and hence reasoning) must include a theory of imagination. In the beginning was the image (in a broad sense). Representing a possibility precedes accepting an actuality.

The point I want to add to this is that imagination is also vital to agency: you can’t act (in the full sense) unless you envisage possibilities, because that’s what choice is—selecting from among imagined possibilities.[2]Action, like belief, is imagination-dependent. The will presupposes imagination, as does the ability to believe (and hence reason). Conation and cognition are thus up to their neck in imagination. The old opposition between rational action and rational belief, on the one hand, and imagination, on the other, is mistaken. Imagination is foundational in both areas. Thus, romanticism is true, after all. The human mind is fundamentally an imagining mind; it uses the same faculty as art and literature. We choose and believe because we imagine.

In addition, imagination is indispensable to freedom, since freedom is choice among possibilities; no imagination, no freedom.[3] True, a creature can be free of constraints hampering its free expression of desire; but unless it can imagine, it cannot choose from among alternatives. Many animals presumably lack an imagination capable of generating alternative possibilities, so they are not free in the way we are (though they can still be free to do what they want). Thus, freedom presupposes imagination. We can conclude that three of our most precious attributes—willed action, rational belief, and freedom—are predicated on the existence of imagination. We would do well to explore imagination further.[4]

[1] I happened upon a talk by Dr. Richard Ogle at the Bath Royal in 2005 (I had not seen it before), which celebrates the publication of Mindsight as reintroducing the imagination into the study of mind. It used to be regarded with suspicion (Plato, Christianity, etc.).

[2] See my “Agency and Imagination”.

[3] See my “Imagination and Free Will”.

[4] The higher flights of imagination, in art and science and philosophy, are based on a faculty universal in our species—presumably one that is biologically grounded. Language itself is made possible by the imagination, because meaning is a matter of grasping possibilities (see chapter 12 of Mindsight).

Imagination and Free Will

Discussions of free will typically focus on bodily action, trivial or momentous. Is such action compatible with determinism? Is it free in the ordinary compatibilist sense? But that is not the only kind of action that can be described as free: there are also acts of the imagination. About this kind of action, I would say two things: (a) such actions are not free from the past, and (b) they are free from coercion.[1] For causation by the past (and present) is not a kind of coercion. You are free to do things if you are not coerced and wish to do them, but you are not free from your own mental and physical nature—it determines what do you, down to the last detail. You are free to imagine what you want to imagine, even though your wants (etc.) determine what you choose to imagine. I think the case of imagination brings out clearly the truth of these two propositions. First, you are clearly not free from your own nature in your imaginative life: what you imagine is uniquely fixed by the totality of impinging physical and mental causes—your brain and your mind. In particular, your imaginings are a function of your desires and experiences; and of course, you are not free from those—why would you want to be? No one ever imagines things wildly at variance with everything they know, desire, and have experienced. No two brains could be exactly alike and yet one has an imaginative life quite different from the other. If they did, it would be random and pointless—like having a belief completely unrelated to everything else about you. This kind of “freedom” is a fanciful myth. Yet you are perfectly free to imagine whatever you feel like imagining—what you feel like imagining being part of your antecedent nature. No one is stopping you—and no illness or brain failure either. Your imagination is working perfectly, and it follows your general (and detailed) psychology (and physiology). You have all the freedom of imagination you could ever want; specifically, you can imagine whatever you desire. Indeed, your freedom in this respect is greater than your bodily freedom, since the body is far more subject to coercion and malfunction. Other people can force you to act against your will by causing your body to move (or not move) in certain ways, but they can’t do that to your imagination. They can imprison your body but not your mind: in jail you can imagine not being in jail—you can perform this act (but not the act of bodily escape). Also, your body can fail you in your desired projects and often does, but your imagination is a reliable partner—it goes where you tell it. You can be in imaginary heaven while stuck in bodily hell. Other people can’t even tell what you are imagining, as they can tell what your body is up to. Thus, the imagination is a haven of freedom, unlike the body which must cope with the physical world. I think few people would deny that this is a case of genuine freedom, and it is perfectly compatible with psychophysical determinism. That is, they would accept a compatibilist account of imaginative freedom: the imagination is clearly free to do as it pleases, though just as clearly not free from the past, because determined by it. The body, by contrast, is not generally free of coercion or constraint—we can’t do whatever we want with it. We are not free to move about as we wish and we are not free to flout natural laws and we are not free to defy our bodily state: but we can do all these things with our imagination. It is paradigmatically free. Compatibilism is true of it, clearly. Freedom is manifest in it. The body acts as a kind of burden, limiting our freedom to do as we desire, but the imaginative mind is anything but. Intuitively, acts of imagining are genuinely free—as free as a bird. There is no impediment to enjoying the freedom inherent in imagination—the indulging of wishes. The imagination says yes to desire, however forbidden or suppressed by external forces. In the light of this, there should be no sense of tension between the freedom of the imagination and its determination by the past, except an equivocation on the word “free”. Freedom of the imagination is in no whit undermined by its dependence on the past.[2]

[1] See my “Two Concepts of Freedom” and other essays on free will on this blog.

[2] Only if our imagination were controlled by some external power and detached from our actual desires (etc.) would we not have freedom of the imagination. But this is not actually the case, barring some exotic tale about mind control from elsewhere. Normally, we imagine what we genuinely desire not what someone else has brainwashed us into thinking we desire. To the extent that this is not true, we are not free. Sheer determinism, however, does not undermine our status as free agents.

Agency and Imagination

The topics of agency and imagination are generally treated separately in contemporary philosophy, but they are closely connected. Imagination is implicated in agency and agency is part of imagination. This is not difficult to see: we often imagine what we intend to do, and imagining is an act in its own right. We act imaginatively and we imagine actively. The philosophy of action needs to incorporate the imagination, and the philosophy of imagination needs to bring in agency.  This may change both action theory and imagination theory. The details, however, are not simple. It is clear that I may imagine a future action before performing it, this playing a role in how I act (or whether I act), but how widespread is this phenomenon? Is it rare or common, even universal? Does it characterize a distinctive class of actions (imagination-driven actions)? It is true that I am constantly imagining many actions that I might end up performing, but is every action I perform preceded by an act of imagination? That seems like stretching a point, since many of my actions are quite unreflective and automatic—and what about animal actions? But maybe imagination is less conscious and deliberate than we think—we don’t always notice it, pay attention to it. Don’t we somehow envisage every action we perform—anticipate it, plan it, mentally represent it? Doesn’t the brain have to form some sort of picture of it, a model, a schema? Maybe what we call imagination comes in many forms, from the subconscious and routine to the conscious and creative. I reach for my cup enacting a mind-brain motor representation of the act that controls how my hand moves; I can also carry out a series of actions intended to bring about a future I have consciously planned and seen in my mind’s eye (say, a trip to a foreign land). These are both acts of imagination, but they differ in their degree of presence to introspective awareness. I don’t think we should preclude this view of things, and it does offer a nicely uniform account of how imagination and action relate. The question is empirical; conceptually, it seems like a feasible theory. Action is always the result of a prior (and perhaps simultaneous) imaginative construction; the cognitive science of action is imagination-based. The organism mentally represents what it is about to do, and the name of this faculty is “imagination”. When training yourself to perform a certain type of action, you are training your brain to form an accurate and usable picture of the action, this being causally involved in producing the action (the competence behind the performance). Your brain doesn’t just brutely cause the action without any kind of internal guidance—how could it? The action is controlled and fine-tuned by the internal picture (sketch, image, blueprint). In any case, a great many human actions are the result of clearly imaginative acts, as when you picture yourself going to the supermarket and then go. If this is true, then we need to include imagination in our philosophy of action, not just desires, beliefs, and intentions. Actions are imaginings realized.

What about imagination as a species of action? Here things are more straightforward: imagining is a type of action like bodily action. It is therefore subject to the same principles as action generally. It is motivated, rational (though not always), intentional, known about directly not inferentially, skilled or unskilled, habitual or novel, done self-consciously or absent-mindedly, etc. However, certain features of bodily action are less obviously present in acts of imagination, and we should highlight these. First, are there such things as sub-intentional imaginative actions analogous to rolling the tongue around the mouth or finger-tapping or head-bobbing? You can do these things without knowing you are, but can you imagine things without knowing you are? That seems difficult to comprehend because you typically know your mental images, while bodily events can escape your attention (they are outside your mind). Could you repeatedly imagine someone’s face and not be aware of it? On the other hand, not all imagining is intentional in the sense that it is deliberate or planned; an image can suddenly pop into your consciousness seemingly from nowhere—you didn’t intend to form it. But it sounds funny to say that an action popped into your body when you did it without thinking. The bodily act and the imaginative act don’t map neatly onto each other here. Second, how are trying and acting related in the two cases? You can try to move your finger and fail because of paralysis, but can you try to imagine a red patch and fail? Is there such a thing as paralysis of the imagination, permanent or temporary? Have you ever tried to imagine passing a test and not been able to—yet you can try to pass a test and fail to. Trying to move your body is up you but succeeding isn’t, but trying to move you mind and succeeding are inseparable. How could you try to imagine a cube and fail? If this is right, then we can’t analyze imagining as consisting of two components: a trying component and a succeeding component. The body may fail to implement the trying, but the mind always obliges—you just have to try and hey presto. There is no counterpart to the bodily movement in the case of imaginative action, so not all action is analyzable into a trying part and a succeeding part—a sort of mental body that may or may not be up to the job. Third, weakness of will: is it applicable to both? It is true that I might imagine things I wish not to imagine, as I can physically do things I wish not to do, but the cases are dissimilar in that morality and prudence don’t apply to both equally. You can’t act immorally in the imagination, since no one is affected thereby, and imagining taking a drink while sworn off alcohol will not get you drunk. Even if there is such a thing as weakness of the imaginative will, it isn’t consequential in the way bodily action is. So what if I can’t stop imagining boozing and hitting people, no one is suffering harm. No amount of weakness of will purely in the sphere of imagination will amount to doing anything bad, but the body is another matter. You can let your imagination run amok and nothing untoward happen—that is one of its great virtues. It may even be a good thing to have a weak imaginative will, an escape valve. Fourth, are there breakdowns of imaginative action like breakdowns of bodily action? Is there a Tourette’s syndrome of the imagining mind? Apparently not: the imagination isn’t subject to these chaotic motor oddities; it doesn’t have tics and spasms. It may be deranged or insane, but it isn’t detached from the will. Nor does it suffer from muscular fatigue or cold weather or laziness or numbness or broken bones. Bodily action is fraught with danger and prone to injury, but mental action is free of these impediments and risks. We never need the analogue of physiotherapy. Imaginative action is more godlike, less vulnerable to malfunction. In sum, imagination is like bodily action in some important respects but unlike it in others; accordingly, the general principles enunciated by orthodox philosophy of action only partially apply to it.

Which came first? You might think it must be bodily action because organisms acted before they had anything deserving to be called imagination. Imagining must be some sort of internalization of this (moving in the head, as it were). But this is not clearly correct because such early forms of bodily movement may not be actions in any real sense, as movements of inanimate objects are not. Actions proper have traces of mind in them—desires, intentions, the will. If we take that view, then mental actions came first—acts of will occasioned by mental states. We call certain bodily movements (not all) actions because of their close relation to inner actions such as reasoning and deciding. It may be that imagination came before properly intentional external action; it was when organisms began to imagine possibilities that they began to choose and therefore act in the full sense of the word (before that they were just bending with the breeze, loafing basically). Action is selecting from among envisaged alternatives, and imagination does the envisaging. If so, the philosophy of mental action is basic and prior, temporally and conceptually. The bodily movement considered in itself was never a type of action; only in combination with intending and trying does it count as an action (a deed, a doing, an expression of will). The philosophy of action should thus start with the imagination and only then extend to the realm of bodily behavior—first the spirit, then the flesh. Our very idea of the animal body is actually infused with mental concepts; considered just as flesh and bone it isn’t an animal body at all. A dead body isn’t a body, just a carcass or ex-body. It is a relic of materialist behaviorism to suppose that the human and animal body is the same as the lump of matter that composes it. Philosophy of action is not the study of this but of the mind-infused agent, and this includes the agent’s imagination. In the beginning was the mentaldeed.[1]

[1] The aphorism “In the beginning was the deed” is commonly taken to encapsulate a behaviorist philosophy, but properly understood it is independent of that viewpoint and expresses the centrality of the active, best exemplified by the will (Schopenhauer not J.B. Watson). Energy not matter, change not static forms. Doing not being. The imagination is the epitome of the active—fast, mutable, spontaneous, energetic, untiring.

Sexual Enticement in Academia (a Fable)

Let’s consider a hypothetical case (I emphasize hypothetical). Suppose we live in a society in which a certain problem is perceived to exist in the universities—the problem of sexual enticement. The problem arises when a student, male or female, entices a professor, male or female, into a sexual relationship in exchange for special treatment. The student may feel no such attraction, or they may, but the main motive is to secure professional advantages—good grades, grant money, research assistantships, etc. We can suppose that the targeted professors tend to be lonely types susceptible to such advances. The advances need not be strictly sexual but may extend to romantic but platonic relationships. They may lead to good work being done by student and professor together and to professional advancement by the student; no one is harmed thereby. However, such relationships are frowned upon on grounds of unfair favoritism and are forbidden by the university’s by-laws. Still, they occur. In fact, there is quite a lot of it about—enticement and acquiescence. It’s agreed to be something of a problem.

Suppose now that there have recently been some high-profile rather flagrant cases of sexual enticement that have made the headlines (journalists love these stories). Students have successfully enticed certain famous professors into some egregious reciprocation, amounting to good money going to the student in question. It is getting to be a national scandal. Politicians have gotten involved. The university decides to crack down on this “epidemic of sexual enticement”. Administrators are afraid, with some reason, that it will affect funding: people won’t contribute money to the university if a lot of this sexual enticement nonsense is going on. They thus start to impose strict penalties on this kind of “sexual misconduct”: the student’s working relationship to the professor may be severed, which may derail the student’s career, and the professor may be subject to disciplinary action too (say, pay reduction). In extreme cases, the student may be expelled and her (or his) life ruined, but the crime is deemed sufficiently abominable that these measures are thought justified. This scourge must be stopped; we have zero tolerance for sexual enticement; etc. In a couple of cases harsh treatment has led to suicide on the part of the student (though never the professor), but this outcome is judged acceptable given the gravity of the offence—public ridicule and denunciation of the student are only to be expected in such a case. And indeed, some cases have been notably egregious—like that serial enticer from Bathsheba College who made a fortune from weak-willed professors, male and female (she was thought to be highly alluring). The hope is that such sexual and romantic quid pro quos would be eliminated from the universities: just say no to sexual enticement!

In truth, the atmosphere had become somewhat hysterical, fueled no doubt by the sexual element (people didn’t seem to care too much about simple embezzlement). People started to get rather worked-up about it, seeing it everywhere, even in simple friendship between student and professor. In fact, in a certain instance, things got out of hand. It happened like this. A student and a professor developed a warm relationship while engaged on a certain academic project. The student was very good and the project worthwhile (something in botany). There was no enticement and no sexual dimension (or even romantic) but it might be described as a loving relationship somewhat like a father-daughter relationship. However, another student in the same department grew suspicious and annoyed at their closeness and decided to report it to the authorities. He went to the human resource office and reported a case of sexual enticement (and complicity in enticement). The university officials, on being alerted to the situation, initiated an inquiry, summoning both parties for interview. They had had a couple of recent cases of this infringement of university rules and wanted to get on top of the situation, mindful of issues of public outrage and funding concerns. They concluded, however, that the report was false—there had been no such enticement, sexual or romantically platonic. The student and her professor were just good friends and (yes) quite fond of each other. There had been no impropriety at all. Still, as one seasoned dean pointed out, there could be a perception of impropriety, and the professor was actually rather well-known publicly. They needed to cover themselves in the event of bad publicity and consequent defunding, which seemed all too likely. But they could find nothing in the statutes that they could accuse the pair of, thus opening themselves up to accusations of being soft on sexual enticement. There were warm emails between the two that could be interpreted as verging on the enticing (“It was so nice to see you today” etc.). In the current political atmosphere these could be cited in support of a sexual enticement allegation. So, they decided to accuse the student of intending to initiate sexual enticement—involving what they called “micro-enticements” and “pre-enticement conduct”. They then severed pedagogical relations between the two and issued a reprimand to the professor for tolerating the student’s enticement-related intentions. This way they could claim to have punished the wrong-doers and therefore not face funding cuts for laxity about campus misbehavior. Nevertheless, the story made it to the college newspaper and then to the wider world, leading to the student having to leave the university and her career being destroyed. It was put about (falsely) by assorted enticement activists (generally disgruntled students) that this was a cover-up on the part of the administration, and that the student had blatantly seduced the professor in exchange for professional perks and a glowing reference letter. The last that was heard of her she was working in a Wendy’s somewhere, being unable to find another botany department willing to take her; she had been branded as a “predatory sexual enticer”. No matter that she denied it and that there was no evidence of it. Meanwhile the university administrators kept their jobs and got their pay raises. The sexual morals of the university had been preserved thanks to their zealous actions (and the funding kept coming in).[1]

[1] Let me repeat that this is intended as a cartoonish hypothetical story not a report of an actual course of events. I know of no actual situation that resembles this. The point is to put actual cases in a new light, revealing the political dynamics involved. It is also intended to be funny in a campus-novel kind of way—a satire, if you like.