Self-knowledge and imagination

Abstract

How do we know when we have imagined something? How do we distinguish our imaginings from other kinds of mental states we might have? These questions present serious, if often overlooked, challenges for theories of introspection and self-knowledge. This paper looks specifically at the difficulties imagination creates for Neo-Expressivist, outward-looking, and inner sense theories of self-knowledge. A path forward is then charted, by considering the connection between the kinds of situations in which we can reliably say that another person is imagining, and those in which we can say the same about ourselves. This view is a variation on the outward-looking approach, and preserves much of the spirit of Neo-Expressivism.

Keywords:

• imagination
• self-knowledge
• introspection
• Neo-Expressivism

Acknowledgements

Versions of this paper were presented at the Self-Knowledge, Psychiatry, and Folk Psychology conference at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and at the 2014 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. I am grateful to the audiences at both venues for their helpful critiques and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the Taft Research Center, University of Cincinnati.

Notes on contributor

Peter Langland-Hassan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati. Formerly, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests include theories of imagination, the nature of introspection, the cognitive role of inner speech, and the neuro-cognitive basis of auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia. He is currently working on a book on imagination.

Notes

1. Some will go further by characterizing propositional imagination as involving the taking of a distinct cognitive attitude toward a proposition, where this draws on elements of cognitive architecture over and above those governing other attitudes such as belief and desire. However, I argue elsewhere (Langland-Hassan 2012) that propositional imagining is a way of using one's standing beliefs to arrive at new judgments, and that doing so need not involve elements of cognitive architecture over and above one's ordinary beliefs and desires. Hence, my more neutral characterization of propositional imagination here.

2. As a referee notes, questions can be raised about whether this sort of pragmatic understanding of performance-equivalence is sufficient for understanding that one is in the mental state one self-ascribes through an avowal. For present purposes, however, I will grant the Neo-Expressivist view of self-knowledge with respect to these cases, in order to show how imagination presents difficulties nonetheless.

3. Byrne (2012b) qualifies and amends DES to account for several objections (such as that we sometimes do not want something we judge to be desirable). Here I aim only to give the flavor of his approach, not defend it in detail.

4. Some will object the kind of reliability guaranteed by BEL is too brute to count as knowledge. Byrne considers this objection in his own work. I admit to having a fairly austere conception of what knowledge requires. But my interest, in the end, is in how we in fact arrive at the kinds of beliefs we have about our own mental states – beliefs others are rarely apt to challenge – whether or not the processes by which we do so satisfy intuitions about what constitutes knowledge.

5. Learning to proceed in this way is not the same as coming to believe the conditional: if p, then I believe that p. To believe that conditional is close to believing in one's omniscience! For it is one thing to follow a procedure of the form, “If p, believe that you believe that p.” It is another to have the belief: “If p, then I believe that p.” The first is not a belief, but a rule one can either follow or not. Compare: “If you go swimming, wear your bathing suit” is a rule one might follow with respect to when to wear a bathing suit. But one could follow that rule without having the belief: “If I am swimming, then I am wearing my bathing suit.”

6. The issue of when infants and children understand false belief remains controversial. Some argue that the differential looking times of infants in studies modeled on the traditional false-belief task are evidence that an implicit awareness of false belief arises in infants as young as 15 months old (Onishi and Baillargeon 2005).

7. Though see Shea (2014) for an argument that such processes are “introspective” at least in the sense that they are meta-representational.

8. A referee questions whether a monitoring mechanism could be sensitive to relational properties of mental states, by tracking the causal source of the mental state (determining, e.g. that it resulted from stimulation of the sense modalities, and therefore is a perception). There are at least two prima facie problems with extending this idea to imagination: first, the cause of imaginings will presumably be the same as for other forms of stimulus-independent thought, leaving the inner sense unable to distinguish among them; and, second, any attempt to sharpen the account of the right kind of cause – stipulating, for example, that the cause will be an intention to imagine – will presuppose a prior account of how that (relationally defined) mental state is known, giving rise to a regress.

9. As a referee observes, IMAGINE IT does not obviously allow one to distinguish between when one is imagining an x as opposed to knowingly hallucinating an x. If sensory imaginings can occur unbidden, as many suppose (citing, e.g. songs stuck in the head), it is not clear how we should understand the difference between hallucination and unbidden sensory imagining. Until that is clarified, the corresponding question about self-knowledge cannot be clarified. For now I grant the point that IMAGINE IT would not allow one to distinguish one's hallucinations from one's sensory imaginings.

10. Appeals to imagination as a source of modal knowledge – or as “evidence” for beliefs about what is possible – have a long history in philosophy. Recent examples include Chalmers (2002), Kung (2010), and Yablo (1993).