Supposition and the Imaginative Realm: A Philosophical Inquiry 2018030865, 9781138223042, 9781315405940

Citation preview

Supposition and the Imaginative Realm

Supposition is frequently invoked in many fields within philosophy, including aesthetics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and epistemology. However, there is a striking lack of consensus about the nature of supposition. What is supposition? Is supposition a sui generis type of mental state or is it reducible to some other type of mental state? These are the main questions Margherita Arcangeli explores in this book. She examines the characteristic features of supposition, along the dimensions of phenomenology and emotionality, among others, in a journey through the imaginative realm. An informed answer to the question “What is supposition?” must involve an analysis of imagination, since supposition is so often defined in opposition to the latter. She assesses rival explanations of supposition putting forward a novel view, according to which the proper way of seeing supposition is as a primitive type of imaginative state. Supposition and the Imaginative Realm: A Philosophical Inquiry will be of great interest to students of philosophy of psychology, aesthetics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and epistemology. Margherita Arcangeli is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She is the author of several articles on imagination and other topics in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and aesthetics, among which are thought experiments, memory and the sublime.

This page intentionally left blank

Supposition and the Imaginative Realm A Philosophical Inquiry

Margherita Arcangeli

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Margherita Arcangeli The right of Margherita Arcangeli to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Arcangeli, Margherita, author. Title: Supposition and the imaginative realm : a philosophical inquiry / Margherita Arcangeli. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Routledge, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018030865| ISBN 9781138223042 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315405940 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Hypothesis. | Imagination (Philosophy) Classification: LCC B105.I49 A73 2018 | DDC 167--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030865 ISBN: 978-1-138-22304-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-40594-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

To my mother, from whom I learnt to walk in the imaginative realm. To Nicolò and Andrea, with whom I still venture into its unexplored territories.

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Acknowledgements Introducing supposition: To imagine or not to imagine, that is the question

ix

1

PART I

The Facets Of Supposition

11

1

13

Phenomenology 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

2

Emotionality 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6

3

The phenomenology claim 13 A rough taxonomy of the phenomenological realm 14 Different phenomenology claims 17 Summary 26 31

The Emotionality Claim 31 The strong interpretation of EC 32 The weak interpretation of EC 34 Emotional supposition and an indirect reading of EC 38 An output reading of EC 41 Summary 45

Participation 3.1 The Participation Claim 49 3.2 Supposition, imagination and their constraints 51 3.3 Different readings of the Participation Claim 55 3.4 Summary 62

49

viii 4

Contents Features proper to supposition 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

66

Introduction 66 Propositionality 68 Inferentiality 70 The relationship with will and truth 75 Summary 77

PART II

The nature of supposition

83

5

85

Supposition as non-imaginative 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

6

Introduction 85 Supposition and entertainment 86 Supposition and the doxastic domain 95 Primitivism and deflationism 102

Supposition as imaginative

106

6.1 Introduction 106 6.2 Cognitivism 106 6.3 Imaginative primitivism 115 Supposition and the imaginative realm: Remapping the territory References Index

131 136 143

Acknowledgements

My philosophical interest in the imaginative realm and supposition was born during my doctoral studies. In 2016, I decided to think afresh about these issues and write a book putting supposition under the spotlight. My deepest gratitude goes to Tony Bruce and Adam Johnson for having believed in my project and having made it possible. I would also like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for a Postdoctoral Researcher Fellowship, which financially supported me during the completion of this work. This book would not have been possible without the support of many people. My intellectual debt is due to Jérôme Dokic, who first disclosed to me the philosophical side of the imaginative realm and, since then, is an invaluable interlocutor, always encouraging and helpful. I owe a very important debt to Dimitri Coelho Mollo and Michael T. Stuart for having engaged closely with earlier versions of the manuscript; without their valuable feedback and constructive suggestions this work would be considerably weaker. Special thanks go to anonymous referees for compelling criticisms and inspiring comments. I am also very grateful to many of the philosophers I have interacted with at a number of conferences and events, as well as via email correspondence. In particular my thanks go to Gregory Currie, Julien Deonna, Steve Humbert Droz, Pascal Engel, Amy Kind, Uriah Kriegel, Andrea Lailach-Hennrich, Sean Landis, Peter Langland-Hassan, Julia Langkau, Aaron Meskin, Kevin Mulligan, Paul Noordhof, Roy Sorensen, Kathleen Stock, Daniela Tagliafico, and Fabrice Teroni. My gratitude extends to Fabian Dorsch, who unexpectedly died when I was working on the manuscript, but whose supportive attitude and stimulating discussions are still alive in my mind. Finally, words alone cannot express the thanks I owe to whoever I bothered with imaginative exercises and Enzo Fabio, Fabrizio, Giulia, Ilaria, Michela, Silvia, Silvia, Tania, Valerio, my Paris family and my S. Rocco family (Stefano and Dario included), who have always been there with their assistance, understanding and endless love.

This page intentionally left blank

Introducing supposition To imagine or not to imagine, that is the question

The activity of supposing is without doubt one of the most important forms of the imagination. Kevin Mulligan When imagination is discussed in the philosophical literature (…), it is generally agreed that imagining needs to be distinguished from supposing. Amy Kind1

It has been remarked that “the imagination appears to pose a problem too deep for proper acknowledgement. It is, so to speak, the missing mystery of philosophy” (Brann 1991, p. 3). This remark captured the idea that the widespread use of the term “imagination” at that time was rarely followed by a deep analysis. Given the extensive and still growing literature on imagination in philosophy of mind and beyond (see, e.g., contributions in Kind 2016a), Brann’s remark no longer captures the state of the art. Replace “imagination” with “supposition”, however, and what we get is a fair assessment of the current state of things: nowadays, it is supposition, rather than imagination, that is the missing mystery of philosophy. Two main questions arise: What is supposition intuitively? Why should we care about supposition? It is commonly maintained that supposition is involved in reductio ad absurdum arguments (e.g., “Galileo supposed that the speed of a body’s free fall increases proportionally to its weight”), in scientific reasoning when a hypothesis is put forward (e.g., “Galileo supposed that large and small bodies fall with the same speed”), or when a possibility is described in the course of counterfactual reasoning or projected into the future (e.g., “Suppose that Columbus died in July 1492”, “Suppose that a woman will win the next French presidential election”). Supposition is often considered to be a speculative mental state, a mental state that is “not constitutively constrained by truth” (Kind 2016b, p. 3). This feature of supposing makes it similar to other speculative mental phenomena, such as assuming, accepting, conceiving, entertaining, hypothesising and imagining. It is far from clear how supposition relates to all these mental phenomena.

2

Introducing supposition

Very often in the literature “assuming” and “supposing” have been used as synonyms (e.g., Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; Goldman 2006b; Dub 2017). Some authors have taken supposition to be a type of acceptance (e.g., Stalnaker 1984), whereas others deny this (e.g., Cohen 1992). It has been underlined that supposing should be distinguished from both conceiving and entertaining (e.g., Balcerak Jackson 2016), but quite often “supposing” is understood as “entertaining” (e.g., Doggett & Egan 2007), and it is occasionally acknowledged that the relationship between supposing and conceiving is a quite complicated matter (e.g., Gendler & Hawthorne 2002). Something similar can be said about how hypothesising and supposing are related (e.g., the latter is defined in terms of the former by White 1990). An in-depth analysis of the relationship between supposition and all these mental phenomena is beyond the scope of this book. The main focus shall be on the relationship between supposition and imagination. Such an analysis not merely clarifies the relations between two important mental phenomena that are often contrasted, which is in itself a meritorious endeavour, but more importantly sheds bright light on the very nature of supposition. Supposition has been mainly defined by defect: it lacks properties that imagination has. However, as we will see, a positive understanding of supposition can be given. In consequence, during the discussion, some of the aforementioned issues shall be illuminated (e.g., how supposing relates to accepting and entertaining – see Chapter 5). Although supposition is mostly contrasted with imagination, it is an open question whether suppositions are imaginings. The big divide is between authors according to whom supposition lies outside the imaginative realm (e.g., Peacocke 1985; White 1990; Gendler 2000; Kind 2013; Balcerak Jackson 2016), and authors who think that supposition is a variety of imagination (e.g., Meinong 1902; Flew 1953; Hannay 1971; Mulligan 1999; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; Nichols & Stich 2003; Goldman 2006a and b; Weinberg & Meskin 2006b; Arcangeli 2014). There are different ways to spell out each position, however. One aim of this book is to delve deeper into these competing accounts of supposition. An informed answer to the question “What is supposition?” must therefore involve an analysis of imagination. But do we have a definition of imagination robust enough, on which most philosophers agree? Unfortunately, the answer is “no”: there is considerable disagreement about how to define the imaginative realm. As highlighted by Edmund Furlong: “A philosopher surveying the territory defined by the term ‘imagination’ finds it a dense and tangled piece of country” (Furlong 1961, p. 15). I believe, however, that there is a common core in attempted definitions of such a piece of country, even belonging to very different and apparently alternative approaches to the issue. This is to see imagination as the capacity to mimic or to “re-create” non-imaginative kinds of mental state.2 What exactly do we mean by “re-creation”? What is the nature of the relationship between imagination and non-imaginative mental states? The mental or

Introducing supposition

3

cognitive dimension is typically believed to be the most appropriate for interpreting this relationship. Imagination presents itself as a complex mental activity that re-creates non-imaginative mental states, producing mental states similar, from a phenomenological and/or functional point of view, to the nonimaginative counterparts re-created. Paraphrasing Alvin Goldman, an imagining is the re-creation “of a mental state by a mental state” (Goldman 2006b, p. 51, fn 10). Importantly, varieties of imagination do not simply share some functional and/or phenomenological features with their counterparts: they preserve or inherit, so to speak, most of the defining features of their counterparts. The fact that imaginings preserve some features of their counterparts is consistent with phenomenological and/or functional dissimilarities, as well as with the possibility that there are different overall cognitive underpinnings for imaginings and their counterparts. In fact, as I will clarify throughout the book, imaginings and their counterparts diverge with respect to the dimensions revealing core features characterising all imaginings. This view has often been associated with the simulationist approach to imagination (endorsed, among others, by Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft, and by Goldman). Indeed, simulationists hold that imaginings simulate – that is, mimic – other mental states, such as perceptions, beliefs and desires (e.g., Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, p. 12; Goldman 2006b, p. 42). However, understanding imagination in the recreativist way suggested above does not entail a strong kind of simulationism, according to which each of several types of imagination shares with a proper non-imaginative counterpart some cognitive mechanism (or set of information-processing systems), which can be re-deployed off-line. Many philosophers have held the view that imaginings share a “structural affinity” (Weinberg & Meskin 2006a, p. 225) with other non-imaginative mental states, without endorsing strong simulationism (e.g., Husserl 1901; Meinong 1902; Mulligan 1999; Peacocke 1985; Weinberg & Meskin 2006a and b). For this reason I take the notion of re-creative imagination to be a good starting philosophical characterisation of the imagination. Divergences among philosophers start when the following points are at issue: 1 2

the heterogeneity of imagination – that is, how many types of imagination there are; the scope of imagination – that is, for which purposes imagination can be used.3

Alexius von Meinong suggested a strong hypothesis about the imaginative realm. He wrote that “the exertions of the imagination in the broadest sense” make up “one half” of “the manifestations of the mental life” (Meinong 1902, p. 286 – see also Mulligan 1999, p. 55 and Goldman 2006a, p. 47). According to this fifty-fifty hypothesis, for each type of non-imaginative mental state there would be an imaginative homologue. On the other extreme of the spectrum there are philosophers who maintain that imagination is akin only to

4

Introducing supposition

one type of mental state, either perception (e.g., Kind 2001) or belief (e.g., Nichols 2004). Between these extremes, lie the moderates. While, according to some views, imagination is able to re-create more than one type of, but not all, non-imaginative mental states, other views are neutral with respect to the exact numbers of varieties of imagination.4 In this book I will follow such a neutral stance. However, I will take as a plausible starting point the idea that there are at least two varieties of the imagination: while one type of imagination has sensory perception as its non-imaginative counterpart, another type has belief as its counterpart. We may call the former “sensory imagination” and the latter “cognitive imagination”.5 When imagination re-creates perception, there is a psychological similarity between the subject’s sensory imaginings and percepts. For instance, if Emma visually imagines a lilac, her mental state bears some phenomenological similarities with the way it feels to perceive a lilac, though, in normal conditions, she can feel a difference, being able to tell whether she is imagining rather than perceiving. The perception-like nature of sensory imagination would make it appropriate for some tasks similar to those played by percepts (e.g., to consider how a burgundy lilac bush would fit in an empty spot of the garden). Likewise for cognitive imagination: it preserves most features of its non-imaginative counterpart, belief, and its belief-like nature makes it suitable for specific tasks (e.g., to imagine a planet like ours, but where the watery stuff has a different chemical composition). Over the course of the book I shall address the question of which features cognitive imagination and belief do and do not share, undermining the idea that the former is a type of the latter, and strengthening the claim that cognitive imagination re-creates belief (see, especially, Chapters 3 and 6). This discussion shall bring us to clarify the relationship between sensory and cognitive imagination. On the one hand, I will dwell on some dimensions considered helpful for distinguishing these varieties of imagination, such as the presence of mental imagery and propositionality. Indeed, very often sensory imagination is defined as the capacity to have mental images in a given sense modality (visual, auditory, etc.), and cognitive imagination as the capacity to consider propositional representations without commitment to their truth (e.g., Price 1965; Carruthers 2002; McGinn 2004). On the other hand, I will stress how other dimensions reveal commonalities between sensory and cognitive imagination (e.g., relationship with the will and truth), supporting the idea that imaginings form an ontologically coherent whole. This idea is somewhat questionable, insofar as it may be argued that sensory and cognitive imagination have essentially distinct natures due to their re-creating mental states of different kinds (i.e., perception and belief). I will show that this worry is misguided, since imaginings have distinctive features in common that group them together into a single kind, and, most importantly, they do not preserve some of their counterparts’ features that make them different kinds.

Introducing supposition

5

Although I shall start by positing only two varieties of the imagination, I hope to show that there is at least a third: this is my new account of supposition that sees it as a type of imagination, but distinct from both sensory and cognitive imagination. My goal is to remap the “dense and tangled piece of country” which is the imaginative realm, and show that supposition has its own territories therein. The question of which mental activities can be explained by appealing to the imagination is still another source of fierce philosophical disagreement. There are many domains in which imagination seems to play a pivotal role, such as modal epistemology and psychology (e.g., Nichols 2006a), counterfactual reasoning (e.g., Currie & Ravenscroft 2002), dreams (e.g., Ichikawa 2009), delusions (e.g., McGinn 2004), empathy (e.g., Goldman 1993), mindreading (e.g., Goldman 2006a), pretense (e.g., Doggett & Egan 2007), fiction (e.g., Walton 1994), thought experiments (e.g., Gendler 2004). Supposition has also been frequently invoked as a key notion in many of these philosophical debates. For instance, it has been argued that we can have a better grip on the nature of our engagement with works of fiction if we distinguish supposition from “a more substantial sense of imagining” (Walton 1994, p. 48). Many scholars regard supposition to play a small role, if any, in fiction, and, on this basis, try to draw a clear-cut distinction between supposition and imagination. The allure of such a move stems from the features supposition is commonly credited with. Supposition is said to lack a phenomenology, to be emotionally “cold” and to involve little participation. By contrast, imagination is understood as having phenomenal character, being emotionally “hot” and demanding strong engagement. The consumption of fiction would require that a reader entertains mental states that can be accompanied by a phenomenal character, emotional responses and strong engagement. For these reasons, supposition is taken to play a marginal role, if any, in fiction. This understanding of supposition is also taken to explain some phenomena connected to our engagement with fiction, such as imaginative resistance affecting imagination but not supposition (see Chapters 2 and 3), and the perspectival or self-involving nature of imagination (see Chapter 3). The notion of supposition seems also essential for understanding thought experimentation. It is widely accepted that imaginative capacities are recruited by thought experimenters (see, e.g., Meynell 2014; Stuart 2017). Still, the role of imagination in thought experiments is a controversial topic. Some authors give it a central role (e.g., Gendler 2004), while others maintain that thought experimenters could and should do without it, imagination being here a source of error (e.g., Norton 2004 and Stuart 2016 for a dissenting view). Moreover, it is an open issue which types of imagination are necessary for thought experimenting (e.g., Arcangeli 2010; Salis & Frigg forthcoming). Most scholars seem to focus on a sensory – specifically, visual – variety of imagination. Alternatively, it has been argued that cognitive imagination, rather than sensory imagination or supposition, is pivotal for thought

6

Introducing supposition

experimenting (see Salis & Frigg forthcoming). Others, however claim that supposition and conceiving, whether or not understood as types of imagination, are crucially involved in thought experiments (e.g., Sorensen 1992; Mulligan 1999; McAllister 2013; Balcerak Jackson 2016). These preliminary considerations suffice to show how important it is to get clear about supposition. The supposition/imagination distinction plays a crucial role in many distinct domains of enquiry. More generally, supposition is a key notion in many philosophical debates in different areas, such as aesthetics, logic, phenomenology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, epistemology. Despite the widespread recognition of the role supposition plays in many mental activities, there is a striking lack of consensus about the proper definition of supposition. Indeed, the following questions are rarely addressed as such in the literature: What is supposition? Is supposition a sui generis type of mental state or is it reducible to some other type of mental state? These are the leading questions of this book, whose main objective is twofold. On the one hand, this book is meant to fill a gap in the literature by offering a detailed overview of the state of the art about supposition in contemporary philosophy. The book comprises two parts. While the first part deals with the characterisation of supposition, the second part explores different theories about its nature. On the other hand, the book aims at showing the liabilities of both the arguments against the idea that supposition is a type of imagination, and the arguments that reduce supposition to other varieties of imagination recognised by the literature (typically, cognitive imagination). I shall argue that supposition is a sui generis type of imagination, different from both sensory and cognitive imagination. I conclude this Introduction with a brief summary of each chapter. Before that, however, I would like to make a methodological remark. My enquiry will mostly be driven by pre-theoretical intuitions, such as phenomenological contrasts, and theoretical notions, such as the notion of acceptance. I aim at offering a theory of supposition able to explain the main features of the folk notion of supposition, but also to put it under the light of philosophical scrutiny, so as to yield a clearer theoretical concept. As I will stress throughout the book, ordinary language is at best a heuristic guide to the nature of a psychological category. That is, I shall not offer a conceptual analysis, but rather an “explanatory theory” of supposition, as Kathleen Stock would put it. As she stresses, an “explanatory theory of x is not aimed simply at recovery of the conditions governing the folk concept of x, but aims informatively to supplement or even in some cases transform our current understanding of x” (Stock 2017, p. 6). Moreover, I will pay less attention to the psychological literature, because I take this work of theoretical clarification to be a precondition not only for a proper understanding of psychological work, but also for the development of relevant experimental studies on supposition. My account of supposition thereby poses solid theoretical bases for the empirical study of the role of supposition in cognition, as well as of its relations to other varieties of imagination.

Introducing supposition

7

PART I: The facets of supposition Chapter 1: Phenomenology It has been maintained that imagining has a phenomenal character, whereas this is not the case for supposing. I call this “the Phenomenology Claim”. Among the authors who defend this claim, some deny that supposition belongs to the imaginative realm, whereas others draw a distinction between two different types of imagination – with and without phenomenal character, supposition being the latter. However, it is doubtful that all these scholars are invoking the same claim. I offer a detailed overview of various interpretations of the Phenomenology Claim, depending on the scope of the relevant notion of “phenomenal character”, which may refer to at least five different phenomena: the sensory phenomenology proper to perceptual experiences, phenomenologies proper to bodily experiences, emotional phenomenology, cognitive phenomenology and the phenomenology proper to imaginings. On the basis of these different meanings of “phenomenal character” very different interpretations of the Phenomenology Claim can be put forward. The upshot of this chapter is that there is room for claiming that supposition can involve a phenomenal character, after all. Chapter 2: Emotionality A quite uncontroversial claim is that imagination has the capacity to elicit emotional responses. This has led many to draw a contrast between imagination and supposition. A widespread claim, which I call “the Emotionality Claim”, is that imagination but not supposition is intimately linked to emotion. In more cognitive jargon, imagination would be connected to the affect system (i.e., the mechanisms that produce emotional responses), whereas supposition would not. Similarly to the Phenomenology Claim, the Emotionality Claim is open to several interpretations. This chapter provides an indepth analysis of the Emotionality Claim which sorts out these different readings and ways to distinguish supposition and imagination. I shall argue that existing readings of the Emotionality Claim fail to properly account for the emotional asymmetry between imagination and supposition. I shall advance a new reading that does justice to such asymmetry by considering also the outputs, and not merely the inputs, of the affect system. Chapter 3: Participation Another source of contrast between imagination and supposition would stem from the fact that imagination appears to involve a kind of participation or engagement, where supposition does not. On a closer look, such a claim, which I call “the Participation Claim”, can be seen as a generic formulation of both the Phenomenology Claim and the Emotionality Claim: if the

8

Introducing supposition

relevant kind of participation is phenomenological, we end up with the former, if it is emotional, we get the latter. But, there are other interpretations of the Participation Claim that make it a claim apart. In this chapter, I start by considering two features characterising supposition that can be seen as deriving from the participatory difference between supposition and imagination, namely its freedom (i.e., there is almost no limitation to what can be supposed) and fixed nature (i.e., once something is supposed, we have to stick to the given supposed content). Then I turn to different readings of the Participation Claim, assessing how and to what extent they are able to account for these features of supposition. The upshot of this chapter is that all interpretations of the Participation Claim are neutral on whether supposition is a variety of imagination, since they can be seen as drawing distinctions between supposition and other varieties of imagination (e.g., sensory and cognitive imagination) without ruling out the possibility that supposition as well belongs to the imaginative realm. Chapter 4: Features proper to supposition This chapter offers a characterisation of supposition that can be widely accepted. Such a characterisation emerges from bringing together the outcomes of previous chapters with an analysis of supposition along four dimensions: propositionality, inferentiality, will-dependence and truth-dependence. First, supposition is a propositional attitude. Second, the inferential relations between suppositions are similar to those at play between beliefs. Third, we are free to suppose as we please. Fourth, supposition is not committed to facts and to what is true, in the way, for instance, belief is (recall the idea that supposition is a speculative mental state). The goal of the chapter is to provide the reader with a substantial picture of the features of supposition, which can be acknowledged by almost all of the sides in this debate, which is a necessary point of departure for an adequate examination of views about the nature of supposition, to which I turn in Part II.

PART II: The nature of supposition Chapter 5: Supposition as non-imaginative In this chapter I survey non-imaginative views of supposition. We can distinguish between at least three views: reductionism, primitivism and deflationism. The more common view is reductionism. According to it, supposition can be reduced to non-imaginative types of mental states. Three candidates for such a reduction are: mere entertaining (or grasping of a propositional content), belief and acceptance. Primitivism claims that supposition is a sui generis mental state irreducible to other mental states such as imagination, entertaining, belief or acceptance. Deflationism, finally, does not take supposition to be a genuine mental state, seeing it as neither reducible to some non-imaginative mental state

Introducing supposition

9

nor as being a sui generis one. I will argue that, given the shortcomings of competing views, only primitivism is a live option. Chapter 6: Supposition as imaginative A competing account has it that supposition is a type of imagination. There are at least two imaginative views: cognitivism and imaginative primitivism. Cognitivism sees supposition as cognitive imagination – if not imagination tout court. Cognitivism comes in at least two grades: (C1) supposition is nothing but cognitive imagination; (C2) supposition is a species of cognitive imagination. Proponents of C2 maintain that there are cognitive imaginings that are not suppositions, and put forward sophisticated accounts aimed at proving that there are only quantitative differences between supposition and cognitive imagination. According to imaginative primitivism, supposition is a sui generis type of imagination different from both sensory and cognitive imagination. The features distinguishing supposition, rather than banishing it from the imaginative realm, show only that it is not cognitive imagination, given its non-belief-like nature. In the version of imaginative primitivism I shall defend, acceptance emerges as the counterpart of supposition. Thus enlarging the range of possible counterparts of imaginative states, the features proper to supposition are satisfactorily accounted for.

Notes 1 Mulligan (1999, p. 55); Kind (2001, p. 9). 2 This definition of imagination is not meant to capture all uses of the ordinary or folk notion of imagination. While the latter tends indeed to highlight a similarity between imagination and perception, it involves many further aspects that make it a highly flexible, and consequently slippery notion. Sometimes the verb “to imagine” or the adjective “imaginative” are employed to pick out phenomena other than exercises of the imagination. For this reason I will be cautious about using ordinary language as a theoretical guide. For instance, quite often in ordinary language imagination is associated with creative thinking. This has led some philosophers to posit an additional kind of imagination, namely creative imagination (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002). I believe there is room for challenging the idea that the latter cannot be reduced to re-creative imagination. This issue, however, is beyond the scope of the present work. 3 There is a third issue showing disagreements among philosophers, namely the question about the cognitive architecture underpinning imagination. This is the main divergence between two prominent competing approaches: simulationism and single-code theory (e.g., Nichols & Stich 2003; Nichols 2004; Weinberg & Meskin 2006a and b). Both approaches agree in thinking that the similarity between imaginings and counterparts is found at the sub-personal level. However, single-code theorists reject the simulationist idea that imaginings re-use off-line their counterparts’ cognitive mechanisms, maintaining that imaginings belong to a different representational system. As this is an empirical dispute concerning the cognitive implementation of the imagination and is only indirectly related to questions about its nature, I will leave it largely aside. At any rate, despite first appearances, these

10

Introducing supposition

theories share considerable common ground: they both instantiate a form of simulationism, namely homomorphic functional simulationism (Arcangeli 2013). 4 For instance, among simulationists, Currie and Ravenscroft and Goldman disagree about the heterogeneity of imagination. They agree in thinking that there are perception-like, belief-like and desire-like imaginings, but contrary to Goldman, Currie and Ravenscroft have raised doubts about the existence of imaginative emotion. Moreover, they have explicitly pointed out that the fact that some types of nonimaginative mental states have imaginative homologues does not entitle us to claim that each non-imaginative type of mental state is the counterpart of an imaginative variety (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, pp. 189–191). In collaborative work (Dokic & Arcangeli 2015a), I put forward a taxonomy of the imagination that is neutral with respect to Meinong’s hypothesis. 5 The expression “sensory imagination” is quite often employed to refer to perception-like imagination (e.g., Martin 2002; Gendler 2016). As for “cognitive imagination”, I borrow the terminology from McGinn 2004. Sometimes the expression “cognitive imagination” seems to be used in a different, wider sense. For instance, Weinberg and Meskin (2006a – see also Weinberg 2008) seem to use it to refer to imagination tout court. Nonetheless, this is so because they take imagination as being only belief-like.

Part I

The Facets of Supposition

This page intentionally left blank

1

Phenomenology

1.1 The phenomenology claim In ordinary language “suppose” is sometimes used as a synonym for “imagine”. For instance, Eva might say to Mary either “I suppose that you will be late tonight” or “I imagine that you will be late tonight”. To take another example, a father, looking at his child who is playing a video game, might say either “I suppose that you have finished your homework” or “I imagine that you have finished your homework”. In both contexts the two sentences seem to be quite equivalent and “suppose” and “imagine” may be used interchangeably. This is not always the case, however. In some contexts the equivalence does not hold and “suppose” refers to a mental phenomenon quite different from imagining. It might be argued that we should distinguish imagination from supposition, since the former is a “phenomenologically distinctive” state “whose presence is not guaranteed by any supposition alone” (Peacocke 1985, p. 20). In order to explain what the phenomenological distinction between supposition and imagination is, and to introduce the notion of imagination he endorses, Christopher Peacocke suggests the following example: a man who has recently become deaf seated in a concert hall may (S) suppose that the orchestra is playing Mozart’s Linz Symphony (I) imagine that the orchestra is playing Mozart’s Linz Symphony According to Peacocke, even though these two sentences seem to capture the same idea, at the psychological level they refer to two different kinds of mental state. In the first case the deaf man would be just entertaining the thought about what the orchestra is playing. On the contrary in the second case the mental state of the deaf man is like a hearing in one’s head. By reproducing a specific phenomenology, that is what it is like or the way it feels (Nagel 1974)1 to hear Mozart’s Linz Symphony, his imagining is comparable to the experience of hearing Mozart’s Linz Symphony as he used to enjoy it. In Peacocke’s words, in the imaginative case the man is imagining “from the inside” being in an auditory conscious state, or better in an experience of hearing Mozart’s Linz Symphony. This would not be the case if he were merely supposing.

14

The facets of supposition

As emphasised in the introduction of the book, in the literature supposition is mainly defined in a negative way by stressing the features that imagination possesses and supposition lacks. Among these features is phenomenology. Imagination but not supposition is taken to involve a phenomenology or a phenomenal character. Let us call this hypothesis “the Phenomenology Claim” (hereafter PhenC). PhenC can be stated as follows: PhenC. All imaginings involve a phenomenology, whereas no supposition does. Peacocke seems to hold PhenC.2 Such a claim can be found explicitly stated in the works of other philosophers. For instance, both Amy Kind (2001) and Magdalena Balcerak Jackson (2016) hold that phenomenology is a necessary component of imagining, but not of supposing. They maintain that this justifies distinguishing imagination from supposition. A quote from Balcerak Jackson nicely illustrates PhenC: “While imagination involves a phenomenology familiar to us from mental states such as perceptual experiences and emotions, supposition intuitively does not require any such phenomenology (although supposing something might initiate a subsequent act of imagining)” (Balcerak Jackson 2016, p. 46). Note that PhenC is mostly taken to be compatible with the idea that sometimes supposition can be accompanied by a phenomenal character, but only in a non-intrinsic way. For instance, when supposing that my overweight friend Sarah sits on the wicker chair of her grandmother, or that a critic will badly react to the fact that the orchestra plays the adagio of Mozart’s Linz Symphony slightly slower on Tuesday than on Monday, my supposition can be accompanied by a phenomenology. However, the widespread idea is that these phenomenal characters seem to be detached from and not necessary for the suppositional act. It is not entirely clear whether all scholars who endorse PhenC have the same view in mind. On a first look it is quite intuitive what PhenC advances. It draws a clear-cut distinction between imagination and supposition: while imaginings have phenomenology, suppositions do not. On a closer look, however, PhenC does not seem fine-grained enough to capture how imagination and supposition can be distinguished at the level of phenomenology. Different claims that stand to PhenC in a precisification relation can be offered depending on the scope of the relevant notion of “phenomenology”. The latter may refer to very different phenomena. I shall briefly sketch what talking about phenomenology amounts to in the current philosophical literature (§1.2) and then turn to four precisified versions of PhenC (§1.3).

1.2. A rough taxonomy of the phenomenological realm In recent years, renewed interest in phenomenology has given rise to rich discussions concerning the possible types of phenomenology (see, e.g., Kriegel 2015; Chudnoff 2015; Montague 2016). It is typical of mental states with an

Phenomenology

15

experiential character that there is something it is like to be in that state. More generally we can say that a kind of mental state has a phenomenology, if its occurrences necessarily involve a qualitative feel. The questions are: Which are these experiential kinds of mental state? How many types of phenomenology are there? Quite uncontroversially philosophers of mind credit perception with an experiential character. Recall Peacocke’s example, hearing Mozart’s Linz Symphony feels a certain way. Hearing Richter’s Berlin By Overnight or Jobim’s The girl from Ipanema feels different. Still, there is a qualitative aspect common to all these experiences. There is something it is like to undergo an auditory experience, rather than a visual or an olfactory experience. All sensory (auditory, visual, olfactory, gustatory and tactile) experiences bring with them a certain qualitative feel. There is something it is like, for instance, to see a lilac, to smell the lilac’s pleasant fragrance, to savour a cup of Earl Grey tea, to touch a bergamot peel. Sensory experiences involve forms of what has been called “perceptual” or “sensory” phenomenology.3 We may wish to attribute a phenomenology even to experiences that go beyond the five conventional senses, such as thermal experiences (i.e., sensations of heat and cold), algedonic bodily experiences (i.e., sensations of pleasure and pain), proprioceptive or kinaesthetic experiences (i.e., one’s awareness of the spatial disposition of one’s body), the experience one has of one’s own action while or in acting (what philosophers of action call the “sense of agency” or the “sense of control” – see e.g., Haggard 2005 and Pacherie 2007). It is quite unanimously recognised that all these experiences have a qualitative aspect. There is a certain way it feels walking in the snow, seeing the whiteness of the snow, hearing the crackling of the steps, but there is also a way it feels to perceive the coldness and the (un)pleasantness it may cause, to be aware of the movements in the snow and of the effort one is making. It is more controversial, however, whether the phenomenal characters shown by thermal experiences, algedonic bodily experiences, proprioceptive experiences and the sense of agency are species of sensory phenomenology. Most philosophers of mind tend to consider algedonic phenomenology as a primitive type of phenomenology, thus irreducible to sensory phenomenology (Kriegel 2015). There is no clear consensus, however, about thermal experiences, proprioceptive experiences and the sense of agency. Moreover, for each of the latter at least two opposite views are open. Consider experiences one has of one’s own actions. On the one hand, it might be maintained that these experiences involve a phenomenology that can be entirely traced back to sensory phenomenology, either as a genuine species on par with visual or auditory forms of sensory phenomenology, or as reducible to one or more species of the latter. On the other hand, it might be claimed that the phenomenology involved in these experiences is another primitive along with sensory and algedonic phenomenology – what can be called “conative phenomenology”.4

16

The facets of supposition

For my purposes here, I do not need to adjudicate this debate. What is important is that if there are bodily experiences (e.g., sensations of pleasure and pain, sense of agency, …) involving sui generis bodily types of phenomenology (e.g., algedonic, conative, …), this is likely to have an impact on discussions about phenomenological differences between imagination and supposition. Thus, only in this provisional way, I will take on board the idea that bodily experiences involve primitive types of phenomenology, which are different from and irreducible to sensory phenomenology. Similar considerations can be brought to bear regarding other mental states extensively discussed in the literature, namely emotions. Although emotions are among the mental states philosophers typically consider when they talk about experiential mental states showing a phenomenal character, it is controversial how to account for their phenomenology. Emotions have a phenomenology, that is each emotion is accompanied by a characteristic feeling. If a subject is disgusted, her experience of being disgusted involves a qualitative feel (often described as revulsion). Similarly, there is something it is like to feel joy, or sadness, or anger. A question arises: In order to account for the qualitative feel involved in emotions, do we have to posit an additional primitive type of phenomenology – what can be called “emotional phenomenology”? As for bodily experiences, at least two options face us. On the one hand, the answer might be positive. On the other hand, it might be claimed, in contrast, that emotional phenomenology can be traced back, or even reduced to, primitive phenomenologies (e.g., sensory, algedonic and conative phenomenology).5 In this case as well I will remain neutral, accepting the existence of emotional phenomenology for the purpose of seeing how this can affect discussion of PhenC. As there is some way it feels to have mental states such as disgust, pain, happiness, seeing green or smelling a lilac, at first glance the same does not hold for believing. It seems that there is no what it is like to believe, say, that Spain’s economy is barely growing, or that salty water boils less quickly. This is not to say that beliefs cannot be accompanied by a sensation or a qualitative feel. For example, when my belief that the Earl Grey tea is flavoured with bergamot occurs, it might be accompanied by a sensation of bergamot’s fragrance, of its pleasantness, as in the case of a perceptual or algedonic experience of a cup of Earl Grey tea. However, since, contrary to the perceptual or algedonic cases, the same belief may occur without any qualitative feel, the phenomenology is taken to be inessential to the belief. It might be argued that at least some beliefs do essentially have a phenomenology. Kind suggests that this might be the case for “some of our demonstrative beliefs about colours” (Kind 2001, p. 93). Emma, while looking at an autumnal tree, might form the belief “That is a lovely shade of yellow”. According to Kind, Emma’s belief couldn’t be occurrent without a qualitative feel of yellow. However, she maintains that phenomenology is not an essential feature of belief as a type of mental state, as a specific way to apprehend a given content. If Emma were to desire her house being painted

Phenomenology

17

with that shade of yellow, her desire as well would essentially involve a qualitative feel of yellow. The latter, hence, seems to stem from the contents of Emma’s mental states, more than the psychological attitude she is in (either a belief or a desire).6 Though in the eyes of many authors belief does not have any sort of phenomenology, the hypothesis has emerged that (occurrent) beliefs, and other (occurrent) cognitive states such as thinking, have a phenomenology, what has been called “cognitive phenomenology” (see contributions in Bayne & Montague 2011). Moreover, while some authors have tried to reduce cognitive phenomenology to other types of phenomenology (e.g., sensory phenomenology), others have claimed that this type of phenomenology is primitive.7 On this view, there is something it is like to have a (conscious token of a) cognitive state, such as, for instance, the belief that Spain’s economy is barely growing, or that salty water boils less quickly, or that that is a lovely shade of yellow, which is non-sensory, non-algedonic, non-conative and non-emotional and goes beyond any sensory, algedonic, conative or emotional phenomenology that might go with it. As with bodily and emotional phenomenology, I will accept that cognitive phenomenology is a primitive for the sake of examining how it can impinge on the debate about phenomenology and imagination – as we will shortly see. We have ended up with four categories of experiential kinds of mental state and with different types of phenomenology. To sum up, experiential states can be: (i) perceptual experiences, which involve sensory phenomenology; (ii) bodily experiences, which involve bodily types of phenomenology (e.g., algedonic, conative); (iii) emotional experiences, which involve emotional phenomenology; (iv) cognitive states, which involve cognitive phenomenology. Note that in the literature there is a tendency to group together (i), (ii) and (iii). The underlying idea is that, though (potentially) of different kinds, these types of phenomenology are sufficiently similar to be contrasted, as a group, with cognitive phenomenology. Currie and Ravenscroft, for instance, take perceptual experiences, bodily experiences and emotions to be “phenomenologically rich forms of awareness” (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, p. 193). I will label such a group “experiential phenomenology”. With this (rough) taxonomical picture of the phenomenological realm, we can turn to supposition and imagination. Now we are in the position to appreciate the fact that the phenomenological contrast stated by PhenC is not fine-grained enough. At least four more detailed claims can be offered.

1.3 Different phenomenology claims 1.3.a. Imaginings as necessarily involving sensory phenomenology A first precisified version of PhenC concerns phenomenology in the sense of sensory phenomenology. This more specific variation of PhenC sounds like this:

18

The facets of supposition PhenC-S. All imaginings involve sensory phenomenology, whereas no supposition does.

Note that PhenC-S is different from PhenC: while the latter excludes that supposition has a phenomenal character, the former leaves open the possibility that supposition involves a non-sensory type of phenomenology. Let us dwell on what PhenC-S says about imaginings. Very often when philosophers discuss the phenomenology of imagination a parallel is drawn with perception. As we have seen with Peacocke’s example, imagining that the orchestra is playing Mozart’s Linz Symphony involves pretty much the same qualitative feel involved in the analogous auditory percept. We can also imagine that the orchestra is playing Mozart’s Linz Symphony in a visual way, which would be phenomenologically similar to visually perceiving that the orchestra is playing Mozart’s Linz Symphony. I am using the expression “pretty much the same” and “similar to”, because no one holds the strong claim which posits a phenomenological identity between imagination and perception. In the imaginative case the qualitative feel seems to be attenuated, in comparison with the perceptual case (locus classicus Hume 1739). This seems to be a widespread point either explicitly (e.g., Peacocke 1985; Kind 2001; Noordhof 2002; Byrne 2010) or implicitly (e.g., Ichikawa 2009) endorsed. Although most of the examples in the literature are visual or auditory, there seem to be imaginings parallel to the other sensory modalities. Emma can imagine being in a bright spring day under a lilac canopy, drinking an Earl Grey iced tea and petting her purring cat. The phenomenology of her imagining is rich and comprises a qualitative feel of the lilac’s colour and of the sound of the cat’s purr, as well as what it is like to touch the cat’s fur, to smell the lilac’s fragrance, to savour the Earl Grey iced tea. Moreover, it seems that Emma’s imagining cannot occur without qualitative feelings like these, thus sensory phenomenology is essential to her imagining. This is hard to deny, but could we say that all imaginings necessarily involve sensory phenomenology as suggested by PhenC-S? Kind’s view points in this direction. Phenomenology is taken by Kind as an essential feature of imagination. She claims that a mental phenomenon without a qualitative aspect cannot be an act of imagining (Kind 2001, p. 94). Moreover, she grounds this essentiality in an intuitive parallel between imagining and perceiving. Similarly to Peacocke she writes that “imagining feels like perception from the inside” (ibid.), making precise that the similarity is a weak one. Imagination might be seen as an imitation (albeit pale) of perception. According to Kind, further support to her view is given by experimental studies, such as Perky’s experiments, which would show that imagination is so phenomenologically close to perception, that in some circumstances imaginings and percepts are indistinguishable.8 However, calling on the phenomenological similarity between perception and some imaginings is not sufficient to prove that sensory phenomenology is

Phenomenology

19

essential to imagination tout court. Kind’s view leaves room for the objection that what she is dealing with is only a type of imaginings, what has been called “perception-like” or “sensory” imagination (see the book introduction), and sensory phenomenology might be necessary just to this type of imagination. This can be better seen by considering the pivotal role played by the notion of mental imagery in Kind’s view. Kind claims that mental imagery, “the experience of having an image”, can account for both the phenomenology of imagination and its similarity with that of perception (Kind 2001, pp. 95–96).9 The idea is that imaginings essentially have a phenomenal character, because they involve mental imagery, which in turn has a sensory qualitative feel. However, mental imagery can properly account for the phenomenal character of imagination only if it is independently shown that imagination essentially involves a phenomenology and how this is explained by having mental imagery. My worry is that such an independent analysis is difficult to be maintained, since commonly in the literature mental imagery is taken to be strictly tied, if not equivalent, to sensory imagination (e.g., Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; Martin 2002; Goldman 2006a; Ichikawa 2009; Langland-Hassan 2015; Gendler 2016). The widespread view is that sensorily imagining x is (nothing more than) calling up a mental image of x, or to put it the other way around mental imagery is sensory imagination (e.g., visual imagery is imagining seeing). If the notion of sensory imagination is defined in terms of mental imagery (or vice versa), there is a worry of circularity or triviality that may affect attempts to analyse sensory imagination (mental imagery) independently of the notion of mental imagery (sensory imagination).10 Consider Kind’s analysis. She tries to support her claim that phenomenology is essential to imagination independently of the notion of mental imagery. In so doing, she calls on the Perky effect. The problem is that the latter is primarily concerned with visual mental imagery (see fn 8). But then she is not showing how imagination has necessarily a phenomenology without involving the notion of mental imagery. Kind does not give sufficient arguments to prove that phenomenology is essential to all imaginings, as well as that the latter imply mental imagery. The upshot of her argument is at best that sensory imagination involves mental imagery, and that this type of imagination shows a phenomenology similar to that of perception, namely sensory phenomenology. Both Peacocke and Balcerak Jackson recognise that imaginings must involve a type of phenomenology, but not necessarily sensory phenomenology. Peacocke is mainly concerned with sensory imagination, that is “imaginings describable pre-theoretically as visualizations, hearings in one’s head, or their analogues in other modalities” (Peacocke 1985, p. 22). More specifically, he is interested in visual imaginings, since his goal is to argue in favour of Berkeley’s claim that it is impossible to visually imagine an unperceived tree. However, he acknowledges that there is more to the imagination than sensory imagination. He offers a general definition of imagination as essentially

20

The facets of supposition

involving the perspective of a conscious experience. Peacocke himself intends this definition to cover instances of sensory imagination, but also, for instance, cases in which one imagines “the conscious, subjective components of intentional action” (ibid.). To take Peacocke’s own example, imagining playing the Waldstein sonata may involve the way it feels to hear the music or to see one’s finger hitting the keys. But is the involvement of sensory phenomenology necessary in order to genuinely imagine playing the Waldstein sonata? It does not seem so. What seems to be necessary is to reproduce in imagination the proprioceptive experience or the agentive experience of the movements on the keyboard. It seems possible to imagine playing the Waldstein sonata without implying any visual or auditory phenomenal character. As I have suggested elsewhere, in collaborative work, one can imagine oneself playing the sonata while (in the imagining) one’s eyes are closed and one’s ears are blocked (Dokic & Arcangeli 2015a, p. 5). In such an imagining only proprioceptive experiences or agentive experiences are involved, without the involvement of any sensory phenomenology. One might insist that a species of sensory phenomenology is still present, for instance, the phenomenal character of touching the keyboard. Although sensory phenomenology cannot guarantee by itself to imagine acting (e.g., playing the Waldstein sonata), it can be necessarily involved. Thus, these cases of imagining acting would not undermine the variation of PhenC we are considering – i.e., the claim that all imaginings involve sensory phenomenology. It is just that some imaginings involve more than one type of phenomenology, sensory plus non-sensory types of phenomenology proper to bodily experiences. Nonetheless, imagining playing the piano is, at least in principle, dissociable from what it feels to touch the keys. Thinking of air piano, the equivalent for piano of air guitar, can help in this imaginative task. Such selective imaginings involve only what it feels like to undergo different bodily experiences. It might be difficult to form them, especially if the action gets complicated, due to the role played by sensory feedback in ordinary execution of actions. Arguably, however, these imaginings possibly exist and are dissociable from sensory imaginings, even if they typically depend on the latter (see Dokic & Arcangeli 2015a). Balcerak Jackson suggests another type of imaginings phenomenologically dissociable from sensory imaginings, namely imaginings that imply emotional phenomenology. She writes: “We can imagine being angry, for example, without experiencing any perceptual phenomenology at all” (Balcerak Jackson 2016, p. 46). Imagining being angry may involve only what it feels like to be angry without necessarily involving perceptual aspects concerning, for example, the cause of such a negative emotion.11 The fact that there are imaginings phenomenologically similar to emotions, rather than to sensory experiences, leads Balcerak Jackson to reconsider the role played by mental imagery in imagination. If mental imagery refers only to the sensory phenomenology involved in sensory experiences, as it is mostly the case, taking mental imagery as a necessary ingredient of imagination yields a too narrow view of the

Phenomenology

21

imagination. At best mental imagery might capture only a specific type of imagination, namely sensory imagination. Alternatively, as suggested by Balcerak Jackson, we should broaden the notion of mental imagery to include non-sensory types of phenomenology. To sum up, we have seen that the phenomenological contrast between imagination and supposition, which many authors have hinted at, might be interpreted in terms of sensory phenomenology. According to this variation of the phenomenological claim (i.e., PhenC-S), imagination is such that all of its acts have a sensory phenomenology that no act of supposition has. If restricted to sensory phenomenology, PhenC loses its initial spirit: supposition may have a phenomenology, albeit of a non-sensory type. However, PhenC-S turns out to be too demanding, since some of our imaginings involve non-sensory types of phenomenology only (e.g., what it is like to have proprioceptive experiences or agentive experiences). Thus, one might go for another precisification of PhenC, which accommodates these imaginings.12 1.3.b. Imaginings as necessarily involving experiential phenomenology On a second phenomenological claim, PhenC might be further specified as contrasting suppositions with imaginings by claiming that only the latter necessarily involve experiential phenomenology. PhenC will then turn into the following claim: PhenC-E. All imaginings involve experiential phenomenology, whereas no supposition does. I have suggested that “experiential phenomenology” is a label to capture bodily types of phenomenology (e.g., algedonic, conative) and emotional phenomenology, as well as sensory phenomenology. All these types of phenomenology might exhaust the field of possible phenomenologies. Thus, there would not be non-experiential types of phenomenology. If cognitive phenomenology does not exist, PhenC-E collapses into Phen-C: imaginings have (experiential) phenomenology in contrast to suppositions. If cognitive phenomenology is a primitive type of phenomenology, then a question arises: Is cognitive phenomenology an experiential type of phenomenology or not? I take PhenC-E to be committed to the view that, if cognitive phenomenology exists, it is a non-experiential type of phenomenology. On this basis PhenC-E grants that there is a phenomenological divide between imaginings, which show experiential types of phenomenology, and suppositions, which may show non-experiential types of phenomenology (e.g., cognitive phenomenology). If that were the case, PhenC would be false, for supposition as well would be endowed with phenomenology. The defender of PhenC-E should support such a claim by explaining why cognitive phenomenology is substantially different from experiential types of phenomenology. A hint is given by Balcerak Jackson. She points out that:

22

The facets of supposition

“Believing that P is not merely having a certain attitude with a distinctive cognitive phenomenology, it is also a matter of being subject to certain normative constraints” (Balcerak Jackson 2016, p. 56). It is commonly acknowledged that beliefs are anchored on evidence or epistemic reasons. Emma may believe, say, that Spain’s economy is barely growing, because she read a detailed and trustworthy essay on that matter. Beliefs can be revised in the light of changes in one’s reasons or evidence. Emma can revise her belief, if, for instance, an interesting conversation with an expert gives her reasons to doubt what the essay on Spain’s economy says. Moreover, beliefs are subject to an ideal of coherence. A subject’s beliefs form a coherent and interrelated whole. In other words, they have a rational character (see, e.g., Bratman 1992; Engel 1998; Tuomela 2000). Emma’s belief that Spain’s economy is barely growing is intertwined with other beliefs she has and must not be in conflict with them. If she were to revise such a belief, she should also revise, for instance, the belief in the trustworthiness of the source which shaped her belief that Spain’s economy is barely growing. Beliefs are more or less enduring across various contexts (evidence being fixed). That is to say, ceteris paribus Emma cannot report the belief that Spain’s economy is barely growing when, say, talking with her best friend, but report the contrary when asked what she thinks about Spain’s economy by someone else. If Emma has strong reasons for believing that Spain’s economy is barely growing, she cannot rationally believe the contrary. A subject who believes both that p and that ¬p is in a problematic epistemic position. All this is to give an idea of the normative constraints believing is subject to. Balcerak Jackson stresses that these constraints define beliefs qua beliefs. By contrast experiences as such are not governed by this kind of constraints and their phenomenologies make them what they are (e.g., percepts, emotions, …). This would be the reason why beliefs shouldn’t be seen as strictly speaking experiences and we should distinguish between genuine experiences, such as percepts or emotions, and beliefs. It might be advanced that the underlying premise in Balcerak Jackson’s argument is that experiences are what they are only in virtue of the phenomenal character they involve. To put it differently, the idea is that phenomenology is sufficient (and necessary) for a mental state to be a genuine experience. Balcerak Jackson’s suggestion would be that this is true for percepts and emotions, but not for belief. For example, if a mental state shows sensory phenomenology, this mental state must be a perceptual experience. By contrast, belief’s distinctive phenomenology, granting that it does exist, would be necessary but not sufficient for a mental state to be a genuine belief. What is sufficient in the case of belief is the obedience to the aforementioned normative constraints, rather than the presence of cognitive phenomenology. There are different ways to question such a narrow definition of what an experience is and its consequences for belief. Let me sketch two of them, since I can not go into details here. On the one hand, one might accept such a definition of what an experience is, but maintain that belief is an experience and, as such, has a phenomenology,

Phenomenology

23

which is a sufficient feature to its characterisation. Balcerak Jackson puts forward an example in which a subject manifests a belief that p (Elizabeth II is the Queen of England) and a minute later a belief that q (England does not have a Queen), where q conflicts with p. Balcerak Jackson suggests that these mental states may both show cognitive phenomenology, but we are not prone to consider them as belief, because they lack the obedience to its distinguishing normative constraints. However, this way of describing what is going on in the head of the subject presupposes a specific view on cognitive phenomenology, which is construed as independent of the obedience to the normative constraints. But it may well be that it is not the case and that cognitive phenomenology (at least the species of cognitive phenomenology shown by beliefs) is somehow tuned with the obedience to the normative constraints. On this suggestion, cognitive phenomenology would not be involved in both mental states entertained by the subject, but rather either in only one or none. The genuine belief would be the mental state showing cognitive phenomenology and obeying the proper normative constraints. This is highly speculative and hostage to a fullfledged view of what cognitive phenomenology is, but plausible in principle. On the other hand, one might reject the narrow definition of what an experience is and claim that phenomenology is not sufficient, though still necessary for a mental state to be a genuine experience. As we have seen it is widely acknowledged that percepts, for instance, involve a specific phenomenology, namely sensory phenomenology. However, it is open to question whether the presence of sensory phenomenology suffices to consider the given mental state a percept. Take the case of hallucination, for instance. Emma might hallucinate the smell of gas in her flat or the voice of her mother calling her. These mental states can involve sensory phenomenology and Emma might be uncertain whether there is really gas in the air or her mother is calling her, but it can be argued that they are not genuine percepts. Imaginings can also have sensory phenomenology, even in a way to make the subject doubt whether she is imagining or perceiving; still, we are not prone to call these imaginings percepts. On this line of thought, belief and experiences, such as percepts or emotions, would be on par: in all these cases phenomenology gives information about the mental state one is in, but more is needed to individuate the specific type of mental state. The idea is that for each type of mental state there would be a certain number of features (phenomenology included), which are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for a mental state to be a genuine, say, belief or percept. Either way there are possible reasons to doubt that cognitive phenomenology is substantially different from other types of phenomenology, such as sensory or emotional phenomenology. All these types of phenomenology can be seen as “experiential”. All these types of mental states can be seen as experiences. The notion of “experience” can be construed broadly such as to encompass (occurrent) beliefs and other (occurrent) cognitive states. To sum up, the phenomenological contrast between imagination and supposition might be interpreted in terms of experiential phenomenology. According

24

The facets of supposition

to this claim (i.e., PhenC-E), imagination is such that all of its acts have an experiential phenomenology (e.g., sensory, bodily, emotional) that no act of supposition has intrinsically. It should be noted that PhenC-E can be weaker than PhenC: contrary to the latter, the former does not exclude that supposition has a phenomenal character, though of a non-experiential type. There is room to argue that supposition involves cognitive phenomenology. In the view of many supposition shows similarities with belief (see Chapters 4, 5 and 6). Cognitive phenomenology might be among these similarities. But, then, PhenC-E works only if it is granted that cognitive phenomenology is substantially different from experiential types of phenomenology. Otherwise, PhenC-E cannot establish a clear distinction between imagination and supposition, as it is purported to do. If cognitive phenomenology is experiential and it is involved in supposition, also PhenC-E ends up being false: it would not be true that no act of supposition has an experiential phenomenology. A third precisification of PhenC faces this objection. 1.3.c. Imaginings as necessarily involving experiential phenomenology – including cognitive phenomenology A third claim contrasts suppositions with imaginings by claiming that only the latter necessarily involve at least one of the four types of phenomenology presented beforehand in the brief taxonomical overview, namely sensory phenomenology, bodily types of phenomenology (e.g., algedonic, conative), emotional phenomenology or cognitive phenomenology. By broadening the notion of experiential phenomenology so that it includes cognitive phenomenology, this alternative version of PhenC-E can be put as follows: PhenC-E*. All imaginings involve experiential phenomenology (broadly construed), whereas no supposition does. According to PhenC-E*, supposition would not imply even cognitive phenomenology, by contrast the latter would be shown by certain imaginings. The strong phenomenological distinction between supposition and imagination posited by PhenC is then re-established. What is the ground for such a view? This view builds on two hypotheses: (a) that there is a type of imagination showing cognitive phenomenology and (b) that supposition phenomenologically differs from this type of imagination. The best candidate to account for (a) is what has been called “belief-like” or “cognitive” imagination (see the book introduction). Given the fact that cognitive imagination is taken to be similar to belief, it is highly plausible that it does show a similar phenomenology.13 Hypothesis (b) is more problematic. Most of the accounts which consider supposition a type of imagination tend to see it as nothing but cognitive imagination (see, e.g., Flew 1953; Hannay 1971; Nichols & Stich 2003; Goldman 2006a) or as a species of cognitive imagination (see Currie & Ravenscroft 2002 and Weinberg & Meskin 2006b).

Phenomenology

25

Balcerak Jackson is among the few who claim that supposition is different from cognitive imagination (“conceiving” in her terminology). The reason she gives in order to motivate the claim that supposition is not belief-like imagination, however, does not pivot on phenomenology. She maintains that cognitive imagination demands more than merely taking a proposition as if it were true (i.e., supposing), “[i]t requires one to be rationally committed to P within the context of the imagining project. (…) This places limits on the propositions to which we can be rationally committed, consistent with our status as believers” (Balcerak Jackson 2016, p. 53). Supposition does not show such limitations, which is taken by Balcerak Jackson as a good reason to think that it is not the same as cognitive imagination (see Chapters 3 and 5). All this is silent on the phenomenology involved in these types of mental state. Although it is not clear which specific claim she endorses, Balcerak Jackson maintains a strong phenomenological difference between supposition and imagination.14 She takes imagination, even cognitive imagination, contrary to supposition, to have a phenomenal character. If it is correct to think that supposition is not similar to belief, it might be that it does not involve cognitive phenomenology. But this is true only if the latter is taken to be the specific type of phenomenology proper to belief and belief-like states such as cognitive imaginings. One might want to construe cognitive phenomenology broadly to encompass occurrent cognitive states in general. On this view, not only occurrent beliefs, but also episodes of thinking, of apprehending or grasping propositions, are phenomenally conscious and involve species of cognitive phenomenology. Supposition can be seen as a type of cognitive state, a certain way to grasp a proposition. Balcerak Jackson herself agrees on that. But so, on the basis of the broad definition of cognitive phenomenology just given, it might be argued that supposition involves cognitive phenomenology. This undermines (b) and impugns PhenC-E*. Phenomenology by itself would not be a good dimension for drawing a principled distinction between imagination and supposition. Obviously, this does not mean that there are not other grounds which can be helpful in distinguishing supposition from imagination (including cognitive imagination). 1.3.d. Imaginings as necessarily involving an imaginative type of phenomenology There is another way to ground the phenomenological distinction between imagination and supposition, which gives rise to a fourth claim. So far I have approached such a distinction by wondering which phenomenologies, among the four types of phenomenology usually discussed in the literature, are necessarily involved in imaginings and not in suppositions. The upshot has been that there is room for arguing that supposition involves cognitive phenomenology, which makes PhenC (and PhenC-E*) false. There is, however, an alternative approach to the phenomenological distinction between imagination and supposition. No matter whether supposition involves cognitive

26

The facets of supposition

phenomenology, one might want to posit a specific phenomenology proper to imagination that all imaginings (i.e., sensory, bodily-like and even cognitive imaginings) would show and suppositions would not. On this view, a fourth precisification of PhenC would be read: PhenC-I. All imaginings involve imaginative phenomenology, whereas no supposition does. More should be said, however, about this phenomenology proper to imaginings and why supposition would lack it. Nothing in the extant literature comes close to addressing these challenges.15 A proposal might be the following. If one adopts the recreativist view on imagination (see the book introduction), it might be claimed that supposition is phenomenologically different from imagination, because, in contrast with imagining, when supposing we are not in the business of re-creating an experience, hence we are not feeling like being in some conscious re-created state. The idea is that re-creating an experience is a fifth further type of phenomenology and this is the type of phenomenology shown by imaginings, which suppositions lack. On this view supposition is different from both sensory and cognitive imagination: while the latter are understood as the recreations of conscious experiences (sensory experiences and conscious occurrent beliefs, respectively), supposition would not be re-creative. Only the former would show the phenomenology of re-creating an experience. Taking for granted that there is a specific way it feels to be in some conscious re-created state, the question arises: Why could supposition not be the re-creation of an experiential conscious state? The proposal builds on the distinction between supposition and both sensory and cognitive imagination, but more should be said to prove that supposition fails to be a type of imagination (i.e., the re-creation of being in some conscious state).

1.4 Summary This chapter focused on the following phenomenological claim: PhenC. All imaginings involve a phenomenology, whereas no supposition does. I argued that although it might seem quite intuitive what PhenC is meant to capture, once different types of phenomenology are acknowledged, different precisifications of PhenC can be put forward. I have taken for granted that PhenC is correct in claiming that all imaginings involve a phenomenology. All four specifications of PhenC we have seen do not undermine such a claim, although they interpret it in different ways. According to PhenC-S, all imaginings show sensory phenomenology. PhenC-E allows for imaginings that do show bodily phenomenology or emotional

Phenomenology

27

phenomenology without necessarily involving sensory phenomenology. PhenC-E* makes room for imaginings that involve cognitive phenomenology only. PhenC-I aims at positing a special type of phenomenology that all imaginings would show. The main aim of this chapter has been to show that it is less clear whether supposition does not involve a phenomenology. What is at issue is not the fact that supposition can be sometimes accompanied by a phenomenal character in a non-intrinsic way, but rather that supposition necessarily has a phenomenal character. Both PhenC-S and PhenC-E do not rule out the possibility that supposition involves a phenomenology (either non-sensory or nonexperiential, respectively), plausibly cognitive phenomenology. However, both claims are problematic: while PhenC-S suggests too narrow a view of imagination, PhenC-E is committed to the view that cognitive phenomenology is non-experiential. By contrast, PhenC-E* denies that suppositions involve cognitive phenomenology, still granting that some imaginings do it (i.e., cognitive imaginings). PhenC-I does not exclude that both suppositions and cognitive imaginings can involve cognitive phenomenology; what the former are claimed to lack and the latter to have is imaginative phenomenology. All this leads to a question: How does supposition relate to cognitive imagination, that is the type of imagination similar to belief, which plausibly involves cognitive phenomenology? Different answers can be given. Supposition can be seen as: nothing but cognitive imagination, as a special case of cognitive imagination, as a different type of imagination or as a non-imaginative mental state. None of these options is clearly favoured by any variations of PhenC. The latter are not sufficiently developed to be helpful in getting clear about the relationship between supposition and cognitive imagination. Another idea may prove more promising: that supposition is emotionally colder than imagination.

Notes 1 A number of different expressions are used to pick out what it is like to be in a mental state: “phenomenology”, “phenomenal character”, “qualia”, “subjective experience”, etc. In what follows I prefer to avoid the latter two expressions, because they are saddled with ontological and other commitments that I do not want to convey. 2 Interpreting Peacocke’s view is a bit more complicated. Although he clearly maintains that supposition has no phenomenal character, it is not clear whether he thinks that all imaginings involve a phenomenology. This is how Jonathan Weinberg and Aaron Meskin (2006b) interpret his view, but they seem to take phenomenology as nothing but sensory phenomenology. According to Peacocke this type of phenomenology is shown by sensory imaginings, but he acknowledges that there are imaginings involving other types of phenomenology and we might wonder whether his “suppose-imaginings” (i.e., imaginings that are similar to suppositions) may count as imaginings without a phenomenal character. 3 For simplicity’s sake I am taking “perceptual phenomenology” and “sensory phenomenology” as synonyms. A subtle distinction has been put forward by Michelle Montague. She restricts “the term ‘sensory phenomenology’ to the phenomenology associated with the representation of low-level properties” (Montague 2016,

28

4

5

6

7

8

The facets of supposition p. 179), and uses the term “perceptual phenomenology” in a broader sense. In her view the latter refers to “whatever phenomenology is associated with perception”, which can include a non-sensory phenomenology (ibid.). Also Uriah Kriegel (2015) does not use interchangeably “sensory” and “perceptual”. He talks of “perceptual phenomenology” when dealing with perceptual experiences, and uses “sensory phenomenology” as a cluster of different primitive phenomenologies, including, but not exhausted by, perceptual phenomenology (e.g., in his view algedonic phenomenology is sensory, but non-perceptual). In what follows I will stick to my terminology, and preferentially use “sensory phenomenology” to refer to the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences. Kriegel (2015) reviews different reductive proposals about conative phenomenology and offers a case for primitivism. By contrast, he takes the phenomenology shown by proprioceptive experiences as a species of sensory phenomenology (ibid., p. 5). This view can be questioned, however. There are reasons to think that proprioceptive experiences, like other bodily experiences such as thermal experiences, are not perceptions. Currie and Ravenscroft, for instance, stress that, contrary to perceptions, bodily experiences are intrinsically valenced and exclusively of our own bodies (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, p. 192). On this basis one might want to argue that proprioceptive experiences (thermal experiences, etc.) have a qualitative feel different from the qualitative feel of any sensory experience. Although in collaborative work (Dokic & Arcangeli 2015a) I gestured towards this view, I will remain neutral here, since it plays no role in what follows. See, e.g., Stocker 1996 and Montague 2009 for a defence of primitivism about emotional phenomenology. Defenders of the view that the phenomenal character of emotions is nothing but the phenomenal character of proprioceptive experiences (e.g., James 1884 and Armstrong 1968) can claim that emotional phenomenology is traceable back to either sensory and/or another primitive phenomenology – it all hinges on how the phenomenal character of proprioceptive experiences is accounted for (see fn 4). Kriegel (2015) defends a reductive proposal of emotional phenomenology, where the reducers are sensory, conative and cognitive phenomenology – a type of phenomenology I shall shortly discuss. I take a psychological attitude to be how a mental state represents, whereas content is what a mental state represents. Very often in the literature “attitude” refers to mental states whose content is propositional, in contrast to “mode”, which refers to mental states whose content is non-propositional. In the present context I am using “attitude” to capture both types of mental states. In this neutral sense I will use the adjective “attitudinal”, that I prefer to “modal” in order to avoid potential confusions with logical modalities. See Kriegel (2015) for a review of different reductive proposals about cognitive phenomenology and a defence of a primitivist position. Also Elijah Chudnoff (2015) has argued that cognitive phenomenology is irreducible to sensory phenomenology. In experiments conducted by Cheves West Perky in 1910, subjects were asked to imagine objects while, unbeknownst to them, faint images of the same objects were projected onto a screen (Perky 1910). A common interpretation of the results is that in most cases, the subjects confused their perceptual states with imaginative states. Work conducted in the 1960s has challenged the easiness of the reproducibility of “the Perky effect”; for instance, it seems that a state of relaxation needs to be induced in the subjects in order to reproduce it (Segal & Nathan 1964; Segal 1971). In any case Perky’s experiments are unanimously taken to show that visual mental imagery may interfere with visual perception. More precisely, forming a mental image may interfere with the normal use of visual perceptual mechanisms, and elevate the detection thresholds of visual perception. In current psychological literature the Perky effect is considered a proof of the impairment in visual

Phenomenology

9

10

11

12

13

14

29

performance due to deliberately keeping a mental image in mind (cf. CraverLemley & Reeves 1992; Craver-Lemley & Arterberry 2001). According to Robert Hopkins (2012) the Perky effect says nothing about the phenomenal similarity between perception and imagination. See Bence Nanay (2012) for a critique of Hopkins’s view and Hopkins (2013) for a reply. Kind claims that mental imagery is the best mental phenomenon explaining not only phenomenology, but also two other core features of imagination, namely its directedness (imaginings are directed to something) and its active nature (imagination is a kind of mental action). Over and above the question of whether these features are genuinely essential to imagination, it might be objected that they do not need to be explained in terms of other mental phenomena. In the case of other mental states, such as perception, desire and judgement, we do not call for mental imagery in order to explain their directedness (or intentionality) and/or their active nature. For instance, the judgement that there is a beer in the fridge is directed to a beer and it is a kind of mental action, even if one does not come up with a mental imagery of a beer. Why in the case of these mental states are intentionality and active nature taken to be intrinsic features, not derived from mental imagery, but the same does not hold for imagination? An explanation is needed. Following the idea, suggested by both White (1990) and Kind (2001), that mental imagery is not a sufficient condition for imagination, I argue (Arcangeli 2017a) that there are two different senses of “mental imagery” that are often ignored or confused. Mental imagery may refer to an attitude, which is perception-like in nature (i.e., sensory imagination), or it may refer to a content, which can be grasped via different attitudes. Although the idea that in imagination we can re-create emotions is widely accepted, there is an issue about the nature of these imaginings (see the book introduction). While some authors claim that re-created emotions are in fact ordinary emotions (Carroll 1990; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; Weinberg & Meskin 2006b), others maintain that they are intrinsically imaginative or “as if” emotions (Walton 1990; Velleman 2000; Goldman 2006a). Moreover, note that the existence of imaginings involving emotional phenomenology is independent from the issue about the existence of emotion-like imagination. Whatever the nature of emotion-like imagination is, imaginings other than emotion-like imaginings may show emotional phenomenology. As I said, I am taking for granted that bodily types of phenomenology and emotional phenomenology are primitives. If it turns out that they are reducible to sensory phenomenology (as compounds of species of sensory phenomenology, or as species of sensory phenomenology in their own right, or as combinations of primitive phenomenologies always comprising sensory phenomenology), it won’t be false to claim that all imaginings involve sensory phenomenology. Although imaginings involving bodily types of phenomenology (e.g., imagining playing the Waldstein sonata) or emotional phenomenology (e.g., imagining being angry) do not seem to involve sensory phenomenology, the defender of PhenC-S might grant that they would do so, since these phenomenologies can be analysed in terms of sensory phenomenology. The debate is clearly hostage to a substantive view about bodily types of phenomenology, emotional phenomenology and how they relate to sensory phenomenology. This suggestion can be found in, for instance, Currie & Ravenscroft 2002 and Dokic & Arcangeli 2015a. However, while the latter take cognitive phenomenology to be an experiential-type of phenomenology, the former suggest that the phenomenology proper to cognitive states is quite apart from the phenomenology shown by perceptual experiences and emotions (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, p. 97, fn 9). Balcerak Jackson clearly rejects PhenC-S. However, it is not clear if she endorses either PhenC-E or PhenC-E*: in line with the latter she holds that supposition has

30

The facets of supposition

no phenomenal character, in line with the former she considers cognitive phenomenology as non-experiential. 15 Kriegel (2015) argues that imaginative phenomenology is a primitive phenomenology. But he takes only sensory imaginings to show such a type of phenomenology. According to him, other imaginings, as well suppositions, involve another primitive type of phenomenology, namely the phenomenology of entertaining. However, he suggests that imaginative phenomenology and the phenomenology of entertaining “belong together” (ibid., p. 195). My preferred view, that I cannot develop here, is that all imaginings share a specific type of phenomenology, but they can also present aspects of the phenomenal character proper to the counterparts they re-create.

2

Emotionality

2.1 The Emotionality Claim1 As is well-known, David Hume has forcefully stressed the existence of an intimate link between imagination and emotion: “it is remarkable, that the imagination and affections have close union together, and that nothing, which affects the former, can be entirely indifferent to the latter” (Hume 1739, II, III, vi). When I imagine being in a hammock surrounded by birch branches shaken by the wind, I can sample the delights of being relaxed in a peaceful ambience. If I imagine that my best friend had a serious accident climbing in the mountains, I can feel anxiety and sorrow. Emotional responses are present even when our imagination is directed towards fictional entities and scenes. The consumption of fiction essentially appeals to imagination.2 When reading Of Mice and Men one may feel hopeful and joyful when George and Lennie’s plan to buy a farm seems feasible thanks to Candy’s offer; or be upset and melancholic imagining the last encounter between The Girl Who Played Go and the Japanese officer. What happens to George, Lennie, the Chinese Go player and the Japanese officer might happen, or has actually happened, to someone. But some kind of joy may arise even when, reading The Master and Margarita, we imagine Margarita overwhelmed by freedom and lightness when she is endowed with supernatural powers; or some kind of irritation may be triggered by Tinker Bell’s trickery against Wendy. Thus, emotional responses may be present when what we are imagining is not only fictional, but also utterly unrealistic.3 It has been widely assumed that the capacity of imagination to elicit emotional responses underpins a contrast with supposition, since the latter is commonly taken to be emotionally colder than the former. In this chapter I shall focus on what I call “the Emotionality Claim” (hereafter EC). According to EC, imagination but not supposition has an intimate link to emotion. In more cognitive jargon, EC can be put as follows: EC. Imaginings are connected to the affect system, whereas suppositions are not.

32

The facets of supposition

EC has been mostly taken for granted and used to capture distinctive features of imagination and supposition. However, as stated, EC does not specify the nature of the relevant connection to the affect system (i.e., the subpersonal mechanisms that produce conscious emotional responses). Thus, it is open to several interpretations which yield quite different views about the nature of supposition. For instance, while a strong interpretation of EC rejects the idea that supposition can be emotionally “hot”, that is, connected to our affect system at all, a weak interpretation of EC admits cases of emotional supposition. The aim of this chapter is to offer a detailed overview and assessment of the different readings of EC. I shall argue that they fail to properly account for the emotional asymmetry between imagination and supposition (§2.2, §2.3 and §2.4), as they often employ overly narrow conceptions of both imagination and supposition. I shall present a novel interpretation of EC pivoting on a specific way a mental state can connect to the affect system (§2.5). The upshot will be that we can distinguish supposition and (specific types of) imagination on the basis of their relationship to emotions, but the distinction is much subtler than is commonly acknowledged.

2.2 The strong interpretation of EC Supposition seems to be required by emotionally colder mental activities (e.g., logical reasoning), in contrast with imagination, which is pivotal in mental activities with a high emotional tenor (e.g., fiction). This has led some authors to maintain that supposition cannot be a type of imagination on the basis of a strong interpretation of EC, according to which only imagination is architecturally linked to emotion. This strong interpretation of EC can be put as follows: StrongEC. All imaginings are connected to the affect system, whereas no supposition is. StrongEC does not entail that all imaginings actually evoke emotions, but states only that any imagining has the power to cause an emotion, whereas no act of supposition has this power. Kind seems to flirt with StrongEC when, after having claimed that imagination is what explains our emotional reactions towards fictions, she writes: It should be fairly uncontroversial that acts of supposition do not of themselves have the power to cause emotional responses. (…) One can suppose all sorts of horrific things without feeling any horror, all sorts of joyous things without feeling any joy, and all sorts of revolting things without feeling any disgust. (Kind 2013, p. 153)

Emotionality

33

Kind concludes that if we think of supposition as imagination, we would not be able to explain how imagination is capable of moving us when we are engaged with fictional works. Kind contrasts the power that imaginings have to elicit emotional reactions with the lack of the same power for suppositions. Arguably this contrast can be rephrased in terms of the connection to the affect system: imaginings are, and suppositions are not, apt to induce emotion, because imagination is, and supposition is not, connected to the affect system. This is why Kind’s passage suggests StrongEC. But what is the ground for such an emotional contrast between imagination and supposition? A suggestion comes from Hume (1739). He stresses that when two options are presented in “lively colours”, under some “particular idea” (i.e., through imagination), some emotion is elicited and our choice follows the emotional response, obtained via imagination. In other words, imagination constitutively implies (or is nothing but) mental imagery, which connects to our affect system and triggers our emotions. On this suggestion StrongEC can be expanded as follows: StrongEC*. All imaginings are connected to the affect system, whereas no supposition is, because only the former imply the presence of mental imagery.4 In the literature, however, there is a widespread distinction between imagination with and without mental imagery, that is, sensory (or perception-like) and cognitive (or belief-like) imagination (see the book introduction). On the basis of such distinction, it might be objected about StrongEC* that it sounds too demanding: not all our imaginings seem apt to evoke emotions, since some of them do not involve mental imagery. Very often while sensory imagination is defined as involving (visual, auditory, etc.) mental images, cognitive imagination is seen as merely considering propositional representations without commitment to their truth (Price 1965; Carruthers 2002; McGinn 2004). This does not mean that cognitive imagination cannot be accompanied by mental imagery. But in contrast to sensory imagination, it does not necessarily do so. While one can cognitively imagine that in a planet like ours the watery stuff has a different chemical composition without conjuring up any mental imagery, one cannot sensorily imagine a sofa in an empty space of one’s living room without mental imagery. Moreover, when a cognitive imagining involves some sort of mental imagery, what is imagined does not seem to be exhausted by what is imaged. In order to cognitively imagine that in a planet like ours the watery stuff has a different chemical composition, one must do more than merely have the visual imagery of some molecular composition; one must entertain a belief-like state.5 Thus, it seems a bad strategy to account for StrongEC by invoking mental imagery, because it unduly assimilates all imaginings to sensory imaginings. It might be true that all sensory imaginings are apt to evoke emotions (see, e.g.,

34

The facets of supposition

Currie 2014; Van Leeuwen 2016), perhaps because they necessarily involve mental imagery. However, once the distinction between sensory and cognitive imagination is in place, and it is appreciated that not all cognitive imaginings involve mental imagery, the proponent of StrongEC* faces a dilemma: either all imaginings exhibit the power to have emotional impact, but at least some of them (namely, the relevant cognitive imaginings) do so not in virtue of involving mental imagery; or mental imagery is still the source of the power to have emotional impact, but then some imaginings turn out to lack that power. Are there other ways to ground StrongEC than via a link to mental imagery? Another suggestion might be to appeal to phenomenology. Perhaps the capacity of imaginings to evoke emotions is grounded in a distinctive phenomenology that they possess and suppositions lack. However, this strategy is open to the same worries just raised against StrongEC*. As I stressed in the previous chapter, in the literature on imagination whenever phenomenology comes to the fore, a similarity between imagination and perception is quite often emphasised (e.g., Kind 2001; Martin 2002; Noordhof 2002). Sensory imaginings are typically credited with a phenomenal character, contrary to cognitive imaginings. Similar to the case of StrongEC*, we are now back in the business of construing StrongEC as a contrast between supposition and not imagination tout court, but a specific type of imagination, namely sensory imagination. Indeed, the phenomenology strategy may even collapse to the mental imagery strategy, namely, if phenomenology is what mental imagery amounts to.6 At this point, following a suggestion made in Chapter 1 (§1.3.d), one might want to posit a specific phenomenology proper to imagination that both sensory and cognitive imaginings would show, and supposition would not. However, no such account is currently on offer. Moreover, the claim that the connection to the affect system should be explained in terms of such a phenomenology would need defence. To sum up, no good ground for StrongEC seems available. Unless the proponent of StrongEC can provide an alternative explanation of the emotional contrast between imagination and supposition, her claim remains unmotivated. However, StrongEC is not the only interpretation of EC that can be offered.

2.3 The weak interpretation of EC A weaker but more plausible interpretation of EC would be: WeakEC. Some imaginings are connected to the affect system, whereas no supposition is. In other words, imagination is such that only some of its acts have a certain power that no act of supposition has. Once again we may ask: what is the

Emotionality

35

ground for such an emotional contrast? WeakEC is not very informative without more details about the emotion-inducing imaginings. Following what has been said about StrongEC*, an initial suggestion is that the relevant imaginings are sensory imaginings. WeakEC would then state a contrast between sensory imagination and supposition, in line with prominent accounts of supposition in the literature (e.g., Flew 1953; White 1990; Kind 2013 – see Chapter 1). Note that WeakEC says nothing about the relationship between supposition and cognitive imagination. It is compatible with the claim that supposition is a type of imagination, viz. a non-emotion-inducing type – perhaps cognitive imagination. It is also compatible with the claim that supposition is a non-emotion-inducing type of imagination still different from cognitive imagination, as well as with the claim that supposition is not a type of imagination – granting that there is a non-emotion-inducing type of imagination (perhaps cognitive imagination). We may wonder, however, whether cognitive imagination might be considered an emotion-inducing type of imagination. As mentioned above, cognitive imagination is commonly defined as belief-like, or as having belief as its counterpart. It has been argued that emotionality is one of the core dimensions of similarity between cognitive imagination and belief (e.g., Currie & Ravenscroft 2002 – for more on the relationship between cognitive imagination and belief, see Chapters 4 and 6). Arguably belief is apt to induce emotion. For instance, if I believe that my best friend had a serious accident climbing in the mountains, my affect system will produce a negative emotional response, such as sorrow. Alternatively, a positive emotion (e.g., joy) may arise if I believe that I won the national lottery. This does not mean that whenever a subject entertains a belief an emotional response should arise. My occurrent belief that my radio requires new batteries is likely not to elicit any emotional response. The idea is rather that belief is the kind of mental state that is apt to induce emotion. To put it in more cognitive jargon, the belief box is connected (or wired) to the affect system, even though not every belief in the box should exploit such connection. Cognitive imaginings can produce emotional responses similar to those of beliefs (see, e.g., Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; Nichols 2004 and 2006b; Schroeder & Matheson 2006). For example, if I cognitively imagine that my best friend had a serious accident climbing in the mountains, I will activate my affect system in a way that at least resembles its activation when I believe the same content. Likewise, a joy-like feeling may arise if I cognitively imagine that I won the national lottery, as if I believed that I really did. The emotion might be milder when I am merely imagining, but it is still there. The idea is not that a cognitive imagining necessarily elicits the same emotion that the corresponding belief would trigger. Rather, similarly to the case of belief, the cognitive imagination box is connected (or wired) to the affect system, though not every cognitive imagining in the box should exploit such connection, and in the exact same way as belief would do.7

36

The facets of supposition

On this view of cognitive imagination, it turns out to be an emotion-inducing type of imagination. Its belief-like nature is what makes it apt to induce emotion (i.e., connected to the affect system). Thus, both sensory and cognitive imagination are linked to the affect system, whereas supposition is not. In the extant literature, there is one account of the relationship between cognitive imagination and supposition along the lines of WeakEC, namely Weinberg and Meskin’s. However, as I show in the remainder of this section, their specific interpretation faces serious difficulties; accordingly, in a later section I will seek alternative interpretations. Weinberg and Meskin agree that cognitive imagination’s belief-like nature makes it emotion-inducing and interpret WeakEC in a way that throws light on the relationship between cognitive imagination and supposition. Consider the following passage: Affect, indeed, is perhaps the paradigm distinguishing system. Our emotions are very often engaged in the [cognitive] imagination, but only very rarely in supposition. This is a matter not merely of statistics, but of norms that govern the practices in which the two activities are typically used. (…) while affect is often required in acts of imagining, and may be an unintended side-effect of some supposition, it is almost never a proper part of a supposing. (Weinberg & Meskin 2006b, p. 195) This passage is full of hints and needs a careful analysis. Two main comments are in order. First, one might read this passage as an endorsement of StrongEC: in contrast to suppositions, all imaginings are connected to the affect system and very often imagination exploits such connection and causes an actual emotion. However, Weinberg and Meskin maintain that suppositions are imaginings, thus suggesting that they have in mind WeakEC: only some acts of imagination can evoke emotions, whereas acts of supposition do not have the power to evoke emotions. In their view, for instance, while imaginings involved in our engagement with works of fiction are emotion-inducing, imaginings involved in philosophical thought experiments are not emotioninducing (see also Nichols 2006b).8 Second, here Weinberg and Meskin are gesturing towards the idea that supposition can after all involve the affect system, although “only very rarely” and “almost never” (Weinberg & Meskin 2006b, p. 195). Unfortunately they do not develop this idea any further (as I will do in the next sections). But their basic point can be put forth as follows: while cognitive imagination is typically connected to the affect system, supposition is atypically connected to it. Actually, Weinberg and Meskin say that the engagement of cognitive imagination with the affect system is variable. Arguably this is a way to stress that not all instances of cognitive imagination are emotion-inducing. Indeed, they think that, like belief, cognitive imagination is apt to induce emotion.

Emotionality

37

Weinberg and Meskin conclude that supposition can be a special case of cognitive imagination. They argue that when one supposes, one runs cognitive imagination but several cognitive mechanisms that are typically connected when one cognitively imagines are disconnected (see Chapter 6). Among the latter is the affect system, which would explain the emotional coldness of supposition. However, this does not seem to really explain the emotional difference between cognitive imagination and supposition; it is rather a mere restatement of the emotional coldness of supposition. We are still not told why supposition shows this feature. The question of what (almost always) switches off the affect system in the case of supposition remains unanswered. Weinberg and Meskin’s reply might be that some contexts require the activation of the affect system more than others. Indeed, they suggest that, contrary to fiction and pretence, mathematical reasoning mostly requires the deactivation of the affect system. For this reason, while fiction and pretence call for cognitive imagination, mathematical reasoning involves merely supposition. At least three objections can be raised. First, Weinberg and Meskin’s proposal reverses the order of explanation: their construal of WeakEC was meant to explain the use of cognitive imagination and supposition respectively in fiction (and pretence) and in mathematical reasoning, not the other way round. Second, the aforementioned contexts do not seem to neatly call for either supposition or cognitive imagination. For instance, fiction is not so straightforwardly suppositionless: when reading a novel we suppose a lot of things about fictional characters.9 Actually, this is in line with a suggestion made by Weinberg and Meskin when discussing the issue of imaginative resistance.10 Another widespread claim is that supposition has a kind of freedom that imagination lacks: there would be imaginative resistance, but not suppositional resistance (this claim will be discussed in the next chapter). Weinberg and Meskin themselves note that if an imagined content raises a resistance while one is devouring a book, one may overcome the resistance by supposing the problematic content, without disengaging from the fiction (Weinberg & Meskin 2006b, p. 189, fn 15). Third, the emotional difference between cognitive imagination and supposition seems to capture core distinctive features of these mental states regardless of determinate context. When a friend asked me to suppose that the Earth has become a desert, I did not have any emotional reaction, though the framing context was unspecified: Was my friend telling me a fictional story or proposing to mount a reductio ad absurdum? Thus, Weinberg and Meskin’s view faces several problems and runs the risk of being a mere restatement of EC. I agree with them that cognitive imagination is an emotion-inducing type of imagination, and that its connection to emotion is a manifestation of its belief-like nature. But, then, WeakEC seems to undermine the belief-like nature of supposition and to cast it either as a third type of imagination different from both sensory and cognitive imagination, or as a non-imaginative mental state – granting that there is a nonemotion-inducing type of imagination different from both sensory and

38

The facets of supposition

cognitive imagination (Chapters 5 and 6 will be devoted to reductive and imaginative proposals about the nature of supposition, respectively). Either way the emotional asymmetry stated by WeakEC is in need of explanation. It is worth exploring whether there are alternative readings of WeakEC. Compared to StrongEC, WeakEC is a more promising interpretation of EC, given that it allows for non-emotion-inducing types of imagination. Since imaginings do not always elicit an emotional response, WeakEC poses a restriction only on supposition: the latter would be disconnected to the affect system. But is supposition really so cold? One might be concerned about WeakEC, or better about EC tout court, on the grounds that there seem to be cases in which suppositions do connect to the affect system, even though they occur “only very rarely” or “almost never” (as Weinberg and Meskin note). In what follows I shall consider this move against WeakEC and, generally, against EC (hereafter I will talk about EC and WeakEC interchangeably, considering the latter as the best starting point to interpret the former). I shall dwell on two examples of emotional supposition. The discussion will lead to rehabilitating EC and offering two more readings of it.

2.4 Emotional supposition and an indirect reading of EC Let us consider the following examples, echoing scenarios discussed respectively by Shaun Nichols (2006b) and Alan White (1990). The evisceration case. During a logic class, students are asked to suppose, for the sake of argument, that someone eviscerated a cat on the table and then ate its dripping entrails, and were then asked the question: “Would the tablecloth then be dirty?” Most students will react with disgust. The sick children case. The father, who believes that the mother is wrong in thinking they could wait until the following day to call the doctor for their sick children, might say: “But suppose that the children are in pain”. The father wants the mother to seriously consider the hypothesis that the children are really sick, in order to infer that it would be better to call the doctor immediately. It is highly plausible to expect that supposing that the children are in pain will evoke some emotional response in the mother (e.g., anxiety). At first glance both the evisceration and the sick children cases show that supposition can be emotional and connected to the affect system after all. Thus, they seem to undermine EC. On a closer look, however, there are at least three worries about these alleged counterexamples. First, one might claim that some contents provoke an emotional response no matter the mental state through which they are grasped (i.e., via belief, desire, cognitive imagination, supposition, …). The mere grasping of such contents (e.g., that someone eviscerated a cat on the table) would naturally elicit emotions.11 However, the emotional response seems to be a contingent

Emotionality

39

fact and not a necessary possession condition of the concepts involved. For instance, while I feel disgust when merely grasping the proposition that someone eviscerated a cat on the table, someone else, say a surgeon, might not feel any emotion, even though we both grasp that proposition and the concepts it involves. Just think of psychopaths or sophisticated robots, who arguably are agents capable of grasping the given proposition without emoting. Moreover, in these cases the emotional impact should be placed at the level of the content, rather than at the level of the attitude at stake. In contrast, the emotional asymmetry between imagination and supposition is an issue concerning whether these mental phenomena can elicit emotions in virtue of being the attitudes they are. Second, it might be argued that in ordinary speech people are sometimes confused about the scope of the two terms and use “suppose” instead of “imagine”. And just as we can read words that are incorrectly written, our mental processes may compensate for the incorrect request. So, although the teacher asks the students to suppose, they automatically imagine (or at least those who react with disgust). Likewise for the sick children’s mother. This might be unproblematic, but then it is not clear when we really (are asked to) suppose, which can only engender more confusion about the relationship between imagination and supposition. I am not denying that sometimes we confuse the meaning of “imagine” with that of “suppose”, but it is fairer to think that, at least implicitly, we know when we should imagine rather than suppose, and vice-versa. A third related worry is that, in these alleged counterexamples, supposition does not trigger directly our affect system; rather, it does so indirectly. Perhaps what is going on is that supposition evokes an imagining (e.g., a visual imagining of the scene), which in turn activates the emotional response. Hence, it would be via imagination that, for instance, the feelings of revulsion and nausea arise.12 This objection seems to be more difficult to parry, since it is hard to ascertain what really underlies the subjects’ emotional responses in cases similar to the ones at stake. The third worry suggests another reading of EC. If we accept that supposition can induce emotion after all, we face two options. One is to deny that there is any asymmetry between imagination and supposition when it comes to emotion. But this seems highly implausible. The point of the overall discussion of EC is an intuitive comparison: for a given p, where imagining that p involves an engagement of the subject at the emotional level, supposing that p is emotionally colder. This is so even if we consider the evisceration case and the sick children case as genuine examples of emotional supposition. The other option is to offer an account of the asymmetry stated by EC that admits cases of emotional supposition. Why not concede that if supposition can trigger imagination which in turn can trigger emotion, then supposition is connected to emotion after all? The fact that supposition can, in some circumstances, trigger a system directly linked to the affect system means that it can impact affect. The intuitive comparison put forward by EC, which talks

40

The facets of supposition

about an aptness to elicit emotion, does not seem to rule out a mediated rather than immediate triggering of emotion. On this line of thought, EC might be made more precise as follows: IndirectEC. Some imaginings are directly connected to the affect system, whereas no supposition is. IndirectEC seems to be a plausible reading of EC and no straightforward objection to it is forthcoming. One might think that it fully accounts for the emotional asymmetry between imagination and supposition. Its explanatory force, however, depends on there being an empirically tenable way of distinguishing between mediated and immediate triggering of emotion. As remarked above, it is a difficult task to ascertain what is really going on in cases of emotional supposition. Probably there is not, at least given the current state of science, any way to tell whether supposition is triggering affect directly or indirectly. Moreover, there is room for arguing that even if IndirectEC is right, on its own it provides an incomplete or one-sided picture of EC. One limitation of typical interpretations of EC is they focus exclusively on which kinds of representations may be processed by the affect system. In other words, how imagination, contrary to supposition, can imply emotional responses would be a matter of connection to the affect system on its input side. Note, however, that the affect system interacts with other systems both on the input side and on the output side. The affect system can roughly be seen as involving an informational process which takes some representations as inputs and yields emotional responses as outputs. The latter can be inputs to other mental processes, because they embody bits of information, for instance about the valence of states of affairs (as shown by the psychological literature on “affect as information”; see, e.g., Clore & Gasper 2000). Once we acknowledge these two ways a type of mental state can be connected to the affect system (as input or as output), a new question arises, namely whether the outputs of our affect system may be taken as inputs by imaginative and suppositional processes. So far, we have considered an account of the imagination/supposition asymmetry that focuses on their interaction with the affect system on its input side. The evisceration case and sick children case address only one way of connecting the affect system and supposition, namely on the input side. These cases, however, do not say anything about the link between the outputs of the affect system and supposition. But it may well be that another aspect of the asymmetry concerns the output side and that ultimately, a complete analysis of EC should take into account both the input and the output sides of the affect system. A complete portrait of supposition’s distinctive functional role, and of emotion’s distinctive place in it, requires that we consider both the upstream and downstream interactions between supposition and emotion. The present idea is that the emotional asymmetry between imagination and supposition can be explained not merely by claiming that supposition cannot

Emotionality

41

directly serve as input to the affect system, but by claiming that emotional responses cannot serve as inputs to supposition.13 This suggestion yields an answer to the worry that there is no way to tell whether supposition is triggering affect directly or indirectly. No matter what we are able to say about the input side, we can still draw a clear distinction between imagination and supposition, if we focus on the output side of the affect system. In the remainder of the chapter I shall propose and defend this new output reading of EC.

2.5 An output reading of EC One might reasonably claim that while supposition can interact with the affect system on the input side (if only in an indirect way), it never takes into account outputs of the affect system, or to put it differently, it is not sensitive to such outputs. For instance, although the affect system can be triggered by the supposition that a diner had eviscerated a cat at the table and eaten its dripping entrails, the revulsion that may ensue from this process would not be taken into account in the subsequent steps of the supposition. On this line of thought, EC is read as follows: OutputEC. Some imaginings are sensitive to the outputs of our affect system, whereas no supposition is. It is worth noting that OutputEC is consistent with claiming that supposition may in principle trigger our affect system. OutputEC poses no restriction on how supposition can imply emotional responses, which is compatible with the idea that supposition does not trigger our affect system directly but indirectly. Thus, there is no problem in holding both IndirectEC and OutputEC. One might even claim that jointly IndirectEC and OutputEC give us a correct and fine-grained analysis of EC. That being said OutputEC is logically independent of IndirectEC and can be held without any commitment to the way supposition interacts with the affect system on its input side. Thus, it provides us with a way to account for the emotional asymmetry between imagination and supposition even in the (present) case where we lack a clear picture about what directly triggers the affect system. A novel explanation of the emotional asymmetry between supposition and imagination is provided by the claim that supposition never takes as inputs the outputs of our affect system. Let me dwell a little on this claim in order to point out the differences between supposition and imagination. Weinberg and Meskin stress that the emotional difference between cognitive imagination and supposition is rooted in a contrast between the normative features that constrain these mental activities. In other words, OutputEC should be put in a broader picture that underlines how various kinds of imagining differ in the cognitive resources they require. Specifically, sensory and cognitive imagination and supposition show very different cognitive dynamics.

42

The facets of supposition

Sensory and cognitive imagination show a holistic dynamics. A sensory, or a cognitive imagining, does not come in isolation, but as a piece of an imaginative project, an imagined world containing more “imagined facts” – seemingly made up by our background knowledge and mindset. Although in imagination we can bracket some of what we believe, to a large extent our imaginings bring our background knowledge and personal attitudes into play (e.g., Walton 1990; Harris 2000). I will refer to the collection of one’s implicit and explicit knowledge, beliefs, memories, personal attitudes, emotions, etc., that marks and is shaped by our way of engaging with the world as “one’s overall mental setup”. Translated into my terminology, the idea is that both sensory and cognitive imagination heavily exploit one’s overall mental setup. This is not to say that one should have in mind a complete story, but rather that one is apt to make up a story which integrates the given occurrent sensory or cognitive imagining. Thus, the dynamics proper to sensory and cognitive imagination make them hungry for inputs, and emotional responses can play this role. The following examples might clarify this feature of sensory and cognitive imagination. Take cognitive imagination first. Mary is cognitively imagining that the Earth has become a desert. It happens that her cognitive imagining triggers her affect system, whose output is a positive excitement. Mary is not afraid to find herself in extreme situations and, indeed, is very good at figuring out survival strategies. Given her background knowledge and mindset, it is highly plausible that if she would go along with her cognitive imagining, she would imagine that there is a way to clean herself in some way, say by exploiting whirls of sand, and to find some kind of nourishment, say desert insects. The latter cognitive imaginings are guided and shaped by her affective response: the positive excitement will make some features of the imagined situation more salient and incite her into elaborating good survival strategies. Roughly the idea is that emotions can provide additional, typically valueladen information, which helps constitute the imagined world and orients the imaginer’s internal attentional focus. The same holds for sensory imagination. Consider Emma, who visually imagines her infant nephew as a teenager riding a motorbike at a very high speed on a country road full of twists. In the present case her affect system is triggered by her sensory imagining and yields a negative emotional response. Emma is a very apprehensive person and loves her nephew deeply. Given her overall mental setup, the negative output of her affect system is likely to orient her in exploring in imagination negative developments of the given sensory imagining (e.g., she might visually imagine her nephew falling off the motorbike).14 By contrast, supposition shows a much more “channelled”, non-holistic dynamics. A particular supposition seems to come in isolation. Supposing does not involve any aptness to make up a story which integrates a given content as a proper part, but it simply requires to take the content for granted. It has been pointed out that in supposing that p, one sticks only to p and its logical consequences; consequently, there is no room for embellishing the

Emotionality 15

43

context (e.g., White 1990; Weinberg & Meskin 2006b). When one supposes that the Earth has become a desert, it seems that one must stick to this proposition and draw what is directly inferable from it (e.g., that water is a rare and precious resource). There is no call to suppose that one finds nourishment or cleans oneself in some way. If Mary was supposing, rather than imagining, that the Earth has become a desert and her affect system happened to be triggered by her supposition, her positive excitement would be ignored by the ensuing suppositional process, because it is a spontaneous response irrelevant to the purpose of establishing what follows from the supposed fact that the Earth has become a desert. The embroidery proper of the holistic dynamics shown by sensory and cognitive imagination can be seen as a way to explore in multiple directions the possibility initially put forward. In supposing there is no call for such an exploration, since the only focus is the given content and its direct implications. Thus, supposition seems to have fewer connections to the rest of one’s overall mental setup. Supposition emerges as a highly controlled process that only takes as inputs states that can be regimented in this sequential functioning, which are likely to be themselves the results of controlled processes. In contrast, sensory and cognitive imagination may take anything as input, including the outputs of the uncontrolled processes of our affect system. Recent cognitive architectural models might be useful here. One way to define the relevant notion of control16 is to relate it to so-called System 2 processing. System 2 processing is known to depend heavily on working memory and thus to be constrained by the latter, which is unique and of limited capacity. It is also tied to the capacity to inhibit spontaneous responses arising from System 1 processing and said to be mostly abstract or domain-general and to function in a rule-based or sequential way. By contrast, System 1 processing is independent of working memory, automatic, concrete or domain-specific and massively associative or parallel (Evans & Stanovich 2013). Moreover, note that emotions are explicitly linked to System 1 processing, at least in some dual-processing theories (e.g., Epstein 1994).17 The features characterising System 2 processing square well with the channelled dynamics proper of supposition and with the idea that emotional responses (i.e., the outputs of the affect system) are likely to be ignored by suppositional processes, thus suggesting that these are underpinned by System 2 processing. Before concluding I would like to consider two objections one might rise against OutputEC and, more precisely, against the claim that supposition never takes as inputs the outputs of our affect system. First, a sceptic may stress that an output of the affect system, say a feeling of disgust, can be the argument of a supposition. I can suppose that I feel disgusted. However, this is not a straightforward objection to OutputEC. The fact that supposition can be about emotional responses at the level of its content does not show that supposition can take as inputs the outputs of the affect system. Arguably I can suppose that I feel disgusted without genuinely feeling disgust (recall Kind’s quote). Hence, it is unclear why the fact that

44

The facets of supposition

supposition can be about emotional reactions should be taken as the result of the affect system connecting in output to supposition. Still, a sceptic may insist that OutputEC is too demanding for the following reason. Take the aforementioned examples. The logic teacher asks the students to suppose that someone eviscerated a cat on the table and then ate its dripping entrails. She might, then, have asked “How do you feel?”, rather than “Would the tablecloth then be dirty?”. Similarly for the sick children case: the father wants the mother to suppose that the children are in pain and might have asked her “How do you feel?”. Plausibly most students would have answered “I feel disgusted” and the mother “I am worried and feel anxiety”. Re-framing these examples in these ways seems to show that the outputs of the affect system (e.g., disgust and anxiety) can be the inputs of the rest of the suppositional process. Weinberg and Meskin suggest a first reply to this objection: “It is an open question whether such an exercise would require use of the affect systems rather than the deployment of a bit of folk psychology” (Weinberg & Meskin 2006b, p. 195). The answers given by the students and the mother would not be the result of the affect system connecting in output to supposition. But rather supposition would exploit our natural capacity to predict mental states and behaviours. One might disagree with this suggestion, however, and still think that in some cases supposition can take into account the outputs of our affect system. A more convincing reply is that the objector faces a dilemma: either there is no violation of the channelled dynamics proper to supposition, or there is. If there is not, what the supposition is about is inferred from the given content. The students would draw from supposing that someone eviscerated a cat on the table and ate its dripping entrails that the situation is likely to generate disgust and answer accordingly the teacher – regardless of whether they are themselves feeling disgust. Likewise for the mother: the answer she gives to the father would be the result of an inference from the supposed negative situation in which the children are in pain, rather than an integration of her emotional response into the suppositional process. If there is a violation of the channelled dynamics, the affective response leads the suppositional process astray. In such a case, however, there is not a proper functioning of the suppositional process and these cases cannot count as genuine examples of supposition. Alternatively, OutputEC could be restricted to rational or well-functioning suppositions, and the relevant cases would count as irrational or otherwise defective suppositions (just as wishful thinking is not the normal way of forming beliefs and leads to irrational beliefs). A second objection may claim that emotional reactions can prompt me to suppose. For instance, if I need to complete a logic exercise and get distressed, my anxiety may prompt me to suppose the premises of the argument. To take another example, jealousy may prompt Eva to suppose that her partner is late because he is cheating on her. There are several ways to defend OutputEC against this objection.

Emotionality

45

It might be argued that in these cases cognitive imagination is at stake, rather than supposition. This seems to be a plausible description of what is going on in the case of jealousy. Eva is doing more than supposing, she is really belief-like imagining that her partner is cheating on her. However, this line of response seems less appealing with respect to the exam anxiety case. Another option would be to say that in these cases as well there is a violation of the channelled dynamics and the suppositional processes is not functioning properly. Once again, however, this line of response may capture the case of jealousy, but less straightforwardly the case of anxiety. A better response is acknowledging that sometimes our emotional reactions can trigger supposition, but without affecting the subsequent channelled dynamics. Anxiety or jealousy might start the suppositional process, but once this process has begun it does follow its proper channelled dynamics without taking into account the emotional responses that set the process in motion. In order to complete the logic exercise I try to derive the conclusion by following the inferences from the premises, anxiety does not play any role in this suppositional process. Jealousy can lead Eva to suppose that her partner is late because he is cheating on her, but what Eva will suppose afterwards is a matter of what she can infer from the given content. In this section I have suggested that OutputEC captures an essential component of the intuitive claim that imagination has an intimate link to emotion, in contrast to supposition. On this view, the emotional asymmetry between supposition and both sensory and cognitive imagination is explained by the fact that while the connection between sensory and cognitive imagination and the affect system is bidirectional, supposition has a unidirectional link with the affect system. Moreover, if one holds IndirectEC, i.e., that supposition triggers the affect system only indirectly, such a link may be seen as specific to supposition.18 The combination of OutputEC and IndirectEC gives us a fuller portrait of the distinctive functional role of supposition, at least as it pertains to the interaction with the affect system. Note that the emerging view also offers a new explanation of the apparent fact that sensory and cognitive imaginings generate more emotional responses than suppositions (i.e., that sensory and cognitive imaginings have more impact than supposition on the input side of the affect system). This can be explained by claiming that the bidirectionality of the connection between sensory and cognitive imagination and the affect system engenders a feedback loop, which amplifies the emotional responses to sensory and cognitive imaginings. The same does not hold for supposition, since it cannot generate the feedback loop, given its unidirectional link with the affect system.

2.6 Summary It has often been claimed that imagination plays a pivotal role in activities with a high emotional tenor, such as the engagement with fiction, whereas

46

The facets of supposition

supposition seems to be required by colder activities, such as logical reasoning. This contrast is captured in what I have called “the Emotionality claim”: EC. Imaginings are connected to the affect system (i.e., the subpersonal mechanisms that produce conscious emotional responses), whereas suppositions are not. EC is a widespread claim in the literature, but it is more taken for granted than analysed. In this chapter I offered a detailed overview of various interpretations of EC depending on the nature of the connection to the affect system. I started by dealing with two interpretations of EC, strong and weak respectively, and consider their plausibility. The upshot was that the weak interpretation of EC is more plausible and thus better positioned to account for the intuition that there is an emotional asymmetry between imagination and supposition. Unlike the strong version of EC, it acknowledges that some types of imagination are not connected to the affect system. Still, it faces an objection: the idea that, in reality, supposition can be emotionally “hot”. Indeed, I considered some scenarios that suggest that supposition can be connected to our affect system after all. I distinguished two ways in which a type of mental state may be connected to the affect system (i.e., on input and on output), and used the distinction to put forward two other readings of EC (in its weak version) that admit cases of emotional supposition: IndirectEC and OutputEC. According to the former, both imaginings and suppositions are connected to our affect system in that they can evoke emotional responses, but suppositions can do it only in an indirect way. According to the latter, both imaginings and suppositions are (directly or indirectly) connected to our affect system on the input side, but suppositions do not take as inputs the outputs of the affect system. Thus, whereas the imagination-emotion connection is bidirectional, the suppositionemotion connection is only unidirectional. Although the view defended here provides a new interpretation of how supposition connects to the affect system, still it leaves unexplained why supposition is not connected to the affect system the way sensory and cognitive imagination are. Nevertheless, the discussion has gestured towards a possible answer. The difference in the connection to the affect system is due to the different dynamics of sensory imagination, cognitive imagination and supposition: holistic for the formers, channelled for the latter. To be sure, the question arises as to why supposition differs in such a way from both sensory and cognitive imagination. Moreover, the discussion did not rule out the possibility that the emotional difference between supposition and (sensory and cognitive) imagination can be accounted for within an imaginative conception of supposition. On EC (in its weak version), supposition can be either a nonimaginative mental state, or a third type of imagination. Let us consider a further attempt at distinguishing supposition from imagination, which may throw more light on these issues.

Emotionality

47

Notes 1 This chapter is adapted from Arcangeli (2017b). 2 See Matravers (2014) for a dissenting voice, and Stock (2017) for a recent defence. 3 Philosophers have distinguished between genuine emotions, which are directed towards real-life people and events, and make-believe (or imaginary) emotions, whose objects are fictional (Walton 1990). For present purposes, I shall leave aside this distinction, since it does not affect my main point. For simplicity’s sake, I shall consider both emotions and imaginary emotions as outputs of our affect system, considered as the subpersonal mechanisms, whatever they are, that produce these emotional experiences. 4 Kind might have in mind this expanded version of StrongEC, if we consider her claim that imagery is necessary to imagination, which she has developed elsewhere (Kind 2001). Later on we will see how Kind has also gestured towards another reading of EC. 5 This entails neither an impoverished representational notion of mental imagery, nor the claim that there is a belief-like state further appended to the mental image. For instance, when I believe that there is a lilac bush in the garden my belief is not appended to a certain content – that can, at least partially, be imagistic. I am simply having a mental state belonging to a type (i.e., belief), which has proper features that are different from those of other types of mental state (e.g., desire), and a content via that mental state. Likewise for cognitive imagination, which is a belief-like way of apprehending a content. I am taking here mental imagery to be a type of content (see Ch. 1 fn 9) and in this sense it does not entirely capture what we are doing when we cognitively imagine. One might go even further and say that the same holds for sensory imagination: mental imagery does not entirely capture what we are doing when we sensorily imagine. Kind, who holds a sensory-like view of imagination (see fn 4), seems to suggest this when she claims that the role of mental imagery is “neither the role of individuator of the imagining nor the role of object of the imagining, but rather, the role of capturing the object of the imagination” (Kind 2001, p. 108 – see Arcangeli 2017a). 6 This suggestion can be found in Kind (2001) and Balcerak Jackson (2016). 7 This is to allow cases of “discrepant affect”, where we are, for instance, amused by imagined things, that are likely to upset us, if believed (see Nichols 2006b). 8 One might object that thought experiments can activate “emotional/social” regions (see Greene et al. 2001; Gendler 2007). This can be explained by claiming that different types of imagination can be involved in thought experiments (see the book introduction). 9 Stock (2017) makes a case for the role of supposition in fiction. 10 This is a much-debated issue in the literature, brought to our attention by Moran (1994) and Walton (1990, 1994) on the basis of a famous passage in Hume (1757). 11 It might be argued that this is true of specific emotions only. Take disgust, which is one of the so-called six basic emotions. As a basic emotion, it is taken to be biologically fixed, innate, and universal to all humans and many animals, even though some objects or events which trigger disgust are partly culture-specific. Moreover, it seems that disgust, like fear, is not context-dependent. Typically, in order to be happy about something (e.g., a praise expressed by a friend), one has to believe or desire something concerning this thing (e.g., one has to believe that the friend was not joking). By contrast, it seems that disgust and fear are not equally dependent on other mental states such as beliefs or desires. If I think of a rotten carcass or of a murderer behind the door I immediately feel some revulsion and fear, without necessarily invoking the belief that someone wants me to eat the carcass or that the murderer is waiting for me. 12 Kind might have in mind this hypothesis when she writes that “acts of supposition do not of themselves have the power to cause emotional responses” (Kind 2013,

48

13

14 15

16

17

18

The facets of supposition p. 153). Anyway, she clearly suggests this hypothesis and attributes it to Nichols himself (ibid.). However, Nichols is not concerned with the distinction between imagination and supposition (according to him both are nothing but cognitive imagination). Also note that this third worry does not say anything about the compatibility between supposition and imagination, since it is not committed to the claim that we stop supposing when we start imagining. This is in line with a point made by Weinberg and Meskin when discussing the issue of imaginative resistance (see fn 10). Indeed they maintain that imaginative resistance can arise from the fact that the affect system puts a representation into the imagination “box”, in conflict with another representation put by another mechanism into the same box (Weinberg & Meskin 2006b, p. 197). But, then, suppositional resistance is likely not to arise, because supposition does not take outputs of the affect system as inputs. Of course more should be said about the ways in which emotions influence the unfolding of (sensory and cognitive) imaginings. Here I have just sketched such a process. Although Sinhababu speaks of assuming, rather than supposing, I take it that his point about the stickiness to the given content typical of assumption (Sinhababu 2013, p. 160) is in line with what I say here about supposition. Very often in the literature “assuming” and “supposing” are used as synonyms, but an in-depth analysis of the relationship between assumption and supposition is beyond the scope of the present work (see the book introduction). See also Stock (2017), who holds that in supposing one commits oneself to taking the given content as fixed and unrevisable for the imaginative project one is engaged in, although she maintains that suppositions as well can be embellished (see fn 17, Chapter 4). By “controlled process” I do not mean the fact that our suppositions can be externally constrained by, for instance, agreements on what to suppose or via what Kendall Walton (1990) calls “prompters” or “props”, that is things in our environment which may induce us to imagine something. In this respect supposition, sensory and cognitive imagination do not differ. Research in cognitive and social psychology (Tversky & Kahneman 1981; Damasio 1994) has led to the hypothesis that our cognition is underpinned by two different modes of processing or clusters of subsystems. There is a family of theories that go by the name “dual-processing” or “dual-system” accounts (see contributions in Evans & Frankish 2009). More generally, it would be interesting to explore the relationship between dual-processing theories and the taxonomy of the imagination. I will suggest some paths to follow in the concluding chapter of the book. According to Elizabeth Picciuto, “the representational content of suppositions is also broadcast to emotional and motivational systems; but in addition, ceteris paribus, the activation of our supposition systems, regardless of the content of these suppositions, triggers an emotion of pleasure” (Picciuto 2009, p. 492). Leaving aside the fact that her definition of supposition does not clearly discriminate between supposition and cognitive imagination, her view is compatible with OutputEC, as long as the pleasure allegedly triggered by supposition is not fed back to our “supposition systems”.

3

Participation

3.1 The Participation Claim There is a third strategy to tell apart supposition from imagination: the Participation Claim (PC for short). Supposition and imagination would not to be on a par, because the latter involves a kind of participation or engagement, which is not required by the former. Instances in which PC is at work can be found throughout the literature. Here are some telling excerpts: Though one might reasonably worry that the notions of identification and participation are too vague to do any real work here, perhaps we can say at a minimum that when philosophers distinguish imagination and supposition, they take imagining to be a more robust activity than supposing; imagining a given scenario requires someone to be considerably more actively engaged with respect to it than she need be if she were merely to suppose it. (Kind 2013, p. 151; see also Kind 2016c, pp. 146–147) Imagining (…) may call for a feat or a flight of imagination, but there are no feats or flights of supposition. (…) Equally, there may be limits or bounds to one’s imagination, but not to one’s supposition. (…) To imagine that p, but not to suppose that p, requires the exercise of a power, which some people may possess in greater degree than others. (…) Imagining that p can be an activity in which one can spend a few minutes, but though one may for those minutes have also been supposing that p, this is not an activity in which one was then engaged. One can exercise or use one’s imagination, but not one’s supposition (…). One can set one’s imagination, but not one’s supposition to work. (White 1990, p. 138) [S]upposition isn’t E-imagination, or re-creation. Merely supposing one owns a mug doesn’t re-create the psychological circumstances operative in a decision-making task. Analogously, I can easily suppose that I am

50

The facets of supposition now living in ancient Troy and observing Helen. What is not so easy is to create an accurate visualization of her. (…) The powers are fine if they are accompanied by suitable knowledge or experience to guide the visualizing act. (Goldman 2006a, p. 175) In this chapter I have argued for a systematic picture of imaginings, supposings (…) as the products of (…) distinctive cognitive capacities. Such a picture is supported (…) most importantly by the ways in which what we imagine, suppose (…) are or are not under our voluntary control. Imagination is the cognitive capacity to take perspectives of other possible subjects of experience and simulate the experiences they would have in various situations. (…) While supposition is under our voluntary control in the strong sense, the extent of the control we have over imaginings (…) is limited by their recreative nature. (Balcerak Jackson 2016, p. 58)

All these quotes are dense and full of different hints. Thus, it is not crystal clear what philosophers have in mind when they maintain that supposing is less participative, a less “robust activity” – to put it in Kind’s words – than imagining. PC, like PhenC and EC (i.e., the claims that supposition and imagination differ as regards phenomenology and emotionality, respectively), has mostly been maintained implicitly without an in-depth argumentative defence. Anyway, the third claim contrasting supposition and imagination can be put as follows: PC. All imaginings involve a certain kind of participation or engagement, which no supposition requires. Stated in this way the Participation Claim is quite vague.1 How can the kind of participation or engagement that is relevant be understood? On a first interpretation the kind of engagement is phenomenological. From this perspective PC turns out to be the Phenomenology Claim: contrary to supposition, imagination would be participative because it involves a phenomenal character. On a second interpretation the difference in participation between supposition and imagination collapses into the emotional difference: contrary to supposition, imagination would be participative because it is bidirectionally connected to the affect system. We would end up with the Emotionality Claim. Thus, it might be doubted that PC is an independent claim. In my opinion PC is not the same as either PhenC or EC. There is more to PC than these claims, since there are other interpretations of PC which go beyond either a phenomenological or an emotional kind of engagement. The aim of this chapter is to explore these interpretations. A useful starting point in order to get clear on PC is White’s (1990) very articulated account aimed at showing that supposition is not a type of

Participation

51

imagination. Several ways to ground PC emerge from this framework. First, I shall discuss White’s points on the normative differences between supposition and imagination. These can be seen as manifestations of the different kinds of engagement involved by these mental activities. Second, White suggests why supposition and imagination are governed by such different normative features. Analysis of his account may thus aid our understanding of PC. After this, I shall go beyond White and consider other explanations suggested in the literature. The upshot of this chapter will be that PC can capture genuine features that distinguish supposition from certain types of imagination (e.g., sensory and cognitive imagination). However, the open question is whether this is enough to rule out the possibility that supposition is a type of imagination, albeit different from sensory and cognitive imagination.

3.2 Supposition, imagination and their constraints The engagement which distinguishes imagination from supposition seems to manifest itself in the ways these mental activities are constrained. In the previous chapter, I pointed out that different norms seem to regulate supposition and imagination. Two normative differences have been the focus of philosophers. First, supposition is “freer” than imagination, in that there is almost no limitation on what can be supposed, whereas there are limitations on what can be imagined. Second, as we have seen in the discussion about the emotionality claim, there is a sense in which supposition can be constrained in a way that imagination is not, if we consider the fact that supposing, contrary to imagining, does not call for embroidery and shows a much more channelled, non-holistic dynamics. I am taking these features of supposition as normative, because they refer to regulative behaviour dealing with permissions and/or obligations. More precisely, we shall see that while the first normative feature regulates what is permissible to be supposed, the second normative feature deals with the obligations due to how supposition represents a given content. Let me better clarify these two normative differences between supposition and imagination, both of which emerge from White’s discussion on supposition.2 3.2.a. The freedom of supposition3 A first normative difference between supposition and imagination arises when we consider how these mental activities fail. When I admit that I am not able to imagine that I am living in ancient Troy and observing Helen, or that an audience would not be interested in the topic of my upcoming talk, I am admitting to there being a restriction on what I am capable of doing. White suggests that there is, instead, something logically offensive about saying that I am not able to suppose that I am living in ancient Troy and observing Helen or that the audience would not be interested in the topic of my upcoming talk. Nonetheless, one can decide not to suppose. As White puts it,

52

The facets of supposition To say that one cannot suppose that p, for example that the audience would be interested in the topic, is to suggest a limit on what one is justified in doing, whereas to say that one cannot imagine that p is to suggest a restriction on what one is capable of doing. (…) the reason for the “cannot” is of a different kind in the two cases, the [imaginative] referring to one’s inability to conjure up such a possibility, the [suppositional] to one’s lack of justification for committing oneself to such a hypothesis. (White 1990, p. 137 – italics added)

White’s passage sounds very familiar to the reader acquainted with the topic of “imaginative resistance” (see Chapter 2). I can imagine that Anna Karenina does not have the property of being faithful to her husband, but I cannot imagine that she does not have the property of being self-identical. Likewise, I can imagine that Thérèse Desqueyroux poisons her husband, but I cannot imagine that murder for pleasure is morally permissible. This undermines the idea that anything can be imagined. Imagination is not as free as sometimes expected, it has its own limits and idiosyncrasies. In some cases involving moral or metaphysical matters,4 the subject either tries to imagine the relevant state of affairs but is blocked (“imaginative blockage”) or refuses even to start imagining (“imaginative refusal”). Thus, there are things we simply can’t imagine, as well as things we are in principle able to imagine but we won’t (Gendler 2006; Weinberg & Meskin 2006b).5 Either way, our imaginings are constrained. The situation seems different with supposition. As White puts it, “there may be limits or bounds to one’s imagination, but not to one’s supposition” (White 1990, p. 138). Arguably, one can suppose that p for any graspable p whatsoever. Not only morally repulsive contents or plain contradictions can be supposed, but even impossibilities. For instance, even though it is hard to imagine that killing babies for fun and profit is morally permissible, that the Universe has twenty-six dimensions, or that Robert Stalnaker is the smallest prime number, we have no trouble supposing these propositions (Doggett & Egan 2007, p. 1 – see also Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; Gendler 2000 and 2006; Weinberg & Meskin 2006b; Kind 2013; Balcerak Jackson 2016).6 As Hume (1757) has pointed out, when we try to counter-resist imaginative resistance we feel a violent effort. By contrast, no proposition is such that it requires a violent effort to suppose, for there is no such thing as “suppositional resistance”. In that respect, supposing is also less effortful than imagining, though not altogether effortless (see White 1990, p. 145). For example, while an anti-racist may easily suppose that she is racist, to imagine it would require a greater mental effort. One may easily suppose things that one cannot (easily) imagine.7 Admittedly, we can experience “suppositional refusal” (White 1990; Gendler 2006), whereby we find ourselves refusing to suppose something. Thus there might be propositions which are hard and effortful to suppose. For instance, a subject may refuse to suppose something that she wants very much not to be

Participation

53

true. Such a content is not so effortless to suppose for her. However, the existence of “suppositional blockage” is more controversial. In the quoted passage, White seems to suggest that even though we can refuse to suppose something, our supposition cannot be blocked. In other words, a subject who refuses to suppose that p (e.g., that the audience would not be interested in the topic of her talk) will still admit that she would easily succeed if only she tried. Although she can suppose that the audience would not be interested in the topic, she finds herself not wanting to (see also Gendler 2006, p. 156). There is thus a persisting asymmetry between supposition and imagination: the latter is, but the former is not, subject to blockage. One might object that some complex propositions in, say, higher mathematics are just really hard to suppose. Some people can suppose them, while others will be simply unable to do so. But this objection is not so compelling. The question about whether there are propositions that one is unable to suppose should be distinguished from the issue about propositions that are per se (more or less) difficult to grasp or entertain. It is plausible that there are propositions that are (more or less) difficult to grasp independently of the psychological attitude at stake (e.g., complex propositions of higher mathematics). However, to say that one can suppose any proposition whatsoever does mean that once a given proposition p is grasped or understood, one can easily suppose that p. In other words, supposing that p is as difficult as grasping that p, but it can be more difficult to grasp p through other psychological attitudes, such as belief or imagination. In any case, the point of the overall discussion is comparative: “things are not unsupposable as they are unimaginable” (White 1990, p. 145). That is, for any p, where imagining that p leads to blockage (and then can be effortful), supposing that p is comparatively easier. 3.2.b. The fixed nature of supposition A second normative difference between supposition and imagination arises once we consider the cognitive dynamics shown by these mental activities, that is, how suppositions and imaginings unfold. White remarks that our way of talking about imaginative and suppositional exercises may reveal such a difference. In imaginative cases we can add: “Can you imagine what would happen?”. In suppositional cases, instead, it seems not to make sense to ask: “Can you suppose what would happen?”. On the contrary, “one can ‘proceed on the supposition that p’, but not ‘proceed on the imagination that p’” (White 1990, p. 137). In this sense there seem to be constraints on supposition that imagination lacks. White suggests that this might be due to the fact that in supposing that p in a certain way we commit ourselves to p (whether we believe that p or not), whereas in imagining that p we are free to make conjectures and to envisage possibilities simply pertaining to p (ibid.). As White puts it, “the real difference is that to say ‘Suppose that p’ invites or introduces a statement of the consequences or implications of p, whereas to say ‘Imagine

54

The facets of supposition

that p’ sets the stage for various kinds of embroidery” (White 1990, pp. 141–142). In the discussion about the emotionality claim, we have already seen the idea that a particular supposition seems to come in isolation and that in supposing that p, one is committed to p in the sense that one sticks only to p and its logical consequences. I argued that this feature of supposition is due to its “channelled”, non-holistic dynamics, which differs from the holistic dynamics of imagination. Supposition emerges as a controlled act, whose focus is only the given content, once it has been determined, and its direct implications. Thus, if one asks me to suppose that I am living in ancient Troy and observing Helen, I cannot change the situation and say: “Actually I am supposing that I am living in ancient Troy, but I am observing someone of whom I am not sure whether it is Helen”. On the contrary in the imaginative case I can reply in this way to my interlocutor, because in imagination one may speculate and even deliberately depart from what is asked to be imagined. What is more, as White – among others – suggests, in suppositional cases in order to continue from the given content one needs further instructions, or at least a specified goal (White 1990, p. 142).8 The idea is that it seems odd just to ask, for example: “Suppose that you are living in ancient Troy and observing Helen”. The hearer needs to know what to do next. A simple “What are you thinking, then?” may suffice. In the imaginative case the hearer does not need any instruction or goal and can deliberately continue imagining and exploring in imagination what would it be to live in ancient Troy and to observe Helen. It is not by chance if supposition seems to play a pivotal role in logical reasoning, in which we start from the supposition that p in order to infer a specific q. Specifically, supposition is quite unanimously considered at play in reductio ad absurdum arguments, in which we suppose that p in order to infer that ¬p. We might wonder to what extent instructions or goals should be explicit and fully occurrent in the mind of the subject who is supposing. For instance, we might think that Einstein supposed that Quantum Mechanics were complete, having in mind a specific goal (e.g., to prove Quantum Mechanics’ incompleteness). However, it could be that Einstein was not wondering whether to prove and believe that Quantum Mechanics is incomplete (perhaps he already believed it to a certain degree), but he was simply interested in figuring out the consequences of its (alleged) completeness (e.g., the incompatibility between Quantum Mechanics’ completeness and the separability-locality principle).9 To take another example, recall the sick children case discussed in the previous chapter. In that example the father asks the mother, who has not considered that the children might be in pain, to suppose that they are, so as to see what might happen and what would be best to do – i.e., to call the doctor immediately. However, these goals are implicitly conveyed by the father. Moreover, the mother may suppose that the children are in pain without having in mind any specific upshot. Similarly, before giving a talk I can suppose that the audience will not be interested in the topic without the project of figuring out whether this is really the case. It might be that I simply seek how to better plan my talk.

Participation

55

These examples show that when one supposes that p there is a set of consequences directly implied by p, and one has the project of figuring out one or more of them. This is all that is needed, and may be implicit; one need not know in advance the specific consequence(s) that will be the goal of the suppositional process. Although there are cases in which these goals are known in advance and instructions may be very specific and even explicitly stated (e.g., in logical reasoning), we should not restrict supposition to this kind of reasoning. There is more to supposition than, for instance, reductio ad absurdum arguments, which too often are taken to be paradigmatic cases of supposition. Certainly, if this is so, a full-fledged theory of supposition should account for these cases, but it would be a stretch to model all cases of supposition on them. 3.2.c. Summary In this section we have seen how the difference in participation between supposition and imagination can be analysed by dwelling on the way in which these mental activities normatively differ. The focus has been on two normative features which regulate differently our suppositions and imaginings. First, while there are contents that we can’t imagine, our supposition cannot be blocked – though we can deliberately refuse to suppose. Second, once a content is given, in supposing it we are in a certain sense committed to it and its direct implications. This does not mean that we have to take such a content to be true, but as if it were true. Thus, we cannot depart from it and any kind of embroidering is unnecessary or even precluded. It might be argued that the second feature of supposition is what explains the first. The idea is that embroidery is the source of blockage: when we can’t imagine a certain content, it is because we are unable to explore the possibility initially put forward. If it is hard for me to imagine that killing babies for fun and profit is morally permissible, or that Robert Stalnaker is the smallest prime number, it is because my background knowledge and mindset make me unable to make up stories which integrate these contents. But then, if supposition does not call for embroidery, this might be the reason why we can suppose nearly any p whatsoever and almost without any effort. Anyway, the question arises as to why imagination and supposition normatively differ in such a way. If the aforementioned normative differences are manifestations of different kinds of engagement involved in imagination and supposition, we are far from having understood what these kinds of engagement are.

3.3 Different readings of the Participation Claim Supposition and imagination show different degrees of freedom (i.e., normatively differ), because they involve different kinds of participation – that is, because PC holds. But, then, how can PC be explained? Once again, White’s discussion on supposition is a good starting point.

56

The facets of supposition

So far I have talked about imagination and supposition as mental activities. However, this has been disputed. Indeed, White argues that while imagination is an activity, supposition is not – i.e., it is not “the sort of things in which one is engaged, interrupted at, find tiring, do slowly or even quickly, well or badly, desire or resolve to do” (White 1990, p. 142). It is not crystal clear what it means to say that supposition is not an activity and at least two interpretations may be given. By saying that “one can exercise or use one’s imagination, but not one’s supposition (…). One can set one’s imagination, but not one’s supposition at work” (White 1990, p. 138), White seems to point out that imagination is a process that can be set in motion and can take time. In contrast, supposition is a mental state that occurs at a specific time. On this suggestion PC can be reframed as follows: PC-P. All imaginings involve a process, whereas no supposition does. However, there seems not to be a genuine contrast here. Certainly supposition can be a process. For instance, we can decide to suppose that p, as well as we can decide to stop or to refuse supposing that p. Moreover, it seems plausible to say that in supposing that p we are doing something with p. As suggested in the previous chapter, we can talk about a suppositional process set in motion once we suppose that p. Finally, saying that supposition is not, contrary to imagination, a process is not relevant for explaining the normative differences between imagination and supposition. For the freedom of supposition and its fixed nature seem to be features independent of whether supposition is a process. White might suggest something stronger, namely that the word “imagination”, contrary to the word “supposition”, does not capture only an occurrent mental process or state, but also a faculty. The idea would be that there are feats or flights of imagination and one can give free rein to one’s imagination, because imagination is a faculty. White, for instance, writes that “[i]magination is a faculty which is exercised in imagining” (White 1990, p. 185). Thus, the suggestion is that, in contrast, there is no faculty of supposition. But, then, if this is the case, it might be because supposition is a process or a state run by a faculty, perhaps even by the imagination. And so this ultimately challenges White himself: the differences he has envisaged do not correspond to an essential distinction, but rather allow seeing supposition as a type of imagining. Anyway talking about faculties is not really illuminating without clarifying what they are and what they do. Indeed, interpreting PC as saying that, contrary to suppositions, all imaginings are the products of a faculty does not tell us anything substantial about the different kinds of engagement involved by imagination and supposition. There are at least two readings of the idea that imagination is, and supposition is not, an activity in the sense of a faculty. A first suggestion might be that supposition is not a faculty because it is not a genuine psychological attitude. Here is the new reading of PC:

Participation

57

PC-A. All imaginings manifest a faculty, whereas no supposition does, because only the former are psychological attitudes. Very often in the literature supposition is described just as the act of apprehending or entertaining a propositional content (e.g., Peacocke 1985; Goldman 2006b; Doggett & Egan 2007; Kind 2016c). Let us call this “the Fregean account” of supposition. The idea is that entertaining is better classified as the act of apprehending a (propositional) content – what Frege called “grasping a sense”, rather than a genuine way of apprehending a content (i.e., a psychological attitude). If it were so, supposition would not be an attitude (such as perception, belief, desire and even imagination), and would be involved in all intentional mental states – including imaginings (or at least the ones with propositional content). I will not say much about the Fregean account here, since it will be discussed at length later on in Chapter 5. Indeed, philosophers who have maintained that supposition is not a type of imagination tend towards the Fregean account. At this stage it suffices to underline that different attitudes can be sorted out along several dimensions and positive characterisations of them can be offered. In other words, each attitude shows proper features that constitute its own way of apprehending a given content. Indeed, the same content (e.g., that there is a birch in the garden) can be apprehended by different attitudes (e.g., belief, desire, perception, memory). It is precisely the different kinds of mental state that give different forces to the same content. According to the Fregean account, there is no positive characterisation of supposition as an attitude; supposition would not have proper features. Indeed, as we have seen so far, supposition is mainly described in a negative way by stressing the features it lacks. Even the first normative feature of supposition seems to reinforce the Fregean account. Supposition is so free that almost every proposition can be supposed, but entertaining also shows such a degree of freedom. The same cannot be straightforwardly said for the second normative feature of supposition. While in supposing that p we are in a certain way committed to p, entertaining the proposition that p is neutral with respect to truth and falsity. White himself is clear on this feature of supposition. Thus, although his account might be interpreted as suggesting that supposition is nothing but the apprehension of a content,10 on a closer look White does not seem to fully endorse the Fregean account, for he suggests that supposition has some proper features, contrary to mere entertaining. A more precise characterisation of the features proper to supposition will be at issue in the next chapter, which will give further elements against the Fregean account and in favour of the idea that supposition is a genuine psychological attitude. There is another way to interpret the claim that supposition should not be seen as an activity on par with imagination, which would seem more successful as an attempt to reject the claim that supposition is a type of imagination. The idea is that supposition cannot be a process or a state run by the imagination, because supposition is not re-creative as imagination is. This

58

The facets of supposition

view has been independently advanced by Goldman and Balcerak Jackson (see the quoted passages in §3.1) and can be put forth as follows: PC-R. All imaginings manifest the faculty of the Imagination, whereas no supposition does, because only the former are re-creative mental states. We have seen that a widespread view on imagination takes it to be the capacity to mimic or to “re-create” non-imaginative kinds of mental state (see the book introduction). Different types of imagination would have different counterparts among the non-imaginative mental states. For instance, while sensory imagination has sensory perception as its non-imaginative counterpart, cognitive imagination has belief as its counterpart. Supposition would not have any counterpart and should be seen as a non-imaginative mental state. The discussion about the Phenomenology Claim already led us to consider this idea. The suggestion was that the fact that when supposing we are not in the business of re-creating an experience manifests itself in a lack of phenomenology: re-creating an experience would involve a specific feeling of what it is like to be in some conscious re-created state and supposition would lack such a phenomenology. In the present context what is at issue is not the phenomenal character that might accompany imaginings qua re-created states, but rather the very kind of mental activity that is in place when we imagine, whether or not it shows up at the phenomenological level. Even if there is no special type of phenomenology proper to the re-creation of experiences, what we do when we imagine would be of a completely different sort from what we do when we suppose: only in the former case we would recreate being in some conscious state. In order to better clarify this way of explaining PC, let us consider Goldman’s example. Goldman maintains that to imagine that I am living in ancient Troy and observing Helen, is quite different from supposing that I am living in ancient Troy and observing Helen. It seems that in the latter case I have simply to put forward the hypothesis, to stipulate that I am living in ancient Troy and observing Helen. In the former case I am engaged in something more complex: I have to open the doors of imagination in order to really envision what it would be like to live in ancient Troy and to observe Helen. According to Goldman this is a matter of a subjective capacity and “the powers are fine if they are accompanied by suitable knowledge or experience to guide the visualizing act” (Goldman 2006a, p. 175). For example, my friend John, an expert on ancient Troy and an avid reader of Schliemann’s work, would be in a better position than me to imagine what it is like to live in ancient Troy. Whereas my passion for the myth of Helen and its artistic representations would make it easier for me to imagine observing Helen. As suggested by Kind, when one has picked up a fair amount of information about an object, a person or a fact, these become things that one can more easily imagine (Kind 2001, p. 88). On the contrary neither John’s

Participation

59

expertise, nor my artistic background would be useful if our aim were to suppose that we were living in ancient Troy and observing Helen. There would not be any difference between our two suppositional acts. This consideration once again points to the role played by one’s background knowledge and mindset in, at least some, cases of imagination. Moreover, it should be noted that Goldman’s words indicate that what is at stake is only visualisation, or sensory imagination. But, then, if in the imaginative case it is only a matter of sensory imagination, perhaps we are dealing with an example that at best differentiates supposition from the latter, and leaves open the possibility that supposition is a type of imagination – perhaps cognitive imagination.11 From this perspective the difference in participation between supposition and imagination easily collapses into the previous differences: contrary to supposition, imagination would be participative because it involves a phenomenal character or an emotional response. Nonetheless, the participative difference does not seem to be merely a question of sensory imagination versus supposition. Supposition and cognitive imagination as well could be seen to require different types of participation, as suggested by Balcerak Jackson (2016). For example, Susan, who has a great passion for film and documentaries on ancient Troy, could be as competent as John in imagining what it is like to live in ancient Troy, but it is plausible that she makes more use of a perception-like imagination than he does; John would exploit a belief-like imagination, since his knowledge about the topic is less visual than Susan’s. Although when they imagine living in ancient Troy they are using different kinds of imagination, both John and Susan are doing something similar: they are re-creating experiences. While John is re-creating a doxastic experience – what it would be like to believe living in ancient Troy, Susan is re-creating a perceptual-experience – what it would be like to perceive living in ancient Troy. In order to re-create living in ancient Troy both exercises require the deployment of one’s overall mental setup, that is to say, the collection of one’s implicit and explicit knowledge, beliefs, memories, personal attitudes, emotions, etc., that marks and is shaped by our way of engaging with the world. In both cases we retrieve the holistic cognitive dynamics proper to imagination we discussed in Chapter 2. John and Susan are exploring the possibility of living in ancient Troy and in so doing their imagination is exploiting their overall mental setup, though one is led to use more cognitive imagination and less sensory imagination than the other. As we have seen supposition exhibits a channelled, rather than a holistic, dynamics and seems to be less connected to one’s overall mental setup. For this reason, it might be thought that supposition is not as perspectival or self-involving as imagination is.12 Once again the difference in cognitive dynamics between kinds of imagination and supposition proves to be a key difference. Once again the question arises as to why kinds of imagination, such as sensory and cognitive imagination, and supposition differ in such a way. The answer suggested by the holder of PC-R (i.e., PC interpreted in terms of re-creative power) is that

60

The facets of supposition

sensory and cognitive imagination re-create conscious experiences, whereas supposition is not re-creative. Within this framework we can also explain the two normative differences between imagination and supposition. First, there are contents that we can’t imagine but almost all contents can be supposed, because, as Zeno Vendler rightly observed, “[t]he limits of imagination are the limits of experience” (Vendler 1979, p. 166). Although Vendler did not explicitly hold a recreativist account of imagination, his observation can be interpreted in a recreativist way. The idea is that each type of imagining has its proper limits, which are in part inherited from that of their counterparts: given our background knowledge and mindset, what we can sensorily imagine is constrained by what is possible for us to perceptually experience and what we can cognitively imagine is constrained by what is possible for us to believe.13 One can sensorily imagine something not directly experienced previously. I can, for instance, visually imagine flying pigs and pucks (ducks with pigs’ heads). I just need to combine items (e.g., a pig with the wings of a bird, a pig and a duck), which are individually experienced. However, the patchwork of ideas which can give rise to our sensory imaginings cannot be composed in a completely free manner: the subject should not lose a handle on her ability to recognise the (visual, tactile, auditory, etc.) appearance of things or her concepts of them. This is the reason why it is difficult, if not impossible, to sensorily imagine a square circle. In this case one is not able any more to recognise the (visual, tactile, etc.) appearance of a circle and loses a handle on the concept circle. In addition, recall that both sensory imagination and cognitive imagination can be resistant when the content is morally evaluable. This is not a question of the moral nature of the contents; on the contrary, we are facing the proper limits of the kind of imagination involved. Take for instance the Waltonian case of Giselda, who killed her baby because of its gender. If I cannot conceive a world in which infanticide for the purpose of sexual selection is right (i.e., I cannot re-create a disposition to feel or to judge it possible), I can not cognitively imagine that Giselda did the right thing. Thus, the refusal or blockage of cognitive imagination relies on my overall mental setup. Putting things this way allows us to see imaginative resistance not as a whole-ornothing matter, rather as something that comes in degrees. This is because things can be more or less easily believable, depending on the subject’s previous experience. On this line of thought it might be suggested that supposition is nearly boundless, because there would be no counterpart which constrains it: supposition would putatively not be the imaginative homologue of any counterpart. Second, we have seen that the embroidery proper to the holistic dynamics shown by sensory and cognitive imagination can be taken as a way to explore in multiple directions the possibility initially put forward. But this seems also to be due to the re-creative nature of imagination. As suggested beforehand, re-creating experiences, such as perceptual or doxastic experiences,

Participation

61

calls for a holistic dynamics, which makes embroidery a means to take on in imagination these experiential perspectives. If supposition is not a matter of recreating a mental state, it should not be surprising that supposition does not call for embroidery and focuses only on the given content and its direct implications. In this section we have seen different ways to account for the idea that what we do when we suppose is different from what we do when we imagine. First, it might be claimed that there are imaginative processes and no suppositional process (this is PC-P). Second, the relevant contrast might be that imagination, but not supposition, is a faculty. Although none of these alternatives proved to really carve imagination and supposition at their joints, the latter can be further developed in order to gain a better grasp on the participative difference between these two mental phenomena. On the one hand, being a faculty may be interpreted as being manifested by a psychological attitude (this is PC-A). Following this interpretation it might be suggested that supposition is not a specific way to apprehend a content, but the mere act of apprehending or entertaining a content. I have called such a view the Fregean account. Contrary to other psychological attitudes, including imagination, supposition would lack the positive features that characterise a sui generis mode of apprehending a content. However, the second normative feature of supposition suggests that supposition is less neutral than mere entertaining. Contrary to the simple grasping of a content, supposing that p implies that we take p as if it were true (I will extensively dwell on the Fregean account in Chapter 5). On the other hand, in contrast to supposition, imagination might be seen as a re-creative faculty (this is PC-R). While in imagining we would re-create being in some conscious state, supposing would not involve any re-creation. Within such a framework both normative features of supposition can be explained. The different degrees of freedom shown by imagination and supposition would be explained by the fact that imagination is constrained by its re-creative nature. This way of interpreting PC is compelling and emerges as the most important challenge against the imaginative nature of supposition. However, an alternative explanation of PC is available. It is true that PC points at genuine features that distinguish supposition from other types of imagination (e.g., sensory imagination and cognitive imagination), namely the aforementioned two normative features. One might also accept the idea that the normative features proper to sensory imagination and cognitive imagination are due to the fact that they re-create perception and belief respectively. A question arises: Why could not supposition be re-creative? So far the discussion has only pointed out that supposition normatively differs from sensory and cognitive imagination. It might be that the normative features shown by supposition are inherited from its non-imaginative counterpart, which, of course, could not be either perception, or belief. The re-creative nature of supposition is still an open possibility.

62

The facets of supposition

3.4 Summary A very general claim is what I have called “the Participation Claim”: PC. All imaginings involve a certain kind of participation or engagement, which no supposition requires. I pointed out that PC is so generic, that it can support all of the arguments discussed in the course of the last chapters. Indeed, if the relevant kind of participation or engagement is phenomenological we end up with the Phenomenology Claim. Likewise, we get the Emotionality Claim from PC, if the relevant kind of participation or engagement is emotional. PC proved to be an independent claim, which points at a difference between supposition and imagination that goes beyond either a phenomenological or an emotional kind of engagement. PC can be interpreted as asserting that imagining and supposing are completely different mental activities. In order to get clear on PC, I started from what it seems to ground, namely two different normative features that regulate differently supposition and imagination. The first normative feature is that, contrary to the extreme flexibility of what can be supposed, there are things that cannot be easily imagined, either because we refuse to imagine, or because we are incapable of imagining (i.e., we face imaginative refusal or imaginative blockage, respectively). The second normative feature is that, contrary to the different ways to explore the possibility of what we imagine, supposition just requires taking the given content as if it were true and to see what can be directly implied from it. I argued that this does not mean that explicit instructions are always needed or that a specific implication should always be known in advance by the supposer. Moreover, I suggested that the first normative feature of supposition can be explained by the second, which in turn seems to be due to the channelled dynamics proper to supposition that contrasts with the holistic dynamics shown by imagination. But this difference is in need of explanation too. Then, I turned to the idea, advanced by White among others, that supposition is not an activity, or at least not of the same sort as imagination. I spelled out different ways to interpret such an idea and checked how they account for the normative differences between imagination and supposition. On a first reading, PC-P claims that there are imaginative processes, but not suppositional processes. This idea seems to be false, insofar we can talk about suppositional processes. At any rate, even granting that the participatory difference between imagination and supposition should be understood in such a way, it is not clear how it explains the normative differences between these mental phenomena. On a second reading, it might be that imagination, but not supposition, is a faculty. This suggestion is not very informative without further clarifications. At least two interpretations can be offered, which point to two more readings of PC. First, if “being a faculty” means “being manifested by a psychological

Participation

63

attitude”, PC-A states that imagination is and supposition is not a psychological attitude. On this view, supposition is merely the act of apprehending, grasping or entertaining a content, lacking any specific way of apprehending such a content. This is what I have called “the Fregean account” of supposition. However, at least the second normative feature of supposition shows how the latter is less neutral than mere entertaining, thus leaving open the possibility that supposition is a genuine psychological attitude. Second, the faculty of the imagination has been defined as re-creative in nature. Saying that supposition is not a faculty might be interpreted as denying that supposition is re-creative. This proved to be the most compelling way of understanding PC, that is PC-R. Indeed, it enables us to account for both normative differences between supposition and imagination. However, I have suggested that this is not the last word on the matter. PC-R distinguishes supposition from other types of imagination (e.g., sensory imagination and cognitive imagination), but does not give enough arguments against the idea that supposition is the re-creation of a non-imaginative kind of mental state. The normative features which regulate differently sensory imagination and cognitive imagination, on the one hand, and supposition, on the other, might be explained by claiming that these traits are inherited from their counterparts, thus suggesting that the counterpart of supposition differs from both counterparts of these types of imagination (i.e., perception for sensory imagination and belief for cognitive imagination). One might be not convinced by this suggestion and still favour the anti-recreativist view on supposition, or even the Fregean account. Indeed, none of these alternative views on supposition has the upper hand. In order to be able to choose among these views it seems necessary to dwell more on the features proper to supposition. Let us now turn to that.

Notes 1 My formulation of PC does not rule out the possibility that supposition involves a type of engagement/participation, still different from the type of engagement/ participation required by imagination. However, a stronger interpretation of the difference in participation would deny this and claim that while imagination involves engagement/participation, supposition does not involve any. Although I will be less concerned with this stronger version of PC, my analysis of the difference in participation can be adapted to this view. 2 White is mainly considering propositional forms of imagination and claims that supposition is not a type of imagination. However, what he says can easily be extended to non-propositional forms of imagination. Thus, the following discussion will suggest that there are normative differences which distinguish supposition from various types of imagination, such as cognitive and sensory imagination. Accordingly, unless specified otherwise, in the remainder of the Section I will use “to imagine” and “imagination” as referring to both cognitive and sensory imagination. 3 This section is adapted from Arcangeli (2014). 4 Generally speaking the resistance may arise also when facing aesthetic or epistemic evaluations (presumably any kind of evaluative sentence), when attributing mental states or both mental and linguistic content (see, e.g., Weatherson 2004).

64

The facets of supposition

5 I take on board this distinction and disagree with philosophers rooting imaginative resistance only in the imaginer’s unwillingness (e.g., Sorensen 2017). 6 Following Meinong, Balcerak Jackson (2016, p. 47) points out that even negative states of affairs, such as absences, can be supposed to obtain without any problems, although it seems difficult to imagine such things. This asymmetry is questionable, however. As acknowledged by Balcerak Jackson herself in a footnote (ibid., fn 14), it might be claimed that we can imagine absences as we can perceive absences. For instance, I have no difficulties in imagining the absence of Pierre in his usual jazz club. 7 The issue about mental or cognitive effort is delicate. Indeed, there seem to be two different (and compatible) senses of “effort”. On the one hand, supposition is a highly deliberate mental act, which presumably requires attention and a huge amount of energy in computational terms. In this sense, supposition is effortful. On the other hand, a subject can easily come up with a supposition and in principle can suppose whatever p she can grasp. In this other sense, supposition is effortless. The latter sense is what is at stake in the present discussion. 8 This point has been frequently stressed in the literature. Furlong wrote: “When Peter supposes, in order to oblige his mother, his activity (…) is directed: it aims at satisfying a request. (…) Thus it is difficult to be sure that there is any undirected supposal. (…) we should rather say that the direction varies according as it comes from without or within” (Furlong 1961, p. 29). More recently, Kriegel (2015, p. 113) has defined supposition as entertaining plus the epistemic goal to know what is inferable from the supposed content. Fiora Salis and Roman Frigg distinguish supposition from other varieties of propositional imagination by characterising it with two distinctive features: “epistemic purpose (EP) and rational thinking (RT)” (Salis & Frigg forthcoming). Balcerack Jackson has also stressed that “supposing always happens for a purpose, while we often imagine for its own sake” (Balcerack Jackson 2016, p. 48). According to Stock, all suppositions (generally all propositional imaginings) are goal-oriented, but she distinguishes between “autonomous” or self-generated supposition, and “instruction-based” supposition (Stock 2017, p. 201). 9 The reference is to the thought experiments put forward by Einstein. For instance, in his thought experiment known as EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) a contradiction is derived from the supposition that Quantum Mechanics is complete and that the principle of separability-locality (which posits that, if two systems are sufficiently separated, the measurements performed on a system do not directly alter the reality of the other) is true. On one interpretation, EPR was conceived to prove not merely Quantum Mechanics’ incompleteness, but rather the possibility of its deterministic completion. On another interpretation, the aim was to show the impossibility of supporting Quantum Mechanics’ completeness holding, at the same time, the separability-locality principle. 10 White seems even to undermine the idea that imagination is a psychological attitude. He defines imagining as thinking – precisely imagining x or that p would be thinking of x or p as “possibly being the case” (White 1990, p. 146). However, thinking in turn can be seen as nothing but entertaining. 11 Actually, this is Goldman’s preferred view. As we shall see in more detail in Chapter 6, according to Goldman supposition can be seen as nothing but belief-like imagination. 12 Tamar Szabò Gendler clearly maintains that imagination and supposition call for different kinds of engagement. She takes PC as an explanans, more than as an explanandum. Indeed, she thinks that “the engagement which distinguishes imagination from mere supposition plays a crucial role in the phenomena we are concerned with explaining” (Gendler 2006, p. 150). These phenomena are the puzzles to which imagination can give rise. She says that “it is only when we engage

Participation

65

imaginatively—an engagement that is, in some difficult-to-pin-down way selfinvolving—that forceful resistance of the relevant kind begins to emerge” (ibid.). 13 The fact that the re-creative nature of imagination is the source of its limits is clearly endorsed by Balcerak Jackson (2016, p. 50). She suggests that this holds for both sensory imagination and cognitive imagination, although she argues that the re-creation of experiences, such as perceptual and bodily experiences, is a very different kind of mental process than the re-creation of belief (“conceiving” in her terminology). I will come back to this issue in Chapter 6.

4

Features proper to supposition

4.1 Introduction The previous chapters focused on the features that supposition is claimed to lack. Imagination has been credited with some phenomenal character, which supposition is denied (Chapter 1). Contrary to imagination, supposition, some philosophers maintain, does not trigger emotional responses (Chapter 2). Another claim made in the literature is that imagination and supposition require different kinds of participation or engagement (Chapter 3). We have seen that things are much more complicated. With respect to phenomenology, the claim that supposition has no phenomenal character (i.e., the Phenomenology Claim) stems from a narrow conception of phenomenology as only sensory or experiential. On this view, supposition is contrasted only with sensory imagination, which would show those types of phenomenology, leaving open the possibility that supposition is a type of non-sensory imagination (e.g., cognitive imagination). However, once we accept the existence of cognitive phenomenology, nothing prevents supposition, as well as other types of non-sensory imagination, from showing such a type of phenomenology. In addition, if we are prone to admit that non-sensory types of imagination like cognitive imagination are genuinely imaginative, and thus to credit them with a phenomenal character, it is not clear why this is so for cognitive imagination but not for supposition. Of course one might think that cognitive imagination has no phenomenology either. But then the Phenomenology Claim would turn out to be false: only some imaginings have a phenomenal character. In order to save the Phenomenology Claim, cognitive imagination would have to be excluded from being considered a genuine type of imagination. This view has been defended in the literature (e.g., Langland-Hassan 2012; Kind 2013; Schellenberg 2013). There are, however, prima facie good reasons to think that cognitive imagination does exist and is a type of imagination. This claim will be motivated in this chapter, as well as in the chapter considering the view that supposition is nothing but cognitive imagination (Chapter 6). As far as emotionality is concerned, it is hasty to claim that there is no link between supposition and emotion (i.e., the Emotionality Claim). First of all

Features proper to supposition

67

when talking about the supposition–emotion connection two things should be distinguished: (a) whether supposition can serve as input to the affect system, and (b) whether the outputs of the affect system may be taken as inputs by supposition. Although it might be doubted that supposition can directly trigger emotional responses, nothing runs against the idea that supposition can do it indirectly – perhaps via (sensory or cognitive) imagination. By contrast supposition seems not to be sensitive to the outputs of the affect system. This disconnection in output from the affect system has been grounded in the channelled dynamics of supposition. Suppositional processes have been described as a regimented sequential functioning which ignores inputs that are irrelevant to the purpose of establishing what follows from the supposed content. After all, there is a link between supposition and emotion, but the supposition–emotion connection is unidirectional. The Emotionality Claim has proved to be more helpful than the Phenomenology Claim to highlight a feature of supposition that distinguishes supposition from both sensory and cognitive imagination – if not from imagination tout court. Also the Participation Claim has pointed at core features of supposition, which help in carving supposition and (certain types of) imagination at their joints. Two normative features characterise supposition: (i) a high degree of freedom about the contents that can be supposed and (ii) a commitment to take the given content as if it were true and to draw what is directly inferable from it. These features differentiate supposition from both sensory and cognitive imagination. (i) points to how supposition is freer than sensory and cognitive imagination. In sensorily or cognitively imagining a much more limited range of contents can be imagined. We might think this freedom is the result of imagination leading sometimes to what has been called “imaginative refusal”, that is, when we sometimes won’t sensorily or cognitively imagine some content. But as I showed in Chapter 3, this is not right, since supposition can also inspire what I have called “suppositional refusal”. Nonetheless, there is something to this idea. There is “imaginative blockage”, when we are unable to sensorily or cognitively imagine some contents, and there are no cases of “suppositional blockage”. Relatedly, supposing requires minimal or no mental effort in comparison with sensory and cognitive imagination. Indeed, a subject can easily come up with a supposition and in principle can suppose whatever content she can grasp. (ii) reminds us that supposition is constrained in a way that both sensory and cognitive imagination are not. The latter are not regulated by a channelled dynamics, but rather by a holistic dynamics. Building on our overall mental-setup (i.e., our knowledge, beliefs, memories, personal attitudes, emotions and so on), both sensory and cognitive imagination explore possibilities integrating the given content. This allows for embroidery, which is not called for by supposition. I have suggested that (ii) can ground (i). Unimaginable contents are those that cannot be explored and integrated in a story. Supposition does not require any exploration or integration, thus in principle there are no unsupposable contents. This also leads to the fact that supposition seems to be less constrained by one’s overall mental-setup. A subject can

68

The facets of supposition

suppose that p, where p is something contrary to a moral view or ontological stance which she endorses. For instance, Emma may suppose that she is racist, though she is not. Imagining does not seem to be so free, because of the role played by one’s overall mental-setup in its holistic dynamics. More generally, the behaviour of both sensory and cognitive imagination along the normativity dimension may be explained by calling on the recreativist account on imagination. According to this account, while sensory imagination is the re-creation of perception, cognitive imagination is the re-creation of belief. When a subject sensorily imagines x or that p, she is re-creating what it would be to perceive x or that p, that is, she makes use of her overall mentalsetup in order to explore the possibility of perceiving x or that p. When we fail in such an exploration, we undergo a blockage of our sensory imagination. Contents that are sensorily unimaginable are those that, given one’s overall mental-setup, can’t be perceptually experienced. Likewise, when a subject cognitively imagines that p, she is re-creating what it would be to believe that p, that is, she makes use of her overall mental-setup in order to explore the possibility of believing that p. When we fail in such an exploration, we undergo a blockage of our cognitive imagination. Contents that are cognitively unimaginable are those that, given one’s overall mental-setup, can’t be believed, at least easily. The normative features that regulate each type of imagining seem to be due to the specific type of re-created attitude. How does supposition fit into this framework? The behaviour of supposition along the normativity dimension may be explained by claiming that supposition is not re-creative. Because supposition is governed by channelled (instead of holistic) dynamics, it does not require any embroidery and is so free that there are no unsupposable contents, and all this might be due to the fact that for supposition there is no re-created attitude that constrains it. This is a persuasive way to explain the normative features which differentiate supposition from both sensory and cognitive imagination. However, an alternative view is available. It might also be that supposition re-creates a non-imaginative attitude, but one that is different from both belief and perception. The fact that supposition, cognitive imagination and sensory imagination have different counterparts would explain their differences along the normativity dimension. It is not yet time to go into detail about these different views. That will be a matter for Chapter 6. In this chapter I would like to consider supposition along other dimensions, namely propositionality, inferentiality, will-dependence and truth-dependence.1 The upshot will be a characterisation of supposition that still better equips us to examine its nature.

4.2 Propositionality On the basis of a linguistic analysis, it can be argued that supposition can only have propositional contents.2 Generally speaking the content of a mental state is propositional if the verb that canonically expresses it (here “suppose”)

Features proper to supposition

69

takes a propositional complement – i.e., when it is followed by another sentence (e.g., There is an oak) introduced by the conjunction “that”. In this respect supposition is not different from imagination, since the verb “imagine” can also take a propositional complement. It has even been suggested that, when used this way, “suppose” and “imagine” are interchangeable. There would be no difference between the following sentences: (S’) (I’)

Emma supposes that there is an oak. Emma imagines that there is an oak.

In addition to its propositional forms, however, the verb “imagine” has nonpropositional syntactical forms; to take the previous sentence: (¬p I’)

Emma imagines (seeing, touching) an oak.

In the case of non-propositional complements, supposition does not sound grammatical:3 (¬p S’)*

Emma supposes (seeing, touching) an oak.

Such a grammatical difference between “imagine” and “suppose” might suggest a qualitative difference between imagination and supposition. Often philosophers of mind appeal to linguistic facts in order to capture psychological phenomena.4 Nevertheless, one might ask to what extent ordinary language can reveal the nature of a psychological category and how it differs from other categories. For instance, Kind underlines that the imagination-related vocabulary is heterogeneous in such a way that we are not sure that when we use it we pick out only exercises of imagination. As she puts it, “[o]ur use of the word ‘imaginative’ (…) far outruns our actual use of the imagination” (Kind 2001, p. 88 – for a similar point see also Flew 1953). For present purposes I take ordinary language and linguistic facts at best as heuristic guides. Balcerak Jackson remarks that it is too hasty to leap from a grammatical to an ontological difference. Still, a linguistic analysis can be of help in ontological and psychological queries. She maintains that non-propositional forms of “imagine” (in her terminology “objectual and eventive imagining”) “capture a distinctive phenomenon”, which she calls “imagination in the core sense” (Balcerak Jackson 2016, p. 47). The grammatical fact that non-propositional forms are not available for “suppose”, thus, suggests that supposition is not imagination in the core sense. We have already pointed out (Chapter 1, Chapter 3) that for Balcerak Jackson imagination and supposition are “two distinct mental kinds” (ibid.). More precisely, she argues that supposition is not re-creative as imagination (in the core sense) is. However, other authors have claimed that supposition is re-creative. Supposition has been described as a variety of imagination which re-creates either belief (i.e., cognitive imagination), or a type of mental state

70

The facets of supposition

similar but different to belief (e.g., judgement, acceptance). It is not yet time to evaluate all these views – this will be done in Part II. For now, it is interesting to notice that the propositionality of supposition has been taken to suggest that supposition has belief, or another propositional mental state, as its counterpart. The idea is that each variety of imagination mimics its counterpart along some dimensions; propositionality is one of these. Following this line of thought, propositionality has been very often proposed as a criterion for distinguishing sensory from cognitive imagination (e.g., Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; McGinn 2004; Goldman 2006a).5 According to this view while the content of sensory imagination would be non-propositional, the content of cognitive imagination would be propositional. This is analogous to one of the arguments to the effect that the contents of perception and belief, that is the counterparts of sensory and cognitive imagination respectively, are distinct. This view is so widespread that commonly the dichotomies between visual/ non-visual and non-propositional/propositional are understood as synonymous. Very often they merge into each other to become the graphical/linguistic, or the pictorial/discursive, the perceptual/propositional distinction. However, the question about the content of perception and belief is far from being settled. On the one hand, the content of perception can be propositional (see the notion of epistemic perception in Dretske 1969), if not always propositional (see Byrne 2005). On the other hand, the literature recognises non-propositional forms of belief (see Szabó 2003; Kriegel 2018). Note that with respect to imagination, it has been suggested that some propositional imaginings are not belief-like.6 More importantly, at least some sensory imaginings would have propositional content (e.g., Mulligan 1999; Dokic 2008).7 Propositionality does not seem to fit as a means to grasp either the distinction between perception and belief, or the distinction between their imaginative homologues. But it might still be true that varieties of imagination are similar to their counterparts along the propositionality dimension.8 To sum up, the fact that the verb “suppose” is typically formulated with a “that” clause – that is we suppose that p, rather than x or φ-ing, does not tell anything substantial about the nature of supposition. Balcerak Jackson is right in pointing out that we, as competent users of English, understand that there is a difference between saying that someone supposes that she sees an oak and saying that someone imagines seeing an oak. Yet, it is open to debate what this difference amounts to.9

4.3 Inferentiality The propositionality of supposition is tied to another feature supposition has been credited with, namely inferentiality. This feature has been extensively discussed for propositional beliefs (hereafter simply beliefs). Beliefs are related to one another by inferential dispositions: having one or more beliefs grounds that the subject ought to have certain other beliefs. For example, on the basis

Features proper to supposition

71

of her belief that there are only beeches in her garden, Emma is disposed to perform certain beech-related inferences on its basis (e.g., infer that there are no birches in the garden, infer that beeches are common in this part of the country). This idea has been described in a more cognitive jargon by saying that belief is connected to inferential mechanisms, whose job would be to take beliefs as inputs and provide as outputs inferentially connected contents (e.g., Nichols 2004 and 2006b; Weinberg & Meskin 2006b; Weinberg 2008). In turn, these contents would be the objects of further beliefs. In the case of Emma, inferential mechanisms would process Emma’s belief that there are only beeches in her garden and yield contents such as “there are no birches in the garden” or “beeches are common in this part of the country”. To take another example, from the belief that the water is boiling an inferential mechanisms’ output is likely to be that the water is at 100 C°, if the subject believes or knows that if water boils at sea level then it is at 100 C°. Belief is said to be closed under believed/known obvious entailment. If a subject believes that p, and believes/knows that p implies q, if nothing points to a revision of p, then ceteris paribus she will believe that q. A worry can be raised. One might follow Jane Heal’s insight and claim that “perhaps in this respect the specific hypothesis is wrong and inference mechanisms do not take beliefs as input but rather take items which represent or encode propositional contents without attached attitudes” (Heal 1998, p. 494). The inferential patterns shown by belief would be due to the type of content, rather than the attitude at stake. Hence, when one believes that p, q and r, and goes on to believe that s, when s can be inferred from p, q and r, it may be because one recognises a particular relationship between the propositions, not because of the way in which these propositions are apprehended (i.e., via belief). However, this pattern is not observed in other propositional attitudes, such as desire. As suggested by Brian Weatherson, desire is not closed under known obvious entailment, though it is (at least some of the time) propositional.10 For example, I desire that more than half of all hungry children are fed, and I know that this entails that there are hungry children, but I do not desire that there are hungry children. Therefore, in some sense inferential mechanisms should be sensitive also to the attitude through which a given content is apprehended, since the propositionality of the content does not suffice to grant that the mental state will obey certain inferential rules (e.g., being closed under known obvious entailment). Are there other propositional attitudes interacting with inferential mechanisms in a way similar to belief – i.e., showing inferentiality? It seems that this is the case for at least one other propositional attitude, supposition. Admittedly, philosophers who have stressed the inferential likeness between belief and supposition take the latter to be a form of cognitive imagination (e.g., Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, Weinberg & Meskin 2006b). Although this view is questionable (see Chapter 6), having a look at what these authors have said about supposition qua cognitive imagination could nonetheless be illuminating for non-imaginative accounts of supposition.

72

The facets of supposition

Inferential functional similarities between cognitive imagination and belief are suggested by cognitive research on modal reasoning and engagement with fiction and pretence.11 Let us see some examples. Currie and Ravenscroft stress that the fact that cognitive imagination preserves the inferential role of belief is so natural that sometimes we do not even realise that we are exploiting our cognitive imagination rather than our belief system. This is so when we think modally, for instance in planning our lives or when we evaluate counterfactual conditionals. For instance, Emma, who would like to plant a birch in the garden, may evaluate a conditional of the form: “If I planted a birch in the garden, my sister would suffer from her birch pollen allergy”. She will first cognitively imagine the antecedent. Then this cognitive imagining is processed as a belief and the upshot is another belief-like state, which may or may not have the consequent as its content (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, pp. 12–13; see also Weinberg & Meskin 2006b; Sinhababu 2013). Maybe, by considering the fact that her sister is not that often in the garden, Emma will come up with a belief-like state whose content is that “my sister will not suffer from birch pollen allergy”. In any case, the upshot can be considered as an estimation of what she would be prone to believe if she really believed that she will plant a birch. Cognitive imagination features inferential properties similar to belief also when expectations about what would have happened are at stake, that is, when we evaluate counterfactual conditionals (e.g., Williamson 2007; Ichikawa 2008). For instance, Emma is thinking about last summer when she was fined for having parked her car without displaying the payment ticket. In fact she believed that parking was free for fifteen minutes, indeed she put the parking disk, and she had just to pick up a friend. She saw the parking officers approaching her car, but she did not run fast enough. Now she is wondering what might have been happened if she had run faster or if her friend had not kept her waiting. In so doing she explores in imagination the causal connection between various antecedents (e.g., I ran faster, my friend did not keep me waiting) and the consequent (i.e., I would not have been fined): she makes inferences from cognitive imaginings to cognitive imaginings that are analogous to belief-to-belief ones. Emma’s cases exemplify a very widespread mental activity we engage in when we think modally. It is not by chance that imagination has been invoked for explaining modal epistemology and psychology (see, e.g., Hume 1739; Mulligan 1999; Nichols 2006a; Williamson 2007; Ichikawa 2008; Ichikawa & Jarvis 2012; Kung 2016). The inferential similarity of cognitive imagination and belief also emerges in fictional contexts; indeed, our engagement with fiction seems to stem precisely from this feature of cognitive imagination (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, p. 13). Cognitive imaginings and beliefs inferentially mingle together and give rise to fictional stories. When we give free rein to our imagination, in most cases, we exploit tacit beliefs about the real world. There are several data in psychology and cognitive sciences which ground this claim. It has been

Features proper to supposition

73

shown, for instance, that when subjects imagine aliens, they tend to preserve the main, and even the co-occurrence of, features proper to earth animals (Brédart et al. 1998). After all, even the mythical creatures from Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Grimm’s fairy tales are likely to preserve real natural features (Kelly & Keil 1985). Even children tend to fill the lacunas in the story with their own beliefs (Leslie 1988; Harris & Kavanaugh 1993; Harris 2000; Skolnick Weisberg & Goodstein 2009). Within the context of pretence, which plausibly involves imaginings, very young children have been shown to draw ordinary inferences about, for instance, the effect of upturning cups pretended to be full of tea. These inferences exploit their beliefs when the pretend information is lacking. For example, their beliefs about water-pouring situations lead them to imagine that a toy animal is wet, if in the pretence game some liquid has been poured over the toy animal and no one has made a comment on the pretend fact that it is wet (Leslie 1988; Harris & Kavanaugh 1993). It might be objected that all this leads to two claims about imagination, which are both too strong. On the one hand, we might think that we “draw conclusions from a mix of believed and imagined propositions that we’re attending to in the swift way that we believe the logical consequences of believed propositions that we’re attending to or in the swift way that we imagine the logical consequences of imagined propositions that we’re attending to” (Sinhababu 2016, p. 112). I agree with Neil Sinhababu that, since we can imagine things that we do not believe, our imaginings generally do not swiftly interact with our beliefs. From my imagining that Lake Garda is made of tomato sauce, and my belief that lakes made of tomato sauce do not exist, arguably I am not led to imagine or to believe that Lake Garda does not exist. According to Sinhababu making up imaginative projects or filling in fictional stories with our beliefs depends on the rules governing what we are supposed to imagine in specific contexts (ibid.). This might be true, but I take the idea to be that the capacity of cognitive imagination to incorporate one’s beliefs or knowledge derives from cognitive imagination and belief being inferentially alike. In other words, the fact that our brains can process cognitive imaginings and beliefs in quite the same way allows for the mingling, which thus leads to the making up of imaginative projects or the filling in of fictional stories. This does not mean that the mingling should happen in all contexts in which we use our imagination. On the other hand, claiming that cognitive imagination shows inferentiality might be taken to be a claim about the generation of imaginative content. This interpretation has been put forward by Kathleen Stock. According to her, philosophers speaking about inferentiality hold that, given a starting imagining, what an imaginer “imagines next corresponds in content to what she would believe, if she believed those premises, in conjunction with further ‘background’ beliefs of hers” (Stock 2017, p. 176) about the world. Stock does not deny that this is true in some cases, especially in modal thinking. But she argues that this cannot be seen as a defining feature of cognitive imagination,

74

The facets of supposition

which is always or generally or normally shown by it. Stock stresses that we do not always imagine for the purpose of working out what else would be true, were a given scenario the case. She defends the view that our goal when we engage with fiction is “to work out what the author intended to imply (…), and to imaginatively engage with that content” (ibid., p. 178). Moreover, we do this by drawing on background beliefs about fiction and language (e.g., how authors use words in a symbolic way), more than about the world. Stock may be right, but she fails to distinguish two interpretations of the claim that cognitive imagination is inferentially like belief. On one interpretation, we make the general claim that, given a certain content p in imagination, we should imagine next what we would believe, if we believed that p. The principles selecting the development of an imaginative project would follow the same principles that apply to the imaginer’s beliefs about the world. However, this claim does not seem to be generalisable to all cases. From my cognitive imagining that Alice is eating a biscuit on the table, I can come up with the cognitive imagining that Alice will become smaller, on the basis of my cognitive imagining that if someone eats that biscuit on the table, then she becomes smaller. If I believed that Alice is eating a biscuit on the table, I would not have formed the belief that Alice will become smaller, since I do not believe that in the actual world people eating biscuits become smaller. On a second interpretation, what is general is the idea that the type of inferential relation between mental states of the same kind is similar, if not identical. Imaginings interact with each other by following inferential relations, in quite the same way beliefs interact with each other by following inferential relations (on this point see Sinhababu 2016, p. 112). This claim is quite plausible and, I take it, the inferentiality of cognitive imagination should be interpreted in this way. The suggestion is that inferential mechanisms do not connect both in input and in output only with belief, but also with cognitive imagination and, more generally, with belief-like attitudes. Analogously to belief, these mechanisms take as inputs cognitive imaginings and provide contents to cognitive imagination. Thus, cognitive imagination shows a belief-like relationship between contents. When it comes to supposition, no matter whether the latter is a type of imagination or else, similar considerations apply. For instance, if I suppose that Spain is larger than China and that filling up one’s tank once would suffice for a Spanish coast to coast trip, ceteris paribus I will also suppose that filling up one’s tank once would suffice for a trip across China. Supposition shows inferentiality, that is, it is connected to inferential mechanisms and processed by them in a way similar to belief. It is not by chance that supposition has been taken to be a type of cognitive imagination, if not cognitive imagination tout court. Note that another worry can be raised. What was said so far might lead us to think that cognitive imaginings/suppositions are a type of belief. This will be at issue in Part II. But now let us dwell on other features of supposition, namely how supposition relates to the will and to truth.

Features proper to supposition

75

4.4 The relationship with will and truth Several authors have stressed the voluntariness of imagination (e.g., Berkeley 1713; Sartre 1940; Ryle 1949; Wittgenstein 1967; Walton 1990; Mulligan 1999; O’Shaughnessy 2003; Gendler 2000; Kind 2001; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; McGinn 2004; Weinberg & Meskin 2006b; Dorsch 2012). Although there are limits to what we can imagine, imaginings seem to be will-dependent. For example, even if in my garden there are only beeches, I can deliberately, sensorily or cognitively, imagine that there is a birch, or that a beech is a birch, or that there are no trees in my garden. That is, we have control over the contents of our imaginings. The will-dependence of our imaginings contrasts them with other mental states, such as percepts and beliefs. The latter are will-independent. While imaginings can be voluntarily controlled, this is never the case for perceiving and believing: I may decide what to imagine, whereas I cannot (directly) decide what to perceive or what to believe. For instance, even if I strongly want to see some birches in my garden, I cannot help perceiving beeches. I cannot perceive deliberately that there is a birch, or that a beech is a birch, or that there is no tree in the garden. The same holds for belief. In order to believe, we need reliable sources of information and reasons: beliefs are shaped by evidence. If I have strong reasons for believing that there are only birches in my garden, I cannot rationally believe the contrary. Will-dependence can be seen as a characteristic feature of the imagination, though not distinctive of it. Mental states other than imaginings are voluntarily produced as well. For instance, if Mary makes the decision to quit smoking next week, her decision is voluntarily produced, but is clearly different from her imagining quitting (or that she will quit) smoking next week. Still, the dependence of imagination on the will can be regarded as one of its essential features. However, the phenomenon of spontaneous imaginings puts pressure on this claim. Indeed, some imaginings seem to be beyond our control: we can be surprised by what we discover in imagination, because we let imagination run without having control on how it develops over time. More specifically, some spontaneous imaginings are unbidden (e.g., Kind 2001 and forthcoming). We are sometimes frustrated by imaginings that we do not want to have, but which haunt us despite our will – like a terrifying image from a film, or a catchy but annoying melody stuck in our mind. However, I take it that there are reasons for holding that spontaneous imaginings, even unbidden imaginings, are in a pertinent sense voluntary or otherwise non-passive. First, sometimes will-dependence is understood in terms of intentions. On this view, imaginings are will-dependent in the sense of being something that we do intentionally.12 Intentions do not seem to be necessary to will-dependence, though. There can be unintentional will-dependent or active states. For instance, one might tap one’s foot unintentionally.13 Certainly this is an activity on the agent’s part, even though she might be unaware of it, but it is spontaneous and can be very intrusive nonetheless. The same is true

76

The facets of supposition

for unintentional spontaneous imaginings (e.g., a terrifying image from the film watched yesterday). These are both things that the subject does (see Kind 2001 on this point). Second, we should keep in mind the conceptual distinction between being will-dependent and being under voluntary control. An imaginer always has the option of intervening in her imaginative experience and of taking control over her imagining, though she may choose or not to exercise this option, and she may still try and fail to do so – as spontaneous and unbidden imaginings show (e.g., Walton 1990; Ichikawa 2009; Kind forthcoming).14 A contrast with perception might be useful. There may be unwelcome percepts, and you can stick your fingers in your ears and hum or run away in order to banish them. This sounds like an external struggle, rather than an internal one like in the case of intrusive imaginings. As Jonathan Ichikawa puts it, the latter are “more like an unwelcome habit or addiction than an unwelcome set of chains” (Ichikawa 2009, p. 107). On this line of thought we can distinguish between spontaneous and deliberate imaginings, but both types of imaginings should be seen as will-dependent. Third, I suggest that the distinction between the role of the subject as an agent and the recognition of this role by the subject herself is also relevant to the question of the will-dependence of imagination. Philosophers who claim that dreaming is imagining point out that dreams show a coherence which seems to reflect a plot (see, e.g., McGinn 2004, pp. 84–85; Ichikawa 2009, p. 116). There is a design in our dreams, and a designer, who is the source of the narrative. Indeed, without putting on the table too much psychoanalysis, dreaming can be seen as a story developed by the dreamer, who expresses (unconsciously) her wishes as well as her fears. Typically we are not aware of this internal agency, but there are dreams in which we realise that we are dreaming and we begin to consciously decide what to dream. These are called “lucid dreams”. In both lucid and non-lucid dreams dreamers do have an active role as authors of their dreams, but only in the former they do recognise their own agency. Perhaps dreaming is not imagining, but it is reasonable to claim that imaginers are not always aware that they are directing their own imaginings. Some spontaneous imaginings, such as unintentional and unbidden imaginings, as well as spontaneous imaginings in daydreaming, might be cases in which the imaginer does not recognise her own agency. Though this idea is often neglected without argument in favour of the view that agency is absent in these cases, it is an open possibility. Jumping to the conclusion that these imaginings are not will-dependent is therefore unjustified. I take these to be prima facie good reasons to think that all imaginings are will-dependent, although they can be either spontaneous or deliberate. Imaginings that are unintentional or not under our voluntary control or not recognised as an action on the part of the subject herself are spontaneous imaginings. As pointed out by Walton (1990), spontaneous imaginings seem to have a life of their own. By contrast, deliberate imaginings are intentional, under our voluntary control and the imaginer is prominently aware of her

Features proper to supposition

77

own agency. If we turn to supposition, such a distinction does not seem to hold. Spontaneous suppositions are infrequent, if there are any. It seems that one cannot spontaneously come up with a supposition, as with a thought or with an imagining. Supposition cannot be as intrusive as imagination can be; one cannot be haunted by a supposition as by an imagining. When a subject supposes she intentionally decides to come up with her supposition, which is under her voluntary control. This does not mean that we cannot be incited or invited to suppose. That is, the source of a supposition need not be the imaginer herself, it might be prompted by someone else. For instance, by reading a novel I may come up with a supposition instructed by what the author wrote, or someone can ask me to suppose that something is the case. Yet in these cases my suppositions are under my voluntary control and intentionally formed (I intentionally follow the requests). Supposition emerges as a highly deliberate mental act. Thus, supposition is will-dependent in a strong sense. The strong dependence of supposition on the will matches quite well with its normativity.15 I have extensively argued for the claim that supposition is characterised by a channelled dynamics, which in turn grounds why supposition does not require any embroidery and is so free that there are nearly no unsupposable contents. This way of understanding supposition reveals it to be highly controlled process: supposition only takes as inputs states that can be regimented in its sequential functioning. Within this framework there is little space for spontaneous suppositions, that is, unintentional suppositions or suppositions that are not under our voluntary control or that we do not recognise as our own actions.16 The will-dependence of supposition is central in considering its relationship with truth. We are free to suppose as we please to such an extent that we can decide to suppose also what we disbelieve, what is false and what we know to be false. Whether the content of my supposition is true or false is completely irrelevant to the success of my suppositional process. Hence, supposition is truth-independent. The same can be said about imaginings. Coming back to the beeches in my garden, regardless of the kind of tree in the garden, I can, both sensorily and cognitively, imagine either that there are birches or that there are beeches. In this respect both supposition and imagination contrast boldly with other mental states, such as belief and perception. The latter show truth-dependence. As Walton puts it: “Belief aims at truth. What is true and only what is true is to be believed. We are not free to believe as we please. We are free to imagine as we please” (Walton 1990, p. 39). I cannot decide to perceive and believe that there are birches in my garden: all I can perceive are beeches and rationally I cannot but believe that there are beeches.

4.5 Summary We have ended up with the following pattern of features for supposition:

78

The facets of supposition

Table 4.1 Supposition Phenomenology Emotionality Normativity Propositionality Inferentiality Will-dependence Truth-dependence

cognitive phenomenology? unidirectional link freedom about what can be supposed and commitment to the given content as if it were true Yes Yes Yes No

This pattern comprises features that are widely accepted in the literature – i.e., those shown by supposition along normativity, propositionality, inferentiality, will-dependence, truth-dependence dimensions. Other features are more controversial, above all those concerning phenomenology and emotionality. In the first and second chapters, I have extensively defended, on the one hand, that supposition can involve a type of phenomenology (plausibly cognitive phenomenology), and, on the other hand, that supposition is linked to emotions, but only in a unidirectional way. The phenomenology dimension is quite slippery, since it cannot be investigated without a clear taxonomy of the types of phenomenology, and in particular of those involved in imagination. It might be argued that emotionality is also problematic, since here as well the debate can gain clarity, once equipped with a stronger account of the relationship between imagination and emotion. Nevertheless, my discussion on supposition along the emotionality dimension has opened a new way of looking at the supposition-emotion connection and yielded a specific hypothesis about such a connection. For this reason, I will take emotionality, but not phenomenology, as a strongly relevant dimension to defining what supposition is. In Part II, which goes deeper into the nature of supposition and compares it with other mental phenomena, I will mostly be concerned with those widely accepted dimensions, with the addition of emotionality. We may ask whether the eight aforementioned features are individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for a mental state to be a supposition. The tendency is to take them as individually necessary, but what about sufficiency?17 Are there other types of mental states besides supposition that have all these features? Even if there are, one might still use these features to set suppositions apart from (other types of) imaginings. An alternative view is to consider the relevant features as a cluster and argue that any mental state that satisfies enough of the cluster of features counts as a supposition. The next chapter will examine mental states that seem to show the same combination of features. I will argue that appearances notwithstanding, they do not really have such features. The sufficiency claim (in its straightforward or cluster sense) will thus be strengthened.

Features proper to supposition

79

Notes 1 There is a marginally discussed dimension that I will not directly discuss, namely how supposition relates to action. It has been pointed out that supposition does not motivate us to act, or at least not in the way imagination does (see Doggett & Egan 2007 and Balcerak Jackson 2016). However, the relationship between imagination and action is a problematic issue. Although in some contexts a subject can be disposed to act on the basis of what she imagines (e.g., in pretence or in the evaluation of potential future actions), imagination seems to be (at least partially) disconnected from action (e.g., usually, in pretence flights from the roof are not attempted, and when reading a frightening passage in a crime novel we do not panic and run out of the room in which we are reading). It might be just a question of contexts, but it might also be a question of type of imaginings. Neil Van Leeuwen (2011) suggests that the relevant imaginings that can guide action are “imagistic”, that is, sensory or experiential, and, more importantly, that it is their aptness to evoke emotion that enables them to guide action. Thus, it might be suggested that different types of imagination are differently related to action. If Van Leeuwen is correct, this idea would square well with supposition being only unidirectionally connected to emotion and typically not motivating action. I will leave the exploration of these ideas for another occasion. 2 It should be noted that philosophical discussions about propositional content are not so transparent. It appears to be partly due to a lack of precision concerning how “proposition” is understood. Propositional content can refer at least to three different notions: Fregean proposition (constituted by concepts), Lewisian/Stalnakerian proposition (conceived as a set of possible worlds) and Russellian proposition (constituted by structured entities with objects and properties). In what follows I will not take a stance on this issue and go with the minimalist (and consensual) view that considers propositions as something that can be true or false. 3 In English the verb “suppose” can be formulated with a “to” clause. Indeed, it is grammatically correct to say “Young people are supposed to look after their elders”. However, in French this use of the verb “suppose” is typically translated by the adjective “censé” (“Les jeunes sont censés s’occuper de leurs aînés”); and in Italian by the passive form of the verb “tenere” (“I giovani sono tenuti a prendersi cura dei propri anziani”). It is difficult to see how this English sense of “suppose” may reveal an essential feature of supposition (see also Stock 2017, p. 199, on this point). What all these different grammatical expressions convey is a duty and the English “be supposed to” seems to mean just “should”. In both French and Italian we can use the conditional form of the verb “devoir” (“Les jeunes devraient s’occuper de leurs aînés”) or “dovere” (“I giovani dovrebbero prendersi cura dei propri anziani”). 4 The propositional/non-propositional distinction has been used to distinguish, for instance, two types of memory (i.e., semantic vs. episodic memory – see Byrne 2010 inter alia) and two types of visual perception (i.e., epistemic vs. simple vision – locus classicus is Dretske 1969). 5 Kind (2013) claims that the distinction between propositional imaginings and objectual imaginings does not coincide with the distinction between belief-like imaginings and perception-like imaginings. The main reason she offers is that while the latter distinction is between fundamentally different kinds of states, the former is not. However, some objections can be raised. First, the distinction between belief-like and perception-like imaginings may not necessarily be a distinction between different kinds of states. These types of imagination differ in a way similar to the way belief and perception differ, but they may not reproduce the difference in kind between their counterparts; and can be seen as belonging to the same kind of states – i.e., imaginings (see the book introduction). Second, it is an open

80

6 7

8

9

10 11

12

The facets of supposition question whether philosophers who put forward the distinction between propositional and objectual imaginings have in mind a qualitative difference between these types of imaginings, contra Kind. Currie and Ravenscroft (2002, p. 12) specify that the notion of propositional imagination encompasses desire-like imaginings as well. Hope-like imaginings also seem to be cases of propositional imagination (Goldman 2006b, p. 44). Walton gestures towards this objection. According to him imagining is doing something with a proposition. For this reason one might think that he deals only with cognitive imagination. However, he takes into account also experiential types of imagination. Hence, he seems to allow for the propositionality of sensory imagination. Certainly this claim should be motivated. For instance, even granted that the content of perception is non-propositional, one might wonder whether the leap can be made from the non-propositionality of perception to the non-propositionality of sensory imagination, that is, whether what holds for perception should also hold for sensory imagination. After all, sensory imagination might have propositional content, even though perception has non-propositional content. There are similar concerns for the relationship between belief and cognitive imagination and, more generally, between counterparts and varieties of imagination. Balcerak Jackson suggests that the difference has to do with how the self is involved in ascriptions of suppositions and in ascriptions of non-propositional imaginings. This is an interesting issue that, unfortunately, I cannot address in detail here. Let me just stress that quite often discussions overlook two different questions. First, there is the question about which self is involved in non-propositional imaginings. James Higginbotham said about infinitive clauses in general that they involve a covert element that “presents the subject as the subject (or experiencer) of the event or state e as given in the higher clause” (Higginbotham 2003, p. 514). So (¬p I’) should be reformulated as: “Emma imagines herself seeing (touching, …) an oak”. However, as far as imagination is concerned, things seem to be more complicated. For instance, it is quite hard to understand the sentence “I imagine being my mum picking me up at the station” as “I imagine myself being my mum picking me up at the station”. In this case the covert element does not present the imagined subject as the imagining subject, indeed the agent of the imagined action is my mum and not me. Moreover, it might be argued that cases like (¬p I’) involve perspectives that are not occupied by the imaginer or anyone else. For instance, when Emma visually imagines an oak, “[t]he first-person perspective from which the subject is imagining (…) can remain virtual or counterfactual, in the sense that she is imagining a situation from a spatial perspective that a normally-sighted subject would have if she were suitably oriented in the imaginary world” (Dokic & Arcangeli 2015b, p. 4). Second, there is the question of how the relevant self is involved. In an imagining, the self can be involved either implicitly, when it fixes the point of view internal to the imagined scene, or explicitly, when it is a constituent of the imagined scene. Arguably ascriptions of non-propositional imaginings are not bound to involve the self only implicitly (see Dokic & Arcangeli 2015a, b for discussion). Weatherson’s insight came as an objection to a claim à la Heal made by Josh Dever in an exploratory session on imagination led by Ichikawa at the University of St. Andrews in 2008. For some scholars (e.g., Currie & Ravenscroft 2002) mindreading (i.e., our capacity to attribute mental states to others) also shows the inferential likeness between cognitive imagination and belief. However, since the role of imagination in mindreading is a highly controversial topic, I will not consider it here. In fact, this is a complicated issue. Of course imagination can have an active nature and not be preceded by any intention (what John Searle (1984) calls “prior intention”), but on some views (including Searle’s), if it is active, then it must be

Features proper to supposition

13 14

15

16

17

81

constituted in part by an intention (what Searle calls an “intention in action”). Other authors, like Carl Ginet (1990), explicitly distinguish between being voluntary and being intentional. Brian O’Shaughnessy (1980) calls acts like tapping one’s fingers on the table out of nervousness “sub-intentional acts”. Walton as well seems to make a similar point (Walton 1990, p. 14). However, he suggests that there are exceptions. According to him, in the case of dreams or trance “we seem not to have even potential, unexercised control over what we imagine” (ibid., p. 16). And he goes on by suggesting that dreams are “imaginings which the imaginer not only does not but cannot direct (consciously)” (ibid.). Similarly, Richard Wollheim suggests that when we dream vividly, but also when we are completely engaged with fiction, our imaginings are passive or involuntary (Wollheim 1973, pp. 68–69). As suggested beforehand, the normative features of supposition might be explained by claiming that supposition, contrary to imagination, is not re-creative in nature. Even its deliberativeness may be interpreted in a similar way, as suggested by Balcerack Jackson. She writes: “While supposition is under our voluntary control in the strong sense, the extent of the control we have over imaginings (…) is limited by their recreative nature” (Balcerack Jackson 2016, p. 58). I will come back to this issue in Chapter 6. The fact that supposition is deliberate, rather than spontaneous, is also in line with the suggestion made in Chapter 2 that suppositional processes are to be related to System 2 processing. While System 1 processing is taken to be automatic, System 2 processing is controlled. In the conclusion of the book, I shall offer some ideas about the relationship between dual-processing theories and the taxonomy of the imagination. Stock (2017) claims that the features shown by supposition along the normativity and the emotionality dimensions are merely contingent. According to her, supposition can be constrained, embellished and accompanied by emotion, as shown by the context of fiction. However, her cases of constrained supposition are more likely to be cases of suppositional refusal, rather than cases of suppositional blockage. Moreover, she interprets the idea that supposition does not call for embellishment as a claim about the content of suppositions, that is, suppositions must have generic content. She rightly criticises this view, which may be attributed to Weatherson (2004 – see also Weinberg & Meskin 2006b). But I offered another interpretation of the second normative feature of supposition in terms of the dynamics of supposition that she does not take into account, although her view on supposition points in the same direction, since she recognises the “fixed” nature of supposition. Finally, she is only concerned with the idea that supposition can evoke emotions (i.e., that supposition can serve as input to the affect system). Thus there is room for claiming that the features shown by supposition along the normativity and the emotionality dimensions are not merely contingent but are defining features.

This page intentionally left blank

Part II

The nature of supposition

This page intentionally left blank

5

Supposition as non-imaginative

5.1 Introduction The previous chapters laid down a pattern of features that delineate what supposing amounts to. More precisely, supposition can be described as: propositional, truth-independent, will-dependent, free (i.e., first normative feature of supposition), involving commitment to the relevant content as if it were true (i.e., second normative feature of supposition), inferential, and unidirectionally emotional. Many of these features have been discussed in terms of a contrast between supposition and imagination. Some authors take this pattern to show that supposition is not imaginative, because many of its component features are putatively not shared by imagination (e.g., Peacocke 1985; White 1990; Gendler 2000; Kind 2013; Balcerak Jackson 2016). There are at least three non-imaginative views about supposition: reductionism, primitivism and deflationism. Reductionism, which reduces supposition to non-imaginative types of mental states, is the most widespread view. Three candidates for such a reduction can be put forward: entertaining, belief and acceptance. Supposition has been frequently assimilated to the mere entertaining or grasping of a propositional content (e.g., Ryle 1949). Alternatively, a popular view maintains that supposition is a cognitive psychological attitude, very similar to belief in essential respects. On this view it can be suggested that supposition is a doxastic state, either a type of belief or a form of acceptance (e.g., Balcerak Jackson 2016). Like reductionism, primitivism maintains that supposition is a non-imaginative mental state, but claims that it is a sui generis one. Deflationism doubts that supposition is a genuine mental state. Supposition would be a specific way of organising or using certain mental states (e.g., imaginings, beliefs, acceptances), rather than an attitude towards a content. In this chapter I shall go into the details of reductionism, primitivism and deflationism and offer arguments against all three, though primitivism survives as a live option provided that no other view of supposition is available. This will be the goal of the next chapter, where I shall examine a family of theories, imaginative views of supposition, that I find particularly promising, of which I shall defend my own version.

86

The nature of supposition

5.2 Supposition and entertainment An influential reductionist view is based on a quite common association of supposition with entertaining or related phenomena, such as apprehending, grasping, considering, understanding. This is often done when contrasting supposition with imagination. The common thought is that when we imagine we do more than merely supposing that p, or entertaining the proposition that p (see, e.g., Chalmers 2002, p. 151; Doggett & Egan 2007, p. 2; Kind 2016c, pp. 146–147). This brings us back to the participation claim. Indeed, the underlying idea is that the kind of participation at stake when supposing is more similar to that involved in entertaining than to our engagement when we imagine. A question arises: Is there any difference between supposition and entertaining? Answering this question is the aim of the present section. I shall start by introducing two different views and stress two features entertaining is commonly credited with. I will then compare entertaining and supposition along six dimensions seen in Chapter 4, namely propositionality, truth-dependence, willdependence, normativity, inferentiality and emotionality.1 The upshot will be that, although these mental phenomena are similar in relevant respects, there is still room for claiming that supposition is not merely entertaining. 5.2.a. Entertainment: two views and its features We have already seen in Chapter 3 an example of a reductionist view. The “Fregean account” has it that supposition is merely the act of apprehending or entertaining a propositional content. Moreover, according to the Fregean account entertaining, and thus supposition, is not a genuine psychological attitude, but rather a mental phenomenon involved in all psychological attitudes – or at least the ones with propositional content.2 In Function and Concept Frege distinguishes assertion from assumption or supposition [Annahme], which he describes as the “putting of a case without a simultaneous judgement as to its arising or not” (Frege 1981, p. 142). Some philosophers, such as Wittgenstein and Russell, saw here a technical use of the term Annahme, 3 and the introduction of a self-standing mental act. However, Michael Dummett stresses that in Frege’s account there is no place for such a mental act. “[S]entences introduced by supposition are not available for Frege as examples of assertoric sentences occurring as complete sentences but without assertoric force” (Dummett 1973/1981, p. 310). Sentences introduced by supposition are incomplete, are constituents of more complex sentences, which are asserted. Thus, Frege seems not to introduce a distinct force of supposition, or to put it in current psychological terminology to think of supposition as a distinctive attitude. Frege’s distinction between assertion and supposition seems to map onto his distinction between judging a thought to be true and merely entertaining a thought, where the latter is not to be understood as a psychological attitude with its own way of apprehending (i.e., force) a given content.

Supposition as non-imaginative

87

In a Fregean spirit there is a general trend of taking entertaining not to be a psychological attitude: “the no-attitude view”. However, this view has not gone unchallenged. It has been suggested that when a subject entertains, she is in a mental state that belongs to a specific kind, different from others – e.g., perception, belief, desire (see Kriegel 2015). This is “the attitude view” about entertaining. Anyway, both parties credit entertaining with two features, namely intentional neutrality and ubiquity. There seems to be no positive way of characterising the intentional force of entertaining. When a subject entertains that p (say, there is a birch in the garden), she does not represent p as true or as good (as it were a belief or a desire, respectively) or what p describes as present to her senses (as it were a percept), but rather she seems to have a neutral stance towards p. Entertaining is likely to be defined by its neutrality, as the absence of judgement, of belief, of position or of intentional force. The defender of the no-attitude view stresses that a genuine psychological attitude should have a positive characterisation, or in other words, proper features that constitute a proprietary way of apprehending a content. As pointed out in Chapter 3, the same content can be apprehended by different psychological attitudes, and it is these different kinds of mental state that give different intentional forces to the same content. For instance, if under normal visual condition I see that there is a birch in the garden, this means that there is a birch there before my eyes. But this is not so if I recall that there was a birch in the garden, since memory concerns what was the case. When I believe that there is a birch in the garden a birch should be in the garden, though not necessarily present to my senses, for belief aims at truth. Whereas if I desire that a birch is in the garden, I would imply that there is no birch in the garden and I would not reason or act as if it were there. Given that entertaining has no intentional force, it is more parsimonious to claim that entertaining is not a psychological attitude at all. The partisan of the attitude view may object that the intentional neutrality shown by entertaining manifests itself at the phenomenological level, which would suggest that entertaining is a psychological attitude. Following Brentano, Kriegel (2015) maintains that entertaining has a proper phenomenology, irreducible to other kinds of phenomenology (e.g., sensory or cognitive). Such a phenomenology would be manifest, for instance, to a chess beginner, when she entertains, without believing or desiring or having any other attitude different from entertaining, that a king and two knights are not enough to force a checkmate. If she reflects on her mental state, typically she would be aware that she is just entertaining and not undergoing any other psychological attitude, such as believing or desiring. The presence of such a specific phenomenology would be a sign of the psychological attitude she is in, namely entertaining. Still, it is very difficult to give a positive characterisation of the phenomenology of entertainment. A tempting view is to say that there is no such a

88

The nature of supposition

phenomenology. What a chess beginner is aware of when she reflects on her entertaining that a king and two knights are not enough to force a checkmate is that she has no phenomenology (or the absence of sensory phenomenology, cognitive phenomenology, and so on). This is in line with the no-attitude view. The defender of the attitude view, however, would have the burden of proving that there is another difference between having the entertaining attitude and having no attitude towards the same content – e.g., that a king and two knights are not enough to force a checkmate (see Kriegel 2015 for such a defence). Moreover, entertaining seems a very ubiquitous psychological act, insofar as it can be involved in all psychological attitudes (or at least the ones with propositional content). As Henry Price nicely wrote: the entertaining of propositions is the most familiar of all intellectual phenomena. It enters into every form of thinking and into many of our conative and emotional attitudes as well. Indeed, one might be inclined to say that it is the basic intellectual phenomenon; so fundamental that it admits of no explanation or analysis, but on the contrary all other forms of thinking have to be explained in terms of it. (Price 1969, p. 192) Entertaining emerges as a primitive act that underlies all intentional psychological attitudes (at least with propositional content). One might still think that entertaining is an attitude and claim that, qua psychological attitude, it can be implied by other attitudes. Indeed, an attitude can imply another attitude. For instance, by seeing a birch in the garden I may form a judgement or a belief that there is a birch in the garden. I believe there is a threatening objection to this picture. Entertaining would be a very ubiquitous attitude and it is very implausible that a psychological attitude is present everywhere and always implied by all other attitudes, as entertaining seems to be (see also Mulligan 1999). Furthermore, there seems to be an asymmetry between how psychological attitudes imply each other and how entertaining is implied by other psychological attitudes. When, for instance, a judgement is implied by a percept two mental acts are discernible. By contrast, when entertaining is implied by, say, a judgement, it seems that there are not two distinguishable mental acts, but at best a judgement which embeds an entertaining. This line of argument may lead one to think that entertaining is not autonomous, in that it can only come with another attitude (e.g., belief – see Mandelbaum 2010), and even to reject the very existence of entertaining as a mental phenomenon (e.g., Gilbert 1991). For the present discussion I will not consider these options. Taking for granted that entertaining does exist, and even as a genuine psychological attitude, there is room for claiming that supposition is not entertaining.

Supposition as non-imaginative

89

5.2.b. Entertainment and supposition: propositionality, truth-independence, normativity and will-dependence The reduction of supposition to entertaining seems to be motivated by some similarities between these mental phenomena. Like entertaining, supposition is taken to have propositional contents. The verb “suppose” is typically formulated with a “that” clause. A subject supposes that p, rather than x or φ-ing. Moreover, we have seen that the supposed p can refer to almost any sort of state of affairs. This is so because supposition is, on the one hand, truth-independent – i.e., it is not committed to the facts, or to what is true, and, on the other hand, it is not limited by content issues as sensory and cognitive imagination are (recall the freedom of supposition, that is, its first normative feature). Likewise, entertaining is truth-independent and shows a high degree of freedom: almost every proposition can be entertained. The intentional neutrality of entertaining can explain both its truth-independence and freedom. If a subject when entertaining has a neutral stance towards the given content, that is, if she takes it as neither true nor false, it comes as no surprise that it is irrelevant for the success of her entertaining whether its content is true. Moreover, to have a neutral stance towards a content is something very easy to do, which does not require any effort and seems unconstrained. There is something odd in saying that I am not able to suppose that I am living in ancient Troy and observing Helen or that the audience would not be interested in the topic of my upcoming talk (Chapter 3). The same holds for entertaining. This is even truer for entertaining, which turns out to be freer than supposition. Let us see how this is so. Although supposition is considerably free and almost any proposition can be the object of a supposition, we might find ourselves refusing to suppose some propositions that are hard and require effort to suppose. This is what I have called “suppositional refusal”. For instance, I might refuse to suppose that my cat has an incurable disease. This is not to say that I can’t suppose that this is the case. I could, but I won’t, because I very much want it to be false that my cat has an incurable disease. Why is this so? Supposition, unlike belief, does not aim at truth, thus the truth or falsity of the content to be supposed should not have any impact on my willingness to suppose it. In supposing that my cat has an incurable disease I am not taking it to be true that my cat has an incurable disease. Truth-independence notwithstanding, supposition seems to carry an intentional force. In supposing that my cat has an incurable disease I am taking it as if it were true that my cat has an incurable disease (recall the second normative feature of supposition). This is the source of suppositional refusal. Therefore, supposition, unlike entertaining, is not completely neutral.4 There is something odd in talking about propositions that we refuse to entertain. It is true that I might say: “I refuse to entertain the thought that my cat has an incurable disease”, “I refuse to entertain the possibility that our picnic will be ruined by rain”. This kind of utterance, however, on the one

90

The nature of supposition

hand seems to be self-falsifying and, on the other hand, points to something more than pure entertainment. Saying that one refuses to entertain the thought, or the possibility that p, suggests a move from neutrality to a positive intentional force, that is, from simply grasping or understanding p to taking it to be as (if it were) true. The subject is not simply refusing to entertain that p, but to suppose, to cognitively imagine or even to believe that p. 5 In entertaining that my cat has an incurable disease or that our picnic will be ruined by rain, I am merely grasping or understanding these contents without any specific intentional force or way of apprehending them. This is not to deny that there are propositions that are per se difficult to entertain (see Chapter 3). The effort, however, is found at the level of content, not at the level of the attitude. The difficulty arises because of what is represented, not the way in which it is represented. In Chapter 3 I have suggested that supposing that p is as difficult as grasping or entertaining that p. Now we are in the position to see that the former can be more difficult than the latter. This is due to the neutral intentionality shown by entertaining, but not by supposition. The neutral intentionality proper of entertaining contrasts with the second normative feature of supposition, which puts constraints on supposition that entertaining lacks. Neutral intentionality represents an important difference between supposition and entertaining. This, I take, undermines the Fregean account. Furthermore, the fact that entertaining has no intentional force is used by partisans of the no-attitude view to claim that entertaining is not a psychological attitude. But the same cannot be said about supposition, since it does have a positive intentional force and, more generally, proper features. Thus, a no-attitude stance is less appealing in the case of supposition, which seems to be a genuine psychological attitude (I will come back to this issue in § 5.4). Given that supposition is not intentionally neutral, its freedom and truthindependence cannot be explained by this feature. In Chapter 3 I have suggested that the freedom of supposition can be due to the fact that in supposing we have only to stick to the given content as if it were true (i.e., the second normative feature of supposition). Only our unwillingness to take some contents as if they were true can limit our suppositional acts. In Chapter 4 I have suggested that will-dependence grounds truth-independence, for supposition as well as for imagination. Given that all suppositions are subject to the will, it is quite natural that supposition not be committed to what is true, as we can suppose also what we disbelieve, what is false and what we know to be false. Hence, the similarities between supposition and entertaining, as far as their freedom and truth-independence are concerned, are only apparent, since these features are differently grounded. This as well spells trouble for the Fregean account. Finally, what about entertaining as far as its relationship with the will is concerned? It seems that entertaining is will-dependent too. We can decide to entertain whatever and whenever we want. However, the partisan of the noattitude view might claim that we can talk about being or not being subject to

Supposition as non-imaginative

91

the will only when attitudes are at stake. If entertaining is not a genuine attitude, it does not make sense to say that it is subject to the will. Still, to the extent that entertaining – thanks to ubiquity – can combine with attitudes which are subject to the will, it can be indirectly subject to the will. It may even be necessarily so, if entertaining never stands alone but always depends on some attitude. Once again, there is room for claiming that the similarity between supposition and entertaining is only apparent, thus undermining the reduction of supposition to entertaining. 5.2.c. Entertainment and supposition: inferentiality and emotionality This brings us to consider two other dimensions, which suggest further differences between supposition and entertaining, namely inferentiality and emotionality. Supposition shows inferentiality; it follows inferential rules in a way similar to other propositional attitudes such as belief and cognitive imagination. To take a previous example (Chapter 4), if I suppose that Spain is larger than China and that filling up one’s tank once would suffice for a Spanish coast to coast trip, ceteris paribus I will also suppose that filling up one’s tank once would suffice for a trip across China. The inferentiality of supposition combined with its channelled dynamics portrays supposition as a highly controlled process that only takes as inputs states that can be regimented in its sequential functioning. This has been suggested as the reason why supposition does not exploit the outputs of the affect system and shows a unidirectional link to the latter (Chapter 2). If we turn to entertaining, it seems odd to ask whether entertaining shows inferentiality. The inferential similarity between supposition, cognitive imagination and belief suggests a functional similarity between these mental states, which entertaining does not share. Although cognitive imaginings and suppositions are truth-independent, whereas beliefs are truth-dependent, all these mental states seem to treat their contents similarly. To a given content (e.g., there is a birch in the garden) they give a similar intentional force. Belief presents as true that there is a birch in the garden. Cognitive imagination presents as if it were true that there is a birch in the garden. Supposition takes that there is a birch in the garden as if it were true. Cognitive imagination and supposition seem to do similar jobs. Indeed, they have been taken to be the same mental phenomenon, as we shall see in detail in the next chapter. However, there is room for claiming that they should not be conflated with one another. Again, this will be at issue in Chapter 6. Moreover, in their processes, in passing from one mental state to another, beliefs, cognitive imaginings and suppositions are also inferentially alike. This similarity emerges when we think modally, for instance in planning our lives or when we evaluate counterfactual conditionals, and both in real and fictional contexts. It turns out, as we have seen in Chapter 4, that our brain can process suppositions, cognitive imaginings, and beliefs in quite the same way, which allows for the mingling between these mental states.

92

The nature of supposition

In contrast to beliefs, cognitive imaginings and suppositions, entertainings do not seem to play any inferential role. This can be attributed to the intentional neutrality of entertainment. There is no operation to be done on a content apprehended via a neutral stance, except for the grasping itself. These considerations reveal the main difference between supposition and entertaining: like belief and cognitive imagination, supposition does something with a given proposition, whereas to entertain is simply to apprehend or to grasp a proposition. This underlies entertainment’s ubiquity. In order to operate on a given content entertaining should be combined with another attitude (e.g., belief, desire, supposition). It is the intentional force brought by an attitude that allows for the processing of the content and determines the type of processing to be carried out. In belief, for instance, you infer that there is a birch in the garden and reason or act accordingly (e.g., on a sunny spring day you can decide to read under the birch and think that your sister will not bother you there, since she has birch pollen allergy). In desire, you infer that there is no birch in the garden, but that it would be good to have one and reason or act accordingly (e.g., you can inquire about birch pollen allergies among the members of your family and, in case, plant a birch). The fact that due to its neutral intentionality entertaining does not call for something to be done with the apprehended content also has an impact on how entertaining relates to emotion, that is, how it connects to the affect system. We have seen in Chapter 2 that the connection to the latter can be both on the input side and on the output side. Thus, we may wonder: (i) whether entertaining can (directly) serve as input to the affect system, and (ii) whether the outputs of the affect system may be taken as inputs by entertaining processes. It seems that entertainment can connect to the affect system on its input side, that is, (i) has a positive answer: entertaining a proposition can evoke an emotional response. The mere entertaining of the proposition that someone eviscerated a cat on the table might elicit disgust. Likewise, it might be that negative feelings arise, if I entertain that my cat has an incurable disease or that I lied to a friend. However, a worry raised when discussing emotionality with respect to supposition undermines this line of argument. Granting that in these cases an emotional response is activated, has it been directly or indirectly triggered by entertaining? When feeling sadness or regret in entertaining that my cat has an incurable disease or that I lied to a friend, it seems that I am not simply entertaining these propositions. It seems that I do not have a mere neutral attitude towards these contents, which are presented as if they were true or even as true. The sadness or regret seem to be caused by this additional intentional force. It is quite natural that if one thinks that some negative events are true or possibly true, some negative emotions may arise. It is less clear why thinking in a neutral way about these events should cause any emotion at all. Thus, the intentional neutrality of entertaining hinders its input connection to the affect system.

Supposition as non-imaginative

93

Entertaining, however, shows ubiquity and can, therefore, combine with other attitudes which carry intentional forces. Entertaining alone cannot directly trigger the affect system, but it can do it indirectly by combining with another attitude (e.g., imagination, belief).6 Thus, like supposition, entertaining can at best interact with the affect system on the input side in an indirect way. It is interesting to consider whether the similarity may be only apparent. There are two reasons to think that this is plausible. First, supposition can indirectly interact with the affect system in virtue of the attitude it is. Taking a proposition as if were true might imply to explore such a possibility, i.e., to activate imagination, which in turn would trigger the affect system. This is why supposition is more likely to be followed by an imagining rather than another attitude (e.g., belief or desire). Second, there seems to be no limitation in the range of attitudes that can combine with entertaining and evoke an emotional response. The same does not hold for supposition, which does not show ubiquity. A sharper difference between entertaining and supposition comes forward if we turn to (ii). What we said beforehand about entertaining and inferentiality suggests that (ii) is wrong-headed. The fact that entertaining does not operate on the apprehended content and lacks any intentional force suggests that it does not make sense to talk about entertaining processes. Entertaining alone does not unfold, has no dynamics. Thus, it is wrong to wonder about whether the outputs of the affect system are processed by entertaining. Unlike for belief, cognitive imagination or supposition, for entertaining there is no process that can take as inputs the outputs of the affect system. It seems that the only way for entertaining to unfold is by combining with another attitude. But then, if an output connection to the affect system arises, it would be due to the dynamics prompted by such an attitude and not by entertaining alone. From the belief that I lied to a friend, a remorseful feeling of having done something wrong may arise and this feeling may be used in my further reasoning. For instance, I may come up with the belief that I am not loyal as I thought. My beliefs can presuppose my entertaining the relevant contents (i.e., that I lied to a friend and that I am not loyal as I thought). But even if this is the case, the fact that these contents are taken to be true grounds the unfolding which takes into account the emotional response issued from the affect system. As far as emotionality is concerned, entertaining shows a bidirectional link to the affect system: it can interact with the affect system both on the input and on the output side, but only in an indirect way and not in virtue of the attitude it is. The discussion has highlighted a deep difference between supposition and entertaining. The type of cognitive dynamics proper to supposition prevents it from exploiting the outputs of the affect system in its processes. There is no cognitive dynamics proper to entertaining and thus no way for it to take into account the outputs of the affect system. Entertaining, however, combines with almost all attitudes and only in this indirect way can it interact with the affect system on the output side.

94

The nature of supposition

5.2.d. Entertainment and supposition: taking stock Comparing supposition and entertaining along six dimensions that characterise supposition (i.e., propositionality, truth-dependence, will-dependence, normativity, inferentiality, emotionality) brings forward two crucial differences between supposition and entertaining. First, I have highlighted that contrary to entertaining, supposition has an intentional force that can be positively characterised. Therefore, supposition cannot be conflated with entertaining, which shows neutral intentionality. I have argued that this feature of entertaining, on the one hand, makes entertaining only apparently similar to supposition as far as truth-independence and the first normative feature of supposition (i.e., its freedom) are concerned; and, on the other hand, it explains why entertaining does not show the second normative feature of supposition (i.e., commitment to the given content as if it were true), inferentiality and emotionality. Second, ubiquity is another pivotal diverging feature between supposition and entertainment. The latter can show inferentiality, emotionality and willdependence, but only in virtue of its capacity to combine with other attitudes. Such a chameleon-like behaviour is not shown by the supposition, which has its own features in virtue of being the attitude it is. Moreover, supposition is not implied by every kind of mental state. There can be entertaining without supposing, further supporting the idea that supposition is not entertaining – no matter whether we take the latter to be a genuine attitude. The upshot is that the Fregean account should be rejected. Supposition cannot be reduced to entertaining. This does not mean that reductionism is not a valuable option. Supposition might be reduced to other mental phenomena. The pattern of features shown by supposition (above all along propositionality, normativity and inferentiality dimensions) reveals parallelisms between supposition and belief, justifying reducing supposition to a doxastic state, either belief itself or acceptance. Before turning to these reductive alternatives, it is interesting to note the fact that (more or less explicit) endorsements of the Fregean account can be found among partisans of the imaginative view on supposition (e.g., Flew 1953 and Goldman 2006a). However, I want to argue that the Fregean account is unlikely to be compatible with such a view and should rather be seen as a reductive proposal which pushes supposition outside the imaginative realm. Entertaining a proposition, or grasping a sense, is an act which underlies all intentional attitudes with propositional content, and perhaps cannot arise independently of them. Hence, it is contradictory to claim that supposition is both a type of imagination and nothing but the entertainment of a proposition, unless granting that imagination is not a genuine attitude and is involved in all intentional attitudes. However, this is highly implausible. As correctly pointed out by Walton, to imagine that p can be interpreted as entertaining p, attending to p, considering p, but imagination involves more than that, it “is doing something with a proposition one has in mind” (Walton 1990, p. 20).7

Supposition as non-imaginative

95

5.3 Supposition and the doxastic domain 5.3.a. Supposition and belief At first glance supposition seems very similar to belief in essential respects, which suggests that supposition can be reduced to belief. This sort of reductionism can be labelled “doxasticism”. The similarity emerges if we consider the features shown by supposition along the propositionality, inferentiality and normativity dimensions. These dimensions have been discussed in Chapter 4. With respect to propositionality, I have pointed out that supposition, like belief, is an attitude with propositional content. Concerning the inferentiality dimension, I have suggested that when we reason through suppositions we follow inferential rules that are similar to those at play when we reason through beliefs. Inference mechanisms prove to be sensitive to the attitude through which a given propositional content is apprehended, since different mental states with the same propositional content, but belonging to different attitudes, obey different inferential rules (e.g., the belief and the desire that more than half of all hungry children are fed). Thus, the fact that supposition is inferentially like belief suggests that it is a type of belief. With respect to the normativity dimension, I take supposition to prevent embellishment or embroidery and to require that the subject stick to what is directly inferable from the given content (the second normative feature of supposition). Weinberg and Meskin see here a parallelism with belief insofar as rational agents do not voluntarily embellish their beliefs. According to them, this aspect of the normativity of supposition shows that supposition is more belief-like than cognitive imagination (Weinberg & Meskin 2006b, p. 196). I will dwell on the details of Weinberg and Meskin’s view in the next chapter. For the moment it suffices to keep in mind their idea that we can create ad hoc contents for our cognitive imagination, whereas the same does not hold for both supposition and belief. On a closer look, however, the normativity that governs supposition is not belieflike. Out of nowhere, one can decide to suppose whatever content one can grasp, for instance that humans invented a way to clean themselves by exploiting whirls of sand, whereas one cannot in the same way decide to believe that this is the case. The high degree of freedom about the contents that can be supposed (the first normative feature of supposition), puts in doubt its putative belief-like nature, thereby undermining doxasticism. The same holds for other features proper to supposition, above all its will-dependence and truth-independence.8 In Chapter 4 I have stressed that suppositions are intentional, under our voluntary control, and that the supposer is prominently aware of her own agency. We can suppose what is true and believed to be true, but we are so free that at any given time we can rationally suppose that p whilst believing that ¬p. More generally, suppositions whose contents are false are not defective. For example, there is nothing wrong with me or with my supposition, if I suppose that China is to the west of Europe. In Chapter 4 I have also pointed out that, in contrast to supposition, belief is truth-dependent and will-independent. It is time to complement the treatment

96

The nature of supposition

offered previously in ways that are relevant for the foregoing discussion. On the one hand, beliefs aim at truth or, to put it differently, have a mind-to-world direction of fit: they are satisfied only if they fit the world. False beliefs are somehow defective (Millikan 1995; Williamson 2002), even if it is not obvious in what their defectiveness consists. On the other hand, belief seems to be an involuntary state. I come to believe that p on the basis of suitable evidence, but I do not decide at will to believe that p. 9 All this gives rise to a normativity that is relevantly different from the normativity shown by supposition. Beliefs are anchored on evidence or epistemic reasons and are subject to an ideal of coherence. As pointed out in Chapter 1, beliefs have a rational character, that is, they form a coherent and interrelated whole, and are more or less enduring across various contexts (evidence being fixed). If we turn to supposition, arguably it is evidence-independent, contextdependent, and lacking in rational character. No evidence or epistemic reason is needed to ground my supposition that China is to the west of Europe. I can change my mind and suppose China is to the south of Europe just a minute after, without any evidence supporting this change.10 To sum up, here is how belief and supposition differ along the dimensions discussed so far: Table 5.1

Truth-dependence Will-dependence Normativity Evidence-dependence Rational character Context-dependence

Belief

Supposition

Yes No

No Yes

Yes Yes No

No No Yes

Given these differences, belief-based doxasticim is unappealing.11 However, advocates of the view can call on a doxastic type of mental state different from belief. A central question in philosophy of mind is how to distinguish the class of doxastic mental states from other kinds of mental states, such as desires and imaginings. Another important question is whether the domain of doxastic mental states is homogeneous or can be carved into different kinds. Belief is typically considered to be the paradigmatic doxastic mental state, but many philosophers prefer to divide the doxastic domain into at least two strands, corresponding to “belief” and “acceptance” (van Fraassen 1980; Stalnaker 1984; Bratman 1992; Cohen 1992; Engel 1998; Tuomela 2000; Frankish 2004). 5.3.b. Supposition and acceptance Advocates of the existence of acceptance as an attitude are motivated by cases in which the notion of belief leads to paradoxical situations in which a

Supposition as non-imaginative

97

rational subject seems to entertain both the belief that p and the belief that ¬p. A way out of this impasse is to claim that one of the two mental states involved is not a genuine belief, but another type of mental state. A variety of cases have been taken to exemplify these odd beliefs and the term “acceptance”, among other labels, has been put forward in order to indicate such mental states. Although there is no unanimous definition of what acceptance is, there are some commonly agreed upon criteria that enable its introduction among our conceptual tools. Let us examine two of them, which show the divergence between belief and acceptance with respect to the relationship to evidence, and quantitativeness. First, acceptance does not seem to be shaped by evidence the way belief is. It is more sensitive than belief to non-evidential or non-epistemic reasons. Moreover, compared to believing that p, accepting that p requires fewer sources of data. When I accept that p I take p as a premise for decision, so I discard the reasons against p and I do not contemplate the possibility that p is false: acceptance, in contrast to belief, brackets doubts. Second, acceptance does not come in degrees – i.e., the notion of acceptance is qualitative rather than quantitative: either I accept that p, or I do not. By contrast, belief comes in degrees, that is, the notion of belief has a quantitative dimension (Bratman 1992; Engel 1998). The strength of a given belief varies on the basis of the evidence possessed by a subject and the extent to which she trusts this evidence. There are several ways of cashing this out, for instance in Bayesian terms. Although I do not want to commit myself to any Bayesian view, Bayesianism can be helpful here. According to Bayesianism, degrees of belief are associated to a subjective likelihood index between 0 and 1. In other words, a subject would bet on believing a given p (i.e., on the truth of p) depending on the evidence (priors). A belief, thus, can be seen as a probability function determined by the subject’s choices. For example, during the night Emma suddenly wakes up and comes to believe that her cat has got in through the bathroom window, as she usually does. All along she thinks she has recognised the sound of her paws on the stairs. She may strengthen (or weaken) her belief by going into the bathroom, collecting further perceptual information – a normally reliable source of information. However, if she fears that a thief came in and she gets up from bed and goes into the bathroom, it means that her disposition to take p as true (i.e., to believe that her cat has got in through the bathroom window) exhibits a low degree which tends to the likelihood index of zero. On the contrary, if she immediately gets back to sleep, her disposition will tend towards one – that is, she is likely to believe that p. But it might also be that she gets up from bed, thinks a little bit (perhaps by listening to the sounds in the house carefully) and then gets back to sleep. In this case her disposition initially tended to an index of 0,5 (i.e., she was uncertain about believing that p) – though perhaps slightly biased towards one (i.e., she believed that p, but weakly), and then it improved markedly

98

The nature of supposition

towards one (i.e., she strongly believed that p). Acceptance does not come in degrees. Some factors (e.g., the sound of the paws on the stairs, Emma’s belief about the safeness of her house) can make her more or less disposed to accept that p (e.g., “my cat has got in through the bathroom window”) rather than that q (e.g., “a thief has got in through the bathroom window”). However, they do not strengthen her acceptance once she has accepted that p. In other words either Emma accepts that her cat has got in through the bathroom window, or not. By relying on the idea that the doxastic domain encompasses both beliefs and acceptances, the defender of doxasticism can claim that supposition is a form of acceptance. This view is supported by the features of acceptance we have just seen. Both acceptance and supposition contrast with belief as far as the relationship to evidence is concerned. Moreover, like acceptance, supposition seems to be a qualitative notion: either I suppose that p, or I do not. It does not seem to make sense to say that I suppose to a certain degree that China is to the west of Europe. The other aspects of the normativity of belief (i.e., rational character and contextuality), as well as truth-dependence, keep acceptance and belief apart, while bringing acceptance and supposition much closer. I take Balcerak Jackson to gesture towards this idea when she claims that acceptance is “a valuable model for supposition”, given that accepting that p is to treat p as true for a purpose, “only temporarily, and even only for a very limited time frame (…) in a limited context only, while rejecting it or suspending judgment in other contexts” (Balcerak Jackson 2016, pp. 52–53). I believe that the same dimensions, however, push towards a distinction between two types of acceptance, only one of which is similar to supposition, as we will shortly see. It is commonly held that acceptance does not aim at truth and is sensitive to non-evidential or non-epistemic reasons. Acceptance seems to aim at utility or success more than truth. Take the following example. A lawyer believes that his client is guilty, but he accepts that his client is innocent for the purposes of pleading before a jury or because he thinks that every defendant has a right to counsel. In this case, a subject acts according to an acceptance which is neither shaped by epistemic evidence, nor aimed at truth. The lawyer responds to practical or pragmatic, rather than epistemic, reasons. A conflict between pragmatic and epistemic reasons is sometimes involved in social contexts. While the lawyer’s belief is driven by epistemic reasons, his acceptance stems from practical reasons.12 The lawyer’s acceptance that his client is innocent is shaped by professional purposes. Moreover, while the lawyer’s belief aims at truth or, to put it in Searle’s words, “to match some independently existing reality” (Searle 1984, p. 12), this is not the case of the lawyer’s acceptance. The aim of the latter is “to create a change in the world” (ibid.), since the client is guilty. Nonetheless, it has been maintained that acceptance does not always diverge from the norms of belief formation, namely justification and truth. About cases such as the lawyer’s, Pascal Engel suggests that they are better

Supposition as non-imaginative

99

understood as involving “pretendings to believe, or simulated beliefs” (Engel 1999, p. 221), or in other words as resting on (cognitive) imagination. The lawyer merely imagines that his client is innocent and behaves according to this imagining, he pretends that this is so, although he believes that his client is guilty.13 I believe that two different notions of acceptance do emerge here. Central cases of acceptance are cases of what can be called “doxastic acceptance”. These are cases in which the subject’s acceptance is mainly driven by reliable sources of information and epistemic reasons, even though it can partially rely on pragmatic reasons. More precisely, doxastic acceptance occurs when (a) there is partial or feeble evidence, insufficient to passively lead one to strongly believe that p, or (b) when there is contradictory evidence, or (c) when contingent reasons override a well-entrenched belief. At any rate, doxastic acceptance is justifiable in a way similar to belief: it is satisfied only if it fits the world. The lawyer case points to another notion of acceptance, which sharply diverges from doxastic acceptance. I call the acceptance that is dependent merely on pragmatic reasons, regardless of truth, “pragmatic acceptance”. The contrast between doxastic acceptance and pragmatic acceptance has been overlooked in the literature, leading to the misguided application of the notion of acceptance to account for doubtfully doxastic cases.14 The lawyer case can be re-described as a case of doxastic acceptance. In presenting the example I have just said that the lawyer believes that his client is guilty, but Engel takes this belief as based on strong evidence. If it is the case, the lawyer’s acceptance does not seem to be doxastic, but rather pragmatic, since it is evidence-independent (it only depends on pragmatic reasons) and not aimed at capturing reality. The lawyer is taking the innocence of his client as true merely for professional purposes, but he strongly believes that his client his guilty. This purely pragmatic version of the case contrasts with the doxastic version. Consider the case in which the lawyer has contradictory or insufficient evidence, he may rely on some of it to ground his belief that his client is guilty, while accepting that his client is innocent on the basis of other pieces of evidence. We would hence have a case of doxastic acceptance. On this version, his acceptance is evidence-dependent and truth-directed. The lawyer, by accepting that the client is not guilty, aims at capturing a fact. The innocence of his client is a state of affairs which has to be the case in order for his acceptance to be satisfied.15 My way of picturing acceptance as a doxastic state also casts doubts on its alleged lack of rational character. Acceptance is often considered not to be coherently interrelated with one’s beliefs, it would be, in other words, belief-independent. The lawyer accepts that p (i.e., the client is innocent), whereas he believes that ¬p. Accepting that p does not entail believing that p. This does not mean, however, that acceptance is not intertwined with one’s beliefs, that the acceptance that p is not grounded on the subject’s beliefs.16

100

The nature of supposition

It should be noted that it is one thing to say that acceptance implies belief, and another that the acceptance that p entails the belief that p: the former can be right when the latter is not. The former point might also be seen as the claim that in the long run doxastic acceptances and beliefs tend to cohere. Doxastic acceptance and belief would be diachronically dependent, but synchronically independent. This does not hold for pragmatic acceptance, which is both synchronically and diachronically independent of beliefs. This becomes evident when comparing the purely pragmatic version of the lawyer case and the doxastic version. The lawyer’s doxastic acceptance is not merely driven by pragmatic reasons (e.g., every defendant has a right to counsel), but also by the contradictory or insufficient evidence. The lawyer has reasons for believing that his client is guilty, but the weak points in the adduced evidence drive his doxastic acceptance that the client is innocent. He may believe, for instance, that the way his client’s alibi has been defeated is not convincing and that the police may have forced him to confess. The lawyer’s doxastic acceptance is synchronically integrated with his belief. This can be said of the purely pragmatic case too – after all, even in this case the lawyer is making decisions on the basis of his pragmatic acceptance (e.g., choosing the defensive strategy). In contrast, the lawyer’s pragmatic acceptance is not diachronically integrated with his beliefs. If the lawyer were to bet on the real legal situation of his client, he would not take his pragmatic acceptance into account at all, even on the long run. By contrast, in the doxastic case the lawyer would take into account his doxastic acceptance. In this case doxastic acceptance and belief are diachronically dependent. I take that relevant changes in the evidence will lead the lawyer to change his beliefs and doxastic acceptances, making them harmonious. Doxastic acceptances are not secluded from other mental states, on pain of leading to irrationality. Rather, doxastic acceptance is what preserves the rationality of a subject when she faces uncertainty due to feeble or contradictory evidence, or when a contingent situation requires one to inhibit some tendencies and to focus on other aspects. Therefore, like belief, doxastic acceptance has a rational character, that is, it is subject to an ideal of coherence. Distinguishing doxastic and pragmatic acceptance also throws light on the contextuality issue. Several authors have maintained that acceptance is context-dependent (Stalnaker 1984; Bratman 1992).17 For a subject could accept that p relative to context C but not context C* (even at the same time), without any change in the evidence. This would be the case, for example, if the lawyer, when talking with some colleagues, manifested his acceptance that his client is innocent, while, when talking with his best friend or writing his diary about the case, he showed the opposite acceptance. Importantly, only when acceptance is grounded purely on pragmatic reasons, can it be contextdependent in this sense.

Supposition as non-imaginative

101

In contrast, doxastic acceptance is context-independent. The lawyer does not doxastically accept that p just when he is discussing with some friends, he manifests his doxastic acceptance across various contexts, at least if he is rational. He doxastically accepts that p is the case, or as Jonathan Cohen would say, he holds the relevance of p: anyone in his shoes should (doxastically) accept that p (Cohen 1992, p. 14). By contrast, if we consider the purely pragmatic version of the lawyer case, it is hard to say that the lawyer would think that anyone in his place would have (pragmatically) accepted that the client is innocent. To borrow once again from Cohen, the lawyer’s pragmatic acceptance would be “an inherently makeshift manoeuvre, even within its particular context” (ibid., p. 13). 5.3c. Supposition and pragmatic acceptance Putting together what has been said so far about doxastic and pragmatic acceptance, as well as about belief and supposition, we end up with the following schema:18 Table 5.2

Truth-dependence Normativity Evidence-dependence Rational character Context-dependence Quantitativeness

Belief

Doxastic A.

Pragmatic A.

Supposition

Yes

Yes

No

No

Yes Yes No Yes

Yes* Yes No No

No No Yes No

No No Yes No

The defender of doxasticism can argue that supposition is a type of acceptance, more precisely, a form of pragmatic acceptance. For both supposition and pragmatic acceptance share essential features: they are truth-independent, independent of epistemic reasons, not diachronically integrated with the subject’s belief (and doxastic acceptances), and context-dependent. I argue, however, that pragmatic acceptance does not belong to the same class of mental states of both belief and doxastic acceptance. These are doxastic states. The idea is that only mental states that show most of the features proper to belief should be taken to be doxastic. As Table 5.2 shows, pragmatic acceptance cannot be genuinely doxastic, since it dramatically differs from belief, and should, thus, also be distinguished from doxastic acceptance, which is in relevant respects similar to belief. But, then, holding that supposition is a form of pragmatic acceptance ceases to be a valuable option for the defender of doxasticism, since supposition as pragmatic acceptance would not be a doxastic mental state. Balcerak Jackson’s view illustrates the difficult position the defender of doxasticism finds herself in. She suggests that “we should understand supposition as a form of acceptance. More precisely, supposition is the cognitive

102

The nature of supposition

capacity to enter into states that meet the minimal requirements on states of acceptance” (Balcerak Jackson 2016, p. 53). Her view is imprecise, since she does not distinguish between doxastic and pragmatic acceptance. Balcerak Jackson merely relies on Stalnaker’s view on acceptance, taking features proper to pragmatic acceptance as minimal requirements on acceptance in general (i.e., truth-independence, lack of rational character and context-dependence). As the considerations above show, this move is misguided: this characterisation of acceptance fails to make space for doxastic acceptance. Once we take the distinction between pragmatic and doxastic acceptance on board, supposition would qualify, by her own lights, only as pragmatic acceptance, and not as doxastic. Doxasticism is in a bind from which it cannot escape. In sum, the upshot of the foregoing discussion is that supposition cannot be easily reduced to either entertainment, or belief, or doxastic acceptance. These are the most plausible candidates for such a reduction and the literature does not suggest any others. Therefore, reductionism should be abandoned. It might be objected: Is not reducing supposition to pragmatic acceptance still reductionism? This is right, but to say that supposition is a form of pragmatic acceptance is not yet to say anything about its nature, once the notion of pragmatic acceptance is detached from the doxastic domain. This type of reductionism is not informative, and reduces supposition to a sui generis mental state. In consequence, rather than a form of reductionism, what we have is a type of primitivism. To see this, let us consider both primitivism and deflationism, which are two remaining alternatives that are open to the defender of a non-imaginative view about supposition. These positions have not been explicitly defended in the literature, but nonetheless deserve at least a brief treatment.

5.4 Primitivism and deflationism Let us start from the idea that supposition is a form of pragmatic acceptance, understood as a non-doxastic mental state. This view can be interpreted as suggesting that supposition is a sui generis mental state irreducible to other mental states such as imagination, entertainment, belief or acceptance.19 According to this view, the combination of features characterising supposition (i.e., propositionality, truth-independence, will-dependence, the freedom of supposition, committing to the given content as if it were true, inferentiality and unidirectional emotionality) is not shared by other mental states and picks out a specific type of mental state. This is primitivism. Primitivism is certainly more appealing than the reductionist proposals analysed in the previous sections, given the shortcomings of reductionism pointed out above. However, views that explain supposition in terms of already known phenomena are more parsimonious. Primitivism would have to show that these are false, if it is to have any pull. As I will take pains to show in the next chapter, imaginative views succeed in explaining supposition as a type of imagination, and prove to be resistant to many lines of objection.

Supposition as non-imaginative

103

Both reductionism and primitivism take supposition to be a type of mental state, thought they account for it differently. A further non-imaginative view about supposition has it that it is not a genuine mental state, neither reducible to some non-imaginative mental state nor a sui generis one. This is deflationism about supposition. On one way of fleshing out this view, supposition emerges when mental states, such as entertainings, acceptances or imaginings, are used for certain purposes (e.g., putting forward a hypothesis in a mathematical reasoning). This proposal, unfortunately, lacks a thorough defence. Philosophers tend to agree that supposition is a mental state. A no-attitude stance, we have seen in §5.2.b, does not seem to be appealing in the case of supposition, given its positive intentional force and proper features. For this reason, deflationism seems an unpromising path to take.

Notes 1 I will not consider an additional dimension further, namely phenomenology. 2 Although it might make sense to say that a subject entertains φ-ing or entertains an image of x, entertaining is usually defined as having a propositional content (see, e.g., Whitehead 1929 and Kriegel 2015). 3 Meinong (1902) introduced Annahme as a technical term. I will not examine his view directly, but one heavily inspired by it, namely Kevin Mulligan’s view in Chapter 6 §3.b. 4 This point is clearly made by Balcerak Jackson. She takes supposition to have “a quasi-assertive nature” and thus being different from entertaining (Balcerak Jackson 2016, p. 52). 5 This connects to the ubiquity of entertainment: “entertainment refusal”, if there is any, is not a genuine phenomenon, but it derives from the attitude which entertainment combines with. 6 As I have stressed in Chapter 2, there might be emotional-laden propositions that naturally elicit emotions no matter the attitude through which they are grasped. If they exist, entertaining can after all directly serve as input to the affect system. The emotional impact, however, should be placed at the level of the content, not at the level of the attitude at stake. Entertaining in virtue of being the attitude it is cannot directly serve as input to the affect system. 7 The equation of imagination tout court with entertaining is suggested in Denham (2000) and Gaut (2003). See also fn 10, Chapter 3 on White. 8 Also the emotionality dimension shows a difference between belief and supposition. In Chapter 2 I argued that the latter has a unidirectional link to emotions, arguably the former seems to have a bidirectional link (see also fn 4, Chapter 6). 9 Ever since Hume, philosophers have pointed out the involuntariness of belief (the locus classicus is Williams 1973). This does not mean that we are completely at the mercy of our beliefs. One may decide to act on a belief or not, whether to make it occurrent or to keep it silent, whether to dwell on the evidence for it and whether to check the latter. One may also try to achieve a belief indirectly. As Pascal (1670) has suggested, we may put ourselves in situations which are conducive to the occurrence of a belief, e.g., acting as if we believed that p might in the long run cause the belief that p in us. However, there is another philosophical tradition, which goes back to Descartes (1641), according to which beliefs are active or voluntary acts whereby we assent to some proposition (or mental representation). This philosophical antinomy might be solved by introducing the belief vs. acceptance distinction. The former would be involuntary or passive, and the latter voluntary or active (e.g., Cohen 1992; Tuomela 2000 – see fn 18).

104

The nature of supposition

10 This is not to deny that suppositions can be coherently tied, indeed they show inferentiality (see Chapter 4), but such a coherence does not necessarily obey the same constraints which regulate beliefs. We should make explicit what makes the unity of a sequence of suppositions intended to be part of the same project. However, this is not always an obvious question. 11 One might object that there is another way to defend belief-based doxasticism, applying to supposition Peter Langland-Hassan’s (2012) view on propositional imagining. Roughly, the idea would be that supposing that p “just is bringing to mind beliefs concerning what would likely happen if p, usually by drawing inferences from other beliefs deemed relevant” (ibid., p. 172). Therefore, according to Langland-Hassan, we should talk about a single attitude (i.e., belief), rather than two. This does not sound as a reductionist view in the sense I am relying on. Simulationists – in contrast to single-code theorists – argue that supposing (cognitively imagining) is to use off-line the belief machinery to generate as-if beliefs, but they still maintain – in line with single-code theorists – that these as-if beliefs are not genuine beliefs, but rather imaginings. What this suggests is that a reduction of cognitive processes (i.e., claiming that suppositions/cognitive imaginings exploit the same cognitive underpinnings) does not entail a reduction of attitudes. Here I am concerned with whether supposition, as an attitude, can be reduced to the attitude of belief, while being neutral with respect to how these attitudes are cognitively implemented (see also fn 3 in the book introduction). Moreover, following Stock (2017) one might argue that Langland Hassan’s view is concerned with the generation of imaginative content. This is an issue different from assessing whether suppositions (and cognitive imaginings) can be reduced to beliefs (or other non-imaginative mental states); it concerns the content, rather than the attitudinal level. 12 There is nothing irrational and pathological in the choice of accepting that p made by the lawyer. Nor are we facing cases in which a subject believes that ¬p in spite of the evidence because of some unpleasantness linked to the belief that p, or because she desires that ¬p – i.e., due to “self-deception”, or “weakness of the will”. The belief/acceptance distinction might have a role in the interpretation of these cases (Cohen 1992). However, I will remain neutral about their interpretation, since they involve a form of irrationality, or at least a departure from ideal rationality, in some cases pathological. The distinction between belief and acceptance does not rest on the existence of irrationality. It is perfectly rational to accept that p, at least in some contexts, even though one does not believe that p. 13 One might argue that it is odd to say that the lawyer is imagining, because, for instance, he would not describe his mental state as an imagining. However, this is another issue. One may imagine without being aware or recognising that one is imagining. 14 Both Engel and Tuomela have tried to overcome this problem and offered different notions of acceptance. Engel (1998, 1999) seems to gesture towards doxastic acceptance when he speaks of “holding as true” or “acceptance2” (in contrast with “holding true” or “acceptance1”). Even though he also calls “acceptance2” “pragmatic acceptance”, according to him this type of acceptance does not meet a core condition of pragmatic acceptance in my sense, namely belief-independence. Tuomela distinguishes between “acceptance as true” (or “narrow acceptance”) and “pragmatic acceptance” (or “wide acceptance”). His notions correspond in many respects to mine. Moreover, Tuomela identifies as a species of pragmatic acceptance “pretend-acceptance”, or acceptance as if p were true (Tuomela 2000, p. 130). Although my view is related to that held by Tuomela, I call for a distinction in kind between doxastic and pragmatic acceptance, while he does not. Importantly, I claim that only the former is a genuine doxastic state, whereas the latter can even belong, at least in some cases, to imagination.

Supposition as non-imaginative

105

15 In fact, in this way we are closer to Cohen’s original example, in which the lawyer “has no belief about the matter” (Cohen 1992, p. 20). 16 The same point has been raised by Engel. He claims that “we accept certain things because we are not sure of where our beliefs can lead us”, but these beliefs “are among the causes of (reasons for) these acts” of acceptance (Engel 1998, p. 149). 17 This is over and above forms of context-dependence that might equally affect belief, for instance if semantic or epistemic contextualism is true (see Rysiew 2016). 18 I am not taking into account will-dependence, because this issue is so complex that it would deserve an extensive analysis, that I cannot offer here. Will-dependence is another dimension that would show a difference between belief and acceptance (see fn 9). However, even in this case discussions are rather confused, because the conceptual distinctions between being will-dependent, being intentional, being under voluntary control and recognising one’s own agency have been overlooked (see Chapter 4, § 4.4.). There is room to claim that both doxastic acceptance and belief are will-independent, although the former is active (i.e., deliberate) and the latter is passive (i.e., spontaneous). By failing to recognise the will-independent nature of acceptance, we run the risk of overlooking the fact that it is anchored also on epistemic evidence and truth, and of confusing it with pragmatic acceptance. The latter seems genuinely will-dependent; a feature which squares well with the idea that supposition is a type of pragmatic acceptance. 19 I have evoked an alternative interpretation. If pragmatic acceptances are nothing but imaginings, reducing suppositions to the former suggests an imaginative view of supposition. This idea is suggested by Cohen himself. Although he does not distinguish between doxastic and pragmatic acceptance, according to him supposition is an act of imagination (Cohen 1992, p. 12), and shows both a contextdependence and an evidence-independence, clearly contrasting with what we want to count as (doxastic) acceptance. This is Cohen’s reply to defenders of the view that supposition is (a type of) acceptance (e.g., Stalnaker 1984).

6

Supposition as imaginative

6.1 Introduction I believe that the best way of accounting for the pattern of features characterising supposition, which Part I carefully individuated, is with a conception of supposition as imaginative. There are at least two imaginative views about supposition: cognitivism and imaginative primitivism. Cognitivism reduces supposition to belief-like or cognitive imagination. Two grades of cognitivism can be distinguished. First, supposition can be taken as cognitive imagination tout court. This is a widespread view, endorsed more or less explicitly (e.g., Flew 1953; Hannay 1971; Nichols & Stich 2003; Goldman 2006a). Second, supposition can be seen rather as a species of cognitive imagination (e.g., Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; Weinberg & Meskin 2006b). Unlike the former, this grade of cognitivism holds that there are cognitive imaginings that are not suppositions – and this point is made on the basis of considerations about the features proper to supposition (i.e., those we saw in the previous chapters concerning normativity and emotionality) which point to a difference between supposition and standard cognitive imagination. An alternative view, which I will defend in what follows, is imaginative primitivism. According to this view, the very features that sharply separate cognitive imagination from supposition suggest that the latter is not belief-like, as cognitivism claims. Thus, imaginative primitivism rejects both grades of cognitivism and construes supposition as a sui generis type of imagination, different from both sensory and cognitive imagination.1 The upshot of this chapter is that cognitivism is unsatisfactory since it leaves some features of supposition unexplained, or else confines the use of supposition to certain contexts without sufficient reason. I shall plea instead for imaginative primitivism.

6.2 Cognitivism Many philosophers have stressed that supposition is in essential respects very similar to belief. This similarity might lead one to endorse doxasticism, according to which supposition is either just belief or a form of acceptance. In Chapter 5, I claimed that taking supposition to be belief is highly implausible.

Supposition as imaginative

107

The features of supposition square better with the idea that it is a form of acceptance, but only if by “acceptance” we mean a purely pragmatic mental state sharply different from the doxastic type of acceptance, which is similar to belief. I have shown that if supposition is pragmatic acceptance, the only promising non-imaginative view is non-imaginative primitivism (i.e., the view that supposition is a new kind of mental state irreducible to others). The latter is a valuable option only if more parsimonious imaginative views fail to properly account for supposition, which is not the case, as I shall show in this chapter. The similarities and dissimilarities between supposition and belief motivate an imaginative view, namely cognitivism, given that cognitive imagination seems to share some of supposition’s functional profile. Cognitivism comes in at least two grades: (C1) supposition is cognitive imagination; (C2) supposition is a species of cognitive imagination. Both grades of cognitivism can be found in the literature. The following nicely describes C1: In ordinary language, the verb imagine sometimes takes a that-clause complement, and in this construction, imagining that p is roughly equivalent to supposing that p. (…) In other words, a supposition might be a pretend-belief, where this is understood in the enactment sense of pretense or imagination. (Goldman 2006a, pp. 47–48)2 Currie and Ravenscroft (2002) and Weinberg and Meskin (2006b) have independently put forward more sophisticated accounts which endorse C2. Here is how Weinberg and Meskin put it: Our ordinary language terms “imagine” and “suppose” seem to pick out two closely related but distinct mental activities. (…) [They] are nevertheless both belief-like to a significant extent. (…) we see those states as stemming from different ways of deploying the same system (with various other mechanisms on- or off-line). (…) [T]he differences between supposition and imagination are generally differences of degree. (Weinberg & Meskin 2006b, pp. 191, 192 and 198) In the next two sub-sections, I will argue against both C1 and C2. 6.2.a. Supposition as Cognitive Imagination C1 is endorsed by philosophers holding very different views about imagination. Some partisans of C1 (e.g., Goldman 2006a and b) defend a simulationist account of imagination; supposition would then be the mental simulation of belief (a “pretend belief”). In contrast, others (e.g., Nichols & Stich 2003) reject the simulationist account but maintain that supposition is

108

The nature of supposition

belief-like imagination. The idea that supposition is a type of imagination akin to belief has been around for some time outside the contemporary debate between simulationists and their opponents (e.g., Hannay 1971; Casey 1976; McGinn 2004). In my terminology, supposing that p would be equivalent to imagining believing that p – that is, supposition would be the type of non-sensory imagination that re-creates belief, what I have called “cognitive imagination”. However, most proponents of C1 fail to explain why supposition deserves the label of imagination, and why it should be seen as belief-like. They may have in mind an argument on the following lines: imagination comes in a non-sensory, belief-like variety; supposition is a form of imagination and cannot be sensory; therefore, supposition must be belief-like. As it stands, this argument is unsatisfactory. Supposition and cognitive imagination have similar features: they are both propositional attitudes inferentially like belief, but truth-independent and willdependent. Despite these similarities, the normativity and emotionality dimensions pull supposition and cognitive imagination apart, as I have argued in Chapter 2 and 3. C1 is objectionable on at least three grounds. First, there is a sense in which supposition is “free”, in that there is no limitation on what can be supposed (i.e., the first normative feature of supposition). Relatedly, supposing requires minimal or no mental effort in comparison with cognitive imagining. Second, supposition requires that the subject stick to what is directly inferable from the given content, thereby preventing embellishment (i.e., the second normative feature of supposition). Third, in contrast to cognitive imagination, supposition is “cold”, in that it is not driven by emotional reactions (i.e., supposition’s unidirectional link to emotion). Many philosophers have taken the peculiar normativity and emotional coldness of supposition to indicate that supposition is not a type of imagination (see Chapter 5). However, as we shall see in the next sub-section, various attempts have been made to explain the features proper to supposition without questioning its imaginative nature. These attempts target C1 without challenging the hypothesis that supposition is belief-like imagination. They picture supposition not as cognitive imagination tout court, but as a special case of it. 6.2.b. Supposition as a sub-species of cognitive imagination Like C1, C2 insists on the imaginative nature of supposition. But unlike C1, it claims that there are cognitive imaginings that are not suppositions: supposition is but one sub-species of cognitive imagination. Let us begin by presenting the analysis of cognitive imagination given by proponents of C2, and then turn to their idea of supposition as a special case of cognitive imagination. Cognitive imagination and belief Contrary to proponents of C1, proponents of C2 go to considerable length in characterising cognitive imagination, and arguing for its belief-like nature. It

Supposition as imaginative

109

is time to complement and delve deeper on what was said about cognitive imagination in previous chapters. Recall that propositionality and absence of imagery are frequently given as the criteria which differentiate this type of imagination from the sensory one. Like belief, cognitive imagination has propositional content. However, in Chapter 4, I stressed that the propositionality dimension does not draw a clear-cut distinction between sensory and cognitive imagination, given that some propositional imaginings may be sensory imaginings. More generally, I suggested that the notion of propositional imagination is not coextensive with cognitive imagination, since some propositional imaginings are not belief-like. Rather, it is a misleading folk-psychological category, since it fails to capture all these different imaginings. As pointed out in Chapter 2, cognitive imagination is typically defined as the type of imagination which occurs without mental imagery. But, I believe, putting things this way is unilluminating, as it is just another way of saying that cognitive imagination is not sensory.3 Indeed, imagery is mostly tied, if not made coincident with, sensory imagination (Chapter 1). Talking about mental imagery brings us back to phenomenology, since the two notions have been frequently associated (Chapters 1 and 2). The fact that cognitive imagination does not involve mental imagery may suggest that it lacks a phenomenal character. I think we should resist such a suggestion. What I said about supposition with respect to phenomenology can be applied to cognitive imagination. Sensory imaginings are typically credited with a phenomenal character, contrary to cognitive imaginings. But this stems from an overly narrow view of phenomenology, for which phenomenal character can only be of a sensory type. If non-sensory types of phenomenology, such as cognitive phenomenology, are recognised as genuine types of phenomenology, cognitive imagination can be credited with a non-sensory phenomenal character. At any rate, proponents of C2 do not rely solely on the propositionality of cognitive imagination in order to characterise it. Nor do they rely exclusively on the claim that it does not involve mental imagery, or sensory phenomenology. Rather, they support the existence of cognitive imagination using research from cognitive science, which indicates that imaginings and beliefs share considerable functional similarities. We have already seen two such similarities. First, cognitive imagination is inferentially like belief (Chapter 4). This does not mean, as I argued, that we should cognitively imagine what we would believe, if we believed the contents of our cognitive imaginings. Rather, the idea is that when one cognitively imagines that p, and goes on to cognitively imagine that q, this is due to something belief-like in one’s attitudes towards these propositions. Inferential relations link beliefs. Likewise, inferential relations link cognitive imaginings. Second, cognitive imagination and belief are alike with respect to the emotionality dimension. In Chapter 2, I suggested that both cognitive imagination and belief are connected to the affect system. Even in this case, the idea is not that cognitive imaginings have the same emotional

110

The nature of supposition

impact of beliefs, though cognitive imaginings can, and often do, produce emotional responses similar to those produced by beliefs (e.g., a sort of joy may arise if I cognitively imagine that I won the national lottery, as if I believed that I really did).4 Although propositionality, inferentiality and emotionality ground the idea that cognitive imagination is belief-like in nature, they do not suffice to justify the idea that cognitive imagination is a type of imagination, rather than a type of belief. But three further dimensions (normativity, will-dependence, and truth-dependence) sharply sever cognitive imagination from belief. Currie and Ravenscroft remark that “beliefs are constrained in various ways in which imaginings are not” (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, p. 15). In Chapter 5, we have seen that the normativity of belief is characterised by dependence on evidence or epistemic reasons, an ideal of coherence or rational character, and context independence. Cognitive imaginings are not governed by the same normativity as beliefs. I may cognitively imagine that there is a quiche on the kitchen table without any evidence or epistemic reasons supporting the fact that there is a quiche on the kitchen table, and even if I have evidence undermining this fact (e.g., I see that there is no quiche on the kitchen table).5 This imagining would not conflict with my knowing that there is no quiche on the table. Moreover, I may cognitively imagine that there is a quiche on the kitchen table and just a minute afterwards, without any change in the evidence, cognitively imagine the contrary. Belief’s dependence on evidence points at belief’s will-independence. If I have strong reasons for believing that there is a quiche on the kitchen table, I cannot rationally believe the contrary – but I can cognitively imagine the contrary. We can cognitively imagine what we please: cognitive imagination depends on the will. As a corollary of will-dependence, imagination is truth-independent. Whether the content of my cognitive imagining is true or false is completely irrelevant to the success of my imaginative project. This is clearly not the case for belief. We may summarise the (dis)similarities between cognitive imagination and belief with the following schema: Table 6.1. Cognitive Imagination Propositionality Inferentiality Emotionality Will-dependence Truth-dependence Normativity Evidence-dependence Rational character Context-dependence

Belief

≈ ≈ ≈ Yes No

≈ ≈ ≈ No Yes

No No Yes

Yes Yes No

Supposition as imaginative

111

Despite cognitive imagination’s propositional, inferential and emotional similarities to belief, there are important differences in their broader functional role.6 These differences are taken, on the one hand, to undermine the idea that cognitive imagination is just a form of belief, and, on the other hand, to support the view that cognitive imagination is a form of imagination. Will-dependence and truth-independence are characteristic features of the imagination, cognitive imagination included. Sensory and cognitive imaginings have a similar normative profile. They are regulated by a similar cognitive dynamics, that is, a holistic dynamics dependent on one’s overall mental setup (see Chapter 4). This allows for embroidery, but it is also the source of the limits of sensory and cognitive imaginings. Sometimes, I have suggested, we fail in exploring the possibility of a given content and experience a blockage of our sensory or cognitive imagination. Given our overall mental setup, there are contents that we can’t sensorily or cognitively imagine. Cognitive imagination and supposition7 Sensory imagination and cognitive imagination have features in common that distinguish them from supposition. First, contrary to sensory and cognitive imagination, supposition shows a channelled dynamics which prevents embroidery and blockage. Second, both sensory imagination and cognitive imagination are able to provoke emotion and make use of emotional responses in their processes. Supposition is emotionally cold. As I have argued, supposition is not sensitive to the outputs of the affect system, though it can trigger emotional responses (perhaps only indirectly). Defenders of C2, who think that supposition is a special case of cognitive imagination, have the burden of proving how normativity and emotionality make only quantitative differences between supposition and cognitive imagination, justifying taking these phenomena as equivalent. As far as normativity is concerned, defenders of C2 mainly focus on the first normative feature of supposition – i.e, that one can suppose any graspable p whatsoever, and do so without much mental effort. Although Currie and Ravenscroft and Weinberg and Meskin offer alternative explanations of this normative difference between supposition and cognitive imagination, their overall strategy is roughly the same. According to Currie and Ravenscroft, supposition “is (a special kind of) belief-like imagining” (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, p. 13). What makes supposition a special kind of cognitive imagination is its isolation from desire-like imagination (ibid., p. 35). Currie and Ravenscroft maintain that imaginings can be desire-like, as well as belief-like and perception-like. They claim that the existence of desire-like imaginings, what we may call – in analogy to cognitive and sensory imagination – “desiderative imagination”, is supported by two main considerations. First, mindreading tasks, and more generally the recreation of practical reasoning in imagination, require desiderative imagination. According to

112

The nature of supposition

them, we can have imaginative decisions grounded on cognitive-desiderative imagination pairs in a way analogous to how real decisions stem from beliefdesire pairs. Second, desiderative imagination has a role to play in our engagement with pretence and fiction (cf. also Doggett & Egan 2007). The introduction of desiderative imagination helps us explain both the puzzle of imaginative resistance and the nature of supposition. In a nutshell, Currie and Ravenscroft think that the limits of cognitive imagination, which underlie blockage or refusal, are due to an intimate connection between cognitive imagination and desiderative imagination.8 While cognitive imaginings are not per se sensitive and resistant to some contents, associated desiderative imaginings are. Nevertheless, Currie and Ravenscroft claim that with some effort we can restrict our imaginative engagement to the recreation of belief and refrain from recreation of desire. The result is supposition, or “belief-like imagining that does not stand in the kinds of relations to desire-like imagining that tend to produce resistance” (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, p. 34). Two comments are in order. First, it should be noted that the existence of desiderative imagination has been seriously questioned (see, e.g., Weinberg & Meskin 2006a; Kind 2011). In this context at least, desiderative imagination tends to be nothing but desire itself. This is even suggested by a hypothesis put forward by Currie (2002), according to which desiderative imaginings follow the trend of one’s real desires: what we desire in imagination is roughly what we desire in real life. Since I desire that female infanticide is not right, I am prone to desire-like imagining the same content. Hence, desire is meant to be the real source of imaginative resistance. Second, even when taking for granted that there is such an intimate connection between cognitive imagination and our desires, and that this would explain the resistance we sometimes experience using cognitive imagination, Currie and Ravenscroft’s explanation runs against the widespread observation that supposition is effortless. Indeed, it follows from their argument that when supposition concerns a content that typically will lead to imaginative resistance, the subject has to make an effort, since she has to succeed in insulating cognitive imagination from desiderative imagination (or desire). However, we seem to feel no difficulty in supposing even morally repugnant scenarios. We do not have the impression that we have to block the trigger of desiderative imagination (or desire). By contrast, we do feel resistance if we try to cognitively imagine, rather than suppose, those morally repugnant situations. Pace Currie and Ravenscroft, then, cognitive imagination seems to be per se limited. This is problematic for their view, since it introduces an essential difference between cognitive imagination and supposition, putting pressure on their claim that the latter is a type of the former. Weinberg and Meskin put forward an account of supposition that might be seen as a refinement of Currie and Ravenscroft’s. The latter focus on a single system, namely desire, which would be deactivated when cognitive imagination is in the suppositional mode. Weinberg and Meskin, on the other hand, argue that when one supposes, one is using cognitive imagination, but several

Supposition as imaginative

113

cognitive mechanisms typically connected when one cognitively imagines are disconnected. According to Weinberg and Meskin, cognitive imagination, like belief, is typically connected to factual knowledge, the affect system and domainspecific mechanisms. Among the latter they count moral cognition mechanisms, folk biology, folk physics, and folk psychology (Weinberg & Meskin 2006b, p. 181).9 The basic insight is that cognitive imagination exploits one’s overall mental setup, but the same does not hold when cognitive imagination is run in the suppositional mode. For instance, Weinberg and Meskin maintain that typically supposition is not connected to moral cognition mechanisms (Weinberg & Meskin 2006b, p. 197). Weinberg and Meskin explain the fact that supposition is unlikely to give rise to blockage by saying that it is not connected to the affect system, and is variably connected to domain-specific mechanisms. They explain in a similar way the second normative difference between supposition and cognitive imagination, namely the fact that, contrary to cognitively imagining, in supposing there is no room for embellishing the context and one must stick to the given content and draw what is directly inferable from it. This normative difference between supposition and cognitive imagination, which underlines a constraint on supposition absent in cognitive imagination, is explained by Weinberg and Meskin in terms of the various mechanisms that may provide imagination with contents. According to them, fewer sources of content are available to supposition, since when cognitive imagination is run in the suppositional mode most of the relevant mechanisms are off-line. More precisely, contrary to supposition, cognitive imagination would be connected to a specific mechanism (what they call “the Script Elaborator”) whose purpose is to generate representational contents that cannot come from the affect system or the domain-specific mechanisms (see also Nichols & Stich 2003). The idea is that we can create ad hoc contents for our cognitive imagination; for instance, we can cognitively imagine that humans invented a way to clean themselves by exploiting whirls of sand, though such content cannot be derived from the previous cognitive imagining that the Earth is a desert, or be the outcome of one’s overall mental setup. Weinberg and Meskin suggest that the same does not hold for supposition, or for belief. They see a parallelism with belief insofar as rational agents do not voluntarily embellish their beliefs, belief being disconnected from the Script Elaborator as well. This aspect of normativity would, then, show that supposition is more belief-like than standard cognitive imagination. Do Weinberg and Meskin succeed in explaining the normative differences between supposition and cognitive imagination? I will now argue that they do not. The disconnection of the affect system and the domain-specific mechanisms is meant to be what prevents supposition from being blocked, accounting for its characteristic freedom. It is doubtful, however, that the disconnection of at least some of the relevant mechanisms would not require mental effort on the

114

The nature of supposition

subject’s part, leading us back to my second objection against Currie and Ravenscroft. At any rate, I would like to move to what I take to be a stronger line of objection to their view. It is unlikely that, when supposing, all these systems are disconnected. Weinberg and Meskin themselves remark that supposition can variably connect with at least some domain-specific mechanisms – e.g., the arithmetic system in mathematical reasoning, or folk psychology in a detective’s reasoning. Even moral cognition mechanisms may be solicited by supposition; for instance when I suppose that I am a timid person and want to draw what is inferable from this. Weinberg and Meskin’s explanation remains unsatisfactory also with respect to the fact that supposition is somehow constrained by inferential rules and prevents embellishment. According to them, this is due to supposition being disconnected from most relevant content-providing mechanisms and, above all, from the Script Elaborator. Their view is liable to at least three objections. First, the Script Elaborator is a dispensable posit. Plausibly, the proposition Humans invented a way to clean themselves by exploiting whirls of sand cannot straightforwardly come from the affect system, a domain-specific mechanism or one’s background knowledge. But, it may result from various pieces of information taken from these sources (e.g., the fact that sand is absorbent, so that it has cleaning power). Do we have to posit a special system responsible for collecting the pieces? I do not think so, since if these pieces of information are added into the “imagination box”, the inferential mechanisms would be able by themselves to come up with the relevant content. Second, even taking for granted the existence of the Script Elaborator, supposition can plausibly also employ, even quite generally, such a mechanism. Thus, out of nowhere, one can decide to suppose that humans invented a way to clean themselves by exploiting whirls of sand, whereas one cannot in the same way decide to believe that this is the case. This suggests, together with the considerations in Chapter 5, that the normativity governing supposition is still not belief-like (and should be explained differently). Third, it is left mysterious, in their account, what the trigger that switches off mechanisms in supposition consists in, how it works, where it comes from, or what causes it to be activated. Such a trigger, moreover, lacks independent grounds for its positing. Weinberg and Meskin may reply that some contexts require the activation of a given cognitive mechanism more than others. For instance, they suggest that, contrary to mathematical reasoning, pretence, as well as fiction, mostly requires the activation of the affect system and moral cognition mechanisms. For this reason, while pretence and fiction call for cognitive imagination, mathematical reasoning involves supposition.10 I have already considered this kind of move and put forward three objections (see Chapter 2), which I will rehearse again here. First, there is the risk of reversing the order of explanation. The normative differences between cognitive imagination and supposition are meant to

Supposition as imaginative

115

explain their use respectively in pretence or fiction and in mathematical reasoning, not the other way round. Second, pretence, fiction and mathematical reasoning do not neatly call for either supposition or cognitive imagination. Third, both normative differences between cognitive imagination and supposition seem to result from core distinctive features of these mental states, regardless of determinate context. If right now someone asks me to suppose that Mauriac wrote that Thérèse Desqueyroux murders her husband, I will do it easily (first normative difference) and stick to this proposition (second normative difference), though the context is unclear: Are we talking about the author of the novel or an alternative fictional world (given that Thérèse’s husband survives in Mauriac’s novel)? Turning to emotionality, Currie and Ravenscroft do not clearly address the issue of the emotional asymmetry between supposition and cognitive imagination. In Weinberg and Meskin’s framework, such a difference is explained by the fact that supposition is disconnected from the affect system. I have pointed out that Weinberg and Meskin do not distinguish between a connection in input and a connection in output to the affect system (Chapter 2). Hence, they fail to see that the emotional asymmetry between supposition and cognitive imagination is better understood by noticing that while the connection between cognitive imagination and the affect system is bidirectional, supposition has a unidirectional link with the affect system.11 However, as I stressed when discussing the Emotionality Claim, all this leaves unexplained why supposition is not suitably connected to the affect system. To sum up, Currie and Ravenscroft’s and Weinberg and Meskin’s accounts have the merit of providing grounds for the existence of belieflike imagination and for the claim that supposition is imaginative. It is will-dependent, truth-independent, evidence-independent, without rational character and context-dependent – as cognitive imagination is. However, I have argued that they fail to sufficiently motivate the claim that supposition is belief-like imagination. In particular, they fail to accommodate the dimensions of supposition pertaining to normativity and emotionality. These dimensions sharply separate cognitive imagination from supposition and suggest that the latter is not as belief-like as they claim. Thus both C1 and C2 should be rejected.

6.3 Imaginative primitivism 6.3.a. Imaginings and counterparts If we add to Table 6.1 what has been said thus far, we obtain the Table 6.2 shows that cognitive imagination is more belief-like than supposition. In addition to propositionality and inferentiality, emotionality moves cognitive imagination closer to belief. The normativity dimension also reveals a greater similarity between cognitive imagination and belief. We have seen

116

The nature of supposition

Table 6.2.

Propositionality Inferentiality Emotionality Will-dependence Truth-dependence Normativity Evidence-dependence Rational character Context-dependence

Supposition

Cognitive Imagination

Belief

≈ ≈ ≠ Yes No constrained by inferential rules No No Yes

≈ ≈ ≈ Yes No constrained by content issues No No Yes

≈ ≈ ≈ No Yes

Yes Yes No

that the former is less free than supposition and is typically constrained by one’s overall mental setup (which includes the imaginer’s background knowledge, web of beliefs and affect system). We may say that within the bounds of what is believable relative to one’s overall mental setup, one is free to cognitively imagine anything. In order to believe that p I need some sources of data (e.g., perception) that ground and guide my belief. I can believe that p with more or less conviction, precisely because I may lack reliable sources, I may ignore some data, or I may be unsure about how to evaluate p. Cognitively imagining that p, like believing that p, may require that the subject envisages some route to the plausibility of p, and activates her disposition to judge or feel as if it were the case that p. Moreover, it is plausible this procedure partially depends on one’s overall mental setup. We tend to exploit our beliefs, perceptions, memories and knowledge in order to ground our cognitive imagining that p. For instance, in Giselda’s case, I cannot cognitively imagine that Giselda did the right thing, probably because I cannot envisage the possibility of a world in which infanticide for the purpose of sexual selection is morally right. My overall mental setup prevents me from finding a way to see how Giselda’s act can be right, but someone else may not be so prevented. Although female infanticide is a repugnant and blameworthy act, it remains one of the scourges of some contemporary societies. Arguably, members of those societies can find some route to the plausibility of female infanticide being right (without necessarily forming the corresponding belief) and, in turn, cognitively imagine that Giselda did the right thing. In certain cases there is no way for the subject to envisage some route to p and to activate her disposition to judge or to feel as if it were the case that p. Some things are less easily believable than others, relative to one’s overall mental setup. What cannot be easily believed, cannot be easily cognitively

Supposition as imaginative

117

imagined: the believable appears as the limit of cognitive imagination. For example, a contemporary of Columbus may be unable to cognitively imagine travelling West and arriving in the East, if she believes that the Earth is flat. This belief prevents her from re-creating a disposition to feel or judge it possible to travel westward and arrive in the East. On the contrary, Columbus can feel or judge it possible and he can cognitively imagine that he is engaged in this type of travel, since he believes that the earth is round. This example shows that cognitive imagination may be resistant even when moral contents are not at issue. I agree with Weinberg and Meskin in thinking that the normative constraint on the freedom of cognitive imagination is due to its belief-like nature. Just like belief, cognitive imagination typically connects to the affect system and to many of the aforementioned domain-specific mechanisms. In other words, cognitive imagination tends to exploit one’s overall mental setup. In imagination we can bracket some of what we believe, but to a large extent our imaginings bring our overall mental setup into play (see Chapter 2). As suggested by Kind, when one has picked up a fair amount of information about an object, a person or a fact, these can be more easily imagined (Kind 2001, p. 88; see also Walton 1990; Harris 2000). The belief-like nature of cognitive imagination, I believe, also grounds the other normative feature of cognitive imagination: its holistic dynamics, which allows for embroidery. I have suggested that when a subject cognitively imagines, she uses her overall mental setup in order to envisage some route to the plausibility of the given content. The embroidery proper to the holistic dynamics shown by cognitive imagination is what allows for this exploration, leading to a presentation of the given content as if it were true. Both normative features characterising cognitive imagination square well with the hypothesis that imagination is the capacity to re-create non-imaginative kinds of mental state. As stressed in the introduction of the book, “re-creation” is to be understood as the “preservation” of most features, or at least as a functional similarity, despite phenomenological discrepancies or different cognitive underpinnings. According to this view each type of imagination would have a proper counterpart among the non-imaginative mental states: clearly cognitive imagination has belief as its counterpart, given that four dimensions out of six show a functional similarity between them (i.e., propositionality, inferentiality, emotionality and normativity). Analogous considerations apply to the relationship between sensory imagination and perception. Many philosophers maintain that perception is the counterpart of sensory imagination (Mulligan 1999; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; Goldman 2006a and b). At least five dimensions show a similarity between sensory imagination and perception: propositionality, inferentiality, emotionality, phenomenology and normativity. As far as propositionality is concerned, we have seen that most philosophers take sensory imagination to have non-propositional content precisely because of a parallelism with perception, which is typically considered to have non-propositional content. Authors who consider the possibility of sensory

118

The nature of supposition

imaginings with propositional contents do this by taking into account the idea that perception can have propositional content too. Thus, they do not question the similarity between sensory imagination and perception along the propositionality dimension; they have a broader view of the content of perception and in turn of sensory imagination’s content. Propositionality is closely related to inferentiality. Propositional attitudes like belief are related to one another by inferential dispositions. Percepts do not seem to stand in similar inferential relations. Having one or more percepts does not imply that the subject ought to have certain other percepts. Likewise for sensory imagination. As Currie and Ravenscroft put it: “Images [sensory imaginings] are not related to one another by inferential dispositions, nor is the having of one or more images ever grounds for saying that the subject ought to have certain other images” (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, p. 103). Many authors have stressed that sensory imaginings play similar roles to percepts in our mental economy (e.g., Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; Goldman 2006a). Both sensory imagination and perception are able to evoke emotions (Chapter 2), and sensory imaginings feel like percepts (e.g., Peacocke 1985; Noordhof 2002 – see Chapter 1). Examination of the normativity dimension has shown that both sensory and cognitive imagination are limited and governed by a holistic dynamics. However, sensory imagination is not limited in the same way cognitive imagination is. Sensory imagination is limited by the perceptually experienceable, rather than the believable. Something is perceptually experienceable if I know how to recognise its (visual, auditory, etc.) appearance. Certainly I can recognise the appearance of a unicorn even if I have never seen – and probably will never see – one pasturing, since I know that a unicorn is a horse with a horn on its forehead, a billy-goat beard, a lion’s tail and cloven hooves. From this perspective unicorns, flying pigs and pucks are alike: in all three cases the ability to sensorily imagine the animals stems from a patchwork of previously perceived items (see Chapter 3). I have suggested that this process is not completely free. We should not lose a handle on our ability to recognise the (visual, tactile, auditory, etc.) appearance of things, and on the concepts we have of them. The specific normative constraints that regulate sensory imagination can be retraced to the type of attitude it re-creates, that is, perception. In Chapter 4, I pointed out that sensory imagination re-creates what it would be like to perceive x or that p, on the basis of one’s mental setup. Blockage arises when contents are sensorily unimaginable, that is, when, given one’s mental setup, they cannot be perceptually experienced. The power of mimicking or re-creating other mental states along several dimensions, combined with will-dependence and truth-independence is what makes a mental state an imagining. Proponents of cognitivism (in both its grades) recognise that supposition can be understood within this framework, since supposition has some of the relevant features proper to imaginings.

Supposition as imaginative

119

They claim that belief is the counterpart of supposition. However, as Table 6.2 shows, supposition shares with belief only two of the six central dimensions discussed here (propositionality and inferentiality). This casts it as essentially unlike belief. I take the upshot to be that one should give up on all grades of cognitivism about supposition. One might want to stop here, and perhaps even question the idea that supposition is a type of imagination and adopt (non-imaginative) primitivism (in Chapter 5, I undermined both reductionism and deflationism, but left primitivism as an open, coherent possibility). Given its will-dependence and truthindependence, however, I believe there are strong reasons to think that supposition belongs to the imaginative realm. Furthermore, I take it that the differences between supposition and cognitive imagination are better explained by maintaining that the former is a specific type of imagination, but distinct from the latter. On this view, supposition is a sui generis type of imagination, which does not have belief as its counterpart. This is imaginative primitivism. Imaginative primitivism occupies the conceptual space left between cognitivism and non-imaginative primitivism. Like the latter, imaginative primitivism holds that supposition cannot be reduced to other mental states such as entertainment, belief, doxastic acceptance or cognitive imagination. And like the former, imaginative primitivism takes supposition to be sufficiently similar to both sensory and cognitive imagination to consider it a type of imagination. Imaginative primitivism has the burden of proving how supposition differs from both sensory and cognitive imagination along both the normativity and emotionality dimensions, while still being a type of imagination. I have shown that these dimensions tie together types of imagining with their counterparts. The question then is: Which non-imaginative mental state is the counterpart of supposition? 6.3.b. Supposition as acceptance-like imagination Hints in the literature Kevin Mulligan (1999) has answered this question in a way that gestures towards imaginative primitivism. He holds a recreativist account of imagination, his strategy consisting in analysing the relationships between types of imagination and their non-imaginative counterparts. In so doing he brings out, on the one hand, the characteristics that make a mental state an imaginative one, and, on the other, what links a type of imagination to its counterpart. Two types of imagination are taken into account by Mulligan: sensory imagination and supposition. These types of imagination and their counterparts are compared along five dimensions: content, limits, will, belief and behaviour. These dimensions are roughly equivalent to my own taxonomy, corresponding respectively to: propositionality, normativity, will-dependence, truth-dependence and relationship to action (see Chapter 4, fn 1). In line with what I claimed so far, he points out that while will-dependence and truthdependence are criteria for whether a kind of mental state is imaginative,

120

The nature of supposition

propositionality and normativity reveal the counterpart re-created by a given type of imagination. Mulligan claims that perception is the counterpart of sensory imagination, whereas judgement is the counterpart of supposition. It should be noted that although Mulligan presses for a distinction between belief and judgement and sees supposition as judgement-like, he does not acknowledge that supposition is mostly put together with belief-like imagination, he does not even take into account such a type of imagination. It may be objected that Mulligan’s account of supposition is in the end a form of cognitivism of the first grade (i.e., supposition is cognitive imagination). It would be so, if for Mulligan judgements were nothing but occurrent beliefs (cf. Tagliafico 2011, pp. 73–74). “Judgement” is sometimes interpreted as the “actualisation of a belief”. The idea is that our beliefs can be dispositional (i.e., stored somewhere in the mind), ready for becoming occurrent (i.e., actually present to the mind). For instance, I believe that two plus two is four, but this belief is occurrent only when I am doing some calculations which trigger this belief. Occurrent beliefs would be judgements. However, it would be unfair to think of Mulligan’s account of supposition as supporting C1. In Mulligan’s view judgement is not another label for occurrent belief, indeed, Mulligan highlights important differences between the two. Contrary to judgements, beliefs exhibit degrees associable to subjective probabilities (i.e., the likelihood index). As I pointed out, sources of data are required in order to believe that p. Moreover, they can make a subject more or less disposed to believe that p, depending on the degree of reliableness she assigns to them (see Chapter 5). Mulligan points out a further difference between judgement and belief, which is linked to the difference in degree. Belief, but not judgement, is subject to the rise of negation, the “negraising” phenomenon (Mulligan 1999, p. 58, fn 11). To reject that p is to judge that ¬p. In contrast, if the subject does not believe that p, it may be because she lacks the belief that p or because she disbelieves that p. Here, Mulligan agrees with Bolzano, Husserl and perhaps Frege in thinking that, contrary to believing, “judging does not come in two polarly kinds: to reject p is just to judge that not-p” (Mulligan 2007, p. 218). I do not think that these differences between judgement and belief underlined by Mulligan suggest that judgement is nothing but occurrent belief. Rather, what they suggest is that judgement and belief are different mental states that belong to the broader class of doxastic states. The distinctive features of judgement underlined by Mulligan run parallel to the ones proper to acceptance, examined in Chapter 5. Like judgement, acceptance is qualitative. Some factors can make you more or less disposed to accept that p, rather than ¬p or q, but they do not strengthen your acceptance, once you have made it. Acceptance does not come in two polarly kinds either (i.e., it is not subject to the “negraising” phenomenon). There is no disacceptance, as there is disbelief: if one rejects that p, one accepts that ¬p. Moreover, Mulligan seems to gesture towards the notion of doxastic acceptance. He takes judgement to be truth-dependent. This is a core feature

Supposition as imaginative

121

distinguishing doxastic from pragmatic acceptance, which is truth-independent. Given this notion of judgement, Mulligan’s view is not easily interpretable as an endorsement of cognitivism, suggesting rather a form of primitivism. Supposition would be a sui generis type of imagination re-creating doxastic acceptance. Although Mulligan does not speak about a tripartition of the imagination as the one I propose here, his analysis is compatible with it. Indeed, he distinguishes between judgement (viz. doxastic acceptance) and belief and, by linking supposition to judgement rather than to belief, Mulligan is neutral about the imaginative homologue of belief, which, I suggest, is cognitive imagination. The idea that supposition is a type of imagination, but acceptance-like rather than belief-like is in nuce in Mulligan’s view on supposition. Other authors also hint at it. For instance, Walton seems to link supposition to imagine-accepting, rather than to imagine-believing. When distinguishing between supposition and “a more substantial sense of imagining” (Walton 1994, p. 48), he remarks that “we are capable of imagining accepting or subscribing to moral principles that in fact we reject” (ibid., p. 43 – my italics) and “[a] work in which it is fictional that genocide is morally permissible would be one that calls for imagining that genocide is morally permissible, not just imagining accepting this to be so” (ibid., p. 49 – the second italics are mine). Walton’s are very suggestive remarks, and I think that they point in the right direction. This is also in line with an insight by Currie and Ravenscroft, who claim that “[t]here may be other kinds of belief, with different functional characteristics; perhaps together all these belief states form a vaguely bounded irregular solid within the space” (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, p. 17). Both doxastic acceptance and belief can be understood as doxastic states belonging to this “irregular solid”. Moreover, these authors suggest that the other kinds of doxastic state might have their own imaginative homologues. My suggestion is precisely that supposition is such a homologue, that of doxastic acceptance.12 Advantages of imaginative primitivism In order to corroborate the hypothesis that supposition is a sui generis form of imagination re-creating acceptance let me show how, within this framework, the distinguishing features of supposition (i.e., its normativity and unidirectional link to emotion) can be fruitfully accounted for. As we have seen, propositionality and normativity are important dimensions that reveal similarities between a type of imagination and its counterpart. Each type of imagining inherits the type of content (i.e., whether it has propositional content or not), as well as its proper limits, from the counterpart. I have claimed that inferentiality, emotionality and phenomenology are also dimensions that reveal the link between a type of imagination and its counterpart. Supposition proved to be belief-like as far as propositionality and inferentiality (and potentially phenomenology) are concerned, but unlike belief with respect to

122

The nature of supposition

emotionality and normativity. My suggestion has been that these latter dimensions are related to the channelled cognitive dynamics shown by supposition. Such a dynamics makes supposition a) so free that almost all contents can be supposed (i.e., the first normative feature of supposition), b) not requiring embroidery (i.e., the second normative feature of supposition) and c) insensitive to the outputs of the affect system (i.e., unidirectional link to emotion). Supposition’s channelled dynamics, I believe, can be explained in terms of features that supposition inherits from its counterpart, that is doxastic acceptance (hereafter simply “acceptance”). Let us take another look at the commonalities between supposition and acceptance. Compared to believing that p, accepting that p requires fewer sources of data. When I accept that p I take p as a premise for a decision, so I discard the reasons against p and I do not contemplate the possibility that p may be false: acceptance, in contrast to belief, brackets doubts. Moreover, acceptance does not come in degrees: either I accept that p, or I do not. Once I have accepted that, for instance, a thief has got in through the bathroom window, what led me to accept this content does not strengthen my acceptance. The content of supposition can be up to the imaginer, and not truth-directed. However, once what is to be supposed is established, suppositions as acceptances discard the possibility that the content is false and seem not to exhibit degrees – e.g., either I suppose that a birch is in the garden, or not. However, like all imaginative states, suppositions are freer than their counterparts. Supposition can do without the set of reasons for accepting the given content: in supposing that p one takes p as if it were true regardless of the pros and cons for taking p as a good premise for a decision. In supposition not only doubts are bracketed: so is most of the subject’s overall mental setup.13 These considerations explain why supposition, unlike cognitive imagination, is not constrained by the believable and appears nearly boundless. Supposing that Giselda did the right thing does not cause in me any resistance, just as the contemporary of Columbus can easily suppose that she is engaged in circumnavigation. When a subject supposes that p she sticks to p as if it were true, without calling on her overall mental setup in order to provide reasons that would ground the truth of p. Supposition is less committed to one’s overall mental setup, and is therefore less constrained by it. For this reason there is no suppositional blockage, although there might be suppositional refusal. Indeed, one may refuse to suppose that p, but once one supposes that p there is nothing that can block one’s supposition. This is not to say that supposition cannot be integrated with one’s overall mental setup. For instance, as a preliminary for a decision (e.g., whether it is the case to call the doctor immediately) one might be invited to add the supposition that p (e.g., that the children are in pain) to one’s overall mental setup in order to come up with an estimation of what one is prone to do if p were the case. This is a case in which a supposition is integrated and connected with one’s overall mental setup. However, this type of connection is

Supposition as imaginative

123

rather different from the one characteristic of cognitive imagination. Here a supposition is integrated with one’s overall mental setup, but it is not exploited in order to ground that, for instance, the children are in pain. This proposition is taken to be true regardless of its pros and cons as a premise for a decision. In contrast, if one is asked to cognitively imagine that the children are in pain, one will use one’s overall mental setup in order to envisage some route to this fact and to activate one’s disposition to judge or feel as if it were the case that the children are in pain. For the same reason supposition tends to prevent embellishment and constrains the imaginer to stick to the given content. In supposing that p one has to grasp the thought that p and to assign it the truth-value “true”. Moreover, if supposing requires only taking a given content as if it were true, it is not surprising that supposition is quite effortless. On my framework, which sees supposition as acceptance-like imagination, supposition’s characteristic channelled dynamics finds therefore a ready explanation. As a happy consequence, other features of supposition that hinge on such channelled dynamics, such as its normativity and emotional autonomy on the output side, are also easily explained.14 In sum, imaginative primitivism is well placed to account for the pattern of features characterising supposition. Defenders of non-imaginative primitivism have the burden of proving that supposition cannot be the re-creation of acceptance. The only attempt in this direction is Balcerak Jackson’s account of supposition. We have seen that she takes supposition to be a form of acceptance. I argued that her notion of acceptance is likely to be pragmatic, rather than doxastic acceptance. The claim that supposition is (a form of) pragmatic acceptance is compatible with an imaginative account of supposition, though this is not the path followed by Balcerak Jackson. Indeed, pragmatic acceptances show features proper to imaginative states, such as truth-independence, lack of rational character and context-dependence.15 Balcerak Jackson might claim that what really prevents suppositions from being imaginings is that they are not re-creative states. Why should this be the case? It depends on how the notion of re-creation is spelled out. Balcerak Jackson defines imagination as “the cognitive capacity to take perspectives of other possible subjects of experience and simulate the experiences they would have in various situations” (Balcerak Jackson 2016, p. 58). According to her, in imagination we can re-create or simulate perceptual and experiential (in a narrow sense) states, that is, we can take perspectives of other possible subjects as smelling, touching, acting or emoting. She also thinks that in imagination we can take the perspective of subjects as believers, this is “conceiving” in her terminology – which can be equated to cognitive imagination to the terminology I have been using. However, she thinks that the re-creation of belief is a mental process very different from the re-creation of perceptual experiences and emotions (ibid., p. 49). This seems to stem primarily from her view about phenomenology.16 Balcerak Jackson maintains that a core feature of imagination is that it

124

The nature of supposition

involves a phenomenal character. Imaginings would involve phenomenal characters similar to those exhibited by the mental states they re-create. And she further claims that cognitive phenomenology is substantially different from experiential (narrowly construed) types of phenomenology. This difference is in turn reproduced in imagination: sensory imaginings would be substantially different from cognitive imaginings. This view is questionable. As I stressed in discussing the Phenomenology Claim, more should be said in order to ground the claim that cognitive phenomenology is not a genuine type of phenomenology on a par with the others. Certainly there are differences between sensory imagination and cognitive imagination, but they do not suffice to show that these are very different kinds of mental process. This is so even granting that both sensory imagination and cognitive imagination involve a phenomenal character – sensory and cognitive, respectively. When we sensorily and cognitively imagine, we put ourselves “in the perspective of another actual or merely possible subject, by recreating or simulating the mental state that the subject has or would have” (ibid.) – i.e., a percept or a belief. Importantly, it is not clear why all this should motivate the idea that supposition is not re-creative. We have seen that there are no convincing arguments to discard the possibility that supposition involves a phenomenal character, plausibly cognitive (Chapter 1). Like cognitive imagination and sensory imagination, supposition can be seen as the re-creation of a nonimaginative mental state: when we suppose, we put ourselves in the perspective of another actual or merely possible subject, by re-creating the doxastic acceptance that the subject has or would have. In the absence of further arguments against the re-creative nature of supposition, imaginative primitivism is better placed to account for supposition. Considering supposition as acceptance-like imagination has several further theoretical payoffs. I will conclude this chapter by highlighting some of them. Confusing supposition with cognitive imagination and acceptance My account explains why supposition has been very often conflated with cognitive imagination in the literature. Supposition and cognitive imagination can be easily confused with one another, whereas they are rarely confused with belief. As Weinberg and Meskin put it, supposing may slide into cognitively imagining and “it may be impossible to say where the one activity leaves off and the other commences” (Weinberg & Meskin 2006b, p. 193). The same confusion seems not to arise between both these types of imagination and sensory imagination. In order to see why this is so, let us take White’s example of the father who asks the mother to suppose that the children are in pain. Arguably the father is not interested in the mother visually imagining that the children are really sick. He does not even wish that she cognitively imagines it. In this scenario, there are already some reasons to think that the

Supposition as imaginative

125

children might be sick, and what the father aims at is that the mother supposes this hypothesis, taking it as a premise for inferring that it would be better to call the doctor immediately. He has already accepted that the children are in pain, and via a supposition he would like the mother to do the same, or at least accept what he thinks should be done. In another situation the sentence “But imagine that the children are in pain” might be less straightforwardly a case of supposition. For example, if the parents are caressing the sleeping children and talking about how strong their love for them is, and the father says to the mother: “But imagine that the children are in pain, what would you be willing to do for them?”. Although it is always imagination that is at work, the father may ask the mother to cognitively imagine or to suppose that the children are in pain, depending on the situation. But the context may be ambiguous, and we are unable to determine which type of imagination is more relevant – perhaps none in particular. In such cases, one may pass from one type to another without being able to disentangle the two states. This is not to deny that there is a matter of fact about which state the subject is in, only that it may be epistemically opaque, and even undecidable. Belief and acceptance are difficult to disentangle as well, both at practical and conceptual levels. As Cohen notes, there is a natural tendency for belief and acceptance “to be linked together in everyday experience” and this “is probably the main factor in generating the widespread tendency to confound the two concepts with one another in philosophical reflection” (Cohen 1992, p. 18). Perhaps the fact that their counterparts are so closely related explains why the same holds for cognitive imagination and supposition. Moreover, if it is true as Cohen argues that acceptance quite generally tends to promote belief (ibid.), this would suggest that the same could be true of supposition: it would very often trigger cognitive imagination. If Columbus persuades his contemporary to suppose that the earth is round and a voyage starting westward and terminating in the East is possible, he may also induce her to cognitively imagine that this is so. Supposition and acceptance as well can in some cases be confused. The following example is suggested by White: Fred supposes that a girl likes him on the basis of scanty evidence. Here it is quite wrong to say that Fred merely imagines that this girl likes him. Is it really a case of supposition? According to my view, Fred would be supposing, if he were re-creating accepting this fact. The reference to the scanty evidence, however, suggests that Fred is doing more than that. He seems to think that it is true that she likes him. He genuinely accepts this fact, using this acceptance across various contexts in his reasoning and actions, perhaps even believing that the girl likes him. It might be a case of self-deception, where in fact the evidence clearly shows that she does not like him and Fred suppressed his belief that this is true. In any case, Fred’s state is more adequately captured by seeing him as accepting, rather than supposing. White is right in thinking that in ordinary language we cannot always translate “suppose that” as “imagine that”. However, this does not mean that

126

The nature of supposition

supposition is not a type of imagination, as the fact that sometimes “imagine that” can be replaced by “believe that” does not show that cognitive imagination is a type of belief. The imagination-related vocabulary and the supposition-related vocabulary can be mistaken, and we may use them to pick out acts other than imaginings and suppositions. Ordinary language is an often useful, but equally often unreliable guide. Sometimes ordinary language is not so deceiving. I claimed that what is going on in Fred’s mind is better seen as acceptance, rather than as supposition. But if I want to convey to an interlocutor the idea that poor Fred is making a blunder, I may say that he supposes that she likes him. Indeed, supposition is the state Fred should be in. We make use of psychological terms in light of appropriateness considerations, and therefore we may not always capture what is really going on, but rather what should be going on – given this normative dimension of mental attitude ascription, we may go wrong in ascribing mental attitudes to others, and perhaps even to ourselves. At any rate, by keeping in mind the differences between acceptance and supposition, as well as the ones between the latter and cognitive imagination so far outlined, we can ascertain which type of mental states a given expression picks out. Obviously, in cases in which we lack a complete picture, we can only make a guess. Take, for instance, the following difficult cases. “The detective supposes that the murderer is a woman”, “Einstein supposed that Quantum Mechanics was incomplete”, “Some historians suppose that the Great War would have begun, even if the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria had not been assassinated”. We may say that in these cases the subject aims at capturing a state of affairs and has epistemic reasons which ground her thought, thus supposition should rather be seen as acceptance. It might also be that in these cases the subjects started with a supposition, constrained by external factors and used for epistemic purposes, though not really based on evidence, and then, motivated by the supposition itself, started looking for further evidence to ground it.17 Once founded, their mental state becomes one of acceptance, perhaps even belief or knowledge. In the case of Einstein, for instance, it could be that in his reasoning he supposed that Quantum Mechanics was incomplete, driven by the suspicion or even the belief that this was the case, while hoping to be wrong. This train of thought might have led him to conceive his thought experiment known as EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen), which, in the end, entitled him to accept that Quantum Mechanics is incomplete, since from the supposition that it is complete he derived a contradiction (see fn 9, Chapter 3). Likewise for the detective’s supposition that the murderer is a woman, and for the historians’ supposition that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was not a necessary cause for the Great War. They might have had beliefs with contents that were identical, or opposite, to the ones they supposed. After all, it is irrelevant to supposition whether what is supposed is compatible or conflicts with what is believed. What makes these cases difficult to interpret is that we do not know if there is some evidence that grounds these suppositions. If there were, there could

Supposition as imaginative

127

also be the corresponding acceptances, since acceptance requires being minimally anchored. There is little doubt that supposition is involved when, for the sake of the argument, one is supposing that the butterfly theorem is unprovable, or that the colour red is perceived as blue. It is indeed quite hard to think that the subject can accept these contents. The following example is even more problematic: “I suppose that you will be late tonight”. Here my supposition seems to be grounded on some evidence, I may even believe that this will be the case, but it might be that I do not want to accept it. For instance, I may prepare the dinner as if my guest would be on time. At a certain point, external factors may force me to accept that this will not be so, but it does not mean that my previous supposition was in fact an acceptance. Ordinary language can be misleading, and states of supposition can be confused with states of either cognitive imagination or acceptance. We may also lack what is relevant in order to ascertain whether we face a genuine case of supposition. I hope to have shown that my framework can be a helpful guide, since it provides distinctions that can help us to disentangle complicated cases. A defence It might be objected that it is the primary purpose of the imaginer which settles whether one is supposing or cognitively imagining. We can put this view as follows: while a subject who takes p as if it were true primarily for the sake of making inferences is supposing, a subject who takes p as if it were true primarily for feigning to believe that p is cognitively imagining. A subject may have multiple goals in taking p as if it were true. One may cognitively imagine that p whilst determining what follows from p, or one might suppose and feign to believe that p. Often, there is one overriding purpose and, according to this picture, what mental state the subject is in would hinge on it. But this is plausibly not always so, opening the way to murky cases in which one has different, and equally strong purposes for taking a content as if it were true. The imaginative difference that can be seen between fiction, pretence and ratiocinative activities would be understood as stemming from the purposes of the subject. I do not deny that different purposes, as well as different contexts, may trigger and require different types of imagination. However, I believe such factors do not explain the differences between types of imagination. A parallelism outside the imaginative realm can be useful. In some situations I may need a normal screwdriver, while in others I need a Phillips-head. They are different tools not in virtue of my needs, but rather in virtue of their intrinsic differences, which makes them useful in different contexts. Analogously, it is the specific nature of a type of imagination that makes me want to use it and that makes it apt in a context. For instance, if I ask my flatmate to imagine a sofa in an empty space of our living room, I want her to trigger her sensory imagination. The father who asks the mother

128

The nature of supposition

to suppose that the children are in pain wants her to exploit this type of imagination. In contrast, when he asks her to imagine that this is so, it is not clear if only one type of imagination is appropriate in order to fulfil the request. Perhaps the context will be compatible with several different types of imagination, or pragmatic cues may settle the question. In any case, it is the perception-like nature of sensory imagination that makes it appropriate for the task I set to my flatmate. Likewise, the belief-like nature of cognitive imagination suits the second but not the first request made by the father. This answer would be problematic if both cognitive imagination and supposition were seen as belief-like. Perhaps this is the reason why philosophers who have conflated supposition with cognitive imagination tend to appeal to context or the subject’s purpose in order to explain why we sometimes use cognitive imagination in its normal, rather than suppositional mode, and the other way around. My framework does not face the same problem. Indeed, in the example of the father, supposition is more appropriate to fulfil the first request due to its acceptance-like nature, which adequately captures the fact that the mother is not asked to explore the possibility that the children are in pain, but rather to take it as a premise for inferring what should be done. Moreover, by understanding supposition in such a way no ad hoc move is needed in order to account for the differences between supposition and cognitive imagination. There is no need either for intimate connections with other types of imagination, or switches that disconnect specific cognitive systems: supposition and cognitive imagination differ because they have different counterparts. Hence, my proposal is simpler than both Currie and Ravenscroft’s and Weinberg and Meskin’s, without any loss in cogency or plausibility. Quite the contrary, it is superior, as I have shown above. As already pointed out, my framework is in line with Mulligan’s analysis of supposition, but is superior insofar as it does not share a central shortcoming of his picture. While he maintains that supposition is a type of imagination which does not have belief as its counterpart, he takes judgement, rather than acceptance, as the counterpart of supposition. And since he does not take into account a belief-like type of imagination, he leaves room for the objection that he is just dealing with a type of imagination which has occurrent belief as its counterpart. The same objection cannot be raised against my view, since I distinguish between belief-like and acceptance-like imagination.

Notes 1 In Arcangeli (2014) I argued against cognitivism, but only gestured towards the idea that supposition is a sui generis type of imagination. Here I use the label “cognitivism” in a narrower sense. In that paper I take doxasticism to be a grade of cognitivism. 2 As hinted at in Chapter 3, Goldman considers the possibility that supposition “is a sui generis form of imagination, irreducible to E-imagination” (Goldman 2006a, p. 48; and similarly in Goldman 2006b, p. 44). However, he does not develop this hypothesis, preferring the “reductive proposal” (Goldman 2006a, p. 48).

Supposition as imaginative

129

3 It can also be seen as another way to defend the propositionality of cognitive imagination, given that mental imagery is often conceived in non-propositional terms – this issue is at the heart of the imagery debate launched by Stephen Kosslyn (a pictorialist) and his opponent Zenon Pylyshyn (a descriptivist). 4 A more specific hypothesis can be put forward. In Chapter 2, I argued that cognitive imagination is bidirectionally connected to the affect system. The same can be said about belief. Beliefs can evoke emotions, and, in turn, emotional responses can guide our beliefs (e.g., believing that I lied to a friend can lead me to feel remorse and this feeling can lead me to further beliefs, such as the belief that I am not loyal as I thought – see Chapter 5, §5.2.c). 5 Currie and Ravenscroft point out that beliefs and cognitive imaginings are differently related to perception (see also Weinberg & Meskin 2006b, p. 178; Sinhababu 2016, pp. 112–113). While believing that p is justified by percepts, imagining that p is not. For example, while my seeing a quiche on the kitchen table justifies my belief that there is a quiche on the kitchen table, it does not ground my cognitive imagining that there is a quiche on the kitchen table. 6 One might add a further diverging dimension. It has been stressed that cognitive imaginings and beliefs are differently related to action (see also Weinberg & Meskin 2006b, p. 178; Sinhababu 2013, pp. 160–161, and 2016, pp. 112–113). Contrary to believing that p, imagining that p does not lead to the action which typically would be triggered if p were believed to be true. Even if I were hungry, my cognitive imagining that there is a quiche on the kitchen would not lead me to go to the kitchen and eat a slice. On imagination and action see Chapter 4, fn 1. 7 This section is adapted from Arcangeli (2014). 8 Currie and Ravenscroft suggest that this connection is particularly salient in moral contexts and is the imaginative homologue of an intimate connection between moral beliefs and desires. They are not very clear about what this other connection is, and in fact they admit that it is hard to determine. They seem to suggest that in moral contexts there should be a harmony between one’s desires and beliefs (i.e., if a subject believes that p, she should desire that p; whereas if she believes that ¬p, she should desire that ¬p). However, they acknowledge that mismatches can happen – e.g., believing that p is good does not always involve desiring p (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, p. 34; see also Stock 2005 on this point). Still, they argue that as imaginers (more specifically as consumers of fiction) we approximate the ideal subjects who show such a harmony, thus in moral contexts cognitive imaginings and desiderative imaginings do not show any dissonance. In my opinion Currie and Ravenscroft’s proposal is quite complicated and needs much more support. One may be sceptical about the existence of the connection between cognitive imaginings and desiderative imaginings, as well as about the analogous one with respect to beliefs and desires. Indeed, one might argue that even readers of fiction can show a mismatch between their desire-like imaginings and belief-like imaginings about characters’ actions. 9 It should be noted that desire is not among the systems taken into account by Weinberg and Meskin. They merely say in passing that, like beliefs, imaginings may interact with desires, thus suggesting that suppositions typically do not. Weinberg and Meskin draw significantly on Nichols and Stich’s (2003) architecture of the imagination, but they depart from it with respect to at least three points. One diverging point is precisely the interaction between cognitive imagination and desire, which seems to be precluded by Nichols and Stich’s architecture. Second, they call the belief-like imagination system the “imagination box”, rather than the “possible worlds box” – as Nichols and Stich do, since they maintain that the impossible can be imagined (Weinberg & Meskin 2006b, p. 179, fn 5). Third, they claim that supposition is a special case of cognitive imagination, whereas Nichols and Stich take supposition as coextensive with belief-like imagination (i.e., they are partisans of C1).

130

The nature of supposition

10 Similarly, Currie and Ravenscroft (2002) suggest that contexts in which it is easier to suppose are those in which the subject’s overall mental setup is less connected or even disconnected. 11 This view, moreover, can be made compatible with their picture (see fn 13, Chapter 2). 12 Similarly Nichols writes that “[i]t is possible that there are actually multiple kinds of codes in the belief box. That is, some beliefs might be stored in one code, while other beliefs are stored in a different code. (…) But the important point is simply that each pretense [imaginative] representation is in the same code as some (possible) parallel belief representation” (Nichols 2004, p. 137, fn 8). 13 Cohen might have a similar point in mind when he underlines that supposition does “not need to hang on anything” beyond itself (Cohen 1992, p. 13). 14 With respect to emotionality, a working hypothesis is that just like both cognitive imagination and belief are bidirectionally linked to the affect system (see fn 4), both supposition and acceptance are unidirectionally linked to it. This does not mean that an acceptance cannot be triggered by an emotional reaction, but rather that the latter does not affect the subsequent process (the same holds for supposition, see Chapter 2). 15 In Chapter 5, fn 16, I have suggested that there is room for the claim that pragmatic acceptance is also will-dependent. 16 Balcerak Jackson also claims that while re-creating perception involves perspectives of ordinary perceivers like us, re-creating belief involves perspectives of “ideally rational believers with unlimited reasoning capacities” (ibid., p. 56). However, she gives us no principled reasons to think that cognitive imagination is bounded to such a difficult imaginative exercise. It is very hard to understand how we can take the perspective of thinkers with unlimited reasoning capacities. As an analogy, can we take the visual perspective of a perceiver with unlimited visual capacities? It is hard to see how to even try to engage with such an imaginative exercise. 17 This challenges the view that supposition cannot motivate action (see Chapter 4, fn 1).

Supposition and the imaginative realm Remapping the territory

The uses, and applications, of the terms “image”, “imagine”, “imagination”, and so forth make up a very diverse and scattered family. Even this image of a family seems too definite. It would be a matter of more than difficulty to identify and list the family’s members, let alone their relations of parenthood and cousinhood. Peter Strawson Imagining seems less tractable than more frequently discussed attitudes such as believing, intending, and desiring, as well as emotional states such as being happy or sad or feeling guilty or jealous. Kendall Walton1

I ventured into the imaginative realm seeking a place for supposition. Supposition emerges as one of the new missing mysteries of philosophy. Supposition has been taken either as clearly non-imaginative, or as obviously imaginative. I have argued that this second option is more promising. The three main arguments against the imaginative nature of supposition, I have shown, fail. Rather than undermining the view that supposition is an imaginative state, they point to differences between types of imagination. The Phenomenological Claim reveals a distinction between sensory and non-sensory imaginings. The Emotionality and the Participation Claims make apparent three main features of supposition upon which almost all philosophers seem to agree, namely its weak emotional tenor, its high degree of freedom, and its fixed nature. However, these features as well can be seen as differences among types of imaginings. Though the objections fail, we still needed a positive motivation for seeing supposition as belonging to the imaginative realm. Why should supposition be a type of imagination? An answer to this question required addressing two further issues. How does imagination differ from non-imaginative mental states? And how do distinct forms of imagination differ from each other? I claimed that if one conceives imagination as the ability to re-create non-imaginative mental states, both these questions can be satisfactorily answered. On the one hand, all imaginings are characterised by some core features (mainly, will-dependence

132

The nature of supposition

and truth-independence), which underpin their belonging to the same, imaginative, realm. On the other hand, such a realm displays further demarcations: different types of imagination have distinguishing features, which are inherited from their proper counterparts (e.g., propositionality, inferentiality, emotionality). Imagination is a re-creative faculty, and imaginings re-create non-imaginative mental states (their counterparts). I pointed out that endorsing this view does not involve any commitment to a strong form of simulationism. All that is needed is that there be a functional and/or phenomenological similarity between imaginings and their counterparts. This minimal notion of re-creation can be seen as the common ground between the most influential approaches to imagination.2 Sensory and cognitive imagination are readily distinguished within such a framework: both are types of imagination because they show the features proper to imaginings; but while the former retains some characteristics of perception, the latter inherits features from belief. I have argued that supposition deserves citizenship of the imaginative realm as well, for it shows the characteristics proper to imagination. Partisans of the imaginative nature of supposition have stressed the imaginative features of supposition, with special attention to its dependence on the will and its independence from truth. They have taken on the challenges expressed by the Emotionality and the Participation Claims, trying to show that these arguments are insufficient to support the non-imaginative view of supposition. With the exception of Kevin Mulligan, advocates of supposition as imagination maintain that supposition consists in cognitive imagination. However, they face the difficult task of explaining why some crucial features are not shared by supposition and cognitive imagination. This seems to me the real challenge raised by both the Emotionality and the Participation Claims. One move has been to argue that supposition is a special case of cognitive imagination. Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft call on an intimate connection between a desiderative type of imagination and cognitive imagination, which would be missing when cognitive imagination is in suppositional mode. In a similar vein, Jonathan Weinberg and Aaron Meskin have argued that, when one supposes, one runs cognitive imagination with some cognitive mechanisms (typically connected when one cognitively imagines) disconnected. These authors have moreover stressed the role played by context in determining whether cognitive imagination is triggered in its typical or suppositional mode. Fiction and pretence would mainly exploit the former, whereas ratiocinate activities, such as mathematical reasoning, would mostly require the latter. My main claim has been that both these proposals are unsatisfactory, since they leave unexplained some features of supposition, or confine the use of the latter to specific contexts without proper justification. A better strategy, I have tried to show, takes inspiration from some insights by Mulligan. Although he does not mention cognitive imagination, he defines supposition as judgementlike imagination. Judgement is a complex notion which can mean simply occurrent belief, or also a mental state different from belief (e.g., doxastic

Supposition and the imaginative realm

133

acceptance). My suggestion has been to think of supposition as acceptancelike imagination, where acceptance is to be understood in its doxastic, rather than pragmatic, sense. My view does not fall prey to the same worries that undermine both Currie and Ravenscroft’s and Weinberg and Meskin’s proposals. While we share the same purpose (i.e., to defend the imaginative nature of supposition), I do not have the burden of showing how we are able to detach cognitive imagination from desiderative imagination, or why under the suppositional use of cognitive imagination some cognitive mechanisms normally exploited by this type of imagination are disconnected. My account actually suggests an explanation for such disconnections: they stem from the acceptance-like nature of supposition. By means of this framework, I accounted for what characterises supposition and for what distinguishes it from cognitive imagination, since they have different counterparts. The discussion also showed that the notion of supposition is extremely helpful to conceptually clarify the domain of doxastic states. Indeed, I have uncovered two kinds of acceptance, doxastic and pragmatic. While supposition is the imaginative homologue of the former, which it re-creates, the latter may be supposition itself. Once we have acknowledged that supposition is such a type of imagination, one may attempt to answer other questions: Is supposition involved in fiction? Is supposition involved in thought experimentation? And more generally one may wonder whether re-creative imagination is involved in fiction and in thought experiments. I believe that the foregoing work lays solid bases for pursuing these further lines of enquiry, which though lie beyond the scope of this book. These areas of investigation may be indeed important test-beds for the overall thesis. My approach to imagination and supposition, beyond bringing much needed clarity to the philosophical debate, and more adequately accounting for the nature of supposition, can also prove useful to more empirical endeavours, helping to shed light on the possible psychological mechanisms that implement the different types of imagination. I shall conclude with a roadmap for such interdisciplinary work.

A psychological suggestion The distinction between two types of doxastic state, belief and acceptance, can be fruitfully integrated with dual-process theories of the mind. Belief and acceptance may rely on the exploitation of different psychological systems (see, e.g., Frankish 2004). In Chapter 2 I have suggested that dual-process theories provide support for the distinction between supposition, and both sensory and cognitive imagination. Different types of imagination would be underpinned either by System 1 or by System 2. Some features of supposition suggest a connection to System 2. The deliberativeness and the considerable independence from the subject’s overall mental setup typical of supposition are compatible with the fact that System 2

134

The nature of supposition

processes are controlled, and mostly abstract or domain-general. Likewise, the channelled dynamics of supposition – which grounds its normative features – parallels the sequential functioning, as well as the working memory constraints, that characterise System 2. Finally, supposition is considered to be less emotional, and indeed emotional processing is attributed to System 1. The effortless aspect of supposition, though, seems to run counter to the high effort required by the workings of System 2, challenging the foregoing considerations. However, there is a ready way out. I take that “effort” means two different things in these two domains. Supposition is effortless in the sense that a subject can easily come up with a supposition and can suppose (almost) any p. This is compatible with the claim that the controlled processes which lead to or form these effortless mental states are effortful, because they require a huge amount of energy in computational terms (see fn 7, Chapter 3). Similarly, the spontaneity, the dependence on the subject’s overall mental setup, the embroidery and the emotional charge of both cognitive imagination and sensory imagination suggest that they are linked to System 1, which is taken to be automatic, domain-specific, independent of working memory, functioning in parallel and encompassing emotional processes. However, both sensory imagination and cognitive imagination can be deliberate, and in some cases imaginers experience a strong effort in sensorily or cognitively imagining certain things – features typical of System 2 processes.3 In light of these considerations, I suggest that while supposition exploits only workings of System 2, sensory and cognitive imagination have a foot in both systems. When an imaginer leaves free rein to her sensory and cognitive imagination, or when these two types of imagination are spontaneously triggered, System 1 would be mainly involved. This does not mean that System 2 has no role to play in these cases. The imaginer may indeed exploit the executive functions belonging to this system in deciding the first steps of her imaginative project. System 2 would thereby control the inputs of System 1 processes, but further processing would be carried out by System 1. For instance, I may decide to imagine that there are gnomes in the forest and see where this imagining leads me. Imaginings that arise spontaneously can also be integrated in a controlled imaginative project. In this case System 2 would take over the outputs of System 1. For example, I may find myself spontaneously imagining about gnomes, and then decide to go along with this imagining. Deliberate sensory and cognitive imaginings would, if this picture is correct, be mainly underpinned by System 2. System 1 would though also have a role to play, since both types of imagination require the exploitation of the subject’s overall mental setup. Collaboration between systems would be broken when System 2 pushes System 1 beyond its limits. When an imaginer forces herself to sensorily or cognitively imagining what is, according to her overall mental setup, neither perceptually experienceable nor believable, System 1 may cease to respond to the requests of System 2. It might also happen that System 1 gives rise to an output opposed to the desired one, which System 2 may try to suppress. The effort felt by an imaginer when imaginative

Supposition and the imaginative realm

135

resistance is involved can be explained as either stemming from this inhibitory role played by System 2, or, alternatively, by System 1 being forced beyond its bounds. These explanations need not be in competition: inhibition may explain some cases, while the limits of System 1 may explain others. Supposition, I argue, is straightforwardly associable with System 2, while sensory and cognitive imagination are better seen as exploiting both Systems. System 1 is required by sensory and cognitive imagination in order to exploit domain-specific modules and emotional responses, with System 2 being responsible for the guiding the imaginative process as a whole. Perhaps it is thanks to the “vigilance” of System 2 that imaginings do not typically produce the same consequences as their counterparts (e.g., with respect to action). In a nutshell, if we merge the psychological literature on dual-process theories and the debate on the heterogeneity of imagination (see book introduction), a case can be made for the claim that imagination relies on both Systems 1 and 2, though some types of imagination can exploit only the processes of the latter. This picture brings to the fore another difference between imaginings and their counterparts. Although both supposition and acceptance would rely on System 2, the same would not be true for sensory imagination and cognitive imagination and their counterparts. Sensory and cognitive imagination seem to depend on System 2 in a way their counterparts do not. Indeed, perception never rests on System 2, and belief need not so do, as the outputs of System 1 are typically beliefs. Hence, imaginings and counterparts may diverge with respect to the systems exploited.

Notes 1 Strawson (1970, p. 31); Walton (1990, p. 21). 2 Elsewhere (Arcangeli 2017a), I suggest understanding the relevant re-creation, which defines imaginings, as re-creation of the attitudinal profile of their counterparts: imaginings inherit most of the features constituting the proprietary ways of apprehending a content shown by their counterparts. This type of re-creation (“mental re-creation”) can be contrasted with the re-creation of the states of affairs that can be the objects of different attitudes (“objectual re-creation” – for similar distinctions see also Goldman 2006a; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; Zeimbekis 2011). On this ground, it can be argued that sometimes the notion of mental imagery does not refer to a variety of imagination, but rather to a type of content, since it is recreative in the objectual, rather than mental sense (see Chapter 1, fn 10). 3 Evans writes that hypothetical thought and mental simulations belong to System 2 (Evans 2008, p. 262). This can be read as suggesting that imagination stems from such a system.

References

Arcangeli, M. (2010). Imagination in thought experimentation: sketching a cognitive approach to thought experiments. In L. Magnani, W. Carnielli & C. Pizzi (Eds.), Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology (pp. 571–587). Springer. Arcangeli, M. (2013). Immaginare è simulare: cosa e come? Rivista di Estetica, 53(2), 135–154. Arcangeli, M. (2014). Against cognitivism about supposition. Philosophia, 42(3), 607–641. Arcangeli, M. (2017a). De l’autre côté du miroir de l’imagination. Imagination et imagerie mentale. Bulletin D’analyse Phénoménologique, 13(2), 108–128. Arcangeli, M. (2017b). Interacting with emotions: imagination and supposition, Philosophical Quarterly, 67(269), 730–750. Armstrong, D.M. (1968). A materialist theory of the mind. Routledge. Balcerak Jackson, M. (2016). On the epistemic value of imagining, supposing, and conceiving. In A. Kind & P. Kung (Eds.), Knowledge through imagination (pp. 41–60). Oxford University Press. Bayne, T. & Montague, M. (2011). Cognitive phenomenology. Oxford University Press. Berkeley, G. (1713). Three dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. Pearson Longman. Brann, E. T. H. (1991). The world of the imagination: sum and substance. Rowman & Littlefield. Bratman, M. (1992). Practical reasoning and acceptance in a context. Mind, 101(401), 1–16. Brédart, S., Ward, T.B. & Marczewski, P. (1998). Structured imagination of novel creatures’ faces. The American journal of psychology, 111, 607–625. Byrne, A. (2005). Perception and conceptual content. In Ernest Sosa & Matthias Steup (Eds.), Contemporary debates in epistemology (pp. 231–250). Blackwell. Byrne, A. (2010). Recollection, perception, imagination. Philosophical Studies, 148(1), 1–12. Carroll, N. (1990). The philosophy of horror. Routledge. Carruthers, P. (2002). The roots of scientific reasoning: infancy, modularity, and the art of tracking. In P. Carruthers, S. Stich & M. Siegal (Eds.), The cognitive basis of science, (pp. 73–95). Cambridge University Press. Casey, E. S. (1976). Imagining: a phenomenological study. Indiana University Press. Chalmers, D. (2002). Does conceivability entail possibility? In T. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Conceivability and possibility (pp. 145–200). Oxford University Press. Chudnoff, E. (2015). Cognitive phenomenology. Routledge.

References

137

Clore, G. L. & Gasper, K. (2000). Feeling is believing: some affective influences on belief. In N. H. Frijda, A. S. Manstead & S. Bem (Eds.), Emotions and beliefs. How feelings influence thoughts (pp. 10–44). Cambridge University Press. Cohen, L. J. (1992). An essay on belief and acceptance. Clarendon Press. Craver-Lemley, C. & Arterberry, M. E. (2001). Imagery-induced interference on a visual detection task. Spatial Vision, 14(2), 101–119. Craver-Lemley, C., & Reeves, A. (1992). How visual imagery interferes with vision. Psychological Review, 99(4), 633. Currie, G. (2014). Standing in the last ditch, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 72(4), 351–363. Currie, G. & Ravenscroft, I. (2002). Recreative minds: imagination in philosophy and psychology. Oxford University Press. Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ error: emotion, reason, and the human brain. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Denham, A. (2000). Metaphor and moral experience. Oxford University Press. Descartes, R. (1641). Meditationes de prima philosophia. Soly. Doggett, T. & Egan, A. (2007). Wanting things you don’t want: the case for an imaginative analogue of desire. Philosophers’ Imprint, 7(9), 1–17. Dokic, J. (2008). Epistemic perspectives on imagination. Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 243(1), 99–118. Dokic, J. & Arcangeli, M. (2015a). The heterogeneity of experiential imagination. In K. Metzinger & J. M. Wind (Eds.), Open MIND: 11(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group, doi: doi:10.15502/9783958570085, http://open-mind.net/papers/theheterogeneity-of-experiential-imagination [published in 2016 in K. Metzinger & J. M. Wind (Eds.), Open MIND. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences in the 21st Century (pp. 431–450). MIT Press.] Dokic, J. & Arcangeli, M. (2015b). The importance of being neutral: more on the phenomenology and metaphysics of imagination. In K. Metzinger & J. M. Wind (Eds.), Open MIND: 11(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group, doi: doi:10.15502/ 9783958570733, http://open-mind.net/papers/the-importance-of-being-neutral-moreon-the-phenomenology-and-metaphysics-of-imagination2014a-reply-to-anne-sophiebrueggen [published in 2016 in K. Metzinger & J. M. Wind (Eds.), Open MIND. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences in the 21st Century (pp. 461–465). MIT Press.] Dorsch, F. (2012). The unity of imagining. Ontos Verlag. Dretske, F. (1969). Seeing and knowing. U. Chicago Press. Dub, R. (2017). Delusions, acceptances, and cognitive feelings. Philosophy and Phenomenolgical Research, 94, 27–60. Dummett, M. (1973/2nd, 1981 ed.). Frege. Philosophy of language. Harvard University Press. Engel, P. (1998). Believing, holding true, and accepting. Philosophical Explorations, 1(2), 140–151. Engel, P. (1999). Dispositional belief, assent, and acceptance. Dialectica, 53(3–4), 211–226. Epstein, S. (1994). Integration of the cognitive and psychodynamic unconscious. American Psycholgist, 49, 709–724. Evans, J.S. (2008). Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 255–278. Evans, J. St. B. T. & Frankish, K. E. (2009). In two minds: dual processes and beyond. Oxford University Press.

138

References

Evans, J. St. B. T. & Stanovich, K. E. (2013). Dual-process theories of higher cognition: advancing the debate, Perspectives on psychological science, 8(3), 223–241. Flew, A. (1953). Images, supposing, and imagining. Philosophy, 28(106), 246–254. Frankish, K. (2004). Mind and supermind. Cambridge University Press. Frege, G. (1891). Funktion und Begriff. Hermann Pohle [en. tr. Function and Concept, in M. Beaney (Ed.), The Frege Reader (pp. 130–148). Blackwell, 1997]. Furlong, E. J. (1961). Imagination. George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Gaut, B. N. (2003). Creativity and imagination. In Gaut, B. N., & Livingston, P. (Eds.), The creation of art: new essays in philosophical aesthetics (pp. 148–173). Cambridge University Press. Gendler, T. & J. Hawthorne (2002). Introduction: conceivability and possibility. In T. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Conceivability and Possibility (pp. 1–70). Oxford University Press. Gendler, T. (2000). The puzzle of imaginative resistance. Journal of Philosophy, 97(2), 55–81. Gendler, T. (2004). Thought experiments rethought — and peperceived. Philosophy of Science, 71, 1152–1164. Gendler, T. (2006). Imaginative resistance revisited. In S. Nichols (Ed.), The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction (pp. 149–174). Oxford University Press. Gendler, T. (2007). Philosophical thought experiments, intuitions, and cognitive equilibrium. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 31, 68–89. Gendler, T. (2016). Imagination. In Edward N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter2016 Edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/ entries/imagination/ Gilbert, D. T. (1991). How mental systems believe. American Psychologist, 46, 107–119. Ginet, C. (1990). On action. Cambridge University Press. Goldman, A. (1993). Empathy, mind, and morals. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 66, 17–41. Goldman, A. I. (2006a). Simulating minds: the philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of mindreading. Oxford University Press. Goldman, A. I. (2006b). Imagination and simulation in audience responses to fiction. In S. Nichols (Ed.), The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction (pp. 41–56). Oxford University Press. Greene, J.D., R.B. Sommerville, L.E. Nystrom, J.M. Darley & J.D. Cohen (2001). An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment, Science, 293 (5537), 2105–2108. Haggard, P. (2005). Conscious intention and motor cognition. Trends in Cognitive Science, 9(6), 290–295. Hannay, A. (1971). Mental images: a defence. George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Harris, P. (2000). The work of the imagination. Wiley-Blackwell. Harris, P.L. & Kavanaugh, R.D. (1993). Young children’s understanding of pretense. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 58, 93–102. Heal, J. 1998. Co-Cognition and Off-Line Simulation: Two Ways of Understanding the Simulation Approach. Mind & language, 13(4), 477–498. Higginbotham, J. (2003). Tensed second thoughts. In Q. Smith (Ed.), Time, tense, and reference (pp. 191–205). MIT Press. Hopkins, R. (2012). What Perky did not show. Analysis, 72(3), 431–439.

References

139

Hopkins, R. (2013). Perky, phenomenal similarity and photographs: reply to Nanay. Analysis, 73(1), 77–80. Hume, D. (1739). A Treatise of human nature. J. Noon. Hume, D. (1757). Of the standard of taste. In Four dissertations. Public domain text at California State University http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r15.html Husserl, E. (1901). Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Teil: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Halle a. d. S: Max Niemeyer. Ichikawa, J. (2008). Imagination and epistemology. PhD Dissertation, Rutgers University-Graduate School-New Brunswick. Ichikawa, J. (2009). Dreaming and imagination. Mind & Language, 24(1), 103–121. Ichikawa, J. & Jarvis, B. (2012). Rational imagination and modal knowledge. Noûs, 46 (1), 127–158. James, W. (1884). What is an emotion? Mind, 9, 188–205. Kelly, M.H. and Keil, F.C. (1985). The more things change…: Metamorphoses and conceptual structure. Cognitive Science, 9(4), 403–416. Kind, A. (2001). Putting the image back in imagination. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62(1), 85–109. Kind, A. (2011). The puzzle of imaginative desire. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 89(3), 421–439. Kind, A. (2013). The heterogeneity of the imagination. Erkenntnis, 78(1), 141–159. Kind, A. (2016a). The Routledge handbook of philosophy of imagination. Routledge. Kind, A. (2016b). Introduction: exploring imagination, In A. Kind, (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of philosophy of imagination (pp. 1–11). Routledge. Kind, A. (2016c). Imagining Under Constraints. In A. Kind & P. Kung (Eds.), Knowledge Through Imagination (pp. 145–159). Oxford University Press. Kind, A. ( forthcoming). Imaginative phenomenology. In U. Kriegel (Ed.), Oxford handbook of the philosophy of consciousness. Oxford University Press. Kriegel, U. (2015). The varieties of consciousness. Oxford University Press. Kriegel, U. (2018). Belief-that and belief-in: which reductive analysis? In A. Grzankowski & M. Montague (Eds.), Non-Propositional Intentionality (pp. 192–213). Oxford University Press. Kung, P. (2016). Imagination and modal epistemology. In A. Kind (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of philosophy of imagination (pp. 437–450). Routledge. Langland-Hassan, P. (2012). Pretense, imagination, and belief: the Single Attitude theory. Philosophical Studies, 159(2), 155–179. Langland-Hassan, P. (2015). Imaginative attitudes. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 90(3), 664–686. Leslie, A.M. (1988). Some implications of pretense for mechanisms underlying the child’s theory of mind. In Astington, J., Harris, P. & Olson, D. (Eds.), Developing Theories of Mind (pp. 19–46). Cambridge University Press. Mandelbaum, E. (2010). The architecture of belief. PhD Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Martin, M. G. F. (2002). The transparency of experience. Mind & Language, 17(4), 376–425. Matravers, D. (2014). Fiction and Narrative. Oxford University Press. McAllister, J. W. (2013). Thought experiment and the exercise of imagination in science. In M. Frappier, L. Meynell & J. R. Brown (Eds.), Thought Experiments in Philosophy, Science, and the Arts (pp. 11–29). Routledge. McGinn, C. (2004). Mindsight: image, dream, meaning. Harvard University Press.

140

References

Meinong, A. (1902). Über Annahmen. Verlag Johann Ambrosius Barth. Meynell, L. (2014). Imagination and insight: a new account of the content of thought experiments. Synthese, 191(17), 4149–4168. Millikan, R. G. (1995). White queen psychology and other essays for Alice. MIT Press. Montague, M. (2009). The logic, intentionality, and phenomenology of emotion. Philosophical Studies, 145, 171–192. Montague, M. (2016). The given: experience and its content. Oxford University Press. Moran, R. (1994). The expression of feeling in imagination. The Philosophical Review, 103(1), 75–106. Mulligan, K. (1999). La varietà e l’unità dell’immaginazione. Rivista di Estetica, 11(2), 53–67. Mulligan, K. (2007). Intentionality, knowledge and formal objects. Disputatio 2(23): 205–228. Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450. Nanay, B. (2012). The philosophical implications of the Perky experiments: reply to Hopkins. Analysis, 72(3), 439–443. Nichols, S. (2004). Imagining and believing: the promise of a single code. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62(2), 129–139. Nichols, S. (2006a). Imaginative blocks and impossibility: an essay in modal psychology. In S. Nichols (Ed.), The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction (pp. 237–256). Oxford University Press. Nichols, S. (2006b). Just the imagination: Why imagining doesn’t behave like believing. Mind & Language, 21(4), 459–474. Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2003). Mindreading: An integrated account of pretence, selfawareness, and understanding other minds. Oxford University Press. Noordhof, P. (2002). Imagining objects and imagining experiences. Mind & Language, 17(4), 426–455. Norton, J. (2004). Why thought experiments do not transcend empiricism. In C. Hitchcock (Ed.), Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Science (pp. 44–66). Blackwell. O’Shaughnessy, B. (1980). The will: a dual aspect theory. Cambridge University Press. O’Shaughnessy, B. (2003). Consciousness and the world. Oxford University Press. Pacherie, E. (2007). The sense of control and the sense of agency. Psyche, 13(1), 1–30. Pascal, B. (1670). Pensées. Guillaume Desprez. Peacocke, C. (1985). Imagination, possibility and experience. In J. Foster & H. Robinson (Eds.), Essays on Berkeley (pp. 19–35). Oxford University Press. Perky, C. W. (1910). An experimental study of imagination. The American Journal of Psychology, 21(3), 422–452. Picciuto, E. (2009). The pleasures of suppositions, Philosophical Psychology, 22(4), 487–503. Price, H. H. (1965). Survival and the idea of “another world”. In J. R. Smythies (Ed.), Brain and Mind: Modern Concepts of the Nature of Mind (pp. 1–23). Routledge. Price, H. H. (1969). Belief. Allen & Unwin. Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind. Routledge. Rysiew, P. (2016). Epistemic Contextualism. In Edward N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter2016 Edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/a rchives/win2016/entries/contextualism-epistemology/ Salis, F., & Frigg, R. (forthcoming). Capturing the scientific imagination. In P. Godfrey-Smith & A. Levy (Eds.), The Scientific Imagination. Oxford University Press.

References

141

Sartre, J. P. (1940). L’imaginaire: psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination. Gallimard. Schellenberg, S. (2013). Belief and desire in imagination and immersion. Journal of Philosophy, 110(9), 497–517. Schroeder, T. & Matheson, C. (2006). Imagination and emotion. In S. Nichols (Ed.), The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction (pp. 19–39). Oxford University Press. Searle, J. R. (1984). Intentionality and its place in nature. Synthese, 61(1), 3–16. Segal, S. (1971). Processing of the stimulus in imagery and perception. In S. Segal (Ed.), Imagery: Current cognitive approaches (pp. 73–100). Academic Press. Segal, S. & Nathan, S. (1964). The Perky effect: Incorporation of an external stimulus into an imagery experience under placebo and control conditions. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 18, 385–395. Sinhababu, N. (2013). Distinguishing belief and imagination. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 94(2), 152–165. Sinhababu, N. (2016). Imagination and belief. In A. Kind (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of philosophy of imagination (pp. 111–123). Routledge. Skolnick Weisberg, D. & Goodstein, J. (2009). What Belongs in a Fictional World? Journal of Cognition and Culture, 91(2), 69–78. Sorensen, R. (1992). Thought experiments. Oxford University Press. Sorensen, R. (2018). Smartfounding: four grades of resistance to thought experiments. Topoi, forthcoming in s.i. “New perspectives on philosophical thought experiments” (Angelucci, A. & Arcangeli, M., Eds.). [published online first in 2017, pp. 1–10] Stalnaker, R. C. (1984). Inquiry. MIT Press. Stock, K. (2005). Resisting imaginative resistance. The Philosophical Quarterly, 55 (221), 607–624. Stock, K. (2017). Only imagine: fiction, interpretation and imagination. Oxford University Press. Stocker, M. (1996). Valuing emotions. Cambridge University Press. Strawson, P. F. (1970). Imagination and perception. In L. Foster & J.W. Swanson (Eds.), Experience and Theory (pp. 31–54). University of Massachusetts Press. Stuart, Michael T. (2016). Norton and the Logic of Thought Experiments. Axiomathes, 26, 451–466. Stuart, Michael T. (2017). Imagination: a sine qua non of science. Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 49, 9–32. Szabó, Z. (2003). Believing in things. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 66 (3), 584–611. Tagliafico, D. (2011). Pretense: a relativist account. Mimesis Edizioni. Tuomela, R. (2000). Belief versus acceptance. Philosophical Explorations, 2, 122–137. Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice, Science, 211(4481), 453–458. van Fraassen, B. C. (1980). The scientific image. Oxford University Press. Van Leeuwen, N. (2011). Imagination is where the action is. Journal of Philosophy, 108 (2), 55–77. Van Leeuwen, N. (2016). The imaginative agent. In A. Kind & P. Kung (Eds.), Knowledge through imagination (pp. 85–109). Oxford University Press. Velleman, J. D. (2000). The possibility of practical reason. Oxford University Press. Vendler, Z. (1979). Vicarious experience. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 84(2), 161–173.

142

References

Walton, K. L. (1990). Mimesis as make-believe: on the foundations of the representational arts. Harvard University Press. Walton, K. L. (1994). Morals in fiction and fictional morality. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 68, 27–66. Weatherson, B. (2004). Morality, fiction, and possibility. Philosopher’s Imprint, 4, 1–27. Weinberg, J. (2008). Configuring the cognitive imagination. In K. Stock & K. ThomsonJones (Eds.), New Waves in Aesthetics (pp. 203–223). Palgrave Macmillan. Weinberg, J., & Meskin, A. (2006b). Puzzling over the imagination: philosophical problems, architectural solutions. In S. Nichols (Ed.), The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction (pp. 175–202). Oxford University Press. Weinberg, J.M. & Meskin, A. (2006a). Imagine that! In M. Kieran (Ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (pp. 222–235). WileyBlackwell. White, A. (1990). The language of imagination. Blackwell. Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and reality. An essay in cosmology. Gifford lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh during the Session 1927–1928. Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1973). Deciding to believe. In H. E. Kiefer & M. K. Munitz (Eds.), Language, Belief, and Metaphysics (pp. 136–151). State University of New York Press. Williamson, T. (2002). Knowledge and its limits. Oxford University Press. Williamson, T. (2007). The philosophy of philosophy. Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1967). Zettel. University of California Press. Wollheim, R. (1973). Imagination and identification. In R. Wolheim (Ed.), On art and the mind: essays and lectures (pp. 54–83). Allen Land. Zeimbekis, J. (2011), Thought Experiments and Mental Simulations. In K. Ierodiakonou & S. Roux (Eds.), Thought Experiments in Methodological and Historical Contexts (pp. 193–215). Brill.

Index

acceptance 2, 85, 96, 106–107, 120, 125; doxastic 99–102, 120–121, 122–123; and emotion 130n14; and the “negraising” phenomenon 120; pragmatic 99–102, 107, 121–121, 123; and quantitativeness 97–98; and rational character 99–100; and relationship to context 100–101; and relationship to evidence or epistemic reasons 97–100; and supposition 98, 101–102, 121–123, 125–127; see also belief, and acceptance; truth-(in)dependence, and acceptance; will-(in)dependence, and acceptance action 20; and cognitive imagination/ belief 129n6; experience of one’s own 15, 76–77; and intention(s) 75–76; mental action/activities 5–6, 29n9, 32, 51, 56; and supposition/imagination 79n1; see also will-(in)dependence affect system 32, 36–37, 42–43, 113–115; bi-/unidirectional link to 45, 50, 92–93, 115, 129n4, 130n14; input/output sides of 40–41; see also emotion(s) apprehending see entertainment assuming 1–2, 48n15 attitude(s), psychological 17, 53, 87–88, 104n11; and emotion 39; propositional 28n6, 71; and supposition 56–57, 90, 103; see also acceptance; belief; desire; entertainment; Fregean account of supposition; imagination, cognitive; imagination, desiderative; imagination, emotion-like; imagination, sensory; judgement; memory; mental imagery; perception Balcerak Jackson, M. 14, 20–23, 25, 50, 58–59, 64n6, 69–70, 79n1, 98, 101–102, 103n4, 123–124

belief: and acceptance 96–100, 101, 125, 133; and emotion 35, 93, 129n4; and inferentiality 70–71; and the “negraising” phenomenon 120; and phenomenology 16–17, 22–23; and propositional content 70; and quantitativeness 97–98; and rational character 22, 96; and relationship to context 22, 96; and relationship to evidence or epistemic reasons 22, 75, 96–97, 110; and supposition 24–25, 69–70, 74, 95–96, 98, 101, 113; see also imagination, cognitive, and belief; judgement, and belief; normativity, and belief; perception, and belief; truth-(in)dependence, and belief; will-(in)dependence, and belief cases: ancient Troy 50, 54, 58–59; Columbus 117, 122, 125; evisceration 38, 40; the lawyer 98–101; sick children 38, 40, 44, 54, 122–125, 127–128; see also imaginative resistance, Giselda’s case cognitive dynamics 41, 53; channelled 42–45, 54, 59, 77, 122–123; and dual-system theories 43, 134; and entertaining 93; holistic 42–43, 54, 59–61, 111, 117, 134 cognitivism 106; first grade of (C1) 107–108, 120; second grade of (C2) 107, 108–115 Cohen, L. J. 2, 101, 105n19, 125, 130n13 conceiving 1–2, 6, 25 conceptual analysis 6 content(s) 16–17, 28n6, 57, 87; and emotion 35, 38–39, 43–44; generation of imaginative 73–74, 104n11, 113–114; non-propositional 28n6,

144

Index

69–70, 117; propositional 28n6, 68–71, 79n2, 89, 109, 118; unimaginable 53, 67–68, 116–117, 118; unsupposable 54, 67–68; see also belief, and propositional content; entertainment, and propositional content; imagination, cognitive, and propositional content; imagination, sensory, and non-propositional content; mental imagery; perception, and non-propositional content context-(in)dependence: and cognitive imagination 110; and supposition 96, 101; see also acceptance, and relationship to context; belief, and relationship to context counterpart(s) 3–4, 9n3, 70, 79n5, 80n8, 117; and supposition 58, 60, 119–121, 122 Currie, G. 34, 112; and Ravenscroft 2, 3, 10n4, 17, 28n4, 29n13, 72–73, 80n6, 110–112, 115, 118, 121, 128n8 desire 71, 87, 92, 112, 129n9 Doggett, T. 2, 52, 79n1, 86, 112 doxasticism: acceptance-based 98, 101–102; belief-based 95, 104n11, 128n1 dream(s) 5, 76, 81n14; lucid 76 dual-system or dual-processing theories 48n17; and emotion 43, 134; and imagination 81n16, 133–135; see also cognitive dynamics, and dual-system theories; effort, mental, and dual-system theories Dummett, M. 86 effort, mental 52–53, 64n7, 89–90, 112, 113–114; and dual-system theories 134; see also imaginative resistance; suppositional resistance Egan, A. see Doggett, T. embroidery/embellishment see cognitive dynamics, holistic emotion(s) 22, 42, 47n11, 50; emotionality claim (EC) 31–32, 38, 40–41, 45, 78, 115; emotional supposition 38–39; see also attitude(s), psychological, and emotion; belief, and emotion; content(s), and emotion; dual-system or dual-processing theories, and emotion; entertainment, and emotion; fiction, and emotion; imagination, cognitive, and emotion; imagination, emotion-like;

imagination, sensory, and emotion; phenomenology, emotional emotional contrast between imagination and supposition see emotion(s), emotionality claim engagement see participation Engel, P. 97, 98–99, 104n14, 105n16 entertainment: and emotion 92–93; and imagination 64n10, 94; and inferentiality 91–92; (no-)attitude view of 87–88, 90; and propositional content 86, 89; and supposition 1–2, 64n8, 86; ubiquity of 88, 91, 92, 93, 104n5; see also cognitive dynamics, and entertaining; Fregean account of supposition; intentionality, neutral; normativity, and entertaining; phenomenology, of entertaining; process(es), and entertaining; truth-(in) dependence, and entertaining; will-(in) dependence, and entertaining evidence-(in)dependence: and cognitive imagination 110; and supposition 96, 101, 125–127; see also acceptance, and relationship to evidence or epistemic reasons; belief, and relationship to evidence or epistemic reasons fiction 5, 72–74, 81n14, 81n17, 114–115; and desiderative imagination 111–112; and emotion 31–33, 36–37 Frege, G. 57, 86 Fregean account of supposition 57, 61, 86–87, 90, 94 Furlong, E. 2, 64n8 Gendler, T. 2, 47n8, 52–53, 64n12 goal(s): for imagining 74, 127–128; for supposing 54–55, 64n8, 103 Goldman, A. 2–3, 10n4, 49–50, 58–59, 80n6, 94, 107 grasping see entertaining hallucination 23 Heal, J. 71 Hume, D. 18, 31, 33, 47n10, 52 hypothesising 1–2 Ichikawa, J. 72, 76 imagination, belief-like see imagination, cognitive imagination, cognitive 4, 5–6, 58–60, 66, 79n5, 130n16; and belief 24, 71–73, 108–111, 115–117; and emotion

Index 35–37, 42, 45, 109–110; and inferentiality 72–74, 109; and phenomenology 24, 109, 124; and propositional content 70, 109; and supposition 25, 27, 91, 107–108, 111–115, 124–128; see also action, and cognitive imagination/belief; cognitive dynamics, holistic; cognitivism; context-(in)dependence, and cognitive imagination; dual-system or dual-processing theories, and imagination; evidence-(in)dependence, and cognitive imagination; imagination, propositional, and cognitive imagination; mental imagery, and cognitive imagination; normativity, and cognitive/sensory imagination; rational character, and cognitive imagination; truth-(in) dependence, and imagination; will-(in) dependence, and imagination imagination, creative 9n2 imagination, desiderative 80n6, 111–112 imagination, desire-like see imagination, desiderative imagination, emotion-like 10n4, 29n11, 47n3 imagination, perception-like see imagination, sensory imagination, propositional: and cognitive imagination 70, 79n5, 109; and supposition 64n8 imagination, re-creative 2–4, 9n2, 58–61, 68, 123–124, 135n2; and phenomenology 26, 58; and simulationism 3, 107–108; see also counterpart(s); imagination, cognitive; imagination, desiderative; imagination, emotion-like; imagination, sensory imagination, sensory 4, 5, 58–60, 119, 127–128; and emotion 33–35, 42, 79n1; and inferentiality 118; and non-propositional content 70, 117–118; and perception 18, 117–118; and phenomenology 18–19, 124; see also cognitive dynamics, holistic; dual-system or dual-processing theories, and imagination; imaginings, objectual, and sensory imagination; mental imagery, and sensory imagination; normativity, and cognitive/sensory imagination; truth-(in)dependence, and imagination; will-(in)dependence, and imagination

145

imaginative project(s) 42, 73–74 imaginative resistance 37, 48n13, 52, 60, 112, 134–135; blockage/refusal 52–53, 67–68, 111; Giselda’s case 60, 116, 122; see also content(s), unimaginable; content(s), unsupposable; suppositional resistance imaginings, objectual: ascriptions of 80n9; and non-propositional content 69; and sensory imagination 79n5 inferentiality: and supposition 71, 74, 95, 104n10; see also belief, and inferentiality; entertainment, and inferentiality; imagination, cognitive, and inferentiality; imagination, sensory, and inferentiality; mechanism (s), cognitive inferential; perception, and inferentiality intention(s) see action; will-(in) dependence intentional force see intentionality intentionality 29n9, 91–92; neutral 57, 87, 89–90, 92–93; see also attitude(s), psychological judgement 88; and belief 120–121; and the “negraising” phenomenon 120; see also truth-(in)dependence, and judgement Kind, A. 1, 4, 14, 16, 18–19, 32–33, 47n5, 47n12, 49, 58, 69, 75–76, 79n5, 86, 117 Kriegel, U. 15, 28n4, 30n15, 64n8, 87–88 Langland-Hassan, P. 104n11 mechanism(s), cognitive 3, 9n3, 112–114; domain-specific 113–114; inferential 71, 74, 114; Script Elaborator 113–114; see also affect system Meinong, A. von 3, 103n3 memory 87; episodic/semantic distinction 79n4; working 43, 134 mental imagery 20–21, 29n9, 29n10, 34, 135n2; and cognitive imagination 33, 109; and perception 28n8; and sensory imagination 19, 33–34, 47n5 mental setup, one’s overall 42, 59–60, 116–117, 118, 123, 134; and supposition 43, 59, 113, 122–123, 130n10, 133 Meskin, A. 3, 27n2, 36–38, 44, 48n13, 95, 107, 112–115, 124, 129n5, 129n6

146

Index

mindreading 80n11, 111–112 mode see attitude, psychological Mulligan, K. 1, 3, 88, 119–121 Nichols, S. 38, 47n7, 130n12; and Stich 129n9 normativity: and belief 22–23, 95–96, 113; and cognitive/sensory imagination 60–61, 117–118; and entertaining 57, 89–90; and supposition 51, 56, 57, 68, 77, 95, 111–115; see also cognitive dynamics, context-(in)dependence; evidence (in)dependence; imaginative resistance; rational character; suppositional resistance

suppositional 40, 43, 45; see also dual-system or dual-processing theories propositionality: and supposition 57, 68–70, 89; see also belief, and propositional content; content(s), non-propositional; content(s), propositional; entertaining, and propositional content; imagination, cognitive, and propositional content; imagination, sensory, and non-propositional content; mental imagery; perception, and non-propositional content qualitative feel see phenomenology

ordinary language 6, 9n2, 13, 69, 107, 125–127 participation, claim (PC) 49–51, 86; in terms of attitude 56–57; in terms of process 56; in terms of re-creative power 57–61 Peacocke, C. 13–13, 19–20 perception: and belief 129n5; and inferentiality 118; and non-propositional content 70, 79n4; and phenomenology 15; see also imagination, sensory, and perception; mental imagery, and perception; truth-(in)dependence, and perception; will-(in)dependence, and perception Perky effect 19, 28n8 phenomenal character see phenomenology phenomenological distinction between supposition and imagination see phenomenology, claim phenomenology: algedonic 15; claim (PhenC) 13–14, 18, 21, 24, 26; bodily types of 15–16, 17, 20; cognitive 16–17, 21–25, 109; conative 15; emotional 16, 17, 20; of entertaining 30n15, 87–88; experiential 17, 21, 24; imaginative 26, 34, 58; Nagel, T. 13; sensory 15, 17, 18–19, 23, 34 phenomenology, perceptual see phenomenology, sensory pretence 37, 73, 79n1, 112, 114–115 Price, H. 88 primitivism: non-imaginative 102–103, 123–124; imaginative 106, 119, 121 process(es): and entertaining 92–93; imaginative 56; mental 39, 40;

rational character: and cognitive imagination 110; and supposition 96; see also acceptance, and rational character; belief, and rational character Ravenscroft, I. see Currie, G., and Ravenscroft reasoning:counterfactual 1; logical 32, 54; mathematical 37, 114; modal 72, 73–74; scientific 1; see also thought expertiment(s) Searle, J. 80n12, 98 self-deception 104n12, 125 self, involvement of the 59, 80n9 single-code theory 9n3, 104n11 simulationism 9n3, 10n4, 104n11 see also imagination, re-creative, and simulationism Sinhababu, N. 48n15, 73–74, 129n5, 129n6 Stalnaker, R. C. 2, 100, 102, 105n19 Stich, S. see Nichols, S., and Stich Stock, K. 6, 47n9, 64n8, 73–74, 79n3, 81n17, 104n11 Strawson, P. 131 suppositional resistance 37, 48n13, 52; blockage/refusal 52–53, 67–68, 112, 122 see also imaginative resistance thought experiment(s) 5–6, 36; Einstein’s 54, 64n9, 126; reductio ad absurdum argument(s) 1, 37, 54–55 truth-(in)dependence: and acceptance 98–99, 120–121; and belief 77, 96, 110; and entertaining 89; and imagination 77, 110–111; and judgement 120–121;

Index and perception 77; and supposition 77, 89–90, 101, 119 Tuomela, R. 104n14 understanding see entertainment Van Leeuwen, N. 34, 79n1 Walton, K. 5, 47n3, 48n16, 76–77, 80n7, 81n14, 94, 121, 131 Weatherson, B. 63n4, 71

147

Weinberg, J. see Meskin, A. White, A. 2, 38, 49, 51–54, 56–57, 125 will-(in)dependence: and acceptance 102n9, 105n18; and agency 76; and belief 75, 96, 102n9, 105n18, 110; and entertaining 90–91; and imagination 75, 110–111; and intention(s) 75–76; and perception 75, 76; spontaneous/deliberate imaginings 75–76; and supposition 77, 90, 119; voluntary control 76 Williamson, T. 72, 96