Abstract
A theory of the structure and cognitive function of the human imagination that attempts to do justice to traditional intuitions about its psychological centrality is developed, largely through a detailed critique of the theory propounded by Colin McGinn. Like McGinn, I eschew the highly deflationary views of imagination, common amongst analytical philosophers, that treat it either as a conceptually incoherent notion, or as psychologically trivial. However, McGinn fails to develop his alternative account satisfactorily because (following Reid, Wittgenstein and Sartre) he draws an excessively sharp, qualitative distinction between imagination and perception, and because of his flawed, empirically ungrounded conception of hallucination. His arguments in defense of these views are rebutted in detail, and the traditional, passive, Cartesian view of visual perception, upon which several of them implicitly rely, is criticized in the light of findings from recent cognitive science and neuroscience. It is also argued that the apparent intuitiveness of the passive view of visual perception is a result of mere historical contingency. An understanding of perception (informed by modern visual science) as an inherently active process enables us to unify our accounts of perception, mental imagery, dreaming, hallucination, creativity, and other aspects of imagination within a single coherent theoretical framework.
Highlights
A theory of the structure and cognitive function of the human imagination that attempts to do justice to traditional intuitions about its psychological centrality is developed, largely through a detailed critique of the theory propounded by Colin McGinn
An understanding of perception as an inherently active process enables us to unify our accounts of perception, mental imagery, dreaming, hallucination, creativity, and other aspects of imagination within a single coherent theoretical framework
When we turn to the various types of hallucinations that people really do experience, we find that they are almost certainly quite closely related to mental imagery in both their phenomenology and their etiology, and readily find their place along the multidimensional spectrum of imagination
Summary
Imagination is a concept far more frequently invoked than it is analyzed, even by philosophers. Parents and teachers warn children not to let their imaginations run away with them, and if people sincerely claim to have had experiences that we find incredible (such as having been abducted by aliens), we dismiss the experiences as mere figments of their imagination. It was because of usages such as this, presumably, that Pascal called imagination “that mistress of error and falsehood”, an “arrogant faculty, the enemy of reason” [4]. Deep cultural ambivalence about imagination has a long history [1,5]; no wonder the Renaissance philosopher Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola was driven to the conclusion that “ all the good, universally, and all the bad, can be derived from the imagination” [6].1
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