Imaginative Resistance Research Articles

The gamer's imaginative resistance : an aesthetic answer of the gamer's dilemma

The gamer's imaginative resistance : an aesthetic answer of the gamer's dilemma

How One Cannot Participatively Imagine What One Could Cognitively Imagine

In this paper, we want to maintain that the puzzle of imaginative resistance is basically a pragmatic issue due to the failure of participative imagination, as involving a pre-semantic level relating to a wide context (the overall situation of discourse). Since the linguistic meanings of the relevant fiction-involving sentences violate some of our basic norms, what such sentences (fictionally) say cannot be participatively imagined. That failure leads one to refrain from ascribing such sentences the fictional truth-conditions they would have in narrow fictional contexts (sets of fixed parameters) as determined by those meanings in those contexts. Yet one could still make that ascription, for one can cognitively imagine what such sentences would say in those contexts. As is proved by the fact that if one either adopts an alternative view on such norms or, for some reason, brackets them, one can again perform that ascription.

Hume and Kant on imaginative resistance

AbstractThe topic of imaginative resistance attracted considerable philosophical attention in recent years. Yet, with a few exceptions, no historical investigation of the phenomenon has been carried out. This paper amends this gap in the literature by constructing a Humean and a Kantian explanation. The main contributions of this historical analysis to this debate are to make room for emotions in explanations of resistance reactions and to upset the polarization between rival accounts by suggesting that our possible responses to morally flawed works can vary. In some cases, we resist imagining counter‐evaluative claims due to our unwillingness to do so, and in others, due to our inability.

Moral dumbfounding and imaginative resistance

ABSTRACT Moral dumbfounding and imaginative resistance have both spawned important literatures that intersect moral psychology. Moral dumbfounding, rooted in Jonathan Haidt’s empirical work, has been taken to be evidence of the epistemic and cognitive shallowness of many of our moral emotions and beliefs. Opinions about imaginative resistance, on the other hand, have treated it as something between a psychological curiosity and an ethical spandrel. This essay argues that the two are related and that teasing out this relation is important for understanding each phenomenon. For positions or practices that our moral communities treat as inadmissible, we do not naturally deliberate about the truth of such positions or imagine what the world would be like if we adopted those practices so much as we resist treating them as live options for moral consideration. As we near the perceived boundary of appropriate moral discourse, we switch from moral deliberation to the rehearsal of stock reasons for why the boundaries of deliberation are fixed where they are or to resisting uptake of reasons for doing what is perceived as morally deviant. Likewise, when asked to imagine a world in a way that invites situating the boundaries of what is morally inadmissible in our world differently, we switch from a willingness to suspend disbelief and accept a narrative on its own terms to explicitly bracketing or actively resisting the story.

A transfer effect of affect: evidence from episodic simulation of moral scenario

ABSTRACT Based on a scenario-place name matching paradigm, the objective of the study was to explore the transfer of affective value under the episodic simulation of moral or immoral scenarios. Experiment 1 revealed that people’s affective attitude towards neutral places matched with moral events will become more positive after episodic simulation, while those matched with immoral events will become more negative. In Experiment 2, we added a new condition—natural reading—and replicated these findings. Besides, we found the different function between episodic simulation and reading in the transfer of negative affect which may verify that imaginative resistance could be as an explanation for the transfer of negative affect under the simulation. The results from the two experiments indicate that episodic simulation indeed induces the transfer of affective value. Therefore, our findings suggest that episodic simulation induces the transfer of affective value to neutral elements in a real-life environment.

Slow violence against animals: Unseen spectacles in racing and at zoos

There is little consensus on what constitutes violence towards nonhuman animals and a perceptual lacuna between understandings of violence and violent effects. This paper aims to address both issues, first by using Nixon’s concept of slow violence to extend conceptions of violence towards nonhumans beyond a focus on physical violence, and second, by foregrounding the subjectivities affected by violence. Focusing on zoos and racing events (horses and greyhounds) – spaces where violence towards animals is largely silent or ‘smoothed’ - practices that support and shape the visual consumption of spectacularised animals are examined through interviews with 59 visitors to these sites. Analysis reveals how the subjectivities of the animals in question are respectively aggregated and negated, instrumentalised, anthropocentrically narrated, and re-captured at potential points of escape from these ‘hypertopic’ regimes. As a discursive corrective to this desubjectification, and offering a means of imaginative resistance, the final part of the paper offers three ficto-critical biographical constructions of the lives of a greyhound, a thoroughbred horse used in racing, and a mandrill. These constructions centre the subjective, lifetime experience of these animals, encompassing not only moments of human interaction but also their effects. In conclusion, the paper argues that unsettling speciesism and anthropocentrism requires more than critiques of fast violence. Expanding and clarifying understandings of violence against other animals is proposed as one means of launching a more serious challenge to the oppression of all animals, including those used in ways conceived as largely benign or even benevolent.

When (Imagined) Evidence Explains Fictionality

Abstract Sometimes, a proposition is fictional in a story in virtue of the fact that other fictional truths are good evidence for it. Cases are presented in which this evidential rule, and not some rule that invokes counterfactuals or intentions, is what explains what is fictional. Applications are made to the question of interpretive pluralism and the problem of imaginative resistance. In the background is pluralism about fictionality: the evidential rule is one of a variety of rules that are needed to account for what is fictional in a story.

Imaginative Resistance in Science

Imaginative Resistance in Science

‘Her own and her children's share’: luck, misogyny and imaginative resistance in twentieth-century Irish folklore

AbstractIn twentieth-century Irish folklore, luck had much to do with women. While women were rarely seen as legitimate possessors of good fortune, luck was frequently perceived as being communicated through women's bodies and lost as a result of their actions. A caul, an intact amniotic membrane over a newborn's head and by-product of a pregnant woman's body, was believed to convey luck and health to either the mother or the child but not to both. The emphasis in this tradition on women's corporeality cast women and their maternal by-products as appropriable familial and communal resources. This and additional lore reveal that women were constructed as dangerous, ‘object-like others’ whose mere presence could threaten men's safety. Twentieth-century Ireland's folk and political cultures each operated within frameworks of supporting ideological systems. Despite being easily distinguishable in articulation, these cultures were frequently in concert with one another, especially relating to prescriptive gender roles. In numerous instances, lore about luck bolstered legislative, social and religious policies of the Irish Free State and the early Irish Republic regarding women. However, narrow divergences allowed women limited space to contest gender hierarchy in folk communities. Some women found opportunities for subversion in the very cultural fabric that restricted them, resorting to imaginative resistance to reject and counter misogynist discourse and assert female subjectivity.

Coping With Imaginative Resistance

AbstractWe propose to characterize imaginative resistance as the failure or unwillingness of the reader to take a fictional description of a deviant reality at face value. The goal of the paper is to explore how readers deal with such a breakdown of the default Face Value interpretation strategy. We posit two distinct interpretative ‘coping’ strategies which help the reader engage with the resistance-inducing fiction by attributing the offending content to one of the fictional characters. We present novel empirical evidence that shows that actual readers use these strategies and we flesh out the exact workings of these strategies by integrating them into a general formal semantic framework for interpreting fiction.

Resisting Tiny Heroes: Kant on the Mechanism and Scope of Imaginative Resistance

AbstractTraditionally, theorists suggested that imaginative resistance (e.g., when a reader does not imagine what a literary work entreats her to imagine) is limited to morally repugnant claims. More recently, theorists have argued that the phenomenon of imaginative resistance is wider in scope, extending to descriptive claims (e.g., those that are conceptually contradictory). On both sides, though, theorists have focused on cases where imaginative resistance goes right, tracking something that is wrong with the story—that it is morally repugnant, or conceptually contradictory. I use a rarely cited discussion from Kant to argue that imaginative resistance can also occur when something goes wrong with the reader—namely, when a reader imports their own biases into the story, and resists a descriptive claim as a result. In identifying this new class of claims that can meet imaginative resistance, Kant presses the question: when should we cultivate imaginative resistance and when should we fight it?

Fictional Resistance and Real Feelings

This paper outlines a solution to the puzzle of imaginative resistance that makes—and if successful helps to vindicate—two assumptions. The solution first assumes a relationship between moral judgements and affective states of the subject. It also assumes the correctness of accounts of imaginative engagement with fiction—like Kendall Walton’s account—that treat engagement with fiction as prop-based make-believe in which works of fiction, but also appreciators of those works, figure as props. The key to understanding imaginative resistance, it maintains, is understanding how real feelings become part of fictional worlds.

Questioning Imaginative Resistance and Resistant Reading

It is widely accepted that readers will resist imagining that a character in a story did something morally wrong, even if the story endorses this judgement. This paper argues, first, that readers will not resist if the question of whether that act was wrong is not salient as they read; and, second, that asking a certain question can be part of correctly appreciating a story—even if that question is not in the foreground of the story, and even if the story itself discourages readers from asking it, as is common in some forms of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. In Jean Craighead George’s (1959) novel My Side of the Mountain, fourteen-year-old Sam Gribley runs away from his home in New York City to live alone in the Catskill Mountains, where he forages, traps game, and converts a hollowed-out tree into a tiny house. Seven months pass before his father comes looking for him. His father is, mainly, impressed with the life Sam has built. He expresses no anger at Sam for leaving or sadness that Sam has been gone, and he returns to New York the next day. Sam does not see his family again for another six months.

Lecture empathique et trauma de la guerre d’Algérie chez Assia Djebar, Boualem Sansal et Leila Sebbar

This article analyses the narrative processes and literary strategies that seek to engender the reader’s empathy for the main characters in three Francophone texts that depict the trauma of the Algerian War of independence. Each text starts from a real event by intertwining historical facts and the present with fiction, allowing for a better understanding of the postcolonial situation. These expectations are reinforced by Djebar’s and Sansal’s paratexts. Drawing on the theories of Suzanne Keen and Fritz Breithaupt empathy can especially be favoured by internal focalization, the characters’ empathic interpersonal relationships as well as polyphony. The imaginative construction of the other is emphasized as necessary, while the detailed description of historical facts may rather provoke feelings of pity. A fortiori, empathy can decline or be blocked in the passages, which go against the moral convictions of the reader. This imaginative resistance is due to the fact that these passages concern reality and not fiction

Emotion in imaginative resistance

ABSTRACT Imaginative resistance refers to cases in which one’s otherwise flexible imaginative capacity is constrained by an unwillingness or inability to imaginatively engage with a given claim. In three studies, we explored which specific imaginative demands engender resistance when imagining morally deviant worlds and whether individual differences in emotion predict the degree of this resistance. In Study 1 (N = 176), participants resisted the notion that harmful actions could be morally acceptable in the world of a narrative regardless of the author’s claims about these actions but did not resist imagining that a perpetrator of harm could believe their actions to be morally acceptable. In Study 2 (N = 167) we replicated the findings of Study 1 and showed that imaginative resistance is greatest among participants who experience more negative affect in response to imagining harm and are lower in either trait anxiety or trait psychopathy. In Study 3 (N = 210) we show that this is the case even when the harms assessed include both low-severity (i.e., emotional harm) and high-severity (i.e., killing) cases. Thus, people’s moral beliefs constrain their ability to imagine hypothetical moral alternatives, although this ability systematically varies on the basis of stable individual differences in emotion.

A Sensibilist Explanation of Imaginative Resistance

AbstractThis article discusses why it is the case that we refuse to accept strange evaluative claims as being true in fictions, even though we are happy to go along with other types of absurdities in such contexts. For instance, we would refuse to accept the following statement as true, even in the context of a fiction: (i) In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl.This article offers a sensibilist diagnosis of this puzzle, inspired by an observation first made by David Hume. According to sensibilism, the way we feel about things settles their evaluative properties. Thus, when confronted with a fictional scenario where the configuration of non-evaluative facts and properties is relevantly similar to the actual world, we refuse to go along with evaluative properties being instantiated according to a different pattern. It is the attitudes we hold in the actual world that fix the extension of evaluative terms, even in nonactual worlds. When engaging with a fiction, we (to some extent) leave our beliefs about what the world is like behind, while taking our emotional attitudes with us into the fiction.To substantiate this diagnosis, this paper outlines a sensibilist semantics for evaluative terms based on recent discussion regarding predicates of personal taste, and explains how, together with standard assumptions about the nature of fictional discourse, it makes the relevant predictions with respect to engagement with fictions.

“She Wished Someone Would Help Them”: PTSD and Empathy in the Six of Crows Duology

Drawing on cognitive criticism, and using Theory of Mind, transportation, and imaginative resistance as a framework, this essay analyzes the ways in which Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows Duology, can build understanding of and empathy for people with living with mental illnesses. Maria Nikolajeva’s germinal work on cognitive approaches to literature for young people is foundational to this analysis, as are psychiatric and psychological studies. We trace the ways in which these novels encourage young readers’ cognitive development, particularly how they enable the ability to interpret the actions of people coping with PTSD and encourage engagement with characters’ thoughts, emotions, and goals. Our analysis focuses on Bardugo’s accurate portrayals of PTSD, and the potential for increased Theory of Mind and transportation through well-developed characters, vivid imagery, and engaging plotlines. We also explore how Bardugo circumvents imaginative resistance to these narratives which can prevent the development of empathy and further stigmatize those living with a mental illness.

Queering Jesus: LGBTQI Dangerous Remembering and Imaginative Resistance

Queering Jesus: LGBTQI Dangerous Remembering and Imaginative Resistance

Sympathy for the Devil: The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance, the Role of Fiction in Moral Thought, and the Limits of the Imagination

AbstractWhat are the limits of the imagination in morality? What role does fiction play in moral thought? My starting point in addressing these questions is Tamar Szabo Gendler's ‘puzzle of imaginative resistance’, the problem of explaining the special difficulties we seem to encounter in imagining to be right what we take to be morally wrong (or vice versa) in fiction, and Gendler's claim that those difficulties are due to our unwillingness to imagine these things, rather than our inability to imagine what is logically or conceptually impossible. Using a wide range of examples, I argue that there is no puzzle of imaginative resistance and that to think that there is such a puzzle is to miss almost entirely the role fiction plays in moral thought. That, however, does not mean that there are no limits to what we can imagine in morality. In fact, I argue, the imagination is limited in morality, as elsewhere, by what is logically or conceptually possible. Together, those claims suggest that fiction and the imagination play a fundamental role in shaping our conception of the moral landscape. The paper concludes by drawing some of the consequences of these views for the nature of moral thought.

Morality and the imagination: Real-world moral beliefs interfere with imagining fictional content

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper was to test whether imaginative resistance – a term used in the philosophical literature to describe the reluctance to imagine counter-moral worlds – is experienced by people when they are asked to do something rather than just imagine it. Prior research suggests that people find it more difficult to imagine morally deviant worlds. Here, in a within-subjects design, we asked participants to describe in writing morally deviant, dystopian, and fantastical worlds; tell us if they had successfully completed the task, and if not, why not; and report how easy it was for them to imagine the fictional world. Despite producing more words in the morally deviant condition, participants were more likely to believe they had failed to describe a world in which the prescribed scenario was true. Associations between creativity, moral identity, need for cognition, disgust sensitivity, and personality and task performance were explored.