Imagination and Belief in a "Single Code"?

A robust and celebrated fact is that imagining that p is often in various respects similar to believing that p. For example, when I imagine, say in the context of engaging with a fiction, that a great injustice has been committed, I feel angry in a way similar to the way I'd feel if I believed that a great injustice has been committed.

Shaun Nichols attempts to offer an explanation for this and other similarities in his paper "Imagining and Believing: The Promise of a Single Code". I'm having a pretty hard time seeing how his explanation is supposed to work.

The explanation Nichols offers, citing his previous work with Steve Stich, is that imagination and belief are distinct propositional attitudes with distinct functional roles, but that the propositional contents of each are given by representations in the "same code". What exactly does this mean?

Particular Beliefs and Belief-Desire Psychology

Let us suppose that Dmitri knows how to sing the "Il balen" cadenza from Verdi's Il Trovatore.

There's a debate about whether Dmitri's knowing how to sing the cadenza amounts to knowing some proposition. According to 'intellectualists', knowing how to X just is (to an approximation), knowing, for some w, that w is a way to X. I don't mean to weigh in on that debate just now, but one of the moves in it is relevant for an issue concerning imagination, which is my current research topic du jour. The move is, on its face, an argument against the thesis that knowing how is knowing that -- it argues that in some cases in which know-how is clearly present, the relevant know-that is not present, because the requisite beliefs are absent or even disbelieved. For example, Dmitri may, consistent with his knowing how to sing the cadenza, have entirely erroneous beliefs about how he does it. Maybe he thinks that he clenches his abdominal muscles, when what he really does is expand his ribcage. He thinks that he opens his mouth widely, but what he actually does is lift his soft palate. The way he sings the cadenza is by expanding his ribcage and lifting his soft palate, but he doesn't know that, because he doesn't believe it. Charles Wallace offers a version of this argument. (This was brought to my attention in a forthcoming paper by my new colleague Ephraim Glick.)

Inference in Imagination, Belief, and Desire

Shaun Nichols writes:

In addition to a pretense box, Stich and I propose a mechanism that supplies the pretense box with representations that initiate or embellish an episode of pretense, the “Script Elaborator”. This is required to explain the bizarre and creative elements that are evident in much pretend play. However, there are also much more staid and predictable elaborations in pretend play. This too is well illustrated by Leslie’s experiment. Virtually all of the children in his experiment responded the same way when asked to point to the “empty cup”. How are these orderly patterns to be explained? In everyday life when we acquire new beliefs, we routinely draw inferences and update our beliefs. No one knows how this process works, but no one disputes that it does work. There must be some set of mechanisms subserving inference and updating, and we can simply use another functional grouping to collect these mechanisms under the heading “Inference Mechanisms”. Now, to explain the orderly responses of the children in Leslie’s experiment, we propose that the representations in the pretense box are processed by the same inference mechanisms that operate over real beliefs. Of course, to draw these inferences the child must be able to use real world knowledge about the effects of gravity and so forth, and so Stich and I also suppose that the inferences the child makes during pretense can somehow draw on the child’s beliefs.

This is, I think, a fairly typical statement of one important respect in which belief is often said to be similar to imagination: each is subject to the same inference mechanisms. Nichols includes this chart:



Notice the 'inference mechanisms' that act on beliefs and imaginings alike.

Now I can see well enough that pretense and belief inferences tend to go in the same way. If I know full well that p only if q, and believe p, I'll often come to infer to a belief that q, just as, if I imagine p, I'll often come to infer to imagine q. (Modulo various familiar complications: sometimes I give up the previous belief, etc.) But doesn't just the same thing happen with desire? If I desire that p, and know full well that p only if q, I'll very often, through a very ordinary sort of means-end reasoning, come to desire that q, modulo various familiar complications like the possibility that I'll stop desiring p.

Take a background situation where I know that nothing funny is going on with the cups; gravity is normal, the water is liquid, etc.

Suppose I believe the cup had water in it and has been turned over. Then I'll believe that the cup is now empty.

Suppose I imagine or pretend that the cup had water in it and has been turned over. Then I'll imagine or pretend that the cup is now empty.

Suppose I desire that the cup had water in it and has now been turned over. Then I'll desire that the cup is now empty.

This suggests to me that the similarities between imagination and belief, in contrast with desire, are exaggerated by, e.g., the diagram above. Those inference mechanisms apply to desires just as well as to beliefs and pretenses. Are there similarities in inference mechanisms that distinguish beliefs and pretenses/imaginings from propositional attitudes more generally?

Is Imagination A Priori?

Is Imagination A Priori? Draft of 21 July, 2009. Will be subsumed into a longer piece.

Sometimes, we come to new knowledge via imaginative processes; plausibly, sometimes, such imagination plays an indispensably warranting role. Is such a role for imagination inconsistent with the apriority of our new knowledge? Stephen Yablo has argued that a certain kind of imaginative engagement, ‘peeking’, is relevantly like reliance on perceptual experience, and thus precludes apriority. I argue that Yablo’s case against the apriority of peeking is not compelling.

Dreaming

Dreaming, with Ernest Sosa. Forthcoming in The Oxford Companion to Consciousness.

Scepticism and the Imagination Model of Dreaming

Scepticism and the Imagination Model of Dreaming. (2008) The Philosophical Quarterly, 58 (232), July 2008: 519–527 doi:10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.546.x  Penultimate draft; please refer to published version, available online here.

Ernest Sosa has argued that the solution to dream skepticism lies in an understanding of dreams as imaginative experiences – when we dream, on this suggestion, we do not believe the contents of our dreams, but rather imagine them.  Sosa rebuts skepticism thus: dreams don’t cause false beliefs, so my beliefs cannot be false, having been caused by dreams.
I argue that, even assuming that Sosa is correct about the nature of dreaming, belief in wakefulness on these grounds is epistemically irresponsible. The proper upshot of the imagination model, I suggest, is to recharacterize the way we think about dream skepticism: the skeptical threat is not, after all, that we have false beliefs. So even though dreams don’t involve false beliefs, they still pose a skeptical threat, which I elaborate.

Dreaming and Imagination

Dreaming and Imagination, (2009) Mind and Language, 24 (1), February 2009: 103-121. Please refer to published version, available online here.

I argue, on philosophical, psychological, and neurophysiological grounds, that contrary to an orthodox view, dreams do not typically involve misleading sensations and false beliefs. I am thus in partial agreement with Colin McGinn, who has argued that we do not have misleading sensory experience while dreaming, and partially in agreement with Ernest Sosa, who has argued that we do not form false beliefs while dreaming. Rather, on my view, dreams involve mental imagery and propositional imagination. I defend the imagination model of dreaming from some objections.

A posteriori knowledge of a priori abilities

Stephen Yablo argues that knowledge of things like shapes, insofar as they depend on visual imagination, cannot be a priori. Here is one of his arguments:

[S]ome imagined reactions are a better guide to real reactions than others. Imagined shape reactions are a good guide, you say, and you are probably right. But it is hard to see how the knowledge that they are a good guide could be a priori. If the mind’s eye sees one sort of property roughly as real eyes do, while its take on another sort of property tends to be off the mark, that is an empirical fact known on the basis of empirical evidence. I know not to trust my imagined reactions to arrangements of furniture, because they have often been wrong; now that I see the wardrobe in the room, I realize it is far too big. It is only because they have generally been right that I am entitled to trust my imagined judgments of shape. (458)

I think, however, that there is a conflation here between knowledge and knowledge of knowledge. It is a controversial thesis that, in order to know via the deliverances of an evidential source, one must know that source to be reliable. But even if that controversial thesis is true, it doesn't entail that in order for one to know a priori via the deliverance of some source, one must know a priori that that source is reliable; that would be a much stronger claim, and not obviously a plausible one.