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A Pluralistic Account of Propositional Imagination

Ferreira, Michael Joseph
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1408917034

Abstract Details

2014, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Philosophy.
We exercise the propositional imagination whenever we imagine that p – e.g. that it’s snowing outside, that Othello murders Desdemona, or that cats are actually Martian-controlled robots. Here I aim to sketch a pluralistic account of propositional imagination, according to which the cognitive phenomena associated with imagination are underpinned by multiple kinds of psychological state. I begin by presenting the default cognitive account of propositional imagination. What I call the new cognitive theory has played a central role in displacing early attempts in developmental psychology to link pretend play in toddlers to an early capacity to reason about the unobservable psychological states of oneself and others. Roughly put, the new cognitive theory casts imagination as a distinct cognitive attitude, yet one that is compositionally akin to belief. I argue, however, that there’s a deep explanatory tension in this account’s core commitments. In particular, the view faces the asymmetry challenge; for, the vehicles of imagination are cast as so very similar to those of belief that there seems to be little reason to suppose that they should play the robustly distinct functional role that the theory demands. Next, I evaluate an emerging alternative approach – the single attitude account – which assimilates the mechanisms and vehicles of propositional imagination to those of counterfactual reasoning generally. I argue that the alternative approach fails to accommodate important tracts of data surrounding our consumption and production of fictions. In the penultimate chapter, I consider how these two accounts of imagination propose to understand the architecture of pretense. One important, unresolved issue here surrounds the question of whether children require recourse to metacognition – i.e. beliefs about imagination, and perhaps other mental states – in order to recognize and engage in pretense. I argue that – in spite of the suggestions by the proponents of both new cognitivism and the single attitude approach – no satisfactory alternative to the metacognitive approach is forthcoming. Hence, we should assume that pretense (at least pretense recognition) requires metacognitive states. Finally, I sketch a pluralistic account of imagination, arguing that the psychological vehicles of imagination are diverse, populating at least three distinct psychological categories: counterfactual elaboration, bare imaginings (i.e. mere entertaining that p), and fictionalized attitudes akin to the metarepresentational pretense states initially put forward in metacognitive accounts of pretense. With little cost, a robust pluralism about the mechanisms and vehicles of imagination at once promises to capture much of the data unified theories fail to capture, while also avoiding the asymmetry challenge I raise for the new cognitive theory.
Richard Samuels (Advisor)
Declan Smithies (Committee Member)
Timothy Schroeder (Committee Member)
156 p.
Philosophy
Imagination; Pretense; Counterfactual Reasoning; Fiction

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Ferreira, M. J. (2014). A Pluralistic Account of Propositional Imagination [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1408917034

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Ferreira, Michael. A Pluralistic Account of Propositional Imagination. 2014. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1408917034.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Ferreira, Michael. "A Pluralistic Account of Propositional Imagination." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1408917034

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1408917034
1,000
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.