Imagination as a Cognitive Lab

Vivyen B. Sagsen

York University

Imagination is often described as a skill. Although this description is accepted widely, it has only recently been explicitly discussed by philosophers. As a skill, imagination is understood as an activity that we can improve or that we can be worse at than others. This understanding helped philosophers distinguish imagination from other similar abilities, such as conceiving or supposing, by appealing to their differences as distinct skills. Kind (2020), for example, claims that someone can be good at imagination but not at conceiving; or supposition is an easy skill (you can suppose anything), while imagination can have constraints (imaginative resistance). In this paper, I argue that imagination serves as a cognitive lab that involves different skills that can be involved in imagining. Doing so, I put the assumption that imagination is a skill into question, as it is not sufficient for a comprehensive understanding of imagination.
  The main motivation for this shift stems from my reading of the developmental psychology studies on pretend-play, counterfactual and causal thinking. In the developmental psychology literature, it is widely accepted that both pretend-play and counterfactual thinking have a shared imaginative ability. However, in their explanations of imagination, what developmental psychologists mean by imagination is more complex and inclusive than what philosophers aim to understand. This is simply because, across the trajectory of the development of pretense and counterfactual thinking skills, it becomes harder to differentiate what specific skills children are using to create imagined scenarios. I argue that this is because imagination is not a single skill that develops over time. Instead, it is a set of skills that emerge at different times in the development that could function for similar imaginative purposes. This approach shifts the philosophical task for giving a theoretically pure description of imagination towards considering imagination in its full, explaining its complexity.

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