ABSTRACT
Very roughly, imagination is the attitude with which we think about possibilities, reason counterfactually, construct pretense scenarios, and engage with stories and other representational artworks. As a part of our mental repertoire, it interacts with beliefs, desires, emotions, and other attitudes and processes to allow us to engage in a rich array of activities. (We will say more about imagination in Section 1.) Very roughly, imaginative resistance is the phenomenon in which we, who are otherwise
competent imaginers, experience a constraint in taking part in an imaginative activity. Philosophers have focused primarily on when people experience imaginative resistance in response to stories. For example, if a story simply states that “in killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl” without any additional context, then many readers are likely to experience a constraint in imaginatively engaging with this story. (We will say more about imaginative resistance in Section 2.) So, where is imagination in imaginative resistance? In this chapter, we seek to answer this question by connecting two ongoing lines of
inquiry in different subfields of philosophy. In philosophy of mind, philosophers have been trying to understand imagination’s place in cognitive architecture. In aesthetics, philosophers have been trying to understand the phenomenon of imaginative resistance, especially in connection with fictional narratives. By connecting these two lines of inquiry, we hope to achieve mutual illumination of an attitude and a phenomenon that have vexed philosophers. Our strategy is to reorient the imaginative resistance literature from the perspective of
cognitive architecture.1 Existing taxonomies of positions in the imaginative resistance literature (e.g., Liao and Gendler forthcoming) have focused on disagreements over the source and scope of the phenomenon – mainly, with respect to the question of when imaginative resistance arises. In contrast, our proposed taxonomy focuses on the psychological components necessary for explaining imaginative resistance. We start by characterizing the attitude and the phenomenon under discussion. In Section 1,
we explain the cognitive architectural framework that guides this chapter, and clarify the sense of imagination that is relevant to our discussion. In Section 2, we give an overview of imaginative resistance. We then offer a new taxonomy of accounts of imaginative resistance based on their cognitive architectural commitments. In Section 3, we examine cognitive imagination (or belief-like imagination) accounts. In Section 4, we examine conative imagination
(or desire-like imagination) accounts. In Section 5, we examine accounts of imaginative resistance that do not fundamentally involve any imaginative attitudes. We conclude, in Section 6, by gesturing toward directions for further research.
