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Imagination and learning To appear in Amy Kind (ed) Routledge Companion to the Imagination

Key words: Imagination, learning, fiction, empathy, testimony, reliability

Abstract

This essay asks whether, and if so how, the imagination can contribute to learning. We

examine what is to count as imagination, and what as learning. We ask how reliable the

imagination is as a guide to reasonable belief and discover that its reliability varies

considerably across circumstances. We attend particularly to the possibility of learning

from those imaginings which are guided by works of fiction. Imaginings guided in this way

have been said to be especially helpful for learning what certain kinds of experiences are

like, and for acquiring empathic skills. We find limited support for these claims in the

available evidence. We conclude by considering how authors of fictions offer implicit

testimony via their invitations to imagine, and whether acceptance of such testimony is

reasonable.

To imagine that I am rich is not to learn that I am rich, and to imagine riding a bike is not

to know how to ride one. How can indulgent imagination lead to anything as serious as

learning? Despite the unpromising contrast, some pathways to learning pass through the

imagination; some even start with it. And imagination is not merely a cause of our

learning; sometimes it helps justify our claim to have learned.1 Imagination can also be a

source of ignorance and error, as we shall see.

There are distinct pathways to imagining itself. There are internally generated or

autonomous imagining, as when I decide to imagine being rich, or find myself imagining

it; there are externally guided imaginings, where I imagine the life of a millionaire as

described in a novel, movie or play. Both kinds of imagining are constrained: all

imaginings are constrained internally by the dependence of imagination on other mental

and bodily systems, while guided imaginings are constrained by the material, often a

narrative, which is their source. These constraints are crucial to understanding how

learning from imagination is possible.

1. Learning We will take “learning” in a broad sense. Learning does not consist only of coming to know

the sorts of things one could report on an exam paper; knowledge of this kind—that the

Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066, for example—we will call sentential knowledge. I

1 This claim sounds less controversial now than it would thirty years ago. Significant for the change has been the idea that imagination, by structurally mimicking belief, gives us insight into the beliefs, and the decisions, of others (for somewhat different formulations, on which there have been subsequent commentary, see Gordon [1984] and Heal [1984]. For other and more recent optimistic perspectives on imaginations epistemic role see Williamson [2014] and Kind [2014].

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may know that Jane’s dress is this colour (said with a pointing gesture at a colour sample)

without having a name, description or perhaps even any concept to apply to the colour;

what I have is propositional knowledge not fully articulable, at least by me. Then there is

learning which is propositional without representing knowledge-acquisition. Converts

from the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic view to Newtonian mechanics and gravitation learned

something, though it was not a transition from falsehood to truth. Their learning

consisted in epistemic improvement, but not in knowledge.2

What about knowing-how, often said not to be a matter of knowing any proposition? In

some cases knowing how to do things really is just a matter of knowing some proposition;

I know how to checkmate you when I know that checkmate will result if I move my knight

to a certain square (Snowdon 2003). Many cases of knowing-how to do things are not, or

do not seem, amenable to this reductive treatment. You may know how to ride a bike

without, apparently, knowing any propositions about bike riding, and knowing them

would anyway not guarantee that you could ride a bike; for that you need bike-riding

practice.3

Imagination is often said to lead to knowing-what-it-is-like (acquaintance, as I shall say).

Imaginative projection into another’s situation is said to acquaint us, sometimes, with

what it is like to be in that situation, and literary, dramatic and cinematic fictions scaffold

such projections, giving us a sense of what it is like to take part in a battle or to live under

Stalin’s tyranny (these are cases of guided imagination, explored more fully later on).

What sort of knowing is acquaintance? Propositional knowing according to some. Jackson

claims that knowing what it is like to see the blue of the sky is knowing some fact or

proposition, and that physicalism is therefore false; one can know all the physical facts

about colour and still not know this fact. 4 But if knowing-how is not always propositional,

then acquaintance might not be propositional either. Some have argued that

acquaintance is just a form of knowing-how; when I learn what it is like to see the blue of

the sky I come to have certain abilities: the ability to remember what seeing the sky is

like, to imagine the colour of the sky, and more generally “abilities to predict one's

behaviour by imaginative experiments”.5 But we are not obliged to say that acquaintance

is propositional knowledge or it is know-how. We may hold instead that acquaintance is

a third, distinct kind of knowing (Conee, Tye).

I will treat sentential knowledge as a sub-species of propositional knowledge. And to

show that imagination aids propositional learning I will take it as sufficient to show that

2 Intuitively, the idea that the earth is spherical is truer—closer to the truth, more verisimilar—than the idea that it is flat, though no one seems to have come up with a satisfactory account of what it takes for one proposition to be closer to the truth than another. See Oddie 2014. 3 Some have argued recently that knowing-how really is a kind of propositional knowledge; you know how to ride a bike when, for some way w to ride a bike, you know under a practical mode of presentation, that w is a way for you to ride a bike. See Stanley & Williamson 2001. 4 Jackson 1982. 5 Lewis 1983, 1988. The abilities account of Mary’s knowledge was first proposed in Nemirow 1980.

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it aids the transition from less reasonable to more reasonable belief. For present

purposes I will treat the categories propositional knowledge, knowing-how and

acquaintance separately but without inquiring further into their natures and relations;

such inquiries would be arduous, and we can afford to operate with an intuitive

understanding of these notions. So our focus here will not be exclusively on propositional

knowledge, since there are cases of change to propositional belief which constitute

learning without constituting the acquisition of knowledge, nor on propositional

knowledge, since there are other kinds of knowing.

There is another reason for not putting knowledge at the centre of this inquiry. For

knowing-how and acquaintance there is nothing comparable to the belief/knowledge

distinction. There is not, in addition to the set of things I know how to do a set of things I

merely believe how to do. I may falsely believe that I know how to ride a bike but in that

case I just have a false propositional belief; I can’t falsely or unreasonable believe how to

ride a bike. What I have is a range of skills possessed with different competencies; I may

be better at riding a bike than at driving a car. Similarly, I might have a merely crude,

coarse-grained understanding of what it is like to live in a tyranny. Knowing-how and

acquaintance seem to run parallel to reasonable belief rather than to propositional

knowledge: categories with variation from the tolerable to the perfect.6 And if

imagination is capable of helping us improve our know-how and acquaintance at any

level that will count, in my book, as a win for the learning-from-imagination thesis. Given

this very inclusive account of learning, it would be difficult to claim that this essay stacks

the cards against the learning-from-imagination thesis.

2. Imagining Whether we think imagination leads to learning will depend partly on what we count as

imagination. It is standard to divide the imagination into a propositional kind, as when I

imagine that there is a tree in front of me, and an experiential kind: I visualise, or visually

imagine a tree, have a tactile image of the rough bark or a motor image of moving my

hand over it. Propositional imagining can be thought of as an imaginative counterpart of

belief, while experiential imaginings in the various modalities are counterparts to

corresponding forms of sensory experience: sight, touch, our internal awareness of the

disposition and movement of our bodies (Budd 1989; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002).

What of assuming or supposing that P? Are these ways of propositionally imagining that

P? If they are, it is clear that we can learn, and indeed gain knowledge from imagination.

Proof by reductio works by having us assume P and derive a contradiction, which allows

us to conclude that not-P; simple proofs that root 2 is irrational take this form. This

6 An objection to the propositional account of knowing-how is that one may have knowledge of how to do F based on a source which is correct but so improbably correct that one could not claim to know the propositions in question even though one believes them; nonetheless, you are very well equipped to F. See Cath 2011.

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technique is not confined to mathematics and logic. I come to know that Jack is not the

murderer (a contingent proposition if ever there was one) by combining the assumption

of his guilt with something I know to be true—that the murderer must have been at the

Cathedral by 9pm--and deriving something I know to be false—that Jack was there at

9pm. Some have said that assuming is not imagining, on the grounds that imagining is

susceptible to what is called imaginative resistance and assuming is not, or that imagining

is affect-involving while assuming is not.7 I resist the imagining offered to me by a novel

in which it is part of the story that slavery is good; I don’t resist the invitation to suppose

it good as part of a philosophical argument about the nature of goodness (Walton 1994).

And talk of imagining suggests the affectively engaged state we experience when

engrossed in a novel, while assuming seems more appropriate to the careful, affectively

neutral construction of an argument.

For what it’s worth, I think of assumption as a kind of imagining. It does not seem wrong

to say, in the philosophy seminar “imagine slavery is moral justified”, when your purpose

is to develop a metaethical argument. And suppose (or imagine) that while engaged in a

philosophical thought experiment about moral responsibility I take on the assumption

that I’m the only person left alive after a nuclear war; at first this has little or no emotional

affect on me and I dispassionately explore my moral situation. Gradually I start to imagine

details of the case which make vivid its horror and loneliness; distressing emotions start

to be felt. Did I, at some point in this process, go from one state, assuming, to another,

imagining? If I felt a twinge of emotion but kept my mind on the argument would I be

assuming or imagining? I’d rather say there was no change in my propositional attitude;

what changed were its effects, as other imaginings concerning the details of the situation

were brought into play. As I imagined in more detail, making causal connections between

events as I imagine them and introducing some vivid sensory imaginings, unpleasant

affect became noticeable, at which point I might experience imaginative resistance.

“Assume” and “suppose” are good words to use when we want to emphasise the non-

affective nature of our imaginative projects; we need not think that they denote a state-

type distinct from imagining.

Still, this debate is not crucial to our inquiries. If supposing is imagining then we can all

agree that there is a kind of imagining capable of generating learning. An interesting

question then remains: does non-suppositional imagining—the kind of affectively

engaged imagining that comes with daydreams, novel reading and the empathic attempts

to understand the life of another or your own future self—have the same capacity? We

may all apply ourselves to that question, regardless of what we think about the relation

between imagining and supposing. To that question I turn in the next section. But it is

important to note that any act of imagining, especially when sustained, is likely to involve

imaginings of various kinds. While reading War and Peace one propositionally imagines

that Pierre and Prince Andrei are talking together; one is also likely to have visual and

7 Gendler 2000. See also Kind 2013, Spalding 2014.

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perhaps auditory imaginings of the scene; one may have proprioceptive and motor

imaginings when Prince Andrei is wounded at Austerlitz.

3. Reliable and unreliable imaginings

If you found that your colleagues at the same level as you were all earning more than you,

would you be distressed? Let’s say you answer yes (most people do), so you come to

believe the conditional

1. If my co-workers all earned more than me I would be distressed

How did you come to believe that? Very likely, your belief was brought about (partly) by

your imagining; you imagined hearing the news about your co-workers’ superior pay, and

you found this a distressing thing to imagine. We think that, by and large, if imagining P

makes us unhappy, P will make us unhappy.

Suppose 1 is true. Then affectively engaged imagining gave you a true belief, and did so

because it was a case of affectively engaged imagining. Does that make such imaginings a

pathway to learning? Not every source of a true belief is happily described as something

from which we can learn, even on our generous construal of learning; if a drunk in a bar

tells you—truly, as it happens—that the economy is going down-hill and you believe her

we would not rate her a source of learning. Drunks in bars are unreliable on the economy

and so, perhaps, is imagination as a guide to how we would feel in various situations.8 Is

it? This is an important question because many life-changing decisions are made partly

on the basis of comparing how we feel when we imagine the various outcomes. The

imagination-based approach to deciding whether or not to become a parent is notably

unreliable given the radical and unpredictable personal changes, including changes of

basic preference, that becoming a parent brings with it (Paul 2015). Research into what

is called “affective forecasting” has thrown up other, less dramatic, examples of

unreliability (Gilbert et. al. 1998). People tend to expect that both they and their partners

will be more upset by their own and the other’s transgressions in a relationship than they

actually are; these people may imagine the transgression, generating an emotional

response which suggests to them greater unhappiness in the actual situation than

actually occurs. In one study of this phenomenon participants correctly predicted that

they would be more distressed in the role of offender than in the role of victim, but

incorrectly predicted that their partner would be more distressed as victim than as

perpetrator, suggesting difficulties with imaginative projection into another’s situation

(Green et. al. 2013).

One reason for a general tendency to overestimate emotional responses to events is

immune neglect: the neglect in one’s imagining about the future of the coping strategies

we adopt to insulate ourselves from negative emotion; this is of significance for

understanding the widely observed reluctance to disengage from abusive relationships.

8 So it is not simply moving closer to truth that makes for learning; the process that gets you closer should be reliable, to a degree. How reliable may depend on the stakes.

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But people also overestimate positive emotional responses; those asked to estimate the

positive affect associated with being on a date on St Valentine’s day neglected the anxiety

that often attends such encounters (Green et. al. 2013). There is also evidence that the

affect we feel (positive or negative) when we experience a situation (and presumably,

when we imagine it) “isn’t tied to the representations that produce it” (Carruthers 2011:

136). People rate their satisfaction with their lives more positively on sunny days than on

dull ones, failing to segregate the affect associated with life satisfaction from that due to

the weather.9 In imagining a situation, the intrusion of inessential or unlikely details may

tip the scales of affect in a misleading direction.

Perhaps the lesson here is that there is no general answer to the question “Can we learn

through imagination how we would feel in situations we have not encountered” and that

it should be replaced with a series of narrower questions of the form “can we learn

through imagination about the valance (duration, intensity) of our feelings in a situation

of kind S?” To some (but only some) questions with this form the answer will most likely

be yes.

Where imagination is a poor guide to how you will feel in a situation it may still be useful

for predicting and explaining the behaviour of other people. One party in the so-called

“Theory vs Simulation Debate” holds that we predict some (perhaps a good deal) of other

people’s behaviour by simulating their mental states; in these situations what we imagine

plays, if things go well, a similar inferential and affective role to the beliefs those people

actually have. If our imaginings then make a certain option C seem more attractive than

other salient ones, that is supposed to be evidence that the person in question will

actually choose C. It has been argued that this is a better and more economical way to

predict the behaviour of others than to appeal to a “folk psychological theory”. A

substantial and, in part, empirical debate has gone on concerning whether this is so.10

We will not try to settle that debate here. However, the following thought is attractive.

Whether or not imaginings (sometimes, often, usually) track the inferential and affective

path of another’s beliefs, they have a very good chance of tracking the inferential and

affective path of that other’s imaginings, and that will help me to predict your decision

when it is based on what you imagine about the future. If both you and I decide whether

to choose option C by imagining how we would feel if C were realised, and if you and I

have relevantly similar preferences and make relevantly similar errors, then I can predict

that you will choose C by noting that my own imagining picks out C as best. Both your

imaginings and mine may be hopelessly unreliable when it comes to predicting how we

really would feel, but my imaginings may still do very well at predicting your future

choice.

9 See Schwarz & Clore 1983. People do make the segregation if the state of the weather is drawn to their attention. 10 See e.g. Heal (1996), Stich & Nichols (1997); Mitchell, Zeigler & Currie (2009)

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Common experience suggests that imagination helps us to predict not merely our own

affective responses to future outcomes but the causal development of those outcomes

themselves. There are, of course, limits to this: we should not try to estimate the time by

imagining looking at our watches. Where imagination does better is in relation to

processes involving our own bodily interventions. We have some capacity to estimate

whether we will be able to climb from that branch of a tree to the one above, without

actually having to try it out. Perhaps we do this by imagining the act of climbing.11 How

this might be done in such a way as to provide reliable information is not well understood,

but it could hardly be done at all if imagining moving failed to respect the constraints on

actual movement. A puzzle then arises: no one other than a few experts knows what those

constraints are, since they depend on very unobvious facts about the construction of our

bodies. But the obvious answer is that we do not need to know, as we do not need to know

how cognition and emotion interact in order (sometimes) to predict our emotional

responses to situations. As long as imagining P has emotional effects very like those of

belief, I can simply read off the emotional effect of imagining I am paid less than my peers

and conclude that I would dislike being paid less. We may wonder why imagination

parallels belief in this way. One plausible answer is that it simply uses the same causal

pathways as belief; there is one system for connecting propositional attitudes with affect,

and it works in the same way regardless of whether the inputs are beliefs or imaginings.

And we can apply this idea to the case of imagined movement, assuming that imagining

movement and really moving activate the same system dedicated to initiating and

controlling action. This would ensure that imagined movements are constrained by the

factors that constrain real movement, as is required if the former is to be predictive of the

latter. There is a good deal of evidence now available both for the idea that imagined

movement is constrained in the way that real movement is, and for the idea that the two

depend on common systems in the brain. For example, it is possible to study the time it

takes people to imagine moving their hands into certain orientations, and these times

turn out to be functions of the factors that constrain actual hand movement, such as

awkwardness of the target position (Parsons 1994). And deficits in actual performance

due to brain damage (Parkinson’s disease in this case) are sometimes predictable from

imagined performance; patients impaired on performance of a certain sequence of finger

movements were equally impaired in imagining performing the action (Dominey et. al.

1995). However the correspondence between real and imagined actions is relatively

fragile. While real and imagined walks over a certain distance took very similar times for

subjects instructed to form careful mental images of the target location, the

correspondence was significantly worse for uninstructed subjects, and for subjects asked

to carry heavy packs (Decety et. al. 1989).

What, then should we say about the reliability of the various forms of imagining when it

comes to predicting outcomes and our responses to them? We may think about reliability

in different ways. First, we may ask how reliable something is at performing a specific

11 Tim Williamson emphasizes this aspect of imaginations power in his 2014.

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task; imagination is reliable (perhaps) when used to estimate walking-time over a short

distance on the flat and without heavy equipment; it is not good at estimating the time

taken to walk with a heavy pack. Secondly, we may ask how generally reliable something

is. Considered in a wholly unrestricted form, this is not usually a useful measure. Though

my car is hopelessly unreliable when driven through water, vertically up cliffs or in space,

I would not complain that it is unreliable. What matters is that it does well in the

environments it was designed for. Perhaps the most useful generality we could get about

the reliability of some form of imaginative activity is its reliability in situations Darwinian

forces designed it for. Climbing trees, crossing streams and walking in open country are

plausible cases of actions within that domain.

3. Imaginings guided by fiction We have seen how imagining is internally constrained; constrained by the architecture of

the mind. We turn now to situations in which the imagination is constrained externally.

Both kinds of constraints contribute positively to the imagination’s capacity to generate

knowledge. Internal constraint helps to ensure a degree of correspondence between what

we imagine doing and feeling and how we really would act and feel in a given situation.

External constraint provides us with opportunities for the sustained imaginative

exploration of scenarios which would otherwise be opaque to us.

Imagining ourselves in the shoes of others is often difficult; we may know very little about

how they conceive their situations, or about their preferences. One of the attractions of a

work of fiction is that it guides us in our imaginings, providing detail about a character’s

psychology that we could not expect to get in real life. Not all the guided imaginings of

fiction are imaginings about the inner states of characters: we also imagine that Pierre

inherits a great deal of wealth, that Natasha nearly elopes with Anatole, that Prince Andre

is wounded. But these objective imaginings also help us understand the inner lives of

characters; a person’s mental states can often be inferred with some probability from

detailed knowledge of their situations.

In one sense we learn nothing by imagining Natasha’s mental life, no matter what the

complexity and vividness of our imaginings; she, after all, does not exist. But an attractive

thought is that in doing this kind of imagining we exercise, refine and extend our

sensitivities to the mental lives of real others, becoming in the process more insightful

and empathic.12 We acquire or improve a skill.

Are there reasons to be confident that our imagined interactions with fictional characters

will be relevantly similar to those we would or might have with real people? If the answer

is no then we may be concerned that the effect of the fiction-as-simulation will be to

distort our capacities and not to enhance them. On one side of this question is the

widespread conviction that authors of quality fictions have a subtle understanding of

12 Nussbaum argues that readers of fiction are placed, with respect to characters, in a position parallel to that of the sympathetic judge (1997). For criticism see Posner (1997).

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human psychology which they are able to embody in their characters. We should ask how

we might assess a claim which seems to require that we have some standard, available to

at least discerning readers, of truthfulness in human psychology against which the efforts

of authors can be assessed. One answer is that readers have a sound though certainly

incomplete and imprecise intuitive understanding of psychology and can make the

relevant judgements themselves. Most readers probably think of themselves in this way:

we make rapid judgements of plausibility in the doings of fictional characters without

stopping to check against psychology textbooks.

A significant question is then whether our intuitive understanding is reliable. We can say

with confidence that it is less than fully reliable. For fifty years social psychology has been

finding good reasons to think that people regularly and systematically misunderstand

their own motives and those of other people and are ignorant of the situational factors

and unconscious biases that regularly influence our decisions.13 Our judgements about

what, in fiction, constitutes realistic motivation or behaviour will reflect these errors.

One response to this pessimism is to argue that the errors exposed by social psychology

are in fact marginal and don’t much compromise the psychological competence of authors

and readers (or anyone else). Another does not seek to quantify the extent of our error

but insists that, however wrong our ordinary, pre-scientific understanding of ourselves

is, it is unlikely to be replaced by scientific theorising which to most of us does not come

easily and which is cumbersome to apply in our real-time interactions with other people.

Further, we manifestly have considerable success in understanding and engaging with

others, so this pre-scientific understanding, however far it may be from the truth about

human motivation, has a good deal of instrumental value, just as Ptolemaic astronomy,

though wildly false, does a reasonable job of tracking planetary positions. If engagement

with imaginative literature sharpens the capacities which go with this certainly useful

pre-scientific understanding, that is all the justification we need to call it an aid to

learning.

True, the response continues, many characters and situations in the most regarded and

enduring fictions are unrealistic, even by the standards of our common conception of

human motivation. But empathising with rather unrealistic characters such as little Nell

may aid the development of empathic skills, exercising the empathy system more

effectively than responding to boringly real people does.

Let us look more closely at the idea that guided imagination is a provider of empathic

skills

4. Learning to empathise How we learn skills is surely an empirical question. Is there some body of data against

which we can assess this idea? Recent psychological experiments have, it is claimed,

13 A classic of this sort of investigation is Nisbett & Wilson 1977. On situational factors see the review of evidence in Currie 2010, Chapter 11; on unconscious bias one might start with Greenwald & Banaji 1995).

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found improvements in empathic skills as a result of exposure to brief fictional stories. In

one study empathy was measured immediately after the reading through the application

of the “reading for the eyes” test which measures people’s ability to infer mental states

from direction of gaze and which is said to be predictive of empathy (Kidd and Castano

2013). It is not clear whether there were any lasting effects and the choice of reading

materials and other aspects of the study have been criticised.14 Another concern is that

fiction’s supposed capacity to enlarge empathy would be a good thing only if it led to pro-

social behaviour; empathy has little value if it makes no difference to our actions. But the

test of empathy used in this experiment and in some others did not demonstrate any

change of behavioural disposition. Another experiment (Johnson 2012) did probe for

helping behaviour by having the experimenter drop some pencils after the reading; a

correlation was observed between those who helped and those who reported high levels

of “transportation” or imaginative engagement with the story. Since helping behaviour

was manifested immediately after the reading it is unclear how long the effect lasted; we

know that trivial events like finding a dime in a phone booth can lead to exactly the same

immediate helping behaviour, without, presumably, leading to shifts in a person’s outlook

or dispositions.

We need, it seems, to make some distinctions between ways that guided imaginings might

affect behaviour. We should first of all distinguish between the development of capacities

and what psychologists call “priming”, wherein exposure to one stimulus affects response

to another via an automatic and temporary spreading of activation in a cognitive network.

Experiments by Bargh and colleagues suggest that mere exposure to words like “strive”

caused enhanced performance on a demanding cognitive task; exposure to such words is

probably just a temporary disruption to normal patterns of behaviour. Similarly, it is

plausible that exposure to the fictional texts of the experiment simply primed subjects for

an atypically empathetic response.15 It will be said that temporary and automatically

induced changes are better than nothing. That may be true, but the friends of learning

from literature have expected something more like thoughtful and reflective learning.

With that in mind, we should now make a further distinction.

Our skills and capacities may serve different kinds of purposes. Some skills quickly arrive

at an undemanding and unreflective steady state, as with my bicycle riding which is

designed only for the village shops. But another kind of skill requires maintenance of

higher-level control even though individual components of the action are performed so

quickly as to defy rational oversight, as with the kind of piano playing exemplified by an

aspirant performer. The pianist’s behaviour never becomes automated in the way that

my bicycle riding does; the pianist is not able to let her mind wander; she must be

constantly assessing and modulating her performance (Annas 2011). This is an important

distinction for us because, as is often noted, unconstrained and unreflective empathy

14 See http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7715 15 See Bargh et. al. 2001. But the existence of priming effects in the domain of social psychology has recently been questioned; see Shanks et.al. (2013).

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often does not lead to morally desirable results. Helping behaviour produced by empathy

tends to be arbitrarily disposed, favours those close to us with whom we empathise

easily, and proceeds without regard to justice or economy of means; it makes us sensitive

to the individual victim of a policy and indifferent to the many whose lives the policy

saved. As psychologist Paul Bloom says

…if a planet of billions is to survive, however, we’ll need to take into consideration

the welfare of people not yet harmed—and, even more, of people not yet born.

They have no names, faces, or stories to grip our conscience or stir our fellow-

feeling. Their prospects call, rather, for deliberation and calculation. Our hearts

will always go out to the baby in the well; it’s a measure of our humanity. But

empathy will have to yield to reason if humanity is to have a future.16

If reading literature simply enlarges our empathy responses without giving us the power

to modulate and direct them it will arguably do little good. And some of the greatest

literature seems vulnerable to the worry that empathy distorts moral judgement: Tzachi

Zamir points out that we care deeply about Cleopatra’s death but give no thought to the

deaths of Charmian and Iras whose poetry is less memorable.17 What we would like, and

what serious advocates of learning from literature surely hope for, is that literature will

help us to be more thoughtful and discriminating empathisers, capable of putting our

empathic capacities to good use by having moral reasoning in an oversight role. The

currently available evidence, even on the most optimistic construal, does not support the

theory that literature does this.

Finally, there is some reason, far from conclusive, to think that empathising with fictional

characters will actually depress people’s tendency to behave well towards others.18 A

recent literature on the topic of “moral self-licensing” claims to identify a homeostatic

system governing conscientious behaviour, mediated by subjects’ perception of their own

status as just and rational beings. In one experiment subjects offered a vitamin

supplement subsequently smoked more than controls did (Chiou et. al. 2011). In another,

subjects given an opportunity to establish non-racist credentials were then more likely

than controls to endorse a view which might be seen as racially problematic (Monin et.

al. 2001). The hypothesis is that the prior behaviour enhances a sense of self-worth which

in turn gives people the feeling of being licenced to behave less well subsequently. (The

converse pattern is also observed, of prior irresponsible behaviour being compensated

for by subsequent conscientiousness.)

Might the person who has spent the day being deeply empathic while reading Anna

Karenina then feel licenced to pay less attention to the troubles of those real people

around them? The time and effort empathising with Anna Karenina did Anna no good—

16 Bloom 2013; see also Pappas 1997. 17Paper delivered at Shakespeare and Philosophy conference, University of Hertfordshire, August 2014. 18 I owe this suggestion to Catarina Dutilh Novaes.

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12

she, after all, does not exist—and the reader well knows that; the reader could not

reasonably claim to have done enough good for the day to be able to pay less attention to

her friend’s distress. But self-licensing is not to be understood as a process mediated by

rational inference. It is better seen by analogy with the processes that make us unwilling

to walk home down a dark alley after the horror movie. We know all the arguments to the

effect that there is no more danger there than there was the previous evening, but the

prospect feels unpleasant enough to make us choose another route. Imagined dangers

can affect our subsequent decision-making in ways that are like those of real dangers. It

is not hard to believe that imagined good deeds can have the same effects on our self-

worth as real ones. Indeed, we know that self-licensing can be produced by merely

imagined activity; subjects in another experiment designed to induce self-licensing were

more prone to frivolous purchases (luxury jeans vs dull vacuum cleaner) after they had

imagined volunteering for community service (Khan & Dhar, 2007).

5. Imagination and the messages in fiction19 The guided imaginings provided by fiction involve a communicative element. The author

communicates her story to the reader by producing a certain text, but that text has to be

understood as a guide to what imaginings are intended; we are expected to imagine many

things not explicitly stated but merely implicated, and much that’s written in the text has

to be understood metaphorically or as the product of an ironic or unreliable narrator.

This communicative element introduces the possibility of learning by testimony or other

means which depend on assumptions about the reliability of an agent whose opinions are

in some way made manifest by the text.

One way for the belief that P to spread from agent to agent is for someone to openly and

explicitly assert P and for the hearer to believe P in consequence. This is by no means the

only way. Much that is communicated is implicated rather than said, as my saying “It’s

gone seven” implicates, given the right context, that we are late. I can also communicate

this by deliberately looking at my watch and frowning rather than saying anything. And

if I simply happen to look at my watch and frown this may indicate to you that we are late

without my intending to communicate anything. Doing all sorts of things other than

making assertions can spread belief, and writing fiction may be one of them. According to

Mark, Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan (something we are intended to imagine

rather than to believe) in response to the question “Who is my neighbour?” Understood

literally and as seriously meant, the story would be a change of subject and hence a

deviation from conversationally cooperativeness. Hearers try, therefore, to understand

the story as providing an answer to the question; they take it that Jesus wishes to convey

that our duties to neighbours extend well beyond our own cultural group, and they have

some confidence in that opinion because the story seems well suited to get that unstated

message across. Perhaps in less obvious ways Proust’s telling of his novel cycle is

19 This section draws on material from Ichino & Currie forthcoming. See also Friend 2014.

Imagination and learning 26/08/2014 10:22

13

evidence that he believes, and wants us to believe, various things about love, time and

memory.20

In cases like these we have a story to be imagined and, we assume, a seriously meant

message put forward as a candidate for belief. If Jesus had told a story in which the

Samaritan robbing the victim, the implied message would be very different. But we

should not suppose that it is only the general outline of the story which matters for the

identification of the proposition communicated; details matter a great deal. Jesus’ parable

of the prodigal son is meant to indicate something important about God’s relation to us.

Knowing what depends on a finely tuned sense of the affective bonds between the father

and the son. That way Jesus gives us an emotionally rich understanding of what it is to

value human freedom even at the cost of God’s suffering: God’s relation to us is like the

one we imagine between the father and the son of the story. Similarly, Proust may be

understood as communicating, not merely the thought that love is irrational (something

we probably know already) but that it is irrational in these ways—the ways exemplified

in the details of relations between Marcel, Albertine and the rest of them.

Advocacy of this communicative model of learning from fiction model again raises

questions about the extent to which readers would be acting rationally in treating the

authors of fictions as reliable. The rationality of trust in Jesus depends, presumably, on

difficult questions about faith and revelation that we cannot settle here, if at all. But the

same question asked about Proust is not easy either. We might happen to know from

personal acquaintance that Proust is extremely wise, but this is not the situation of most

readers. We might argue that Proust’s wisdom is manifested in his skill in composition,

character construction and the other hard tasks of sustaining a narrative. But it is not

clear that there is a significant correlation between the personal qualities thus manifested

and reliability on matters to do with love, time and memory. Nonetheless the

manifestation of these sorts of qualities does seem to influence the credence we give to

the opinions of people with those qualities; we are more likely to believe someone if we

admire her than if we don’t, irrespective of whether the qualities we admire are

indicators of reliability of this subject (Harris & Coriveau 2011). Seen in this way we

might think of great literature as epistemic traps rather than as fonts of learning.

6. Conclusion Sometimes a very broadly phrased question about learning can be framed and answered

in the affirmative. Is testimony a source of learning? Certainly. Lying and other forms of

epistemic irresponsibility are not so common that they cast doubt on the general

proposition that testimony does more epistemic good than harm—imagine our

predicament as learners without it. A comparably general question about imagination as

20 I leave aside here the possibility of understanding the text as containing many explicit assertions about these things, though the decision between this and regarding such statements as emerging from a fictional and possibly unreliable narrator is not easy to make.

Imagination and learning 26/08/2014 10:22

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a source of learning is harder to answer and at this stage of the debate seems rather a

distraction. We need to focus on the small-scale structure of particular scenarios in which

imagining brings about cognitive change. That focus requires serious experimental work

together with a philosophically structured understanding of the options for describing

and explaining those cognitive changes.

Greg Currie

University of York

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