At first glance,
the topic of the imagination appears somewhat peripheral to the major concerns
of philosophy and psychology. Currie and Ravenscroft quickly persuade us
otherwise. Imagination, it turns out, is central not only to those
subdisciplines in which we would expect it to play a major role, like
aesthetics, but also to our ability to plan our lives, to reason practically,
and perhaps to morality. Breakdowns of imagination, deficits or excesses in our
imaginative capacities, have devastating consequences for those who suffer from
them.

Currie and
Ravencroft are concerned here only with the recreative,
not the creative, imagination.
Whereas the creative imagination is the ability, utilized by artists and
scientists, to make unexpected connections and imaginative leaps, the
recreative imagination is the ability, possessed by almost all of us to some
degree, to recreate in imagination the experiences and perspectives of other
agents. Given that this is their topic, Currie and Ravenscroft devote a great
deal of attention to the simulation program, which has been a central concern
of many cognitive scientists, psychologists and philosophers of late. The
central claim of simulationists is that we understand the mental states of
others, not by utilizing folk psychological theories but by simulating their
states: by placing ourselves in their shoes. For instance, it is often claimed
that we predict how others would behave by running our own decision-making
apparatus “off-line”: so that its inputs are (in part) imaginary and its output
is disconnected from action. Currie and Ravenscroft reject the notion that we
need to bring the system off-line. If the inputs are imaginings, then the
output is automatically disconnected from action, and there is no need to
postulate an extra step.

Much of this
consideration of simulation is devoted to its relation to theorizing. Simulationists
have often claimed that simulation renders theorizing redundant, while skeptics
have argued that simulation collapses into theory. Currie and Ravenscroft steer
a course between these two positions, arguing that some, but not all,
simulation is theory.

Imagination,
Currie and Ravenscroft argue, is essential to normal childhood development.
They devote two chapters to ways in which breakdowns in imagination can have
devastating consequences for sufferers. The first of these is devoted to
autism. It is uncontroversial that autism is characterized by some kind of
imaginative deficit. Autistic children engage in very little pretend play, for
instance. But the precise nature and cause of this deficit is still little
understood. Some theorists contend that autism is an executive disorder: its
characteristic symptoms, from lack of play to difficulty in dealing with social
situations, are the result of the heavy demands placed upon the executive
system by these tasks. Currie and Ravenscroft contend, instead, that
imaginative impoverishment is the root cause of the observed problems. Rather
than strains on the executive system explaining the imaginative deficits, the
imaginative deficits explain the strains on the executive system. We use our
imagination not only to predict the behavior of other people, but also to plan
our own future actions, allowing us to assess the consequences of a proposed
course of action before we carry it out. If we lack the capacity to imagine our
own actions, our ability to plan is significantly impaired. They suggest that
autistics do not suffer from a complete lack of imagination, but from an
inability to integrate their imagined assumptions with the rest of their
beliefs and desires. Such integrating is more or less difficult for all of us,
at least some of the time: autistics lie toward one end of a continuum upon
which we are all situated.

If autistics
suffer from imaginative impoverishment, schizophrenics suffer from imaginative
excess, Currie and Ravenscroft argue. Schizophrenics suffer from an inability
to distinguish between their own imaginings and their beliefs, due to a
breakdown of mechanisms that monitor their own acts of will. Thus, when they
imagine something, they take it for a perception, or a belief.

I found this
section of Recreative Minds the most
puzzling. The suggestion that schizophrenics mistake their own imaginings for
perceptions or beliefs faces a difficulty: how are we to explain the fact that
they themselves frequently do not seem fully to believe in their delusions?
(This is a phenomenon we witness in many psychopathologies: Capgras patients,
for instance, often seem strangely unconcerned by the fact –as they see it –
that their spouses and friends have been replaced by replicants). Currie and
Ravenscroft see in this an advantage of their account: it is in the nature of
imaginings for their possessors not to seek to resolve inconsistencies between
them and their beliefs. But this is the wrong tack to take, since they
hypothesize that schizophrenics take their imaginings for beliefs. If they take
them for beliefs, why do they treat them as imaginings?

Currie and
Ravenscroft suggest an answer to this question: Though they do not recognize
their delusions as imaginings, they retain the capacity to see that they are often
wildly implausible. In this case, however, they do not take them to be beliefs
at all. Instead, the behavior of schizophrenics suggests that their delusions
occupy some kind of position midway between imaginings and beliefs: taken to
represent the way the world is, yet not fully integrated into the patient’s set
of beliefs. This is, more or less, what Currie and Ravenscroft themselves
suggest. But it is not a position for which they seem to have an adequate
explanation.

Currie and
Ravenscroft are important players in the debates over simulation and related
topics. The reader of this book is plunged directly into these debates. This is
both the book’s strength, and its weakness. Although the authors do not
explicitly assume much, they move so fast that the reader unfamiliar with this
terrain is sure soon to find herself lost. Even for those who manage to keep
up, the rapidity of the pace, and the concentration upon the details of
relatively obscure debates within cognitive science and philosophy of mind ensures
that the shape of the overall theory of the recreative imagination, its
significance in human life and for human development, remains somewhat
obscured. This book might have been better if it was longer: if the authors
took more time to explore why the recreative imagination matters, rather than
plunging into a series of debates with their peers.

© 2003 Neil Levy

Dr Neil
Levy is a fellow of the Centre
for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Charles
Sturt University, Australia. He is the author of two mongraphs and over a
dozen articles and book chapters on Continental philosophy, ethics and
political philosophy. He is currently writing a book on moral relativism.

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology