In the “imaginative resistance paper”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/gradconf/papers/Trogdon.pdf I linked below, Kelly Trogdon defends a variant of the salience story about imaginative resistance. The idea, and I’m summarising crudely here because I want to attack a lot of positions at once, is that morally deviant claims can’t be imagined because they are impossible in an obvious way. Impossibilities in time travel stories or the like can be imagined because the impossibility of them does not immediately register. I used to believe some variant of this, but I got talked out of it by Douglas Adams. The story of how is perhaps of some philosophical interest, and in retrospect I think it was fairly funny.
This all happened in the days before I had an iPod. The only way I had to listen to MP3s was on my laptop. Unfortunately, the laptop is about 1995 vintage, which means it was excellent value as a word processor, but less than ideal value as a MP3-player. Still, if you don’t have another alternative, it isn’t too bad on lo-fi files, and since most spoken word files are lo-fi, listening to the old radio-play versions of _Hitch-hikers_ was perfectly possible.
Of course, lugging around a laptop isn’t really a convenient way to listen to MP3s. But this day I’d been working in at the library at Melbourne Uni before meeting a friend for drinks and dinner and drinks, and then catching the last-ish train back home. So I still had the laptop, and I was tipsy enough to think that trying to set it up to play MP3s on the train was a good idea.
The trains in Melbourne aren’t as noisy as they were back in the day, but they’re still not the best environment for concentrating on textual subtleties. The “texting”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000558.html revolution has quietened things down a bit I guess, but late night trains will always be late night trains. And as I said, I was by this stage less sober than a judge, and trying to play MP3s on a computer quite expressly not designed for that purpose. But still, I was struck by a couple of things when I got to the passage where Adams first describes Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
First, practically everything about Milliways is impossible. I was struck by this because after each sentence describing some impossible feature of Milliways, the narrator says something like “Of course, this is impossible.”
Second, it is perfectly possible to _imagine_ Milliways, and everything the narrator says about Milliways is true in the story. (At least all the categorical claims, I’m less sure about the claims that Milliways’s features are impossible. But they aren’t relevant to what follows.)
And at that point, in a clunky Melbourne train, late at night, not perfectly sober, trying to manage a computer that really shouldn’t be used as a kind of proto-iPod, I realised that the salience story about imaginative resistance couldn’t work. If the Milliways story makes its own impossibility salient enough for that temporal part of mine to realise it, but does not generate imaginative resistance, there is something more to imaginative resistance than salient impossibility.
Let me add a couple of other things about Trogden’s paper. I don’t think the interpretation of Gendler’s view is entirely accurate. (One might make a similar complaint about my paper, but I’m not the one under discussion here!) Here’s a key passage from “Tamar’s paper”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tsg3/imagresist.pdf. (It’s pages 31-2, and I’ve taken out a long discussion of impossibility that I don’t think is particularly relevant in _this_ context. Emphasis added.)
bq.. So my hypothesis is that cases that evoke genuine imaginative resistance will be cases where the reader feels that she is being asked to export a way of looking at the actual world which she does not wish to add to her conceptual repertoire. Why should this raise particular problems for morality? … For a story to even make sense, a great number of things which are held to be true within the fiction must be held to be true outside it, and vice versa. The moral principles that govern the world in question are generally among these, as are the truths of logic, mathematics, andin most genresthe laws of physics and psychology and even etiquette. When a story explicitly cancels one of these presuppositions … we are generally inclined to take the cancellation as governing only the fictional world… _In most cases, the very fact of deviance is sufficient indication that literal export is not the intention_.
But because we recognize that there are instances of actual moral disagreement, when we encounter fictional truths that concern deviant morality, we cannot assume that their deviance is an indication that the author does not wish them to be exported, or that she wishes them to be exported in altered form. There may be indications that this is all that is intended … and then the imaginative resistance disappears. But when, as is the default, we understand the story as demanding that we take on a certain way of looking at the actual world, we are inclined to resist.
p. And here’s “Trogden’s summary”:
bq.. Many propositions become part of the content of an imagining because they are true in the actual world, and there are many propositions we come to accept as true of the actual world by virtue of the fact that they are part of the content of our imaginings. In the light of these considerations, Gendler seems to suggest the following rules for imagination:
_Import Rule for Imagination_: In general, if C is the content of an imagining, then, if something is true in the actual world, its true in C.
_Export Rule for Imagination_: In general, if C is the content of an imagining, then, if something is true in C, its true in the actual world.
p. Obviously there were space constraints in Trogden’s paper, but I think this is at best too simplistic a summary of what Tamar’s up to. On the one hand, she does think that there is a tighter connection between what’s true in an imagination and what’s true in the world than some people may have believed _a priori_. But I don’t think Tamar can be really said to have said this connection holds “in general”. In fact, she thinks there’s a fair bit of work to be done to show that it holds in general even for moral claims, and descriptive claims are off the table at this point.
In fact, we can read Tamar as saying something quite contrary – that ‘in general’ you can do anything you like in imagination or fiction, just as long as you don’t mess with ‘framework’ propositions. And even if you do mess with the framework, you can get away with it provided you smile the right way while telling the story. I don’t think Tamar’s way of spelling things out here works, but I don’t think she’s committed to anything like as extreme as Trogden attributes to her.
So what of the complaints in Trogden’s paper about me? (It always comes back to me.) On the one hand, these seem much better focussed than the complaints about Tamar. On the other, I’m not sure they really get at the core of what I was trying to say. Not that complaints about the specific things I did say are unwarranted. The complaint turns on sentences like this one.
bq. Slavery is morally good by virtue of the fact that turtles arent ceiling fans.
Well, that can’t be imagined or true in a fiction. But does it fictionally entail any asymmetric compound impossibilities? I’m not sure. It better, if my theory is to be universal. Let’s say it doesn’t. What follows from that? Well, my specific theory is wrong. But what isn’t (proven to be) wrong is my basic idea that what is always imported into imaginings, and by default imported into fictions, is the class of conceptual truths about what is true in virtue of what. Maybe the way to capture that point isn’t in terms of asymmetric compound impossibilities, but I still think the point that these conceptual truths about ‘in virtue of’ relations are the key stands up.
Sloganeering, I think we can’t change those connections in imagination because we imagine by exploiting those connections. And that, I think, is why there’s imaginative resistance.