A post by Julia Langkau

We all seem to agree that intuitively, there is a strong link between fiction and imagination. Beginning with Walton's influential account of make-believe, imagining has been seen as the operative attitude when it comes to fiction as opposed to believing: "Imagining aims at the fictional as belief aims at the true." (Walton 1990: 41). This mutually exclusive distinction between imagining and believing has shaped much of the discussion about our engagement with fiction, such as the definition of the relevant kind of imagination, patchwork puzzles, etc. The claim, as I understand it, has been a normative one (see Balcerak Jackson & Langkau 2022) — after all, Walton talks in terms of what fiction prescribes. Even if it turned out that most people actually believed most fictions while reading – perhaps before realizing they were fictions and then disbelieving them – they would all be making a mistake: they should have imagined instead.

A post by Julia Langkau

What is creativity? Margaret Boden (1994/2004) has suggested it is the ability of a subject to produce an idea or artifact that is valuable, new and surprising. Similarly, Sternberg and Lubart (1999, 3) think that ‘creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e., original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e., useful, adaptive concerning task constraints)’. Boden further makes the tacit assumption that the idea or artifact ‘was freely generated by the person concerned’ (Boden 2014, 233). Besides talking about a ‘creative’ subject, we can thus also call the required mental process ‘creative’, and we can speak of a ‘creative idea’ or a ‘creative artifact’.

The value component in the definition of creativity allows us to distinguish creative ideas or artifacts from what Kant called ‘original nonsense’ (Kant 2000, 186), which is an idea or artifact that is new and surprising, but lacks any value. Alison Hills and Alexander Bird (2018, 2019) have argued for a wider notion of creativity which does not require that the idea or artifact be valuable. Hills and Bird’s argument goes roughly as follows. When we look at certain ideas or artifacts that are the result of what looks like a creative process, some of them are valuable and others are not. Following the idea that creativity involves value, we judge that only the ones that are valuable are creative. However, the mental process involved in generating both kinds of ideas or artifacts must have been more or less the same, and it would be unreasonable to judge creativity on the basis of the product only. ‘It is therefore not appropriate to give different explanations of how each [idea or artifact] was produced—both are explained by the use of [the] imagination.’ (Hills and Bird 2018, 101) Hence, creativity cannot involve value. The authors conclude: ‘Rather than value, we propose that the imagination is essential to creativity: creativity is the disposition to use the imagination in the fertile production of ideas along with the motivation to bring those ideas to fruition.’ (Hills and Bird 2018, 105-106)

A post by Julia Langkau

I’m interested in the process of creating, or in how we come up with things.

Together with two musicians, I decided to produce an audio play, broadly on the topic of the pandemic. My part was to come up with the idea for the story, and to write it. In this post, I will talk about some aspects of the process of coming up with the story, and compare it to some aspects of the process of coming up with a philosophical idea. Here is the plot of the story.

A post by Julia Langkau.

In his post ‘Choosing your own adventure?’, Peter Langland-Hassan argued that our affective responses to fiction are driven by our beliefs about the content of the fiction rather than by what we imagine, and in last week’s post, Luke Roelofs appealed to the fact that fiction is an ‘objective social entity’ and that our desire to ‘align our imaginings with others’ might explain why simply imagining a happier ending of Romeo and Juliet after having watched the play will not make us feel better. I will suggest yet another explanation of this phenomenon, and my explanation is based on how we engage with and experience literary works like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. 

A post by Julia Langkau.

Imagine walking through a winter landscape: there is fresh snow on the trees, on the hills and rocks around you, and in the background, you see the snow-covered mountains. It has stopped snowing and a little bit of blue sky and sunlight is getting through the clouds and reflecting in the snow. 

This week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Kathleen Stock's recent book:  Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation, and Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2017).  See here for Kathleen's introduction.  Additional commentaries and replies will run each day this week.

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Commentary From Julia Langkau: Extreme Intentionalism and Testimony-In-Fiction

In the last part of chapter 3, Stock applies her view, extreme intentionalism (the thesis that fictional content is determined by the author’s intentions), to the question of how true beliefs we acquire through reading fiction can be justified.