The evaluative character of imaginative resistance

British Journal of Aesthetics 46 (4):287-405 (2006)
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Abstract

A fiction may prescribe imagining that a pig can talk or tell the future. A fiction may prescribe imagining that torturing innocent persons is a good thing. We generally comply with imaginative prescriptions like the former, but not always with prescriptions like the latter: we imagine non-evaluative fictions without difficulty but sometimes resist imagining value-rich fictions. Thus arises the puzzle of imaginative resistance. Most analyses of the phenomenon focus on the content of the relevant imaginings. The present analysis focuses instead on the character of certain kinds of imaginings, arguing that we resist in such cases given the rich evaluative character of the imaginings prescribed, and the agent-dependent constraints on imagining in such ways.

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Dustin Stokes
University of Utah

Citations of this work

Imagination.Shen-yi Liao & Tamar Gendler - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The Problem of Imaginative Resistance.Tamar Szabó Gendler & Shen-yi Liao - 2015 - In Noël Carroll & John Gibson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature. New York: Routledge. pp. 405-418.
The Content-Dependence of Imaginative Resistance.Hanna Kim, Markus Kneer & Michael T. Stuart - 2018 - In Florian Cova & Sébastien Réhault (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 143-166.
Imagination.Tamar Szabó Gendler - 2012 - In Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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References found in this work

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Dispositional Theories of Value.Michael Smith, David Lewis & Mark Johnston - 1989 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 63 (1):89-174.
The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance.Tamar Gendler - 2000 - Journal of Philosophy 97 (2):55.
The expression of feeling in imagination.Richard Moran - 1994 - Philosophical Review 103 (1):75-106.

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