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7 Imagination Incorporated
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7 Imagination Incorporated The “default thought” theory of delusion needs to show how default thoughts, which are essentially simulations, can come to occupy the functional role of belief, or at least enough of that role to cause an interpreter (perhaps even a self-interpreter) to conclude that the subject is acting on the basis of belief. The problem also arises for imaginative theorists of delusion who argue that delusions are produced by processes of imagination rather than belief fixation (Currie 2000a; Currie and Jones 2006; McGinn 2004). My solution is similar in some respects to that of imaginative theorists such as Tamar Gendler and Andy Egan (Gendler 2008a,b, 2011; Egan 2009). Both Gendler and Egan argue that the everyday concepts of belief and imagination are inadequate for cases like delusion in which imaginatively generated states structure psychology in a belief-like way. Gendler suggests that we need a concept of “alief” to capture these ambiguous cases, and Egan proposes a concept of “bimagination.” While I think that Gendler and Egan are right about the structure of the problem, their solution is to revise the personal-level conceptual scheme by introducing a hybrid concept. Concepts like alief or bimagination abstract from the cognitive processes 136 Chapter 7 that generate the ambiguity. The approach I prefer is to trace the flow of information in the control hierarchy: to show how the default system functioning in delusional mode can structure personal-level psychology in characteristic ways. While I do not disagree with these imaginative theorists about the nature of the problem, my approach is more bottom-up, or “middleout ” (Arbib 2003). It starts with the cognitive level: the information -processing properties of the default system. As in previous chapters on default thinking, I argue that once these cognitive properties are fully described, the regimentation of personallevel vocabulary becomes a secondary issue. The nature of default processing explains why people are tempted to describe delusions variously as beliefs, aliefs, imaginary, and bimaginary states. I think we should describe them as per the theoretical definition given earlier: states of an unsupervised default system monopolized by hypersalient information. The default thought theory of delusion is congenial to the views of theorists such as Shaun Nichols who treat imagination as the offline simulation of other mental states. This account treats imagination and belief fixation as black boxes in a model of high-level cognitive processing and then employs that model to interpret personal-level phenomena and explain puzzles about the relationship between belief and imagination (Nichols 2004, 2006, 2008). The description of the default system provided in previous chapters suggests that the mechanism that produces simulations of personally relevant scenarios is the default system . So, for the purposes of this chapter, I will treat default thinking and imagination (as conceived by Nichols) as different levels of description of the default system involved in delusion. With that stipulation in place, I consider debates between imaginative and doxastic theorists of delusion and argue, not so [3.237.178.126] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:31 GMT) Imagination Incorporated 137 much that imaginative theorists are right, but that the default thought account of delusion can explain the ambiguous properties of delusions that generate that debate. 7.1 Incorporating Imagination What then is going on? The patient simply imagines that p (has the default thought that p) and proceeds accordingly. This type of acting on the basis of a mental state without metacognitive evaluation is incorporation. Incorporation is quite a familiar cognitive phenomenon. Any time we use the prepositional phrase “on the basis of” in psychological explanation, we are referring to instances of incorporation . For example, we fix beliefs, emote, form desires, and act “on the basis of” perception. Similarly, we may proceed from thought to thought or thought to action “on the basis of” the initial thought. In each case, mental states and actions associate in a sequence. In the case of delusion, people act “on the basis of” a default simulation: an imaginative state triggered by a sensory or perceptual anomaly. Before I defend the idea in more detail, consider the following case of incorporation. A parent has a teenage child who has not returned home after a party. The thought occurs “she has had an accident.” This thought is a default thought triggered by surprisal. The child is not home at 4:00 a.m., which violates a prediction. There are different ways such a thought can lead to behavior, depending on the mode in which...