4 Vendler’s varieties of imagination

4.1 Two kinds of self-involvement

Vendler (1984) suggests that the phrase “S imagines doing A” invites what he calls “subjective” imagination, while the phrase “S imagines herself/himself doing A” can be used to describe “objective” imagination. Prima facie, Vendler seems to interpret the distinction between subjective and objective imagination in terms of two ways in which the self can be involved in our imaginings—implicitly or explicitly.

Subjective imagination concerns cases in which the self is implicitly involved in the imagining, whereas objective imagination concerns cases in which the self is explicitly involved in the imagining. This is why the phrase “imagining doing A”, which does not explicitly mention the agent of the action A, is best used to describe subjective imagination, whereas the phrase “imagining myself doing A”, which explicitly mentions myself as the agent of the action A, is more suitable to the description of objective imagination.

The self is implicitly involved in an imagining when it fixes the point of view internal to the imagined scene without being a constituent of that scene. One can imagine seeing the Panthéon from the other end of rue Soufflot without imagining oneself as another object in the scene. Still, the scene is imagined from a specific point of view, as defined by a virtual self. One can also imagine seeing oneself in front of the Panthéon. In such a case, the self is a constituent of the imagined scene—it is explicitly represented as a part of the imagining’s content.

Of course, when one imagines seeing oneself in front of the Panthéon, one’s imagining also involves the self implicitly. One imagines a scene from the perspective of a virtual self, which is distinct from oneself as a constituent of the scene. As a consequence, Vendler makes clear that subjective and objective imagination are not mutually exclusive. Commenting on Vendler’s distinction, François Recanati concurs, writing that “the objective imagination is a particular case of the subjective” (Recanati 2007, p. 196).

It should be sufficiently apparent that the distinction between implicit and explicit self-involvement is a matter of the imagining’s content and more precisely deals with the issue of how the self is involved in imagination. In contrast, the distinction between internal and external experiential perspectives has to do with the mode re-created in imagination, respectively an external and an internal experience. Therefore, the two distinctions answer different questions and turn out to be orthogonal.

First, objective imagination can involve the self either implicitly or explicitly (but not both at the same time). This is easily seen by considering the Panthéon example. Peacocke himself suggests another relevant case. He observes that the phrase “imagining being seated on a horse” is ambiguous between adopting the point of view of the rider (namely oneself) and adopting the point of view of someone else who could see the rider (see Peacocke 1985, p. 23). If the relevant perspective is that of the rider (namely oneself), the self need not be a constituent of the imagined scene—in this case (where the rider does not see any part of her body), it is implicitly involved in the imagining. In contrast, if the relevant perspective embraces oneself as the rider, the self is explicitly involved; it figures in the content of the imagining. However, both interpretations involve visual (i.e., external) perspectives, so what is at stake is a distinction within objective imagination rather than a contrast between subjective and objective imagination.[14]

Second, it is at least arguable that subjective imagination can involve the self either implicitly or explicitly. Suppose that one subjectively imagines swimming in the ocean. One may re-create the internal experience of what Marc Jeannerod & Elisabeth Pacherie (2004) call a “naked” intention (in action), which precisely does not involve an explicit representation of the agent. In this case, no self is part of the representational content of one’s imagining. One subjectively imagines swimming without imagining the agent as such, whether oneself or anyone else. However, one might also re-create a more complex internal experience, whose content embraces oneself as the agent of the action of swimming. Accordingly, in this case, the self (oneself) is explicitly represented in the content of one’s subjective imagining. One subjectively imagines a particular agent swimming; in Vendler’s example, that particular agent is oneself.

One might object to the last point and claim that the self is never an object of internal experience. One can have at best internal experiences of particular mental states, such as intentions in action, but never of oneself having those mental states. However, this is a substantial claim that certainly needs to be backed up by careful arguments. Note that the assumption that the self can figure in the content of an internal experience is in principle compatible with the Humean point that the self cannot be introspected. Introspection, conceived as a form of inner perception, is only one type of internal experience. Perhaps there are non-introspective cases of internal experience whose explicit contents cannot be fully specified except by using the first-person pronoun. For instance, one might argue that at least some cases of proprioception as well as internal experiences of controlling one’s body as a whole give us access to one’s self, or at least to the boundaries between oneself and the rest of the environment.[15]

Consider other examples offered by Vendler. When you imagine yourself eating a lemon by imagining your pinched face, your imagining is explicitly self-involving and might be fulfilled via objective imagination, such as visual imagination, but also via subjective imagination, such as proprioceptive imagination, at least to the extent that it recreates an internal experience of your bodily self. What about imagining implicitly involving the self? If while imagining eating a lemon, the subject imagines the action of eating a lemon and nothing else, she is exploiting her subjective imagination, insofar as she is re-creating an agentive perspective. It seems possible to imagine eating a lemon via objective imagination too, for instance by re-creating a visual experience as of an action independently of any identification of the agent.

To sum up, while the distinction between subjective and objective imagination seems to capture two forms or modalities of imagination, the distinction between two kinds of self-involvement, although important in itself, is less relevant to a taxonomy of experiential imagination. The orthogonality of these distinctions is shown again in figure 2. In the following sub-section we shall further motivate our hypothesis that Vendler’s own contrast examples are best understood in terms of the independently motivated distinction between internal and external experiences.

Figure 2: Explicit and implicit self-involvement in subjective and objective imagination