Imaginary Worlds

Leaders today seem to be suffering from what might be called a failure of the imagination. We seem to be continually finding ourselves in situations where the leaders say something like “no one could have imagined that this would happen.” For example: Who could imagined that Hurricane Katrina would breach the levies in New Orleans; who could have imagined that an insurgency would arise from the U.S. invasion of Iraq; who could have imagined that falling foam could critically damage a space shuttle; who could have imagined that people would crash airplanes into buildings; and so forth. Some time after such statements were made it has turned out that people did imagine such possibilities, so it was humanly possible, but the decision makers were committed to one way of thinking about these things and so did not imagine alternative ways that the world might turn out than what they expected. For several years I have been studying various aspects of imaginary worlds, when and how people construct and use them; but in looking back now I see that the seeds of this work were laid in the story understanding and memory research I did with Gordon Bower in the later 1970s. Particularly striking in retrospect is a paragraph that appeared in a paper we published in the journal Poetics in 1980 (Black & Bower, 1980). The initial parts of this paper critiqued the extant story grammar theories of story understanding and memory, then proposed that the structure of stories could be characterized as