Imagining and Believing: The Promise of a Single Code

Recent cognitive accounts of the imagination propose that imagining and believing are in the same “code”. According to the single code hypothesis, cognitive mechanisms that can take input from both imagining and from believing will process imagination-based inputs (“pretense representations”) and isomorphic beliefs in much the same way. In this paper, I argue that the single code hypothesis provides a unified and independently motivated explanation for a wide range of puzzles surrounding fiction. The imagination has always been one of the darker faculties of the human mind. Recent work on the imagination in cognitive science scarcely dispels all the mysteries of the imagination. But cognitive approaches might illuminate one central feature of imagination – the striking similarities between imagining and believing. In this paper I will explore the idea that the similarities between imagination and belief are partly explained by the hypothesis that imagination and belief are in a “single code”. A good deal of scaffolding is necessary to explain this idea, but I will argue that the single code hypothesis provides a surprisingly powerful account of one aspect of the imagination. Unraveling the details of the relation between imagining and believing has ascended to a prominent place on the agenda of researchers working on theories of imagination, fiction, and belief. In this paper, I will not be defending an underdog theory. Far from it – the single code theory, in one form or another, is embraced by most contemporary cognitivist accounts of pretense and imagination. However, the explanatory power of the single code hypothesis has not, I’ll maintain, been adequately recognized. The single code hypothesis provides a unified explanation for a wide range of similarities between imagination and belief. In the first section of this paper, I will describe and elaborate the version of the single code theory that Stephen Stich and I have developed. Then I will argue that this theory offers simple solutions to a diverse set of philosophical puzzles about fiction. I. FICTION AND IMAGINATION In earlier work, Stephen Stich and I developed a cognitive theory of the imagination, based largely on empirical findings and empirical considerations about pretend play. A brief review of a portion of our theory of pretend play will supply backdrop. Several features of the theory can be illustrated with a lovely experiment on children by Alan Leslie. In Leslie’s experiment, the child pretends to fill two cups with tea. The experimenter picks up one of the cups, upends it, and places it next to the other cup. Then the experimenter asks the child to point at the “full cup” and at the “empty cup”. Both cups are really empty throughout the entire procedure, but two-year-olds reliably indicate that the “empty cup” is the one that had been turned upside down and the “full cup” is the other one. One significant feature of episodes like Leslie’s tea party is that children distinguish what is pretend from what is real. That is, at no point in this experiment do children believe that either of the cups is full. Their pretense that the cup is full is “quarantined” from their belief that the cup is not full. Another, more interesting, feature of the experiment is that it indicates that a belief and a pretense can have exactly the same content. When the children are asked to point to the “empty cup” and the “full cup”, they maintain that the previously overturned cup is the empty one. On the most natural interpretation of this, the child is pretending that the cup is empty. We adopt the representationalist approach that is common in this area and say that such pretending involves a “pretense representation” with the content the cup is empty. Although the child is pretending that the cup is empty, she is not blind to the fact that the cup is really empty throughout; rather, the child also believes that the cup is empty. This suggests that the crucial difference between “pretense representations” and beliefs is not given by the content of the representation. For a pretense representation and a belief can have exactly the same content. So, pretense representations are quarantined from beliefs, and yet the distinction is not driven by differences in content. The natural cognitivist proposal, then, is that pretense representations differ from belief representations by their function. Just as desires are distinguished from beliefs by their characteristic functional roles, so too pretenses are distinguished from beliefs. Stich and I exploit the familiar illustrative device of using boxes to represent functional groupings, and we propose that besides a belief box and a desire box, there is a “pretense box”. This pretense box, we suggest, is part of the basic architecture of the human mind. In addition to a pretense box, Stich and I propose a mechanism that supplies the pretense box with representations that initiate or embellish an episode of pretense, the “Script Elaborator”. This is required to explain the bizarre and creative elements that are evident in much pretend play. However, there are also much more staid and predictable elaborations in pretend play. This too is well illustrated by Leslie’s experiment. Virtually all of the children in his experiment responded the same way when asked to point to the “empty cup”. How are these orderly patterns to be explained? In everyday life when we acquire new beliefs, we routinely draw inferences and update our beliefs. No one knows how this process works, but no one disputes that it does work. There must be some set of mechanisms subserving inference and updating, and we can simply use another functional grouping to collect these mechanisms under the heading “Inference Mechanisms”. Now, to explain the orderly responses of the children in Leslie’s experiment, we propose that the representations in the pretense box are processed by the same inference mechanisms that operate over real beliefs. Of course, to draw these inferences the child must be able to use real world knowledge about the effects of gravity and so forth, and so Stich and I also suppose that the inferences the child makes during pretense can somehow draw on the child’s beliefs. Putting this all together generates the functional architecture depicted in Figure 1.