The Content-Dependence of Imaginative Resistance

Abstract

An observation of Hume’s has received a lot of attention over the last decade and a half: Although we can standardly imagine the most implausible scenarios, we encounter resistance when imagining propositions at odds with established moral (or perhaps more generally evaluative) convictions. The literature is ripe with ‘solutions’ to this so-called ‘Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’. Few, however, question the plausibility of the empirical assumption at the heart of the puzzle. In this paper, we explore empirically whether the difficulty we witness in imagining certain propositions is indeed due to claim type (evaluative v. non-evaluative) or whether it is much rather driven by mundane features of content. Our findings suggest that claim type plays but a marginal role, and that there might hence not be much of a ‘puzzle’ to be solved.

Full text

7
e Content-Dependence of Imaginative
Resistance
Hanna Kim, Markus Kneer, and Michael T.Stuart*
1. Introduction
Imaginative resistance “occurs when an otherwise competent imaginer nds
it dicult to engage in some sort of prompted imaginative activity” (Gendler
and Liao 2016). ere are now many puzzles surrounding this phenomenon
(see, e.g., Gendler and Liao 2016, Kieran and Lopes 2003, Todd 2009, Walton
2006, Weatherson 2004). In this paper, we focus on the oldest and most widely
discussed puzzle, which was baptized by Tamar Gendler in her work (2000), and
traces back to Kendall Walton, Richard Moran, and ultimately, DavidHume.
is version of the puzzle of imaginative resistance involves “our inability
or unwillingness to imagine counter-moral propositions in ction” (Kind and
Kung 2016:23). In Hume’s words, there are many things in a ction that we
know are descriptively wrong, and that will “detract but little from the value of
those compositions” (Hume 17 57 , para. 33). For example, we seem to have no
problem with leprechauns, hobbits, and vampires, which we know do not exist.
However, “a very violent eort is requisite to change our judgment of manners,
and excite sentiments of approbation or blame, love or hatred, dierent from
those to which the mind, from long custom, has been familiarized” (Hume
17 57 ). For example, if Shakespeare had written all the circumstances of
Duncan’s murder at the hands of Macbeth exactly as we know them, but added
that Macbeth’s actions were morally praiseworthy, this would have been very
dicult for us to imagine (Moran 1994). e puzzle, then, concerns how we
* Names are in alphabetical order; the three authors contributed equally to thiswork.
9781350038837_pi-326.indd 143 13-Jun-18 12:00:29 PM
Uncorrected proof. Please consult the final version. Citation: Kim, H., Kneer,
M. and Stuart, M.T. (2019), “The Content-Dependence of Imaginative
Resistance”, in Cova, F. and Réhault, S. (eds.), Advances in Experimental
Philosophy of Aesthetics, London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

144 Advances in Experimental Philosophy
can explain the dierence in diculty between imagining counterevaluative and
counterdescriptive propositions.1
e empirical assumption underlying the puzzle is that people do indeed
experience more imaginative resistance when they attempt to imagine scenarios
that are evaluatively deviant rather than descriptively deviant. We apparently
have a harder time imagining that something ugly is beautiful, that something
morally wrong is right, that something dull is funny, or that something clumsy is
elegant, than we do imagining something that is descriptivelyfalse.
is “curious asymmetry” (Kieran and Lopes 2003:8, Matravers 2003:91)
is widely assumed in the literature, not very oen argued for, and frequently
restricted to moral deviance. For example, Moranasks,
Why can we not, as it seems, treat the judgments of morality and decency the
same way we treat any other judgments, and accept as ctionally true what the
story tells us (or implies) is true, and comfortably leave our genuine attitudes
at the door? What happens to our sense of distance at that point, the distance
between what we can imagine and what we actually believe? e suggestion here
is that we cannot treat these as on a par with other ctional truths. (1994:97 )
Magdalena Balcerak Jackson writes that “most convincing examples of
imaginative resistance involve requests to imagine situations where morally
highly deviant behaviors and attitudes are endorsed” (2016:47 ). Neil van
Leeuwen wonders why “it seems easy to incorporate outlandish descriptive
propositions into our understanding of the story, but our minds are far less
exible about incorporating outlandish moral propositions” (2016:103–104).2
Like Hume and Moran, Walton uses introspection and thought experiments
to motivate the claim that imagining counterevaluatives is more dicult than
imagining counterdescriptives (1990:154–155, 1994), though he expands the
claim beyond morality to other evaluatives. For example,
If in a story a comedian tells [in Walton’s own words elsewhere, “a really dumb
joke”] and the author simply writes explicitly in the text that it is hilariously
funny, Iexpect that Iwould attribute a juvenile or an incomprehensible sense
of humor to the narrator, and stick with my own judgment that the joke is not
funny. Iinsist on applying my own sense of humor. (Walton 1994:40)
is example is meant to show that it isn’t just moral deviance that we resist, but
counterevaluatives of many kinds (see also Yablo 2002:485). As we said above,
this was Hume’s original point. In this paper, then, we will speak of the puzzle of
imaginative resistance in terms of counterevaluatives broadly conceived.
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Imaginative Resistance and Content 145
What sorts of reasons are there for believing that imaginative resistance is
more powerful for counterevaluatives than for counterdescriptives? e most
common strategy is to provide a few short narratives or narrative sketches to
pump intuitions into agreement. “We happily go along with talking mice and
time-travel tales, but we balk if recreational torture is endorsed, or presented
as truly permissible within the story” (Driver 2008:302). Asecond strategy
dierentiates between kinds of imagination:one kind draws on the faculty of
sentiment, and another on (what Hume called) the faculty of understanding.
Desire-like (Currie 2002) or value-like (Stokes 2006) imagination on the
sentiment side is more dicult to control than cognitive imagination on the
understanding side. If this is true, it would explain why we experience more
resistance with counterevaluatives than with counterdescriptives. Athird reason
is that while we oen import real beliefs, desires, and values into ctions (e.g., we
assume Sherlock Holmes has at least one kidney because we believe all humans
do), we can also export imaginings into real beliefs, desires, and values (e.g.,
we might come to believe, desire, and value things about nineteenth-century
London because of Dickens’s novels). Imaginative resistance is then argued
to be about what we ought to imagine, given that we risk exporting what we
imagine into what we believe, desire, and value. We ought to resist imagining
any counterevaluative that might “contaminate” (that is, negatively aect) our
moral framework (Gendler 2000). Afourth reason might be that there are no
counterdescriptives that cannot be imagined. Some of the best contenders for
counterdescriptives that we cannot imagine are conceptual impossibilities,
which, Gendler argues, can be imagined aer all (Gendler 2000). If we can
imagine that the sum of ve and seven both is and is not equal to twelve, then
certainly we can imagine any descriptive claim in a ction. And this is not the
case, Gendler claims, for counterevaluatives.
But there are also good reasons for doubting that it is more dicult to imagine
counterevaluatives than counterdescriptives (see Mothersill 2006, Tanner 1994,
Todd 2009, Weatherson 2004, Yablo 2002). One is that Hume’s distinction
between sentiment and understanding might be cognitively crude. If there is
no defensible distinction between the faculties of sentiment and understanding,
or if such faculties do not exist, the asymmetry disappears. Another is that we
might not believe there are moral facts, in which case it becomes dicult to see
how there can be moral counterevaluatives, and again the puzzle loses some of its
bite. Something similar happens if we deny a strict distinction between facts and
values (see Marchetti and Marchetti 2017 ). We might also target Gendler’s claim
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146 Advances in Experimental Philosophy
that conceptual impossibilities can be imagined. Stock (2003), for example,
argues that they cannot.
To help decide the issue, we could turn to experiment. Black and Barnes
(2017 ) show that there is quite a bit of individual variability in the amount of
imaginative resistance people experience, and also that imaginative resistance
is positively correlated with moral features (e.g., moral authority, moral
harm, disgust sensitivity, fear of moral contagion, etc.). If this is right, people
do experience some form of imaginative resistance when exposed to certain
counterevaluatives. What we are interested in, however, is the assumption on
which much of the work on this topic is premised:whether it is really more
dicult to imagine counterevaluatives than counterdescriptives.
In our study, we investigated whether the degree to which a proposition
was counterevaluative or counterdescriptive inuenced levels of imaginative
resistance. Dierently put, we explored whether imaginative resistance is
sensitive not only to proposition type (evaluative vs. descriptive) but also
content, independently of type. We found that it was. Apilot study indicated
that, in general, counterevaluative claims generate signicantly more resistance
than counterdescriptive claims. However, the degree of counterfactuality also
had a signicant eect on resistance judgments.3 In other words, imaginative
resistance cannot be accounted for purely in terms of claim type. Instead,
features of content (of which degree of counterfactuality is but one) seem to
have an impact aswell.
e pilot study raised a worry for imaginative resistance traditionally
conceived:What if the detected overall dierence in resistance between
counterevaluative and counterdescriptive claims is not in fact due to claim type,
but instead to features of content for which the experiment does not control? More
precisely, resistance might be triggered by contents that represent states of aairs
that are considered unlikely, astonishing, unusual, and so on. For simplicity, we
introduce a catch-all term for potential resistance-inducing properties of this
sort:“weirdness.” It might turn out that the counterevaluatives invoked in the
literature as those that produce imaginative resistance (e.g., the proposition
that the practice of genocide or slavery is morally acceptable, or that it is evil
to associate with people of other races [Walton, 1994:28]) are simply “weirder”
than the counterdescriptives with which they are standardly compared (e.g., the
proposition that there is a ring that makes its wearer invisible, or that a village in
Scotland appears and disappears every one hundred years [Walton, 1994:31]).
If this turns out to be correct, the dierence in imaginative resistance triggered
by dierent claims would thus not be due to claim type, but weirdness of claim
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Imaginative Resistance and Content 147
content. Our study addressed this worry by exploring imaginative resistance
across claim types while controlling for a variety of features that might render
their contentweird.
2. Experiment
2.1 Participants
A total of 1,216 participants were recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turk to
complete a paid online survey on Qualtrics. e IP location was restricted to
the United States. Subjects who failed an attention test, took less than een
seconds to complete the main task, changed their response more than ten times,
or had native languages that were not English were excluded. e exclusion
criteria were determined in advance of the experiment. Aer the elimination,
845 subjects remained, of whom 441 were female. e average age was 38.8years
(SD=12.3years).
2.2 Method and materials
Participants were randomly assigned to one of twenty-four conditions in a 6
(claim type:evaluative 1 vs. evaluative 2 vs. evaluative 3 vs. descriptive 1 vs.
descriptive 2 vs. descriptive 3)x 4 (degree of counterfactuality:low vs. medium-
low vs. medium-high vs. high) design. Evaluative 1 involved a moral norm,
evaluative 2 involved a humor norm, and evaluative 3 involved an aesthetic norm.
Each participant responded to three questions regarding weirdness and three
questions regarding imaginative resistance (truth, diculty, and possibility).
Appendix 2 in the Supplementary Materials contains the complete text of all
scenarios and questions.4 We will use the aesthetic condition as an example. e
prompt and questions (variations of degree in square brackets)read:
Adaleine, Picasso’s greatest student, was a prolic painter, whose work was
unfortunately lost to history—with the exception of her last painting:A 3x4’
canvas, painted from edge to edge in the exact same shade of yellow as the
McDonald’s golden arches. It is [a somewhat beautiful paintingi /a beautiful
paintingii /a very beautiful paintingiii /without doubt one of the most beautiful
works ever madeiv].
Q1 (weirdness 1):How unusual is it that Adaleine’s painting is [a somewhat
beautiful paintingi /a beautiful paintingii /a very beautiful paintingiii /without
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148 Advances in Experimental Philosophy
doubt one of the most beautiful works ever madeiv]? (1=completely ordinary,
7=completely unusual)
Q2 (weirdness 2):If there is a world where Adaleine’s painting is [a somewhat
beautiful paintingi /a beautiful paintingii /a very beautiful paintingiii /without
doubt one of the most beautiful works ever madeiv], how dierent would this
world be from ours? (1=completely the same, 7 =completely dierent)
Q3 (weirdness 3):How surprised would you be if you found out that Adaleine’s
painting is [a somewhat beautiful paintingi /a beautiful paintingii /a very
beautiful paintingiii /without doubt one of the most beautiful works ever
madeiv] in our world? (1=completely unsurprised, 7 =completely surprised)
Q4 (truth):If you were to nd the previous scenario within a work of ction,
to what extent would you agree that the following statement is true in the
ctional scenario? (1=completely agree, 7 =completely disagree)
“Adaleine’s painting is [a somewhat beautiful paintingi /a beautiful paintingii
/a very beautiful paintingiii /without doubt one of the most beautiful
works ever madeiv].”
Q5 (diculty):How dicult is it for you to imagine that Adaleine’s painting
is [a somewhat beautiful paintingi /a beautiful paintingii /a very beautiful
paintingiii /without doubt one of the most beautiful works ever madeiv]?
(1=very easy, 7 =very dicult)
Q6 (possibility):To what extent do you deem it possible to imagine that
Adaleine’s painting is [a somewhat beautiful paintingi /a beautiful paintingii
/a very beautiful paintingiii /without doubt one of the most beautiful works
ever madeiv]? (1=completely possible, 7 =completely impossible)
Participants responded to all questions on Likert scales ranging from 1 to 7 ,
which were anchored as specied above. e order of test questions was xed.
e experimental prompts were preceded by an attention check and followed by
a demographic questionnaire.
2.3 Results
Since we were interested in the impact of claim type and degree, we aggregated
across scenarios of the same claim type. We conducted a mixed ANOVA with
Greenhouse-Geisser correction (within-subjects factor:measure—truth versus
diculty versus possibility; between-subjects factors:claim type—evaluative
versus descriptive, degree—low versus medium-low versus medium-high
versus high). ere was a signicant main eect for degree F(3,837 )=36.18,
p < .001, p
2=.115, a signicant main eect for measure F(1.80,1504.26)=47 .06,
p < .001, p
2=.053, a signicant main eect for claim type F(1,837 )=37 .68,
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Imaginative Resistance and Content 149
p < .001, p
2=.043. e measure*degree interaction was signicant F(5.39,
1504.26)=9.63, p < .001, p
2=.033, and so were the measure*claim type
interaction F(1.80, 1504.26)=33.30, p < .001, p
2=.038 and the degree*claim
type interaction F(3,837 )=3.18, p=.023, p
2=.011. e three-way interaction
was not signicant F(5.40, 1504.26)=.7 8, p=.57 7 , p
2=.003.
To further explore the eect of claim type and degree of counterfactuality
on the three distinct measures of imaginative resistance, we ran an ANOVA
each for truth, diculty, and possibility judgments. With truth as the dependent
variable (Figure7 .1), claim type proved signicant F(1,837 )=93.38, p < .001,
p
2=.10, and so did degree F(3,837 )=5.62, p=.001, p
2=.02. e interaction
was not signicant F(3,837 )=1.03, p=.38, p
2=.004.
For the dependent variable diculty (Figure7 .2), claim type did not
prove signicant F(1,837 )=3.25, p=.07 , p
2=.004), degree was signicant
F(3,837 )=35.16, p < .001, p
2=.11, and the interaction was not signicant
F(3,837 )=1.57 , p=.20, p
2=.006.
For the dependent variable possibility (Figure7 .3), claim type proved
signicant F(1,837 )=7 .49, p=.006, p
2=.01, degree was signicant
F(3,837 )=38.03, p < .001, p
2=.12, and the interaction was also signicant
(F(3,837 )=4.45, p =.004, p
2=.02.
In short, while claim type has a considerable impact on imaginative resistance
judgments regarding truth (p
2=.10, a medium eect), it has next to no eect
on either diculty or possibility judgments (p
2 < .01, i.e., not even a small
7
6
5
Mean rating
4
4
Evaluative
Descriptive
3
3
2
2
Degree of counterfactuality
Error bars designate standard error of the mean
11
Figure7.1 Mean ratings of imaginative resistance in terms of truth for evaluative and
descriptive claims across degrees of counterfactuality
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150 Advances in Experimental Philosophy
eect size). By contrast, degree of counterfactuality has a pronounced eect on
diculty (p
2=.11) and possibility judgments (p
2=.12), yet a much smaller
eect on truth judgments (p
2=.02).
Next, we explored whether claim type still had an impact on imaginative
resistance once weirdness of content was controlled for. Recall that for each
target claim c, participants rated how unusual they considered c, to what extent
a world in which c is true would dier from ours, and how surprised they would
7
6
5
Mean rating
4
4
Evaluative
Descriptive
3
3
2
2
Degree of counterfactuality
Error bars designate standard error of the mean
11
Figure7.2 Mean ratings of imaginative resistance in terms of diculty for evaluative
and descriptive claims across degrees of counterfactuality
7
6
5
Mean rating
4
4
Evaluative
Descriptive
3
3
2
2
Degree of counterfactuality
Error bars designate standard error of the mean
1
1
Figure7.3 Mean ratings of imaginative resistance in terms of possibility for evaluative
and descriptive claims across degrees of counterfactuality
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Imaginative Resistance and Content 151
be to learn that c was actually the case. Averaging across the results, we calculated
a weirdness composite score. Across conditions, reliability analyses produced a
Cronbach’s alpha of .7 5 among the questions used to compute the weirdness
score, indicating that the composite score was strongly internally consistent. On
average, weirdness scores for the counterdescriptive claims (M=5.31, SD=1.45)
were signicantly higher than those for counterevaluative claims (M=4.7 7 ,
SD=1.60), t(843)=-5.19, p < .001, Cohen’s d=.36, a small eect.5
We also conducted hierarchical multiple regressions (HMRs) in order to
explore whether claim type had an impact on the three measures of imaginative
resistance, once weirdness of content had been controlled for. Table7 .1
summarizes the HMR results for all three types of imaginative resistance
judgments.
Truth: e rst hierarchical multiple regression revealed that at stage one,
weirdness contributed signicantly to the regression model, F(1,844)=54.7 1,
p < .001, and accounted for 6.1percent of the variation in truth judgments.
Introducing claim type explained an additional 13.2percent of variation in
truthjudgments and this change in R² was signicant, F(2,844)=100.67 ,
p<.001. Together the two independent variables accounted for 19.3percent of
the variance in truth judgements. Furthermore, the positive value of b=.435 for
weirdness shows that weirdness was a positive predictor of truth—that is, the
weirder the claim, the less likely one was to accept it as true in the ction. e
negative value of b for claim type (i.e., −1.595) indicates that evaluative claims
(coded as 0)were less likely to be accepted as true in the ction than descriptive
ones (codedas1).
Tabl e7.1 Hierarchical regression analyses fortruth
Truth Diculty Possibility
Predictor B SE b Βp B SE b βp b SE b βp
Step 1
Constant 1.965 0.245 <.001 0.591 0.218 <.01 0.382 0.204 Ns
Weirdness 0.344 0.047 0.247 <.001 0.7 3 0.041 0.519 <.001 0.636 0.039 0.492 <.001
Step 2
Constant 2.293 0.229 <.001 0.7 16 0.217 <.01 0.517 0.202 <.001
Weirdness 0.435 0.044 0.312 <.001 0.7 64 0.041 0.544 <.001 0.67 3 0.039 0.521 <.001
Claim Type –1.595 0.136 –0.369 <.001 –0.609 0.129 –0.14 <.001 –0.657 0.12 –0.164 <.001
(R2 = .061 for Step 1; ∆R2=.132 for Step 2, all ps < .001), diculty (R2 = .27 0 for Step 1;
∆R2=.019 for Step 2, all ps < .001) and possibility (R2 = .242 for Step 1; ∆R2=.026 for Step
2, all ps <.001).
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152 Advances in Experimental Philosophy
Diculty: e second hierarchical multiple regression revealed that at stage
one, weirdness contributed signicantly to the regression model F(1,844)=311.43
p < .001, and accounted for 27 .0percent of the variation in diculty judgments.
Introducing claim type only explained an additional 1.9percent of variation in
diculty judgments and this change in R² was signicant, F(2,844)=17 0.90,
p < .001. Together the two independent variables accounted for 28.9percent
of the variance in diculty judgments. As above, the weirder the claim, the
more dicult it was to imagine it (b > 0). Furthermore, descriptive claims were
deemed less dicult to imagine than evaluative ones (b<0).
Possibility: e third hierarchical multiple regression revealed that at stage one,
weirdness contributed signicantly to the regression model, F(1,844)=269.14,
p < .001, and accounted for 24.2percent of the variation in possibility judgments.
Introducing claim type only explained an additional 2.6percent of variation in
possibility judgments and this change in R² was signicant, F(2,844)=154.18,
p < .001. Together the two independent variables accounted for 26.8percent of
the variance in possibility judgments. Again, the weirder the claim, the more it
was considered impossible to imagine (b > 0). Furthermore, descriptive claims
were deemed less impossible to imagine than evaluative ones (b<0).
In a nal analysis, we double-checked the results of the HMR analyses. e
six scenarios, each of which invoked target claims diering in terms of degree of
counterfactuality made for twenty-four individual conditions. We conducted a
Tukey post-hoc test for the weirdness scores of the twenty-four conditions, and
used the largest homogenous subset to explore the impact of claim type on the
three measures of imaginative resistance. Dierently put, we explored whether
claim type still has an impact on judgments of imaginative resistance (truth,
diculty, and possibility), when the claims at stake were deemed weird to similar
extents. Consistent with the HMR results, imaginative resistance conceived in
terms of truth in ction is signicantly higher for evaluative claims than for
descriptive claims (p < .001), though no signicant dierence could be detected
across claim types for diculty judgments (p=.32) or possibility judgments
(p=.63). For the full analysis, cf. Appendix 3 in the Supplementary Materials.6
2.4. Discussion
So far, we have proceeded under the assumption that judgments regarding
truth in ction, diculty, and the possibility of imagining a non-actual state
of aairs all belong to a single, uniform category. ey all capture dierent, yet
not unrelated, aspects of imaginative resistance (where imaginative resistance
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Imaginative Resistance and Content 153
is understood in a broad sense), just as judgments regarding wrongness, blame,
permissibility, and punishment are standardly conceived of as dierent types
of moral judgments. However, given the results, it might be helpful to draw
more attention to the distinction between imaginative resistance conceived
in terms of truth judgments on the one hand, and in terms of diculty and
possibility on the other. Our ndings, we would like to suggest, might support
a dual process model of imaginative resistance, a model that is structurally (and
structurally only) similar to Cushman’s (2008, 2013) dual process model of moral
judgment. According to the latter, wrongness and permissibility judgments are
principally sensitive to mental states, whereas blame and punishment judgments
are sensitive both to mental states and causal factors and outcomes. In the case of
imaginative resistance, we found truth in ction (or “ctionality”) judgments to
be sensitive both to claim type (evaluative vs. descriptive) and features of content
(degree of counterfactuality, or weirdness); diculty and possibility judgments,
by contrast, were found to be sensitive to features of content only (Figure7 .4).7
3. General discussion
ere are many questions to ask concerning imaginative resistance. Some
relate to its scope. For instance, does imaginative resistance arise from certain
moral propositions, evaluative propositions more generally, or also for
counterdescriptive propositions? /Do we resist any of these types of propositions
more than others? And what explains the varying amounts and types of
resistance? In the following, we will briey trace out the implications of our
ndings for these questions. In closing, we will address some possible directions
for future research.
Regarding scope, our pilot data showed that imaginative resistance exists
for nonmoral counterevaluative claims as well as for counterdescriptive claims
(see also Black and Barnes 2016). In other words, imaginative resistance has
Content
Claim Type
Difficulty
Possibility
Fictionality
Figure7.4 e dual process model of imaginative resistance
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154 Advances in Experimental Philosophy
wide scope with respect to claim type. Do the dierent claim types face dierent
levels of resistance in principle? We found that resistance can be stronger for
nonmoral counterevaluatives than for moral counterevaluatives. us, if Hume’s
asymmetry did obtain, Hume, Walton, and Yablo would be correct that it holds
for counterevaluatives of all kinds, rather than merely moral counterevaluatives.
e overwhelming focus in the literature on specically moral counterevaluatives
might therefore be somewhat inappropriate. We have also shown that resistance
can be more pronounced for certain counterdescriptives than for certain
counterevaluatives. erefore, the strong claim that counterevaluatives always
produce more imaginative resistance than counterdescriptives isfalse.
More importantly, the results from our experiment show that out of the three
measures of imaginative resistance tested (truth, diculty, possibility), claim
type matters only for truth judgments (that is, whether something is judged
to be true in the ction). And even in this case, claim type is neither the only
signicant factor driving resistance (degree is also signicant:F(3,837 )=36.18,
p < .001, p
2=.115), nor is its impact particularly pronounced (the eect size
of the main eect of claim type on resistance was medium-small, p
2=.043).
is suggests that with respect to any of the three measures tested here, there
is no principled asymmetry we can draw between counterevaluatives and
counterdescriptives. Hence the alleged puzzle, according to which a dierence
in imaginative resistance is due exclusively or, at the very least, predominantly to
claim type, simply does not exist. On the other hand, if Hume’s original puzzle is
taken to refer only to imaginative resistance in the sense of resistance to truth in
ction judgments, and his observation is merely that claim type partially explains
such resistance, the puzzle remains, though in a substantially weakerform.
Turning to explanations of imaginative resistance, we found that the
“weirdness” of a claim was the main explanatory factor for resistance conceived
in terms of diculty and possibility, and a partial predictor of resistance
conceived in terms of judgments of truth in ction. As long as one wants to
postulate a general concept of imaginative resistance that captures a variety of
distinct, though related phenomena, one might want to adopt a dual process
model:diculty and possibility judgments are inuenced principally by features
of content (as measured by degree of weirdness), whereas truth in ction
judgments are inuenced by both content and claim type. Anumber of questions
now stand out. First, what is weirdness? In our study it was an amalgamation of
(i)unusualness, (ii) dierence from the actual world, and (iii) surprisingness.
But how exactly do these factors contribute to imaginative resistance? Second,
what is it about truth in ction judgments that makes them turn on content and
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Imaginative Resistance and Content 155
claim type, while diculty and possibility judgments are only tied to weirdness?
We take up these questions inturn.
3.1 Unusualness
“We happily go along with talking mice and time-travel tales, but we balk if
recreational torture is endorsed, or presented as truly permissible within the
story” (Driver 2008:302). Perhaps this is because ctions endorsing recreational
torture are more unusual than talking mice tales, in the sense that most of us
have some previous experience with fables, movies, and cartoons that portray
nonhuman creatures that talk, but we don’t typically have as much experience
with stories that involve morally permissible recreational torture. If imaginative
resistance is a function of unusualness, and unusualness is a function of previous
experience, then, a fortiori, imaginative resistance is a function of previous
experience. is is just as Hume said:we resist imagining things “dierent from
those to which the mind, from long custom, has been familiarized.” Imaginative
resistance caused by unusualness might therefore be explained as what happens
when a ction attempts to overcome a certain kind of cognitive inertia established
by experience.
3.2 Dierence from the actualworld
Our dierent intuitive reactions to time travel and torture might not rely on
the perceived dierence between the ctional and actual world since it would
be very dicult to work out whether the time travel world is farther from the
actual world than the morally permissible torture world. But the dierence
between the ctional and the actual world is helpful in measuring the degree of
imaginative resistance we experience. Astory with talking mice is closer to the
actual world than a story with talking mice who have also mastered time travel,
which is closer still than a world in which those same mice are morally right to
travel through time in order to pursue their recreational torture activities.
Also, the perceived closeness of a ctional world to the actual world might
contribute to an explanation of the political sense of imaginative resistance.
is kind of imaginative resistance results any time we are asked to imagine
something that we recognize might “contaminate” our actual beliefs, values, and
decision-making behavior. And it should hold equally for counterdescriptives
as for counterevaluatives; as it does, for example, with imagining there to be
important cognitive dierences between human races, or imagining that the
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156 Advances in Experimental Philosophy
refugees in our countries have come purposely to damage our societies. In
other words, perhaps distance from our own doxastic-evaluative framework
(or distance from the set of evaluative and descriptive propositions we believe)
is a type of perceived distance from the actual world, which could explain the
political sense of imaginative resistance. We refuse to imagine recreational
torture as morally permissible because it would not be morally right in this
world, whatever the case in other worlds (cf. Gendler 2000). And we should not
spend too much time in those worlds, lest we get any strangeideas.
3.3 Surprisingness
Surprise is a response to a violated expectation, and that expectation can be built
upon several things, including previous experience, an inference, or convention.
When the expectation violated is based on previous experience, surprise is
related to unusualness, as oen-experienced correlations that suddenly cease to
hold will be judged unusual and can surprise us. When the expectation violated
is built upon an inference about what will happen in a ction, surprise becomes
related to perceived nearness of a ctional world to the actual world, since the
worlds about which our inferences fail in surprising ways will be judged as
distant worlds.
Expectations can also be set up by context, including pragmatic context
and genre. Liao, Strohminger, and Sripada (2014) show experimentally that
imaginative resistance diminishes or vanishes when dealing with less realistic
genres (see also Black, Capps, and Barnes forthcoming). Stock (2017 :Chapter4)
provides examples where children murder innocent parents, innocent people
are tortured or killed, and women are degraded, and there is very little or no
imaginative resistance because of the genre, whether gothic, erotic, horror, or
black humor. In these cases we do not balk, presumably because the pragmatic
context (including genre) can change our expectations and evaluations by
changing our dispositions to characterize and frame certain objects and
events (Camp forthcoming). e pragmatic context tells us “what to do” when
confronted with a ction. When we are confronted with a ction about talking
mice, we know what to do:imagine the talking mice roughly as tiny people
who like cheese and are afraid of cats. We can experience resistance if those
mice do something talking mice don’t normally do in their genre. When we’re
confronted with a story in which recreational torture is morally permissible,
we will experience resistance only if that story isn’t embedded in a pragmatic
context that makes recreational torture morally permissible. Because genre sets
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Imaginative Resistance and Content 157
up expectations that are violated, genre could certainly be included in weirdness
as an explanatory factor for imaginative resistance.
3.4 Other factors
Our weirdness measure draws on unusualness, distance from the actual world,
and surprisingness. But presumably, other factors could gure into weirdness
that would make it an even better predictor of imaginative resistance. Another
possibility is that a ctional claim is weirder when its assertions contravene
commitments that are more deeply held (following Todd 2009). at is, they are
“weird” because we cannot work out how to tell a consistent story given the claims
made in the ction plus our existing commitments. We either don’t know which
claims need to be altered, or how to alter them. Since moral beliefs are plausibly
among those things to which we are most strongly committed, this would explain
why we oen experience imaginative resistance to counterevaluatives:because
many of us are strongly committed to our values. But it also explains why we
can identify counterdescriptives that produce more resistance (Black and
Barnes 2016), because denying these would require equally great (or greater)
adjustments to our webs of commitment. Of course, all of this holds only when
the reader knows that the author intends her to believe that the weird claim does
follow from the narrative in the sense that if the scenario actually obtained, the
weird claim would indeed follow (Stock 2017 :Chapter4). is isn’t always the
case:sometimes authors simply want their readers to entertain weird claims for
fun, puzzlement, or some other eect, in which case we experience no resistance.
We can set aside these cases, since our studies follow the philosophical literature
in presenting cases that do seem to ask the reader to assent that p follows from
q in the scenario (e.g., that shooting Jack and Jill was the right thing to do, given
the other features of the case). If the centrality of the commitments countered by
the scenario does play a role in determining weirdness, imaginative resistance
can then be used as a partial measure for how central a commitment is. e
suggestion would be:the more dicult it is to see a counterfactual inference
through, the more likely it is that the inference requires denying a central
commitment. Likewise, given increasingly central commitments, we should be
able to produce increasing levels of imaginative resistance in an experiment.
Another potential source of weirdness is the epistemological authority of
the author (Matravers 2003). According to Matravers, we trust journalists to
tell us which events took place, but not what is morally right or hilariously
funny. In other words, it isn’t the content that drives imaginative resistance,
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158 Advances in Experimental Philosophy
but the perceived epistemological status of the author. While our results show
that imaginative resistance is not unique to evaluatives, we have not explored
the possibility that we might resist imagining when authorial authority breaks
down. We merely urge caution in thinking that such authority only breaks down
when it comes to values. People can and do accept value authorities, from advice
columnists to religious leaders (Stock 2005), and likewise when it comes to
descriptive claims, people can and do reject the authority of certain sources, for
example, Breitbart News and Donald Trump. In other words, claims deriving
from sources whose authority we do not trust might strike us as weird. e
reverse also holds:when we encounter a weird headline, we oen inquire about
its author or source. Again, this is an idea that could be put to experimentaltest.
Another possible source of weirdness can be inferred from Weatherson
(2004). Weatherson asserts that a ctional claim will be resisted in imagination
when it violates his “Vir tue” principle, which is premised on the idea that some
ctional claims are the kind that must be true in virtue of lower level facts. e
principle states that it must be possible to work out (from what’s given in the
story) what p is true in virtue of, when the story is about those lower level facts
(Weatherson 2004:18).8 When Virtue is not satised, we experience imaginative
resistance. For example, recreational torture is morally wrong in virtue of the
harm that torture does. If it were possible to torture people recreationally in a
way that caused no harm, perhaps it would be morally permissible. It is possible
therefore that violating Virtue is a further source of weirdness.
In a somewhat similar vein, Kathleen Stock argues that while we do not usually
need to make recourse to lower level facts, we can fail to imagine something
when we do not understand it (2005). at is, when we fail to nd a context
that makes sense of the scenario we are asked to imagine. Stock and Weatherson
will therefore agree that whether we can nd a way to understand the ction
in terms of its context (or lower level facts) will be relative to the individual. In
our view, Stock and Weatherson (and others, like Nanay 2010) have identied
another possible source of weirdness:we cannot imagine something when we do
not understand it (cannot make sense of it), whether because we cannot work
out how it could obtain in terms of lower level facts or because of the context,
including the presumed intentions of the author. is notion of weirdness as a
lack of condence in the quality of one’s epistemological position with respect
to drawing certain inferences might be resolved into unusualness and distance
from the actual world, but perhaps not, and more empirical work could be
helpfulhere.
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Imaginative Resistance and Content 159
3.5 Truth in ction
What is it about truth in ction judgments that makes them turn on content and
claim type, while diculty and possibility judgments are only tied to weirdness?
Here is a proposal. According to the dual process model of moral judgement
(introduced above), wrongness and permissibility judgments are sensitive to
mental states, whereas blame and punishment judgments are sensitive to both
mental states and causal factors and outcomes. ese causal outcomes are
important for blame and punishment because there are social, personal, moral,
legal and political consequences to our actions (whether they are intended or not),
and we feel a responsibility to include facts about consequences in our reasoning
about blame and punishment. Analogously, in the case of imaginative resistance,
truth in ction judgments are sensitive to content and claim type. Claim type
could be important because we feel we have a responsibility to denounce certain
claims as true in the ction, given a (perhaps implicit) recognition that calling
something “true,” even if in a ction, can have social, personal, moral, legal and
political consequences. is coalesces with the work of Gendler and others who
claim that imaginative resistance occurs when we refuse to imagine certain
things to avoid contaminating our moral perspectives (discussed in section 1).
We can extend such accounts by taking the empirical results outlined in this
chapter as evidence that most of us recognize a responsibility to stand up against
anything that might lead to moral contamination in ourselves and others (and
thus to morally wrong dispositions and actions), and this is why truth in ction
judgements are sensitive to claim type. We feel responsible for the consequences
of ctional claims on ourselves and others, even consequences unendorsed by
the author. Action writer might not want to contaminate our moral framework,
but there’s real danger that some of their claims might, and so we refuse to accept
certain potentially contaminating claims as true. While counterdescriptives can
also contaminate our moral frameworks (see section 3.2), perhaps that kind
of case is comparatively rare, and so our consequence-based considerations
tend to concern counterevaluatives. is idea could be tested by comparing
judgments about truth in ction for counterevaluatives and counterdescriptives
that are perceived as equally dangerous with respect to the contamination of our
frameworks. However we should expect this eect to be most pronounced in
moral domains, so more work needs to be done to see whether this could also
be a good explanation for truth in ction judgments concerning aesthetic and
other domains.
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160 Advances in Experimental Philosophy
4. Conclusion
With the work of Black and Barnes (2016, 2017 ), Black, Capps, and Barnes
(forthcoming), Liao, Strohminger, and Sripada (2014), and Phelan (2017 ), we’re
still just beginning to bring empirical data to bear on philosophical issues of
imaginative resistance. With respect to further avenues of research, we think
it would be fruitful to follow up on the factors contributing to weirdness. We
should like to know how many there are, what the nature of each is, and how
each contributes to imaginative resistance.
In addition, more work is required concerning the discrepancy we found
between judgments of truth in ction on the one hand, and diculty and
possibility on the other. Both the claim type and the content seem to aect
whether people judge something to be true in a ction, while only content
aects whether people judge something ctional to be dicult or (im)possible
to imagine. As we mentioned above, this might be congenial to a dual process
model of imaginative resistance, which might be explained by a kind of
consequential reasoning based on ctional claims that might contaminate the
moral frameworks of others. Another possibility is to exclude truth in ction
judgments as a kind of imaginative resistance. But we have tried to maintain a
broad notion of imaginative resistance, and judgments about truth in ction
are important for several authors in the literature. Nevertheless, what we have
shown is that the truth in ction puzzle is quite distinct from the imaginability
puzzle (see also Liao, Strohminger, and Sripada 2014:342), and perhaps dierent
philosophical accounts will be dierently suited to explain these dierent puzzles.
For example, those that focus on the authority of an author might be in a better
position to explain our unwillingness to claim that a certain ctional statement is
true in the ction, while those who focus on our inability to process certain claims
inferentially might be in a better position to explain our experienced diculty in
trying to imagine those claims. In any case, a complete account of imaginative
resistance (in the broad sense including truth in ction judgments) must make
reference to content, and not just claim type. And if we want to preserve the
asymmetry upon which the original puzzle of imaginative resistance is based, this
can only be done, and only partially, in the domain of truth in ction judgments.
Summing up, in terms of diculty and possibility, imaginative resistance
depends largely on the weirdness of the content, not on whether the claim is
evaluative or descriptive. Truth judgments, by contrast, are sensitive to features
of content and claim type. In discussion, we have suggested that the weirdness of
a scenario is relative to the individual, and might depend on its (i)unusualness,
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Imaginative Resistance and Content 161
for example, on how oen a subject has experienced the content of the scenario;
(ii) the perceived distance between the ctional and actual world, resulting from,
for example, the perceived distance between doxastic-evaluative worldviews;
and (iii) surprisingness, resulting from violated expectations generated by
previous experience, inference, or awareness of ctional context. ere is much
more to do, including nding other factors that contribute to weirdness. Such
factors might include the level of personal commitment to what is violated in the
scenario, the epistemological authority of the author presenting the scenario, and
how easy it is for the subject to understand the scenario or to work out the lower
level facts that justify ascriptions of higher level properties in the scenario. ese
should be tested experimentally, where possible. Whatever weirdness turns out
to be in the nal analysis, it is not a property exclusive to counterevaluatives,
and there is no curious asymmetry of imaginative resistance in the sense of
(a)diculty imagining something or (b)diculty judging something to be (im)
possible. ere does, however, seem to be a version of the puzzle that survives.
Namely:why is it that when it comes to deciding whether something is true in
a ction, we take into account whether that content is evaluative or descriptive?
Acknowledgments
e authors would like to thank Edouard Machery for his unwavering support and
the Pittsburgh Empirical Philosophy Lab for funding. We would also like to thank
Shen-yi Liao, Wesley Buckwalter, Florian Cova, and the members of the Pittsburgh
Empirical Philosophy Lab for extensive and extremely helpful comments on
earlier dras of this paper. Mike Stuart would also like to thank audiences at the
University of Graz Evidence and Imagination conference, the New College of the
Humanities Mind and Brain conference, the Southern Society of Philosophy and
Psychology meeting in Louisville, as well as the University of Pittsburgh and the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding.
Notes
1 We dene a “counterevaluative” as a statement that overturns a held evaluative belief,
and a “counterdescriptive” as a statement that overturns a held nonevaluative belief.
When we want to be less specic, we will use “counterfactual” to mean a claim that is
either counterevaluative or counterdescriptive.
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162 Advances in Experimental Philosophy
2 Others who focus their attention on this assumption in its moral form include Brock
(2012), Carruthers (2006), Currie (2002:217 ), Dorsch (2016:50), Driver (2008:302),
Kind (2016a:8; 2016b:167 ), Kung (2016:234), Mahtani (2012), Matravers (2003),
Modrack (2016:25), Nichols (2006:3–4), Rosenbaum (2016), Liao (2016), Sauchelli
(2016), Stear (2015), Stock (2005), Stokes (2006), and Stueber (2016:37 5).
3 Appendix 1 in the Supplementary Materials (https://osf.io/n5cpd/) contains the
complete text of all scenarios and questions from the pilotstudy.
4 See https://osf.io/n5cpd/ for Appendix2.
5 A potential worry:if weirdness correlated very strongly with the measures of
imaginative resistance, one might be concerned that it captures the exact same
phenomenon. Alack of correlation, by contrast, would cast doubt on the hypothesis
that features related to the content of the target claim could be meaningful
predictors of imaginative resistance. Weirdness correlated positively with judgments
of truth in ction (r=0.23, p < .001), diculty (r=.52, p < .001), and possibility
(r=.49, p < .001), with eect sizes just at the border between medium and large for
diculty and possibility, and a small eect size for truth in ction; so we do not see
any reason for concern.
6 See https://osf.io/n5cpd/ for Appendix3.
7 One might object that a dual process model of imaginative resistance cannot
be inferred from the fact that claim type has a signicant eect on truth but
a nonsignicant eect on diculty and possibility. Aer all, the dierence
between “signicant” and “not signicant” is not itself statistically signicant
(Gelman and Stern 2006). However, the original mixed ANOVA (within-
subjects factor:measure—truth vs. diculty vs. possibility; between-subjects
factors:claim type—evaluative vs. descriptive; degree—low vs. medium-low vs.
medium-high vs. high) showed that the measure*claim type interaction F(1.80,
1509.02)=27 .60, p < .001, p
2=.032 was signicant, which means that claim type
had a dierent eect on the three measures. To see whether it was claim type’s
eect on truth that diered signicantly from claim type’s eect on diculty
and possibility, we further conducted two 2 × 2 ANOVAs: (i) 2 (evaluative ×
descriptive) × 2 (truth vs. diculty), and (ii) 2 (evaluative × descriptive) × 2
(truth vs. possibility). For (i)truth vs. diculty, we found the claim
type*measure interaction F(1, 842)=34.06, p < .001, p
2=.039 was signicant;
claim type aected truth (Meval=4.48, Mdesc=2.89) signicantly more than
it aected diculty (Meval=4.56, Mdesc=3.95). For (ii) truth vs. possibility,
we found the claim type*measure interaction F(1, 842)=35.50, p < .001,
p
2=.040 was signicant; claim type aected truth (Meval=4.48, Mdesc=2.89)
signicantly more than it aected possibility (Meval=3.91, Mdesc=3.25).
Hence, the eect of claim type on truth judgments diered signicantly from the
eect of claim type on diculty and possibility judgments, which supports the
dual processmodel.
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Imaginative Resistance and Content 163
8 is extends Walton’s account (1994), which also presents a supervenience-based
account of imaginative resistance. Walton claims that moral facts supervene on
natural facts, and so if we are told to imagine a dierent moral fact with the same
natural facts, we cannot. Weatherson extends this from evaluatives to allfacts.
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