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PJ and Dr. Amy Kind explore the question, "How do imagination and creative thinking interact with each other?" They also discuss whether we should view imagination as a skill that can be trained and improved.
Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
Dr. Amy Kind Transcript 61:56
PJ Today on Chasing Leviathan, we pursue the big question: How do imagination and creative thinking interact with each other? My guest is Dr. Amy Kind, Russell K. Pitzer professor of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. We discuss whether creative thinking and imagination are skills you can develop, and I learn how both imagination and creative thinking help us all become more empathetic. So come, have a seat with us, and learn to listen with me.
PJ As we get started here, do you mind sharing with us your own journey and how you became a philosopher, and how you became interested in imagination and creativity? What led you to write this book?
Dr Kind Great question, so in terms of how I got interested in philosophy, I guess it all started in high school, actually. I was taking a class called “Shaping of Western Thought” or something like that, and it wasn’t specifically a philosophy course, but we ended up reading from a lot of great western philosophers. That helped me get interested in the subject, so then when I went to college, I decided to take a class in philosophy. One class led to another, led to another, and I kept exploring without really ever saying “I’m going to become a philosopher.” But all of the sudden, I realized that I was a philosophy major, it happened. I still wasn’t convinced that it was going to be my career or anything.
Actually, for a long time I thought I was going to be a journalist. So I worked on my highschool paper, I worked on my college paper, and that’s really where I thought my career was going to take me, but for various reasons I decided not to pursue journalism. Then when I was in college I was thinking that maybe I was going to be a lawyer. I was toying with the idea of law, and I was toying with the idea of graduate school in philosophy.
It was the summer between my junior and senior year, and I said “I don’t want to study for more than one entrance test for post graduate studies; I’m either going to study for the LSAT or I’m going to study for the GRE to go to grad school in philosophy, and I just tried to figure it out, and I decided to go to grad school in philosophy. That’s how it happened, it wasn’t really a master plan, just one step led to another, led to another.
In terms of how I got interested in imagination, that also wasn’t a master plan! I was in graduate school at UCLA, and UCLA is really good in philosophy of language. Especially at the time I was there, there were a lot of famous philosophers of language working there. So we were doing a lot of reading of philosophers like Frege and Russell, and also Kripke, “Naming a Necessity”. And there is a part in “Naming a Necessity” where Kripke is talking about whether this lectern, which is made of wood, or whether it could possibly be made of ice. And he talks about how we can't imagine it being made of ice. And at the time, when I was reading that passage, I just kept thinking that Kripke was going from the fact that he didn’t think that the lectern could be made of ice to sort of back up his claim: so we can’t imagine it. And I couldn’t help thinking it should be the other way around, like, let’s figure out what we can imagine, and then we can figure out what we can draw from that about the possibilities, what claims we can make from the fact that we can imagine them.
PJ Right.
Dr. Kind So really, just like I didn't have this master plan to work on philosophy, I also didn’t have a master plan to work on imagination. I just wanted to figure out what was going on in that passage and thinking “If we could get clearer on imagination, we could understand better what is going on in these modal arguments, these arguments about possibility.” So all of the sudden I started working on imagination, and here I am, a few decades later, still working on imagination.
PJ Well, there’s so much to cover!
Dr. Kind Oh, and in terms of the book that’s coming up on imagination and creative thinking, I was invited to do that by the editor of the Cambridge Element Series, on philosophy of mind, Keith Frankish. I was just excited about it because I hadn’t done much work on creativity before, although I’d always been interested in it. So it seemed like a good opportunity to expand my interest in imagination, and I’m really glad I did. I love thinking about creativity.
PJ Yeah, and I got to read a draft of the book, and I really appreciate it. So, help me to understand the purpose of the series. Is it kind of introductory, for the most part?
Dr. Kind Yeah, it’s introductory. These are small texts. So I feel kind of weird even calling it a “book”. I’ve been calling it a “monograph”, just because they’re so short. But they’re aimed to be like–what does the back cover say?-- the definitive introduction to a particular topic, or something like that. So, yeah. It’s not meant to presuppose any background knowledge on the topic, and what I do in the book/monograph, there’s part that introduces readers to the philosophical study of imagination, and then there’s a section that introduces readers to the philosophical study of creative thinking, and then a section that brings the two together to talk about the role of imagination in creativity. It shows how the two are connected. And the last part of the book does a sort of case study where I think about imagination and creative thinking with respect to artificial intelligence and artificially intelligent systems. There’s been a lot of talk recently, not just about the sentients of artificially intelligent systems but also about whether we can have imagination machines, whether machines can do something creative. So I thought that it would be a nice way to explore issues about imagination and creativity, and where the theories take us. That’s what I do in the, uh, “book”. I hope that it will be a useful introduction for folks.
PJ Yes, it really was. I just got to read a draft, but it really helped situate me in the field and it helped me understand if I wanted to go any certain direction, who, or where I would want to read more. Which should be the point of an introduction of philosophy, so I think you did a great job. So it’s “Imagination and Creative Thinking.” When is that coming out?
Dr. Kind I think it’s slated for the end of August, so depending when all this goes live, it will hopefully already be published. But I think it will be available as both a hard copy and possibly an e-copy.
PJ I think your mention of artificial intelligence and all the talk around that leads me to a good set up question to talk about this entire issue. It seems to me at least, why do people seem to get so uptight? Why is there so much tension around creativity and imagination? I mean, in general, when you start to define it, people get uncomfortable, but then there’s AI, and there’s definitely more emotion involved than you might expect.
Dr. Kind Huh. That’s an interesting question, I’m going to have to think a little bit more about that. I guess part of it must have to be an intrinsic sense of ourselves where we want to think of ourselves as special, right? And we’re holding out for, in what respect are we special. Oh, well maybe the machines can outsmart us in various activities, and maybe they’re going to beat us in chess and maybe they’re going to beat us in jeopardy, and beat us in go. But surely, we are going to be more imaginative and creative than they are. I don’t know, maybe that's what it is. We like to think of humanity as special in a way, with differentiation from animals and machines. And I think maybe I could also turn what I was just saying about us thinking of ourselves as special, maybe I can sort of turn it around a little bit. See if this works. When we look in a machine, we think of the machine as just a manifestation of its programming, so it has this programming and all it can do is what its programming allows. Right? It can’t go beyond its programming, it's all programming generated, it's all algorithms or whatever. And then we see the machines producing various things that look very creative or that look very imaginative, and then we start to look at our own outputs, and we think “woah! Wait, are those just the results of algorithms and programming? And are we nothing more than a collection of programming too?” And that makes us feel uncomfortable about ourselves and how we like to think about ourselves. Hey, a lot of philosophy is discomfort. Let me put it this way, a lot of good philosophy should make you ask uncomfortable questions. You have to be willing to confront the uncomfortable questions if you’re going to engage in a real study of philosophy. So I hadn’t pushed the AI analogy specifically to make people uncomfortable, but if you’re looking at the tension, or the nervousness that comes up when we start talking about machines and creativity, maybe that’s why.
PJ That makes a lot of sense. I just realized for our listeners, and some of them may be familiar, but just to be clear, when we talk about imagination, can you give us a philosophical definition? Because I remember when I first started to get into philosophy, the idea of talking about imagination was really fascinating, and then I got into it, and I was like “Okay, I understand why they defined it this way.” But it is sort of different from everyday speech.
Dr. Kind Yeah, I hope that when we philosophers are talking about imagination that it sort of connects with what ordinary folks are talking about?
PJ It does, it does connect. It’s not like two completely different things.
Dr. Kind Right, kind of like a Venn diagram of sorts, as always, we philosophers are going to try to get more precise or something. We’ll try to figure out how to use ordinary language to come up with something more precise.
PJ Actually, if you don’t mind, it’s funny that you combined imagination and creative thinking, because I think when I first got into philosophy, I think where I got confused was in Kant, who has very specific types of imagination, right? But it was I would think of “imaginative” and I would think of “creative” which you do a good job of defining those two separately. And there definitely seems to be a relationship between them. But I think it’s funny when people say “imaginative” and what they mean is “creative” in ordinary speech. So I think that might be part of what I’m referring to here. It’s not like all of the sudden we’re going to be talking about symbolic logic or something with imagination. Like it’s not going to be completely separate. Sorry, I just thought that would clarify.
Dr. Kind Yeah, cool! I think you’re right that in ordinary talk, we are probably looser with our terms than philosophers are, and in ordinary speech we probably use “imaginative” and “creative” as synonyms. We tease things apart. So I guess I’m using “imagination” to refer to some kind of mental activity, and it’s a speculative activity. One way to put it is it allows us to transcend our current circumstances to either think about them differently from how they actually are, whether as future or some possible alternative, or in some way different. So my son is at Disneyland right now, so I might be imagining him on Space Mountain right now, and trying to avoid imagining something going horribly wrong with him on the ride. So this uses what I already know. I know what my son looks like, I know what Disneyland is like, I know what Space Mountain looks like. But I’m not there right now, and I’m trying to speculate what’s going on with him. That’s one example of imagining, a fairly realistic imagining. But of course we could use imagining in all sorts of non realistic ways as well. We frequently do. I might just imagine winged horses, pink elephants, or all kinds of crazy creatures, and here again I’m doing something that transcends the reality that I’m currently in. So maybe we’ll come back to this, but I think of imagination serving both practical purposes and fantastical purposes. In either case, I’m thinking about imagination as a mental process, or a mental activity. It’s something that we do, either deliberately, or we simply find ourselves doing it. We might give ourselves a particular imaginative project. We might find ourselves daydreaming about something and engaging in some sort of imaginative activity.
Now, let’s focus on creativity for just a second. Creativity is something that as a term we sometimes apply to mental processes or activities, creative thinking, but we also apply it to people, we describe them as creative, and we describe things in the world as creative. A painting, a book, an invention. There we’re not using the term creative to apply to a mental activity, because we are talking about a creative product or a creative person. When we are talking about the mental activity, creative thinking, it’s pretty natural to think that what makes it creative is utilizing our capabilities of imagination. Likewise, I think when we have a creative product, we think “How did that creative product come to be?” Someone used creative thinking, someone used their imagination to produce the idea behind this product. Likewise, when we describe a person as creative, I think we mean they have great powers of imagination or great powers of creative thinking. This is how the two get connected, but here’s one of the questions in this monograph: is there an essential connection between imagination and creativity? So can there be creativity without imagination? Can there be imagination without creativity? It’s gonna turn out different depending on if we’re looking at the mental processes, or the product, or the people. We are going to see different connections there.
PJ Yes, this is good. It’s always reassuring when I’m in an interview, and something confirms that yes, I did understand that part! (laughs)
Dr. Amy Kind Awesome.
PJ I’m over here looking at the book, I’m not sort of gazing off in the distance while you’re talking. But right now I can’t remember the different words you used for it…one maybe was fantastic…
Dr. Amy Kind You mean for different kinds of imagining?
PJ In the book you say instructive and transcendent.
Dr. Amy Kind I do, yes.
PJ And then when you were talking you used the word “fantastic” and um, I forget what the other one was, and I found that helpful.
Dr. Amy Kind I believe I used “realistic”. With the terms that I’ve used in the book, I’ve drawn a distinction between what I call “transcendent imagining” and “instructive imagining”. But it’s just as helpful to think of cases as more fantastical or more realistic cases of imagining. But they are going to be cross cutting various distinctions in various ways. So if I put it in the terms of uses, the way I do in the book, I can put it this way: sometimes we’re just engaged in an act of imagination as a way to escape reality. You might be in a meeting, and start imagining your upcoming vacation. You might be a child playing games of pretend–you might be an adult playing games of pretend. But I think the example I used in the book was you might be on the playground and imagining that the play set is a pirate ship, and the other children on the play set are a rival pirate gang, so you’re actually engaged in imagining all sorts of things while you play this game of pretend. So you’re escaping your reality by doing that, transcending your reality. Those are some acts of imagination where we’re engaged in this act of transcendent or escapist use, but then lots of times, we use imagination for practical purposes as well.
The same kind of imagining where you’re imagining your upcoming vacation might be not just for escapist purposes, but you might actually be trying to learn various things, and figure out whether you want to go to the beach or to the mountains. So you’re imagining yourself first at the beach, and then at the mountains, and trying to learn something and decide if you should buy the tickets to this place or to that place. So imagination can save us that labor of actually exploring both paths, we imaginatively explore them because we cannot afford to do both, we have to make choices. For another example, suppose you were to go to the furniture store and you forgot to take as good of measurements as you should have of your living room before going there, and you don’t want to drive all the way home and back, and there’s no one at home to call, so you’re trying to figure out whether the sofa that you’re about to buy is going to fit in the space. So what do you do? Well, you imagine it in the space. Or you might be wondering if the sofa is going to fit through the door. How are you going to position it? Or can it fit in your car? You are going to imaginatively manipulate the sofa. And you might be standing right outside your door with the sofa, and it’s heavy so you are going to imagine different ways to fit it through the door first to save your back some of the physical labor. That’s an example of imagining being put to a very practical use.
PJ Yeah, I can’t tell you how painful that last example is because I am so bad at that. I can’t tell you how many times I have moved something and it was not how I imagined it would be! (laughs)
Dr. Amy Kind Gotcha, okay.
PJ That’s why, like you mentioned in the book, they have the little paint swatch cards, but even with that I have to rely on my wife, because unless the paint is right there on the wall, I’m not going to be able to see it. Also the pirate park really struck a chord with me because I have a four year old and a seven year old, and the nearest public park actually has a giant pirate ship! So it was really funny how strongly I connected to all the examples that you used! They make so much sense to me.
So as we look at the “instructive” and “transcendent”, when you talked about the vacation, I was picturing myself up at the mountain, and I thought “Oh, I’m going to need to buy mosquito repellant.” So it’s amazing how the more practical your imagination can be, the more helpful it is to give your decisions more weight. You basically collect more information to work with. You can see that quite a bit. I run a digital marketing agency as my day job, and imagining is definitely a large part of it. I think “If I was the consumer, how would I respond to this?”
Dr. Amy Kind Yeah.
PJ These kinds of things are ubiquitous. As you talk about “instructive” and “transcendent”, I might be confused, but I think “transcendent” gets used twice? You talked about how we can transcend paradigms of accepted thought. Is that in the same usage or in a different section?
Dr. Amy Kind I think the second use might be in a different section where I’m talking about creativity. We might think that for something to be truly creative it might have to “think outside the box” to use an expression. When we talk about that, we are talking about a kind of transcending of previously accepted norms or solutions.
Could I go back for one second to some of the things you were just saying? Two things really resonated with me. One, you were talking about how many times you failed at imaging the sofa correctly, or how you need the paint swatches, and so you rely on your wife. And those examples bring out two things that I like to point out in my work. I like to think of imagination as a skill, and thinking about it as a skill, brings out two things that came up in your reflections. One is, some people are more skilled than others. Your wife might be better at imagining paint colors than you are, and in that case we can see how imagination can be viewed as a skill that one person might be better at in one scenario than another. But we can improve our imagination! So I think people who think that they don’t have very finely honed imaginative powers, if they care about it, they shouldn’t say “I’m bad at imagining, so be it.” As a general rule, if you’re bad at something but you care about it, you can work to get better. So I think the more imagining we do, there are things we can do to improve. We shouldn’t view it as a fixed capacity.
The second interesting thing that I wanted to pick up on, you were bringing up examples that really get at some of the theory that I’m interested in in the monograph. You talk about imagining the mountains and the mosquito spray, and you said something to the effect of “some of those imaginings might be more helpful than others for getting you to decide what kind of vacation you will go on.” I completely agree with that and I want to say there are a lot of things we can do to make those imaginings more useful.
First of all, in order for our imaginations to be helpful, we try to imagine our most relevant past experiences, and we try to learn from those and plan from those. So maybe when you’re trying to figure out where to go on vacation, and you’ve never been to the Rocky Mountains, but you’ve been to some other mountains, you do what I’ve called” imaginative scaffolding”. You scaffold out from experiences that you’ve had to experiences you have never had by combining experiential resources and imagination. To be a better imaginer, first of all, if you have more experiential resources, that’s going to help you, and second of all, if you’re able to manipulate and combine the experiential resources that you have to sort of pick the right combinations, then you’ll be able to leverage those to get further in imagination. I think imagination builds, combines,and transposes all of the different experiential elements, and we’re moving towards trying to get to experiences that we haven’t had by doing all of that imaginative work from experiences that we have had.
PJ I love that, and I don’t know that I have any answers to this particular point, but one thing is that imagination is incredibly powerful. We’ve discussed that in a couple of different ways. But one thing that is fascinating is that it can actually be harmful! So, just as a silly example, back to vacation. Generally if someone is really engaging their imagination with vacation it creates certain expectations, and if those expectations are not met, even if it’s a good vacation, it can be a let down. Like this cabin in the mountain in the woods that I’m renting has a hot tub. But you get up there, and you have great conversations, wonderful dinners and hikes, but for some reason the hot tub is broken when you get there, and you even get a refund, but you just had in your mind a cool night’s breeze and you’re in the hot tub, but in reality you’re sitting in a rocking chair talking with your family. You should be enjoying the moment, but all you can think about is “I wish I was in the hot tub right now!” It’s so interesting how imagining is like a double edged sword, because it can help us predict the future, but also hinder us if we can’t let go of the expectations it creates. I don’t know where else to go with that, but anyways.
Dr. Amy Kind I think that’s a really interesting point. As you said, imagination can set up various expectations for us, and we’re always disappointed when our expectations aren’t met. So there, I guess since I’m so pro-imagination, I wouldn’t blame imagination there. I would blame the cabin owners for not having their hot tub working. But also it has something to do with the expectations that come out of the imaginative exercise. If the place was advertised with a working hot tub, then you were right to imagine the evening in the hot tub! Your imagination didn’t do anything wrong there. Should you have also imagined “Oh, well what if the hot tub is broken?” Oh, sorry that’s my dog whining, she is bringing me a toy.
PJ I saw some brown fur kind of duck behind you, and I thought “That’s either a dog, or an undergrad trying to grab some graded papers!” (laughs)
Dr. Amy Kind (laughs) gosh, don’t start any rumors! There are two little puppies behind me, so that’s what’s going on. Anyways, we have to think about our own ability to let things go. It’s not so much that the imagination hindered us, but our inability to let go of what we’ve imagined. We have to think of some other personality traits, be it stubbornness, or just inflexibility. Maybe we can use imagination to become more flexible and more adaptable. Maybe we can not just imagine scenario A, but also scenario B and C. Then we can get ourselves out of that sort of inflexible thinking. But I just didn’t want to blame imagination when your vacation goes wrong.
You might think that there are other ways that our imagination can harm us. I wasn’t sure what kind of example you were going to bring up when you said it, but I mean, I was talking before about imagining my son at Space Mountain, and some people kind of can’t help themselves from engaging in these kind of nightmare imaginings about bad things happening to other people, or our kids, and we keep finding ourselves dwelling on painful, or problematic, or doomsday imaginings. So we might think we’d be better off not imagining at all than engaging in these doomsday sort of imaginings. If the imaginings are not doing anything productive for us, then that might be a way that they hinder us. Or maybe we are doing this escaping or transcendent daydreaming all the time and always tuning out our reality. That can be a problem too. But it’s also not surprising! There are a gazillion things that we should only do in moderation, but we do them too much and it causes problems. It wouldn’t be surprising if that were true for imagining as well.
PJ I would definitely say that it’s the expectation that is the problem. I think we talked about making good decisions. And the power of imagination is that it gives weight to things. So it makes the expectations more powerful. It’s not the imagination’s fault, per say. And this is obviously me spit balling so feel free to correct. But this is a really interesting train of thought to me, even as you were talking about the imaginings that the parents have, it’s not just thinking those things that’s the problem, it’s the fear and the worry that accompanies it. But obviously the more vivid that imagination is, the more it’s going to give weight to the fear and worry. I think that’s more proof of its power than of its being problematic. It’s so interesting how we don’t talk about it much, but it’s so ubiquitous. You can definitely develop it as a skill, but everyone does imagine quite a bit!
Dr. Amy Kind I think so, yes. When I teach an undergraduate seminar on imagination, one of the activities I like to do on the first day of class is to ask the students to give an example of a way in which imagination has factored into their life. It can be a small example, like sometime when you engaged in an exercise of imagining. When do you associate imagining with your own life? It’s just so interesting the range of different kinds of examples that I get, you know, whether it’s someone who’s really into music who talks about the way imagination interacts with their listening and understanding of music, or their composition, or another person who talks about it engaging with fiction, right? They’re reading a book or watching movies. And there will be someone else talking about doing problem solving. These are college students, so they might talk about the decision of where to go to college and how they imagined what life would be like at each institution. I mean I get so many different kinds of examples. And I’ve never had a student say “Oh, no. I just never imagine anything.” We might talk about how some imagine more, and some imagine less, and how much of a role imagination plays, but yeah. I’ve never had a student say “No imagination in my life, it just doesn’t factor in.” It’s just anecdotal, but I’m batting a thousand on that one. No non-imaginers among my students, anyway. I don’t know, maybe the non-imaginers don’t take classes called “Imagination.”
PJ (laughs) It is a biased sample, but I think you’re right. You mentioned earlier when you talked about training, and I’ve seen this in my own life–I mentioned for digital marketing that I have to imagine the way customers think, and probably one of the most useful tools has been my voracious fiction reading.
Dr. Amy Kind Ah, yeah.
PJ You mention Martha Nussbaum and empathy. Would you like to talk about that and other training “methods” if I can put it that way? Obviously we don’t have imagination coaches, though maybe we should.
Dr. Amy Kind Yeah, I wish we did. So earlier I said I think of imagination as a skill we can develop and do various things to train our imagination. I should say, I don’t think it’s like we have to hire a coach or have some book of imagination exercises, but I think there are all sorts of things we can do, some of which we naturally do anyway to develop our imagination. Martha Nussbaum, whose work I mention in the monograph, talks about how children learn to empathize with others by engaging with stories. So she gives the example “Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are.” And she says when the child starts to wonder about the star, the child is starting to imagine the inner lives of others. It’s this idea of imagining the inner lives of others that starts with this simple exposure to nursery rhymes, and as we engage with increasingly sophisticated works of storytelling, whether it’s on the written page or in the movies or whatever–let’s just talk about books, because it’s easier to focus on one thing. As we read more and more, we start to imagine the scenes that are presented and we start to imagine the emotions of the characters, and each time we’re reading, we are training our imagination in various ways. So think of all the things we do when we read books. You might not do all of them, but other people do. Some might try to guess the ending. Or when you finish a book, if you don’t like the ending, you might imagine alternative endings. What might have happened if this character did this? We are often trying to imagine who the villain is, “who done it?” We try to mine the book for clues. This doesn’t have to do with empathy or imagining inner lives, but those are things you can do that train your imagination. Now with respect to empathy in particular, one of the reasons that reading can train our capacity for this kind of imaginative exploration of other minds, is that we get a lot of information from the book that we don’t necessarily have when we’re just talking to people in everyday life. Like right now, I can see the expression on your face, but I don’t have access to your inner thoughts whereas in the book, I get this detailed description from the narrator or the first-person perspective that explains how they’re feeling in a given situation. So we learn a lot about the minds of others from reading, and it’s a way to practice our empathetic explorations and our imaginative simulations of other minds. I think fiction is a great, great tool–I mean, I love it independently–but I think fiction is a great tool for the cultivation of imagination, both empathetic imagination and other kinds of imagination.
PJ Such as propositional and then sensory, and then experiential, which kind of lines up with empathy, am I correctly understanding that?
Dr. Kind Yes, so there are different kinds of imagination.. Here’s an example. I might imagine that there is a tray of brownies in the kitchen. Notice that I’m imagining a proposition, a full fact. That there’s a tray of brownies in the kitchen. Another thing I might do is imagine the brownies themselves. What they look like. What they smell like. What they taste like. I’m not taking an attitude towards a proposition, I’m just focused on the brownies as an object. And notice when I do take the attitude to the proposition, the propositional imagining, I might have a mental image of the brownies or I might not, but when I’m imagining the brownies themselves–I should say that I think that when you’re really imagining, there is definitely an image. Not everyone agrees with me on that. So, I’m just kind of putting that on the side for a second. But with the propositional imagining, we’re focused on this fact. Or we might be focusing on the brownies, again, smell, taste, image. Notice, I’m using “ image” in an expanded sense, not just visual images. We can talk about auditory images, or gustatory images, or olfactory images.
PJ This is the cruelest example you’ve used, I’m just going to say. (laughs)
Dr. Amy Kind The brownies? Oh, are you hungry? Okay. Well, I like brownies, what can I say.
PJ I am hungry now! (laughs) You’re talking about how they taste, and how they smell. (laughs) I was just like, I can feel it.
Dr. Amy Kind You’re just using your powers of imagination! I’m sure I could come up with more cruel examples.
PJ laughs.
Dr. Kind Experiential imagining was the last one I wanted to say you might imagine tasting the brownies. You’re putting yourself into the imagining, sort of putting yourself in the experience. Experiential imagining. So when we engage in empathy, when someone tells us a story about something terrible that happened to them, we try to understand, we say, by putting ourselves in their shoes. So if I’m calling up that kind of feeling, that kind of experience, it’s that experiential imagining.
PJ Yes, absolutely. I can think of individual books that tend to lean into these different types, right?
Dr. Amy Kind Oh, cool!
PJ So like, propositional types, right? These are terrible examples, but I tend to prefer more experiential, empathetic books. I feel it accomplishes something for me. I like the way I feel afterwards. But, it demands more from me.
Dr. Amy Kind Yeah!
PJ Sometimes if I’ve been reading a lot of philosophy–I’m doing several a week right now because my wife is due in August, so this is me using experiential imagination: I don’t think my wife will appreciate me saying “Hey honey, I know we have a seven year old, a four year old, and now a brand new baby, but I’m going to go work on that podcast!”, so I’m getting ahead!
Dr. Amy Kind Good job, good job!
PJ I might not be great at imagination, but I have enough for that. (laughs) But if I’m doing a lot of heavy reading, I find myself gravitating more towards maybe sensory or propositional. There’s this vampire hunter series that I enjoy reading, it’s a light novel. The characters are not very deep. (laughs) It’s just a lot of action and a lot of fantastic set pieces. Not like M. K. Jemison’s Trilogy.
Dr. Amy Kind Ooooo, yeah!
PJ I can tell it’s going to be so good, and that it’s going to emotionally hurt me. (laughs) I need to wait until I have time to process this! Like, I’ll read Haruki Murukami, and afterwards, I just feel so fragile. Or I love and am trying to work my way through Praust, and it's the same thing where it demands more from you. I think that’s the training happening in some ways, and it’s more intense, like any kind of training. It seems to line up with the different types of imagining that are going on. Am I understanding that correctly?
Dr. Amy Kind That’s Awesome! Yeah, I hadn’t really thought a lot about what kinds of different books demand different kinds of imagining from us, so I really like the examples that you were giving. So for example, in the dragon books, where the characters aren’t deep, but maybe there’s a lot of world building, or something like that. So you’re trying to imagine the world that’s being presented and that’s the demanding imaginative task. It’s not so much understanding why the characters did this because it’s all really obvious. But they’re set in a world that has got dragons! It has all these cultures and various customs, and you’re trying to understand all of that, and it’s a different kind of imaginative demand. It’s funny you bring up the Broken Earth Trilogy, M. K. Jemison, I love that trilogy, I hope you find time before your next baby is born, because you won’t have time to really…you won’t have time for anything!
PJ laughs
Dr. Amy Kind I started reading the first one in the trilogy in March of 2020. Our college shut down, I got sent home to do all virtual teaching, and I picedk up this book because so many people recommended it to me, and it starts off with the end of the world. I’m like “Oh, no! This is hitting a little too close to home!” I used to have the first sentence memorized, but it’s something like “Let’s start at the end of the world.”
PJ And it’s not just like the end of the world, it’s like a mom and her child. All this is not spoilers, it’s in the first chapter. I’m like “Oh, this is heavy.” I’m going to open this up in a month.
Dr. Amy Kind It’s a really great series, you should definitely come back to it. What I was going to say about the book is, there are so many different kinds of imaginings that we have to do in a book like that. First of all, we’re left a little at sea about what kind of world we’re in, and we learn as we go. The world building is not laid out for us, it’s parceled out sparingly as we go. But then there is deep, deep engagement with the characters and their motivations. There’s a lot of imagining what these characters are going through at various times. That book, the whole trilogy, is going to be both imaginatively demanding, but remarkably enriching.
Back to the basic point you were making, books can both train our imaginations and stretch our imaginations in different ways based on what’s going on in them, and that shouldn’t be surprising.
PJ I want to be respectful of your time, and I wanted to touch briefly on creativity. You talk about value and novelty, as being two of the main conditions, but there’s some talk about agency and surprising. Do you mind just giving us a brief overview of that? I know that’s a huge order.
Dr. Amy Kind Sure! Absolutely. I guess the basic question that I start off with in the monograph is to ask what creativity is. It seems really basic, I guess, that in order for something to be creative there’s got to be some sort of novelty involved. There’s got to be some sort of newness. Then there’s the question “Well, does everything that’s new count as creative just because it’s something that’s never been seen before?” You might not think so. Not every doodle that your child does is exactly the same, and no other child might have scribbled that exact way before, but is that really creative? In the book, there’s the example: I use my iPhone with predictive text option and I tap out a sentence, it’s like okay, that sentence–first of all, it might not even be a sentence–that collection of words has never been produced before, so it’s novel, but is it creative? It really doesn’t seem so. It looks like there’s something else that is required for creativity, and philosophers tend to put some kind of value. Now, value in a really deflationary sense. It doesn’t have to have monetary value necessarily, or great value in any sense, but it adds something. It brings something positive. Even the value requirement for creativity is disputed. We can talk about certain kinds of things that seem to lack value, or things that might have negative value, so when that comes up–speaking of cruelty–you might think of some kind of torturer or serial killer who devises these incredibly novel methods of torture. Those don’t really bring positive value to the world.
PJ Maybe he describes brownies to his prisoners. (Laughs)
Dr. Kind Good one! “Oh, you think you’re starving now? Let me describe some brownies to you.” It would be interesting to hear from the listeners what they think of these “new” torture methods. Should we describe them as creative, or not? Insofar as we are disinclined to use the notion of creativity to describe that, might it be because we think of calling something creative as a kind of praise? We think of the thing as being creative because it brings some sort of value. Also some other examples that come up: false theories. You might think it’s very creative, but since it’s false, it doesn’t really have any value. Maybe we could find a way in which it has value, in that it leads to a detailed understanding subsequently, or something like that. In any case, there’s ways to push on the value requirement.
Another requirement that often comes up in discussions of creativity, is whether you can be creative by accident? Does it matter if you’ve been doing it on purpose? That’s where we might think that we need some sort of agency there in order for something to count as creative. I think I mentioned before, that we can talk about people as creative, or products, or the processes as creative. So we’re talking about a product now. This painting or this invention. We’re asking whether it can be creative or not and we’re talking about agency. In order for it to be creative, does it have to be the result of an intentional process? Can it be creative even if it happened by accident? Some scientific discoveries were merely accidental.
PJ Vulcanized rubber is the one that you mentioned in the book.
Dr. Amy Kind Vulcanized rubber, it happened when Goodyear was trying everything to figure out what substance was going to work. They tried cream cheese, they tried this, they tried that. One day by accident the rubber came into contact with something and they figured it out. But you can also think of all sorts of other accidental discoveries. When you look at the discovery itself, it looks sort of creative, but then when we find out that it happened by accident, sometimes we want to pull back on our attribution of creativity there, which suggests that we’re requiring some kind of agency. I have another example I use in the monograph. I have two sons, so this could happen to either of them, but my oldest is the one who walks around with his airpods in all the time–my younger son has over-the-ear headphones, so it could happen to him too–so they knock something over in the kitchen, a bottle of ketchup, and they don’t even notice. As I’m thinking now I wonder if it’s that they pretend they don’t notice???
PJ laughs
Dr. Amy Kind So they knock over the bottle of ketchup, it spills all over the floor in a very interesting pattern, maybe the pattern is novel, maybe it has some value, but are we going to call it creative? Well, no, it just happened when they knocked the ketchup bottle off. So again, insofar as we are disinclined to describe that ketchup splatter as creative, it probably means that we’re thinking of creativity as needing to result from some sort of agency. Notice that that’s where imagination can come in, because it’s by using that mental process of imagination versus just an elbow knocking into something, using that process of imagination that we can intentionally guide the creative processes, and put some of our agency into it.
PJ Absolutely. Well, I want to say thank you for coming on. This will be coming out in August, so your monograph/book, it’s a great introduction to imagination and creativity, will be coming out. But as we wrap up here, what would you leave to our listeners about imagination and creative thinking?
Dr. Amy Kind So what are my final parting words?
PJ Yes, what are your parting words of wisdom?
Dr. Amy Kind You’d think of all the questions, that one shouldn’t trip me up! But I can say a couple of things. First of all, something that already came out in our discussion on imagination, but I’ll say the same thing about creativity: I like to emphasize that both of these things are not fixed capacities. We can push ourselves to be more imaginative or creative. We can work to train our imagination, we can work to do various things that implicate creative tendencies in us. So my first parting word would be: Don’t think of them as fixed capacities, think of them as skills. I think that’s useful for all of us.
My other parting thought, I want to say something about the ubiquity and importance of creativity and imagination for our lives. I really do think that they are woven into the fabric of our lives and we can understand a lot about ourselves and about humanity and about our world by thinking about imagination and creativity. Sometimes in philosophy, the more rational capacities get all of the attention, and I think that we can learn a lot from focusing on imagination.
PJ Dr. Kind, thank you so much for coming on today.
Dr. Amy Kind Oh, you’re welcome!