Topics Mind

Question Are humans capable of imagining things, that are not based on other things they've already seen, or a combination of things they have already seen? For instance if I ask a kid to imagine a new animal (there I'm already using things I know 'animal'), he/she will most likely come up with something like a elephant feeted, giraffe necked, winged, crocodile or somewhere in that fashion. Now of course some people are more creative, but when you look at e.g. art, again what you get are the elephants with long feet, crazily constructed houses, people in all kinds of strange and surreal forms. But in the end it always seems completely based on things we've perceived in the past. What is your view on this, are humans capable of coming up with something 'new'? This raises the question, what do you consider 'new' (not based on things we've seen/heard/perceived in any way before)? This also draws me to the question if there is knowledge which is not acquired by learning? I hope some of you are interested in answering (well, expressing your view on things, that is, of course); thanks in advance, Dirk.

Accepted:
March 6, 2007

Comments

Descartes ponders this sort of thing in the course of the first of his Meditations on First Philosophy. He speculates about whether everything he has taken himself to be really experiencing might actually just be a figment within a dream; and he initially decides that, yes, it could be. But then, on further reflection, he notices that this only seems to be true of composite things. The basic elements out of which these things are constructed within the dream, he feels, will still need to have been derived from prior experiences. He makes the same observation that you made: "For even when painters try to create sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies, they cannot give them natures which are new in all respects; they simply jumble up the limbs of different animals." But then he goes a step further than this: "Or perhaps if they manage to think up something so new that nothing remotely similar has ever been seen before -- something which is therefore completely fictitious and unreal -- at least the colours used in the composition must be real."

Now, David Hume introduces an interesting speculation at this juncture. Suppose someone has had lots of experiences of all kinds of colours, including every shade of blue from the lightest to the darkest... except for one specific shade in the middle of the spectrum. Can anyone seriously suggest that he wouldn't be able to conjure up this missing shade of blue in his imagination, filling in the gap between the shades on either side? Hume feels that he surely could do this. (His discussions of this may be found in the very first section of his Treatise of Human Nature, and again in the second section of his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding).

However, returning to Descartes, he doesn't actually stop at colour. In the class of the most basic elements upon which he finally settles, out of which he feels that all imaginary objects must indeed be constructed, he does not include colour at all. Instead he includes: "the shape of extended things; the quantity, or size and number of these things; the place in which they may exist, the time through which they may endure, and so on." The most basic elements of our experiences of bodies will be the most general ones, the ones that feature in every single experience we can ever have. There are bodies which don't have any colours at all -- think of a glass, for instance. But every body needs to have some shape or other. And maybe we can form images of new shapes we've never actually seen: once we have gained at least a vague and intuitive conception of geometry, we can figure out for ourselves how new geometrical figures might be constructed. But how could we do this if we hadn't first seen some other shapes upon which to base such a conception? Experience seems to be necessary, if not to give us the idea of any particular shape, then at least to give us the concept of shape in general. Certainly Descartes, for his part, did not believe that his own mind could simply have conjured up that idea from the resources of the imagination alone.

Moreover, once we have received the ideas of these most basic elements through experience, it also seems fair to suggest that they do need to be present in every figment of the imagination too. They really are that fundamental. After all, if a figment of the imagination has nothing whatsoever in common with the sorts of things we experience through our senses -- if we are imagining something with no shape, no size, existing in no place and at no time -- then it's hard to see why this would even deserve the title of "imagination" any more. Surely "imagination" is all about images, which does seem to tie it directly to the senses.

But, okay, let's not get too hung up on the word "imagination". Is there any other sense in which we can conceive of something that has nothing whatsoever in common with the kinds of of things we experience. Well, quite possibly there is. We do seem to have the power to think about purely abstract objects, things that could not possibly be experienced, let alone actually have been. Certain objects of pure mathematics might provide an example. God might provide another, at least according to certain theories about the nature of God. And a lot of philosophers -- including Descartes, as it happens, though he would stress that we are now far outside the realms of the imagination -- would say that we can not merely think about such objects, but that we can actually have genuine knowledge about them, knowledge that must, by its very nature, be wholly independent of experience. But all this now opens up a whole new can of worms, which I shall leave well alone...